Over the course of eight weeks, Ben Towill, the co-owner of the Fat Radish, and the photographer Patrick Dougherty are biking 4,500 miles across the U.S. to talk to strangers about food. Each week, they'll file a dispatch for T about their discoveries.
"Son, you're in the heart of coal country," said the retired coal miner as we pulled into a gas station in the town of McKee in Eastern Kentucky. "We can fix just about anything here."
Ten minutes later, Jasper, a.k.a. Junior, age 70, returned with a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a wrench in the other. Within five minutes he had fixed a bent bicycle wheel and we were back on the road.
SERIES
A Ride Across America
Read more of Ben Towill's weekly dispatches about food and how we eat it, filed as he bikes across the country. More…
Sadly, Jasper and his fellow Kentuckians' talent for fixing anything does not extend to a good, nutritious meal. In fact, in this corner of the world, it feels that food has not been part of the conversation for a long, long time. After four days, 300 miles, four Subway lunches, two Dairy Queen dinners and an order of deep-fried Oreos as an afternoon snack, I was beginning to think that the idea of this ride was somewhat hopeless.
Then, miraculously, we pulled into the town of Berea, home to a liberal-arts college of 1,600 students, all of whom work at the school in exchange for free tuition.
After a little research, I made my way down to the farm that serves the college cafeteria and spent the morning talking and touring the grounds with three students working there. All three had something in common: their fathers had diabetes, the direct result of poor diets. After all I had seen in Eastern Kentucky during the days before, it was refreshing to hear these kids speak with passion about food and healthy eating, convinced that their generation would be healthier than the one before through an awareness of good food. They had seen firsthand the financial burden of living with diabetes, which, they'd come to realize, is far more expensive than fresh produce.
From there, I walked down to the town's greenmarket, where I found a wonderful community of farmers and artisans. Faye and her husband are farm apprentices, Sarah is working in community gardens around the Appalachians and Corrie is putting on an event combining food and theater. These folks stick out like sore thumbs in the area because they are doing something so fundamentally different. They are the odd ones, but after six days in Kentucky it struck me that they were the happier ones.
Perhaps the most unusual members of the community are Liam and Valentina, who sell their home-baked bread at the market. They invited us to stop by for lunch on our way out of town the next day. The couple met in Sicily and bicycled through Europe to Ukraine. Part of what impressed us about them is that they only use bikes to get around, and live fully off the grid.
When we arrived, Valentina was washing dishes in the creek and Liam was concluding his morning coffee ritual, which includes roasting the beans in his homemade wood-fired oven. Lunch was a mixture of veggies that Valentina pulled from the garden. "We don't go to restaurant, restaurant come to us," she said in her thick Ukrainian accent as she tossed them my way. I cooked sweet potato, Swiss chard and green onion stew over the oven, discussing the pros and cons of radical simplicity. It was certainly not the conversation I expected to have on my way out of Kentucky. But that's the joy of travel: a day never quite works out the way you'd planned it.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
T Magazine: A Ride Across America | Greenmarkets and Off-the-Grid Living in the Heart of Kentucky Coal Country
Dengan url
http://travelwisatawan.blogspot.com/2014/06/t-magazine-ride-across-america.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
T Magazine: A Ride Across America | Greenmarkets and Off-the-Grid Living in the Heart of Kentucky Coal Country
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar