What is Context?

At the core of it all, context is everything that influences and matters in your operation. At The Chef’s Garden, our context looks different than the context of a conventional farming operation. With regenerative agriculture at the forefront of all of our decisions, everything we do is rooted with deeper intention and care.

While context varies for everyone, a few notable key components the Noble Research Institute share that follow us in our every day farming practices are:

• Soil health parameters
• Climate, region and environment
• Our individual backgrounds, educations, experiences and knowledge bases
• Family and employee dynamics
• The history of the property
• Influence of neighbors and others
• Willingness to learn something new
• Our belief system

While these components shape our daily practices, they are themselves shaped by an overarching factor in our operation at The Chef’s Garden: sustainability.

Sustainability as our Foundation to Context

We work hard to provide chefs with the best in-season vegetables and we consider our produce to be at a higher standard than most not just because of what we’re growing, but because of how we’re growing them.

The Chef’s Garden treats sustainability as the foundation, not the finish line. While many think sustainability as being “green” and “eco-friendly”, we see it as something broader and more holistic.

For our farm to be truly sustainable, we believe that it must meet three essential criteria:

1. Environmentally Friendly
2. Socially Responsible
3. Economically Viable

CEO and Co-Owner of The Chef’s Garden, Bob Jones Jr., often compares these three pillars to three legs of a stool. Keep all three strong, and you create a stable foundation that can support long-term success.

We take pride in caring for the land, but we take even greater pride in caring for the people who live on it as a direct impact of our work with the land. When we work with nature rather than against it, the Earth responds in kind—with healthier soil, more nutrient-dense vegetables for our customers and a farming system that supports over 150 dedicated team members.

Sustainability isn’t just part of our context—it is our context. It’s how we grow, how we think and how we ensure that both our farm, our food and our community has a future.

Context Matters in your Kitchen

Those who understand the care and intentionality behind their ingredients create dishes with deeper flavors and meaning. Having the context behind your ingredients allows you to respect and highlight the ingredient, not just cook with it. This context can include anything from the importance of sustainability to your business or home, how or where your vegetables are grown, or seasonality of your produce.

Take, for example, a carrot. To some, it’s just a humble root vegetable, pulled from a bin at the grocery store. But to the cultured cook, it’s a product of living soil, nurtured through regenerative agriculture not just for flavor, but to restore the health of the land itself. These carrots are grown in ways that deepen the richness and sweetness only truly healthy soil can offer. They aren’t grown just to fill shelves or pack boxes—they’re grown to nourish people, steward the earth and preserve the story of where our food comes from.

This context brings purpose into your craft, a connecting conversation with a guest and a flavor that’s remembered well after the meal has been served.

Context Shapes Everything We Do

Context makes every farm and kitchen unique. When bringing context into the picture it forms a lens through which your actions gain meaning. For a farmer, it guides the choice of methods to nurture soil for exceptional vegetables. For a chef, it informs the selection of produce, prioritizing the best for guests and the environment. Regardless of your role, The Chef’s Garden remains committed to working in harmony with nature, providing kitchens everywhere with vegetables that are full of meaning and purpose.

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If you have a phobia of watching someone hold lusciously edible leaves in the dark, do not watch Farmer Lee in this video! Repeat: do NOT watch this video . . .

Or perhaps you’re like Farmer Lee, someone who loves to embrace, use, and enjoy vegetables in uniquely beautiful ways; then feel free to watch the video multiple times as you imagine how to include the lovely and flavorful beet blush in your creative dishes and menus.

Origins of the Beet Blush

Colonists who came from Europe stored root vegetables in underground locations to survive the cold, lean winters. When storing beets, leaves sprouted from the mother beet, and the colonists ate those leaves to enjoy something green during the winter.

The same thing happened at the farm when we stored our beets, and upon seeing the leaves’ potential, we began growing beet blush for our chefs. We grow beet blush in the dark, including from the candy stripe beet, golden beet, and traditional red beets, and they’re absolutely gorgeous.

