I don’t have a salary. If I don’t work, I don’t make money. There was this stress of: What do we do now? 

I never get to sleep. So [the first month of lockdown], I just slept. But after that first month … I don’t like to have idle time. So I dove deep into yoga, astrology, and meditation. Meditation was great for my busy mind. 

I stayed in Brooklyn the whole shutdown, and it was rough, for sure. I envy everyone that left. New York is wonderful. But I describe New York like that toxic ex you can’t quit. You have a great time at night and then they give you this really intense romance, but they don’t call you for 10 days. Just long enough where you say, ‘I’m over this person.’ Then, New York calls you like, ‘Hey, how you been? Sorry, I’ve been busy.’ And you fall back in love again. When you take away the constant busyness and creative aspect of New York, it’s not fun. 

June [of 2020] hit, and Diamond Reef reopened at 25 percent indoor capacity and outdoor seating with tables spaced 6 feet apart. But in November, we closed for the winter because it was very cold. In February, my boss hit us up on WhatsApp asking us to do a Zoom meeting on the 5th. That’s when we got hit with the news that our block was bought by a real estate company and our lease had been bought out. Diamond Reef was gone. 

I totally fell into depression. My whole identity when I moved here was to work at this place. That was me, José in New York WAS Diamond Reef. 

The fact that it shut down, it just made me think more about myself and what I was doing here. It made me think about my purpose. 

Before Covid, I went to Oaxaca a lot, where they produce mezcal. One day, some people asked if I wanted to help them make it. That was the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. The agave, they call it piña, you use the root. But you also have to replant it once you dig it up.

Each mezcalero has their own expression of what they do. Some put a cross on top of the pile that’s getting cooked, or some take some of the mezcal they made before and pour it on top—a little bit for the Devil so he doesn’t ruin the batch. Seeing [the production process] and being a part of it was the most spiritual awakening I’ve ever had. 

Most spirits are that way. You’re buying rum, but think about what they do for that sugar cane, how they harvest it, and what they do to make it. All that provides for their families. With mezcal, for example, they use the leaves to make brooms, they use it to make roofs, the leftover pulp from the mezcal they use that to make bricks and to build houses. 

It’s a connection with the Earth and Mother Nature. It’s like saying thank you so much for giving this to us. And we’re going to use every bit of it and give back to you—we took one plant, we’re going to plant three. 

It gives me chills thinking about going through it again: how much heart and soul and love goes into making spirits. 

And all this stuff was and is made by people of color. That for me, that’s everything. I was having a hard time, wondering why I’m still in this industry. Even though I’m just making a drink, it’s an experience. And I want to make sure you feel good. 

After my experience during the pandemic, I feel more in [the] driver’s seat. I know exactly how I want to move, who I am, and how I want to present myself in this industry and in my everyday life. I’ve been very honest with every person who I’ve interviewed with. I’m not playing any of this, ‘The customer is always right.’ Through exhaustion and desperation, Covid gave me the confidence and the tenacity I needed to move forward.

I learned that I don’t want to work for white people anymore. That I have to interact with my bosses before I take on a job to understand their energy, to make sure it’s beneficial for me and also the staff. 

The service industry has this kind of manipulative, toxic trait. Are you loyal? Are you ‘Team whatever this bar’s name is’? And if you are, what will you do for it? Fuck that. Why am I loyal to someone who just sees me as a number so they can hit theirs? I’m the one who’s living off nothing and then going to work in this stressful environment where some of the owners don’t think about what I’m going through as a person. I’m treading water, and I’m tired. That’s what it was like working during Covid.

The code-switching I used to do for customers, I’m done. You’re going to get who I am, and if you violate and you say something out of pocket, racist, or misogynist, transphobic—you’re fucking done. I’m not playing this game anymore. You’re gone. Don’t come back. We don’t need your money. We don’t want your energy. Covid gave me that. I’m moving intentionally. I’ll only work with people I trust.

During Covid, I walked around my neighborhood a lot, and there was this new spot, For All Things Good. It’s a molino. They ship the corn in from Mexico and make their tortillas from scratch. I smelled it one day. It smelled like my grandma’s house. I walked in and started speaking Spanish with the people, and we became friends. When they got their liquor license, they asked me to work for them.  

