Johnson & Wales at AS220: A Lively Experiment

When one talks about a community arts center like AS220 (www.as220.org), where unknown and struggling artists or musicians can find a guaranteed place to showcase their works, one wouldn’t think that culinary arts could play a role. Yet this is exactly what happened last winter at the gallery on Empire Street. Brought to us Providence local-foods lovers by Farm Fresh RI (www.farmfreshri.org), the Wintertime Farmers’ Market was an experiment: While farmers’ markets are all the rage in summer, would the age-old concept translate into the off season? Could there be enough local foods to sustain sales all winter long? And what kind of Rhode Island-farmed foods are there in the wintertime? It turned out to be a great success. On Saturday afternoons the market turned into a family-friendly combination of colorful original art by local painters, food products from area farms and purveyors, and toe-tapping music from the Old Time String Band.

It was into this backdrop I decided to bring cooking demonstrations to the market. As a community-service chef at the Feinstein Center, I’ve done “Veggin’ Out” demos at farmers’ markets many times before—in the summer, of course. Since food stamps can be spent at these markets, Veggin’ Out’s goal is to make valuable culinary and nutritional information available to that audience, and to help expand participation in the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program. This, in turn, helps to support local farmers and locally grown produce. JWU staff and students demonstrate healthy nutritious meals using locally grown produce and provide recipes for participants to take home. The recipes use the produce available at the markets so WIC recipients can then use their vouchers to purchase the produce used in the recipes and make the meals at home.

The beauty of these public cooking demonstrations is that they benefit more groups than just their intended target. Farmers and other food producers certainly have a stake in seeing their wares purchased and consumed, perhaps even more so in winter. Everybody who eats (and there are a lot of us) can benefit from nutritious local products. Providing samples of unfamiliar food items helps to create more demand, for Food Stamp recipients as well as for everybody else. Sampling ensures that market customers know exactly what they’re getting beforehand so they won’t be afraid to spend their money on a food item if they’re not sure they’re going to like it.

Beyond trying to stimulate sales at the Wintertime Farmers’ Market, a major part of my rationale was to increase student involvement. Initially I turned to members of The Green Collaborative (TGC), the new student organization dedicated to sustainability at the University. It was, in my mind, a great opportunity to put TGC members out into the public view and to showcase Johnson & Wales’ progression into a greener, more sustainable campus. And while these volunteers were essential to making the demonstrations feasible, I felt I needed to go a step further. The culinary students of The Green Collaborative already had knowledge of, and a gung-ho interest in, the issues surrounding the consumption of local foods. The Wintertime Farmers’ Market could be a great environment for teaching chefs-in-training about the benefits of buying local.

Therefore I started arranging for some practicum students to participate in these cooking demonstrations as a part of their nonprofit rotation. I found it unfortunate that most of the Veggin’ Outs occur during the summer, when there aren’t any students around. Even more importantly, I soon recognized that many foodservice and hospitality students had never been to a farmers’ market. There isn’t, in fact, much in the culinary curriculum regarding these types of “green” issues. Awareness of sustainability in the food world is essential to these young chefs if they want to realize dynamic, successful, passionate careers.

The students’ participation in the farmers’ markets, however, was not merely a classroom project. As the season progressed, and I tried to get the students excited about these real-world experiences, many questions came up. What kinds of people go there? What sort of foods do they have? How do they even make cheese, anyway? Not content to just tell them, I decided to show them. It’s perhaps too easy to tell people why they should support their local farms: It’s safer, more nutritious, tastes great, saves on transportation (“food miles”), and so forth. It’s a different thing entirely for students to fully comprehend that food isn’t just a thing that’s ordered from the storeroom to be delivered to a classroom, without any context for how it was created. Asking the person how she made the cheese, shaking the hand of the man who grew all those apples, or sampling an oyster from Rhode Island waters, shucked by the man who grew and harvested it—all are experiences that can’t be duplicated in a culinary laboratory.

By all accounts, then, the Wintertime Farmers’ Market was a great success, despite some of the challenges. The AS220 gallery is small and was unable to accommodate all of the vendors who wanted to participate. Parking is an issue, too, possibly keeping people away who might otherwise be willing to support the local economy by patronizing the farmers at the market. Nevertheless it has been shown that an off-season market is an effective way of getting local foods into the hands of consumers, in addition to an educational experience for chefs.

The idea is evolving. Next winter it could take shape as a central year-round farmers’ market, complete with an incubator kitchen, where farmers could increase the value of their crops by developing prepared foods from their own locally grown ingredients. Furthermore such a market could function as a hub through which local produce could be distributed to restaurants, schools and supermarkets. Given the right situation, such a site could include a demonstration area where local chefs and students could conduct cooking demonstrations and other nutritional programs. That would be quite a lively experiment indeed.