Farm to Table-Abra Berens
Buying water that was sourced in the South Pacific and then bottled in a plant that runs on diesel fuel because the local power grid cannot support such demand and then shipped across the ocean on a freighter and then shipped across land on a truck to your local convenience store that you probably drove to in a car doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, right? Neither does eating corn in January or even eating an oyster from Washington state when you live in Boston. But we do it anyways because it’s made available to us, and we can afford it (well maybe not the oysters). Industrialized agriculture has made food affordable for most of us, but there are hidden costs involved in such practices that many of us remain blind to. The way our food is processed today is likely more similar to the production of our iPods than the way our ancestors got their food. Some of the costs of industrialized food production include water pollution, soil degradation, and deforestation, not to mention the immense transportation network needed to distribute the goods across the country and globe. Additionally, there are costs to human health as well that include contamination due to unsanitary production facilities and chemical contamination due to the fertilizers and pesticides used during the growing period. Of course, too, there is the experiential cost, that being how our food tastes. Over relatively recent years there has been an explosive growth of interest among the general public in some of these issues. One needs only to look at the organic foods market over the last decade to see evidence of this. Unfortunately, however, much of this food remains priced higher than the average person is able to pay for. One reason, unsurprisingly, is the fact that the large agricultural companies (and their government counterparts) are reluctant to changing the way we produce our food because of the complex system of financial agreements and subsidies already in place to support the current methods of production.
Meet our friends at Bareknuckle Farm in beautiful Northport, Michigan (www.bareknucklefarm.com). Just coming off their inaugural season, Abra Berens and Jess Piskor have taken to fields to produce delectable edibles and raise animals responsibly, the way they should be. Both with experience in the culinary world, Abra and Jess have a passion for what they do and this translates into creating ingredients that are healthy for us (and healthy for the land), fresh, and most importantly ones that taste good. In addition to hosting local dinner events where they create masterful feasts from the fruits of their labor, they also have reached out to provide food to local restaurants and even some top-notch establishments further south in Chicago and Ann Arbor. Having had the opportunity to experience the joy of tasting meals created in such a fashion has inspired Stuttio Workshop to envision how food production can be integrated into the home.
Most architects concerned with sustainable design have a fairly good grasp of the importance of sourcing local materials. They recognize not only the fuel saving associated with such choices, but also the design potential of using materials that resonate aesthetically with their surroundings and also the benefit of the materials being naturally resistant to the climatic stresses of the local environment. The Stuttio Workshop team, when designing the COEH project, asked, why stop designing at the materials used for the walls, floors, and roof? Why not also consider the food on the table as well? In an effort to think comprehensively about the notion of the local, we designed a kitchen that was immediately adjacent to and accessible to a small vegetable and herb garden on the roof of the sunken bedrooms below. Especially for a community with such a rich agricultural heritage like Greensburg, we felt it was important to promote smaller scale agriculture that would be manageable (and enjoyable) for the residents. The benefits of being able to create delicious meals without going to the grocery store are coupled with an increased awareness of the food production process that is often lost upon us in this age of industrial agriculture. This, we think, makes perfect sense.