I work about five to six days a week depending on the week, between the café and a neighborhood joint in Crown Heights called the Branch Office. It’s an oldhead bar. I love it. All these oldheads come through, they want their shot of Jack or Henny, talk about their day. That spot is fun, and it’s good to have a balance of both. 

When Covid restrictions were lifted and people started feeling more comfortable, me and my homie would meet somewhere outside, get a bottle and some cigars. A lot of my friends who aren’t white told me that they didn’t know much about spirits and felt like it was kind of pretentious to ask questions. Also, the people who would usually sell them the spirits are white, and they don’t feel comfortable to talk with them about it. I understood that. 

So what I’ve been doing now is getting a few friends together, we get some cigars that I think will pair well with the spirit and chop it up. I explain the process of how it’s made. From there, we just keep drinking and smoking cigars. We play a card game or some dominoes. I’m a very good enabler. I’m really good at encouraging people to have another one or try something unfamiliar. 

I don’t do it for money. I love my people. Let’s get together and talk about how we’re feeling in this world right now. Let’s share this. 

This piece was edited for length.

The post “I’m not playing any of this, ‘The customer is always right’” appeared first on The Counter.

I grew up in Manhattan, pretty far from the farming life. If it had been available, I probably would have been a nature kid. I did spend a few summers with my grandmother in the south of Wales as a kid. She was a passionate gardener, and I think she probably gave me the bug. In the last decade I’ve been learning more and more about farming, attending the Young Farmers Conference, coming up with a conservation action plan, a business plan, different kinds of crop rotations. This year is my first full-on growing season.

I’ve been outed as a total novice [laughs]. We’re working with a group called Greenagers who are this very cool, Berkshire-based nonprofit that empowers young people through growing. They have trailblazing crews, agricultural crews, victory garden crews. They’re giving them paying jobs in agriculture. And these kids, or I should say young adults, they know a lot more than I do. On the first day in the field, we hit this boulder in the middle of our primary growing area. It was huge; we never found the edges. I basically had to scrap my entire growing plan.

I had done all the research, I had this plan, it was meticulous, it was all the things. And it was interesting because I started training in dance 30 years ago, and I became accustomed to confidence in my mastery of that form. I feel like a total expert in dance. And then here I am in this farming stuff, and I’m forced to contend with the clear reality that I’m not an expert. It’s humbling! 

We’re starting with this field which is about an acre and a half. Right now we have 16 35-foot rows. Then we also have a perennial garden which is a bit more whimsical than the garden-style rows. The Pillow has over 220 acres, so if this goes well and is able to be incorporated into food services, there’s a lot of room for growth. There is a lot of land which is underutilized. And we’re looking into things like agroforestry and silvopasture; pigs could do really well in those woods. I haven’t actually gotten the green light to start raising pigs, but I’m hopeful!

We’re approaching this as a year of deliberate experimentation. We have lettuces, kales, chards, peppers, squash, tomatoes, a lot of herbs like basil, parsley, eggplant, corn, arugula. One that I’m excited about is the arnica bed. You know arnica is used by dancers all over the world for sprains and injury. I like the idea of making a salve out of that. We have a tea blend bed because I’d love to have tea for volunteers or people who want to visit the garden. 

The dance festival sits nicely inside of the growing season, but it ends a little early, around mid-August. So we’re kind of focusing on things that are fast to grow like peas and lettuces. I was trying to find crops that are quickest to maturity, plus perennials like strawberries and blueberries. Last week we had our first harvest. Seven and a half pounds of produce; I don’t mind bragging!

Right now we have two volunteer days a week, a Saturday volunteer day for the public, when anybody can sign up to come help. And then Mondays, which is the festival’s day off, so we have a volunteer day for the Pillow family. That’s been really sweet, to get interns from the archives or people in the administration working in the field. I would love to incorporate farmwork into the training regimen for all of the students, because that’s what Ted Shawn and his dancers did. They had two or three hours a day of farm work, and that was part of their physical training as well as their creative practice. 

