And so, on a cold January day, as I drove by the offices of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, I asked myself: Could a person (or a family of four) survive for one year eating nothing but food grown by the Marion Terpstras of the state?
Iowa remains an agricultural state despite trends that have seen farmers leaving the land in record levels during the last 20 years. But most of the farming that takes place today involves the production of corn and soybeans, which is used as livestock feed or for a variety of products like sweeteners, printing ink, ethanol fuel, plastics and other materials. A study by the Leopold Center at Iowa State University a few years back determined that the typical piece of produce for sale at your local grocery store has traveled an average of 1,700 miles.
The difficulty of our task paralleled the bounty of each season. In early spring, it seemed as if we survived on asparagus, spinach, big salads and all the radishes we could stomach. Just as we were about to surrender, the markets were suddenly filled with an amazing variety of vegetables – broccoli and cauliflower, a half-dozen kinds of onions, peas, green beans and strawberries. Next, came tomatoes and sweet corn, Muscatine melons, berries and cherries. The season ended with squash and pumpkin and another round of some of the same greens that thrive in cooler weather.
The best surprise, perhaps, was the meat. Thick, juicy steaks and chops, meaty chickens, tasty lamb chops. The bacon and sausage being produced by butchers at Iowa’s last remaining locker plants are made from choice cuts of meat. We ate like royalty all summer and CeCe and I still managed to lose 20 pounds a piece because we weren’t filling our gullets with fat-laden prepared food.
Of course, many of our friends and family were skeptical.
One of my pals reminded me that an entomology professor at ISU teaches a class on edible bugs. Another friend asked me if I wanted to learn to hunt. And, maybe worst of all, my father-in-law suggested that CeCe and I give up our claim to Thanksgiving at our house, and instead plan on dinner with her side of the family at a local restaurant.
So, this holiday will be a sort of a watershed in this little experiment. It’s one thing to resist a craving during the other 364 days of the year and eat squash when what you really want is parsnips. Obviously, this Thanksgiving the menu can’t be altered much. I know stuffed pork chops – no matter how delicious – wouldn’t be fully appreciated on the dinner table on Thursday. But there will be no “Classic Green Bean Casserole” this year with its sauce of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, half a block of Velveeta, and Durkee’s Fried Onions as a topping.
Instead, I’ve developed a recipe of beans in a herb-infused cream sauce topped with thick-sliced, sweet, caramelized onions. Only the Kentucky bourbon used in a favorite sweet potato recipe will spoil our all-Iowa feast. But getting to this point has taken 30 weeks of work.
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A Guide For Newbies and Out-Of-Staters.
THERules
By Jay P. Wagner / Posted January 9, 2007
This article was written in November, 2004, and originally appeared on www.offenburger.com.
My kids didn’t bat an eye the other day when farmer Gary Guthrie, of Nevada, Ia., stopped by our house. Guthrie was delivering a big grocery bag filled with his remarkable Bolero carrots, a couple dozen onions and two dozen head of garlic.
My offspring weren’t at all impressed with the 40 pounds of potatoes I toted home from the conference for organic growers at Iowa State University a day later. They’ve watched me lug vegetables into the house since April, and have lost fascination when I set big pots of boiling water atop the stove to sterilize Ball jars for canning.
Thanksgiving is coming and both my children are expecting a feast. They don’t find it at all remarkable that everything on our table on that day, except for a few minor seasonings, will have come from farms within a 100-mile radius of Des Moines.
All of us were spoiled this summer by the fresh produce we enjoyed from local farmers’ markets and from Angela Tedesco, a Granger farmer who tended a huge garden for 100 families in the Des Moines area. (More about that later.)
We’re all so spoiled that Kiernan, my two-year-old, still asks for garden-fresh tomatoes for breakfast each morning. He got used to them this summer when our kitchen counter was always covered with a half-dozen heirloom varieties that Tedesco delivered to Des Moines once a week from April to September.
For the last seven months, we’ve been on a strict Iowa diet.
My wife CeCe has put up with a lot of my crazy ideas since we were married six years ago. So she didn’t hesitate when I came home one night last January and said I wanted to spend one year stocking our kitchen with only foods grown in Iowa.
Ten years ago, when I was a reporter at the Des Moines Register, I wrote a story about Marion Terpstra, a New Sharon farmer who was abandoning his Iowa-typical corn and soybean operation to pursue vegetable production. Marion was a bit of a pioneer at the time – only a handful of farmers were raising vegetables exclusively – but since then the number of rural Iowans doing the same thing has skyrocketed.
I saw proof of that each Saturday during the summer while visiting Des Moines’ terrific Downtown Farmers Market. Every year the number of vendors – and the array of produce they offered – multiplied.
A 100-Mile Thanksgiving
One family's attempt to eat locally grown food for a year
NOW HERE’S THE MENU FOR THE WAGNER FAMILY’S ALL-IOWA THANKSGIVING FEAST:
Pumpkin soup (Terpstra Produce, New Sharon)
Tossed salad w/ Polenta croutons
Turkey (Sheeder Farm, Guthrie Center)
Savory fruit sauce ala cranberry (K&M Gardens, Oskaloosa)
Sage dressing (Paul’s Grain, Laurel, and Mariposa Farms, Grinnell)
Green beans with caramelized onions (Terpstra Produce, New Sharon)
Corn souffle (Grimes Sweet Corn)
Mashed potatoes (Living Earth Farm, Waverly)
Gravy
Bobbi’s favorite bourbon sweet potatoes (Growing Harmony Farm, Gary Guthrie, Nevada, and Angela Tedesco, Granger)
Carrot Ring (Gary Guthrie)
Buttered peas (Terpstra Produce, New Sharon)
Homemade bread (Paul’s Grain)
AND THE RELISH TRAY, ALL CANNED IN THE OUR KITCHEN:
Beet pickles (Terpstra Produce)
Bread and butter pickles (K&M Garden, Oskaloosa)
Carrots (Gary Guthrie)
Pickled shallots (Her Vue, Pella)
Spiced apple rings (Downtown Farmers Market)
Jalapeno pickles (Terpstra Produce)
Chevre (Northern Prairie Farms)