My Week at Quillisascut: Why Everyone Should Go to ‘Farm School’

Posted by Vera Chang on May 11, 2012 - 0 Comments

Since I moved to Seattle a year and a half ago, there’s no farm whose name has come up more than Quillisascut, located in the foothills of the Huckleberry Mountains in Rice, WA. And since I visit farms as Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation’s West Coast Fellow, I have lots of conversations about food and farming. Quillisascut is a cheese company, selling what they call “traditional farmstead cheese from the pampered pets of Pleasant Valley,” but it’s also a school for the domestic arts.

After completing a five-day “Introduction to Farming” workshop at Quillisascut recently, nicely documented by Farmgirl Gourmet, I understand why this farm school is so beloved by food service professionals, healthcare students, farmers and aspiring farmers, vacationers, and other “co-producers” (as Slow Food and the farm’s cookbook, Chefs on the Farm refer to us “eaters”). Attendees from around the US and the world come to milk goats and share the dinner table with farmers Lora Lea and Rick Misterley. Celebrity chefs, such as Tom Douglas, and media, like Sunset Magazine, have lauded Quillisascut. I hope that you, dear reader, can one day visit it, too.

Since 2004, more than 23 Puget Sound Bon Appétit Management Company employees — general managers, executive and sous chefs, line cooks, operations managers, catering directors, and catering hands — have attended this farm school to expand their knowledge of sustainable cooking practices. Quillisascut offers a joyous yet frank window into, as Bon Appétit Management Company Seattle University Executive Chef Shannon Wilson describes, “all of the sweat, love, and tears that go into bringing food from farm to plate.”

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How Low Carbon Can You Go? We Can Help!

Posted by Elizabeth Sullivan on April 19, 2012 - 0 Comments

These days, you can’t walk into a grocery store without being exposed to a new diet: flexitarian, vegetarian, vegan, paleo, cookie diet, low-fat, cabbage soup, gluten-free, elimination, low carb…the list goes on and on.

But there’s one important diet that most people have never considered: the low carbon diet. Shrinking our environmental “foodprint” is just as important as shrinking our waistlines. The food system — from fertilizers to livestock, transportation, and packaging — is responsible for at least one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

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