Ted Shawn was also trying to create a whole ecosystem for dance. He thought it was important that his dancers be away from the city, that they live close to nature, eat simple food. And he wanted his dances to be relatable to the broad American public. At that time, most Americans had laboring jobs, so he wanted his dancers to have an experience of that. He thought ballet was this sort of bourgeois Eurocentric thing and he wanted his company to be a populist, for-the-people kind of movement. And a big part of that was a connection to the land.

There was a lot of thought behind it; it was very intentional. It was also practical because this was the Great Depression, and they needed to feed the performers. I love that duality. They did this farm work every day so I thought okay, I should do that as part of my process; it’s like method acting. But to be honest, after just a few weeks, I really felt a profound change—in my sense of rootedness in the ground, in my sense of space and time. 

My dancers are finally visiting the farm [the week of July 4]. We’re doing this performance where we’re going to be harvesting the garlic and offering it to members of the public; that was the first thing we planted last October. And we’re performing a reconstructed dance from 1916 called Tillers of the Soil, which was a duet for Ted Shawn and his dance partner Ruth St. Denis. So that’s sweet. It’s a pantomime of tilling a field, but we will be performing it in the actual garden so we won’t need to use our acting as much.

One of my dancers, Brett Perry, who I went to school with, is now working on a farm in Boise, Idaho. Another dancer I worked with for years has an urban landscaping company in Brooklyn. Another dancer I know is in horticulture school. There’s something there, a connection of dance and growing: It’s not just me. I feel the connectivity. There’s this sweat equity. It’s this sensuous thing. I feel it intuitively, though I struggle finding the language to articulate it. I would just love to help find the language to get at what this connective tissue is.

I know that dancers can have a really strange relationship to food; personally I struggled with bulimia throughout my career. Dance is a visual art form and how you look affects the parts you can get. But dancers are also athletes. You need to be fueling your body in specific ways, and I think that’s where you can get into trouble. I haven’t figured out exactly how to tackle eating disorders with this farm project yet. But it’s all there. 

I’ve also found it incredibly empowering to grow things out of the earth. With dance you work so hard and at the end of the day, the dance is over and you have nothing to show for it. But here, here’s a tomato. It’s a real thing, it’s tangible, it’s in your hands. It’s a thing that nourishes people. It’s really powerful.

The post “I call it seed to stage”: At world-renowned dance space Jacob’s Pillow, choreographer Adam Weinert is teaching his dancers to farm appeared first on The Counter.

So I took one week of vacation and I told myself, ‘I’m going to figure out what I’m going to do with my life by the end of the week.’ I did a lot of research pursuing this question: What is the most impactful thing I can be doing with my time, being alive on the Earth, in this moment of the climate emergency? What is the best thing to be working on? So many things—such as writings by Sarah Taber and wisdom from A Growing Culture’s farmer network—pointed to agriculture. Farming is the way that we are impacting the land the most because everybody needs to eat and everybody is trying to grow food in so many different ways. On the last day before I had to go back to work, I asked myself: What if I just told myself I was going to be a farmer?

I started volunteering in August, made a lot of connections, and met some great people. As the winter came on, I began looking for educational opportunities, so I ended up taking all these courses on vegetable production, on poultry, on mushrooms via the Cornell Small Farms program. I also read a ton of books on indigenous philosophies, including Wisdom Sits in Places and The Wayfinders; I read Farming While Black by Leah Penniman; I read 40 Centuries of Farming, which is a book about agriculture in Japan, China, and Korea.

Meanwhile, I was also really involved with this organization called Heart of Dinner, which is a mutual aid organization that provides culturally relevant meals to Asian-American elders every week. It was just such a powerful thing to be a part of during the winter. This is something we can all do to make sure everyone can eat and everyone has attention and is cared for.

When January and February came around, I made a spreadsheet of farm jobs and then as soon applications opened up, I applied. I ended up getting a job as a seasonal farmer and environmental educator at Randall’s Island Park Alliance—a non-profit dedicated to the maintenance of Randall’s Island Park in New York City—which was really exciting. I felt like it was a longshot, so I was quite in disbelief. 

