Chapter 4 — Where Does Food Come From?

I Once Spent a Week on a farm, and It Changed Everything I thought I Knew About Cooking.

In the summer of 2001, at the insistence of a farmer friend who had grown tired of my asking him questions about produce over the phone, I spent a week working on his farm in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. I was not a young man — I was in my early fifties, with four decades of professional cooking behind me. I had touched more food in my career than most people see in a lifetime. And yet that week humbled me more completely than any culinary experience I had ever had.

I woke before dawn each morning to harvest vegetables in the blue-gray light before the heat came. I pulled carrots from the earth and felt how cold they were, how heavy, how alive. I picked tomatoes warmed by the afternoon sun and ate one standing in the field, juice running down my chin, and tasted something that bore almost no resemblance to the tomatoes I had been buying from a distributor for years. I dug potatoes, which are unlike any other vegetable to harvest — each plant yields a hidden cache, a buried treasure, and the act of uncovering them feels vaguely archaeological. By the end of the week, I understood something I had thought I already understood but clearly hadn't: the distance between a seed in the ground and a dish on a table is not just physical. It is transformative. It changes the food. And it changes the cook.

The conversation about where food comes from has never been more urgent or more muddled than it is today. Children growing up in cities and suburbs often have no experiential understanding of how food is produced. They know that strawberries come in plastic clamshells and that chicken comes in boneless, skinless portions wrapped in plastic film. The farm, the field, the soil, the season — these things are as abstract to many modern children as medieval history. And yet they are not abstract at all. They are the foundation of everything we eat.

The concept of seasonality is, to me, one of the most important and most neglected ideas in food education. We live in an era of global supply chains that deliver strawberries in December and butternut squash in June. While this represents a genuinely remarkable logistical achievement, it has come at a cost. When food is available year-round regardless of season, we lose the ability to taste it at its peak. A tomato grown in a hothouse in January and a tomato grown outdoors in August in New England are not the same food. The August tomato is sweeter, more complex, more nutritious, and more alive. The flavor difference is not subtle. It is dramatic. And nutrition tracks flavor — peak-season produce, harvested at full ripeness, contains more vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients than produce harvested early and ripened in transit. Seasonality also teaches something more fundamental: patience. In a world of instant gratification, of streaming, same-day delivery, and fast food available at any hour, there is something genuinely countercultural about waiting for asparagus to come back in April, about understanding that the best peaches will only be here for six weeks in August, and then they will be gone. This is not deprivation. It is anticipation. And food anticipated and consumed at its proper moment tastes incomparably better than food demanded and delivered on command.

The connection between food and place is equally important. Different soils, different climates, and different microclimates produce different flavors. This is the concept the French call terroir — the particular character that geography imprints on what grows in it. Italian food is inseparable from Italian geography: the rich volcanic soil of Campania that makes San Marzano tomatoes extraordinary, the chalky hillside soils of Tuscany that give the wine its particular mineral character, the brackish coastal air of Liguria that infuses the basil grown there with its unique fragrance.