Four months into the job, it has been amazing. It has been hard. It’s been a new learning experience every single day. Learning how to work outside and with my body has been a fascinating experience. How do you pace yourself? How do you relate to different soreness in your body? How do you hold your body when you’re doing different tasks that are repetitive? Just learning to be a physical human in the world with physical tools working outside in a range of conditions is really fascinating.

Fifty percent of my job is being an environmental educator. This is the first time I have taught children and teenagers, who do field trips on our farm twice a week. Every weekend, we also host volunteers, and hosting them is so, so beautiful. It’s such a rewarding experience to be able to share the land with people and share the work with other people of all different demographics.

In the months ahead, I’m looking forward to fall, a time of closure and reflection. There’s a lot of rituals, like saving what we grew to be able to last through the winter and all of these things I’m excited to experience. I’ve been really interested in preservation.

Farming has helped me feel—not absolved, because there’s so much more work to do with being anti-racist—but it helped me see a light and direction to move toward. I am a settler here, and I am not indigenous to this area, but I’m here now, and it’s our work to understand how to be in balance with the land that we currently live on. How are you protecting that water? How are you protecting this air? How are you protecting the ecosystem that is here? How do we heal our relationship with the land that we live that sustains us now?

I had a partner at the time who was for a long time my boyfriend. We were really scrappy for the first four years. We had the smallest food truck on Earth—four by eight feet on the outside. The menu grew item by item, starting with chicken guava katsu. We started getting booked for festivals where there were thousands of people. Chicken katsu takes a really long time to fry. We thought, “We have to come up with something that is fried chicken, because people love fried chicken. But we can’t have these really long lines.” We started making mochiko chicken, which are much smaller pieces of chicken breaded in rice flour.

I’ve always been of the philosophy that constraints give way to creativity. In this case our constraints were: We’ve got a lot of people to feed, and we have to come up with something unique and delicious, but it still needs to reference Hawaii roots. Our signature dish—mochi nori fried chicken with furikake in the batter and togarashi-yuzu mayo—grew out of that.

We started getting booked for weddings and corporate events. Apparently it’s a thing to have a luau in the summer here in Philly. So I accidentally fell into this niche area that hadn’t been filled by any other food business. There were no other businesses that focused on Hawaii’s food. 

After four and a half years, we found the perfect restaurant space. The place was in Center City and it was close to a lot of our main clients. Our biggest client at this point was UPenn. We were one of their preferred vendors. We were also close to the Comcast buildings. There were a lot of office workers, a lot of law offices, but then Philadelphia shut down for indoor dining. It was March 17 or 18. We switched for the first few days to takeout and delivery, but we felt the effect right away. The delivery platforms at that time were charging 30 percent of each of our orders. We weren’t making any money because 30 percent of our money was going to these platforms. We decided to temporarily shut down and didn’t open again until the very end of May. We started only doing once a week take-out and pick-ups. We were very much affected by foot traffic, or lack thereof. 

Then we did the math. No matter how we did the numbers, we always came up short. We could not survive without having weddings and corporate events and classes at UPenn in session. We needed all of that in order to have a sustainable, break-even business. Here’s the most boring advice of all time: base your decisions on numbers, not on hopes and dreams.

We only had a year and a half remaining on our lease, so it wasn’t too hard to get out of it. We gave away most of our restaurant equipment to up and coming businesses that do the world good. I’m actually still working on some closing paperwork. Closing a restaurant requires a ton of paperwork. 

Do I miss running a restaurant? I miss running a restaurant before the pandemic. Do I want to be running a restaurant right now, with widespread staff shortages, lack of people eating out, and without guaranteed corporate catering budgets? I miss it from before, but I’m glad I’m not doing it right now. 

The sauces came purely by accident. I was cooking at an event at Poconos Organics in September of 2020, and one of the things I made for this event was the chili peppah water. My friends at Burlap & Barrel were also at the event and they said I should bottle it. They told me how one goes about starting a retail business. And then I started one. 

The Lavender Ponzu is entirely my creation. I think a lot of people are familiar with how ponzu tastes, but they don’t necessarily know how it tastes with a floral component like lavender. That was just me tinkering around in the kitchen. The chili peppah water is very well-established in Hawaii. The guava katsu—I mentioned that was one of the first things we served in the food truck. The version I made in the food truck contained chicken stock and Worcestershire sauce. The version that I make now, which tastes exactly the same, is vegan. 

I’m still at the very beginning of it. I’m still trying to figure out what all the acronyms mean. There’s a lot of jargon; there’s so much to learn. The first place I went to was the Drexel University food lab. I was like, ‘How do you make sure the stuff is shelf stable?’  I needed a primer on food science and they gave me one. They also sent me to Rutgers. I worked a little bit with a food scientist there, tweaking formulas, learning about acidified and non-acidified foods. 

I work with two different co-packers now. I’m still learning the ropes. I’m very lucky to have unintentionally made sauces that are high in vinegar, which makes them much more shelf stable. If I was coming out with a frozen product, well, God help me.

The post The pandemic closed her popular Philly restaurant. Now she makes hot sauce. appeared first on The Counter.

I started working as the assistant to the editor-in-chief at Bon Appétit on September 11th, 2017. But I kept my job at Red Rooster because I wasn’t getting paid enough and needed to pay rent. I used to go to night shifts after work [at Bon Appétit], but it was way too much.

I do not have a background in food. I played soccer at Stanford. I majored in human biology and African-American studies and wrote a thesis on the natural hair movement. My resume does not scream food media. 

[At BA], I expected to have an opportunity to grow the same way the two people before me did in my position. I didn’t. My ideas were called “passions.” There was not a spot or a voice for me there, or for any other Black voices. I would pitch something or write something, but there were these gatekeepers, who are in charge, determining what fits and what doesn’t. That became more frustrating as my time continued. 

If you look at the first piece I ever wrote at Bon Appétit, the Oakland article, in my first edit I wrote “gentrification” clear as day. The editor said, “No, we can’t include this.” So I set up a meeting and said, “I’m letting you know that I won’t be writing this piece if there’s no acknowledgment of gentrification.”’ I grew up in Oakland. Then they said, “You can’t use the word, but you can describe it.”

Fast forward to 2020, things are moving along. In my D.C. story, the word gentrification is in it because now they’re pressured externally [to appear and actually be more diverse] and there’s a need for Black content. Still, nobody actually wants to listen to me. 

I heard lots of those stories. People should speak up and feel supported. Tell your truth and hold people accountable. Storytelling is only as meaningful as the authentic relationships you’re able to build. If you go into a community with entitlement, then your story is going to be wack. There’s lots of those stories. They exist everywhere. 

Some publications I have spoken with have a really different approach. A lot of them are run by people who have worked in corporate media. One magazine I really like is Whetstone, a super-cool publication. But I want to see more. 

A corporation like Condé Nast, it’s not creative. It’s white supremacist. It doesn’t matter how much you like the platform, at the end of the day, these things are capitalist engines producing content and selling their souls to bullshit advertisers. It’s a constricting grip that these corporations have. And it squeezes all the creativity out of everybody.

The fact that people can’t make the connection between the fights that are happening on the street and inside corporate America … they’re intrinsically linked. There’s overt racism and then there’s covert racism. They’re not mutually exclusive. They impact each other. 

Lots of things have been confirmed for me in 2020 and early 2021, about what people really think about Black people and Black women. Knowing what I know and what I’ve been through, I have different expectations for what my next creative environment would be. I’m only interested in writing about Black and brown folks and people that happen to be white. I want to work on decolonizing my life. That is my creative process. I like a creative environment that is supportive and caring. One where I feel listened to. Not gaslighted routinely, or punished for speaking up. Not labeled angry Black girl. I felt mighty powerful last summer; I feel like other people can feel that too. If you ever need support, DM me.

There’s some story pitches that I have that I need to get together, but a lot of my project right now is myself. I had a lot of mental health struggles. I was just going and going. I’m that type of person. It hasn’t even really been a year yet. It’s been a really crazy time for everybody, but I’ve been trying to give myself the time to heal. 

Disclosure: Ryan and I first met in the summer of 2019, two Black women working in food media. Equal parts solidarity and friendship, our relationship has continued to this day. 

The post After speaking up and walking away from Bon Appétit, Ryan Walker-Hartshorn re-evaluates her expectations of food media appeared first on The Counter.

Back in the States, I started looking for a job. There was nothing available in restaurants at the time, or they weren’t paying well, or they couldn’t offer you the hours you needed to make a living. I decided to leave the industry for a little bit to do one of those WWOOF-ing things. [Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms is a cultural and educational program that links visitors with organic farmers. Visitors spend about half of each day working on the host farm learning about farming and sustainability and in turn, they receive free room and board during their visit.] I always thought about doing this in another country, but when I couldn’t really find work here, I thought it would be interesting to try. As a chef, I care about where my food comes from—especially the things we don’t handle directly. It was a whole other aspect of the food world I wanted to experience. I looked at different farm jobs and I came across a post for a cheesemaker at Prodigal Farm in Rougemont, North Carolina. I’d never made cheese before, but I was familiar with the process of pasteurizing. Sanitation is very important in the food service industry, so I thought I knew enough about aspects of the process to give it a try.

I started working on the farm February 15, 2021. One of the hardest parts of the restaurant industry for me was always being stuck inside under artificial lights. You usually can’t even really go outside for your break to get some air. Maybe you can take 15 minutes to get some sun in the parking lot. So, I really enjoyed being out on this beautiful farm. It was a completely different experience in the food industry that I really enjoyed. I’d go to the farm at 6 in the morning and I’d be done by 2 p.m. Each day I’d empty the milk tanks, heat up the milk, record the temperatures, add the cultures, let the PH drop. Getting to the cheesemaking process is time-consuming because you’re really just waiting for temperatures to rise and drop in the milk before you can do anything. In between all of that, I was flipping cheeses, washing the rinds, making sure the good bacteria was growing. It was all a very slow process and very different from what I was used to.

I know I don’t want to work for someone else my entire life. Eventually, I want to open my own restaurant. Right now I’m learning and practicing and saving up money for a downpayment to open a place. I want to make simple, well-made Mexican food, like tacos and ceviche. I want to use good ingredients from Mexico that people don’t typically use here. When I was in Mexico, it really opened up my eyes to what Mexican food actually is and all of the things that are uncommon here that are common in Mexico. I’ve started growing hoja santa because it’s expensive in supermarkets here, and I got a bunch of heirloom variety seeds from Mexico that I started growing this year—mostly different chiles you can’t find here. I guess my story is that I went to Mexico to connect with my culture, Covid complicated a bunch of stuff, but I was able to bring some of my culture home and now I want to build something of my own.

Covid spinned my life into all of these weird directions, but I never felt like I was totally derailed. Professionally, it pushed me into a different route and personally, I thought about my role in the industry. I started to think: What if restaurants don’t come back? Is this industry even worth coming back to? Having all of that free time in Oaxaca, I re-evaluated things and reprioritized what’s really important in life. Covid helped me do that. I needed that time, and I needed to relax and breathe. I’ve been in the restaurant industry since I was 15 years old, and it’s been non-stop working for 13 years until the pandemic happened. In Mexico, I was in my body and actually experiencing the world around me and taking things one day at a time. The restaurant industry wasn’t on my mind all the time. I’m very grateful for that part of the pandemic. 

The post Covid-19 stranded a North Carolina chef in Mexico. The unexpected detour changed his plans forever. appeared first on The Counter.

I also learned a lot about breeding. I sell bulls and female animals—it might be a yearling heifer or it might be an adult cow with a calf at her side. Around the West, people come to me because they’ve done their research, and it’s kind of nice—they just show up to buy breeding stock. And then I sell grass-fed beef.

So here I was producing food I knew was really good, but I couldn’t easily go to the farmers’ market [because of the pandemic]. I had children at home who I had to take care of this last year. I’m a single mom and I had to keep them on their academic program.

I was approached by a company called Barn2Door, which helps farms with online sales, and they really helped me. This was in March or April. They are based in Seattle and must have done an internet search for farmers. They took all the knowledge they had of internet marketing, and they set a price, depending on how much of the service you wanted. They were able to create a new website for me, and they helped me organize newsletters. They created a system where you can have people look on the site and click on, ‘yes, I want 20 pounds of burger,’ and they’re charged for it. And there’s a pick and pack list and I can say, ‘okay, I’m going to deliver on April 25.’ And I can see that I have 10 20-pound packages, and this is where they’ll go. I spent a good bit of time last spring when I was home, learning all of the internet systems. It’s tricky as a producer to also try to be the internet marketer. I’ve got to know a whole lot about livestock and soils and cattle management in addition to marketing. So it was very nice to have Barn2Door.

It cost a little over $1,200 to set up the new website. I got the mid-range and it was for a year of service. They had a teacher who contacted me every week and we’d work through things. ‘How are you going to price your beef, Jenny? How do we want to set up the online store?’ They’d ask me what I wanted to sell and then they’d help me set it up. It was really helpful. Because I’m a single mom, it probably took longer than some farmers.

Before this, I had built up an email list of a lot of people like myself—starting with homeschool moms who were looking for high quality foods for their kids. I would send out a notice to the group saying, ‘I’m going to the butcher in November, and I’m selling about a quarter.’ And people would meet me on a given day after the meat was processed and they pick up their quarter beef and give me a check.

I tried for a couple of years doing the farmers’ market, but that didn’t really work quite so well for me, because people don’t really want to wander around the farmers’ market with 20 pounds of melting, expensive beef. So they would buy a burger, but I had to pay somebody to cook burgers, and they buy one. Pretty much the burger sales just went into marketing because I had to pay someone to cook the burger so I could answer questions, and it just took forever.

A lot of ranchers who sell their seed stock—meaning their live animals, their bulls and their pregnant cows—get one paycheck a year. So I am used to going long stretches of the business without getting paid much. There aren’t a lot of expenses in the spring and summer; you’re really just putting animals out and putting grass in front of them and watching them grow. My biggest expense is to buy hay, and that’s about as close to $50,000 a year.

It’s kind of a lonely life. We live 50 miles from town and there’s a small village nearby. These are people I’ve known for 25 years, and there’s not many of them. I look forward to being able to connect with more people, to just come to the farmers’ market and see other people. Last year we worked with another online company called Hipcamp, which was very successful. People can pay for a camping spot and we actually have a couple of little guest cabins on the range. So my 20-year-old son last summer, when he was stuck at home with no university to go to, he hosted from a distance different guests as they came through because we’re pretty close to Yellowstone. People like to be able to stay on a working ranch. So I have worked on developing income sources for the kids, and that was a good one. He’s doing that again this summer. I’ll probably do it on a smaller scale once the kids leave in September—it keeps me connected with people who are from all over the place.

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We then had a cooks’ meeting in the kitchen: Let’s go through the list here, let’s start packing food, what can be frozen, preserving things that can be preserved, and what’s perishable and cannot be saved. Let’s pack up to-go bags for the staff and send everything home with them. That was an a-ha moment because I looked at this and I thought, “Okay, this. This is what we do.” We put together a week’s worth of food for our crew and had people come back on Tuesday to do it again to prep food for pick-up. And we did it again on Saturday.

I talked to a friend in the medical field and asked, ‘How do we do this? Is this a safe thing to do?’ We didn’t know everything that we know today. But his answer was, ‘Yes, just isolate your groups of people. Choose teams, bring in two to three people for one team, and two or three people for another team and just don’t mix them up. Everybody’s responsible for everybody else. If you limit your exposure and personal decisions, then that’s going to help everybody else.’

So we started working in these A and B teams and cooking through the inventory. Then, because it’s a small town, the list of people we were feeding started to grow. What cooks will tell you is that if you’re cooking for 20, it’s an afterthought to cook for 30. If you’re cooking for 30, you can cook for 50. It’s not that much more work once you bring a group of people together. Pretty soon, we were cooking for 50 and the list grew to first responders that we knew or nurses in the hospital who we wanted to help out, or people who lived up the valley who were elderly and didn’t want to make a trip into town or were concerned it wasn’t safe. It grew to 50 meals twice a week, which is a lot of food.

It started to become expensive because we had cooked and distributed everything that we had in-house. So then we’re working with farms who have lost their whole customer base for that time of year. We did a bit of farm work—you know, ‘Hey, let’s go out and harvest a little bit and we’ll trade labor for vegetables.’ That was really successful through the spring. Then we got a call from the Oregon Hospitality Foundation, which is a charitable group that basically helps people like us do what we’re doing. We had stumbled on this. We had unintentionally created a support network for our people that grew to a slightly bigger one to help other people as well. Packaging the meal kits and cooking the meal kits—that was 100 percent volunteer.

The meal kits are different every time we prepare them, but it’s food for four people to sit down and eat at least one hearty meal, or maybe through the course of a day. What I’m going to pack today is going to be a stew—hearty pork and beans and vegetables. And then we’re baking bread—we always send loaves of bread from the restaurant. Then we have fruit that’s typically a donation from one of our local orchards. This is a fruit-growing region. Apples and pears and cherries are the things that grow here, so we always have an abundance of fruit. And then something to sweeten things up a little bit. I baked some cherry cakes that are in a little oil pan. And then there’s tofurkey and tofu broth. Carrot and celery sticks because those are durable and will add something crunchy. The Oregon Food Bank has been a donator of really helpful stuff like bulk foods—50 pounds of rice and grains and pasta and beans and things like that that are a good base or background for us to build on.

I think June 20 is when we opened again. Everybody came back, we’re feeling good, we’re going to do this. At the point of reopening, we had taken a week off of the meal kits and we realized, you know, it’s not that much more work for us because we’re already cooking. Remember what I said about cooking for 20, 30, 50 people? We were cooking for hundreds of people at that point with the restaurant in mind, so it felt like an afterthought. We realized that we needed to keep doing this, so we decided that we would keep it going.

We then got a call from a community member who said, ‘Hey there, there is a group that is deserving of your attention, will you look into this?’ She put us in touch with a Native American woman who is kind of a liaison for the local Native American community, who are fishermen—they do subsistence fishing. It’s a sordid history, but basically there are arrangements with different tribes that were made by the federal government that date back, you know, 100 years or more. They were given access to the river for fishing, but they don’t have places to live, essentially, so they now live in these fishing villages that have minimal provisions. There is no power and some running water. So the request was put out like, hey, maybe you should divert one of your meal programs and see if you can distribute there. We did that, and it was kind of a shocking awakening for me. It’s really a delicate thing and I struggle to put words to this. They are not specifically asking for help. We, the broader, you know, Western culture, have created a situation that feels impossible and I don’t know the solution. We are a Band-Aid on a gaping wound here, trying to provide them with a little bit of food. It’s not making the situation better in a broader sense other than filling someone’s belly for a couple of days. I don’t have a better answer to this situation here. I know that it’s welcome. I know that it has value. But I know it’s not nearly enough and I don’t know what else to do.

The bottom line is that the valuable things in life are people. It’s been reinforced in me on many different levels. We are a business that reopened and are able to function in a really difficult employment climate because every person who left, who we couldn’t keep employed on March 17 when we closed, came back to work for a while until we closed again in November, and then came back again and again. I feel certain that it’s because we were all committed to each other. And I’m thankful that my eyes are open to a world that is bigger than the one that I was living in before.

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Instead, I continue to define and develop new opportunities. One of those is with my sister, Betsy. Ever since she had worked as the morning drive radio host for Martha Stewart’s Sirius satellite radio show, we had wanted to do something together in food. But how, when she lived in Ohio and I lived in Florida?

After some thought, we launched our weekly garden-to-table newsletter, “Dishtillery,” in late June 2020. We include food memoir and poetry; recipes that we develop or learned from our mother, a wonderful self-taught cook; gardening advice, which we can do year-round since we plant in near-opposite zones; and interviews with food and beverage makers and artisans who are women, marginalized, and/or underrepresented in their fields.

Putting together “Dishtillery” has not only brought us closer in spirit when we can’t be near each other physically, but it has led to freelance jobs, both solo and as our first paid co-byline. It also allowed us to master new programs and apps.

So while I still mourn my critic’s identity, the pain of losing it recedes along with the pandemic. In its place, other pieces of my self assemble. As long as I’ve been a critic, I’ve also been a poet, an essayist, an educator, and an editor of a literary magazine, as well as a mother, a sister, and a daughter. For the sake of my health, change has been crucial. Embracing it, and understanding that identity is about far more than my career, is what makes me whole.

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