Because diners eat with their eyes first, that’s a true bonus! But beet blush is far more than just a pretty face.

All the Flavor of Gnarly Beets in a Delicate Leaf

These delicious leaves have a subtle note of earthy beet beneath the overarching sweetness, and chefs often use these edible leaves like they would chicory or endive. These exquisite beauties have won over many people who claimed that they just don’t like beets—and when they taste one, they have a look of pure wonder on their faces.

Our farm team carefully monitors the growth of these eye-catching leaves, meticulously choosing ones that are perfectly sized and shaped to grace your tables.

Final Note About Beet Blush

Unlike early colonists, Farmer Lee doesn’t limit his enjoyment of the beet blush to just winter. It’s a treat that he enjoys all year long.

Please let your product specialist know what beet blush you need for your menus. We look forward to serving you!

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Just between you and us, though, Farmer Lee loves this vegetable so much that we sometimes have a bit of trouble tracking him down during the spinach season. He even talks with the spinach!

Think we’re kidding?

All joking aside, we think your diners will love our spinach, too. And, thanks to our use of cold frames, as fall transitions into winter, the sugar content of our spinach will continue to rise. Think about vintners using frozen grapes to make incredible ice wine—and that’s the same concept that we use when we grow our ice spinach.

Ice spinach freezes at night and thaws in the day, continuing to bring sugar levels up to the point that brix readings are as high as those of an apple.

As Bob Jones, Jr. explains it, spinach leaves are little solar receptors that capture sunlight through photosynthesis. This light energy is converted to chemical energy—and while we won’t get into all of the technical details here, the result is natural sugar. In fact, if you look at the root of a bunch of our ice spinach, it’s even turning pink because of the concentration of natural sugars near the soil line.

Our ice spinach is a deep, rich green in hue with leaves that are full of life and energy—and of vigor and vitality.

And, oh. Mum’s the word, but Bob explained the talking-like sound coming from the spinach that Lee is holding. It comes from the cell walls’ integrity and amount of calcium—which translates into an incredible shelf life for you and your restaurants.

Ready for farm-fresh spinach on your winter menus? Just let your product specialist know!

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Louise Schiavone is a senior lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and a lifelong journalist. She is a veteran of CNN, ABC News, and the Associated Press and is now a newscast anchor at NPR. At Roots 2023, she guided a discussion among the following panel members: Amanda Harris of Playa Viva, Brandon Bir of Crimson Cup, and Jamie Simpson of the Culinary Vegetable Institute at The Chef’s Garden.

Each brings a unique perspective to the conversation, and all agree that to achieve a sustainable future, we must change the ways in which we produce and manage food. Here’s what they had to say at Roots 2023: Regenerate.

Amanda Harris

As the permaculture manager for the Playa Viva hotel in Mexico, Amanda Harris is responsible for 200 acres of land, supervising the soil’s health, building a food forest, ensuring the growth of fresh foods, and helping local farmers with their sustainability efforts in a challenging climate.

About one thousand people live in this agrarian community/micro watershed with the hotel being a unique, environmentally friendly resort for travelers. As the hotel was being transformed, employees for the regenerative farming portion increased from four to fourteen, including the first women to be paid for agriculture work in more than a century.

Goals include feeding soil to produce food, planting water, reintroducing native and climate-adaptive species, focusing on carbon sequestration, rotating crops, strategically using forestry techniques, and creating economic opportunities so that residents don’t have to leave home to find ways to support their families.

Planting water involves planting certain species, such as the drought-resistant moringa tree—the tree of life—from seed at the right moon cycle. As it grows, this tree draws water to itself through a root system that becomes the size of two or three tires; besides drawing forth moisture for its own needs, it also provides water for plants near it to grow.

Another technique used by Amanda involves planting four species in the same hole that work in harmony. For example, one may grow to provide the necessary shade for the other, mutually supporting one another from generation to generation.

At Playa Viva, people experiment, take risks, make mistakes, observe, and interact to achieve the best results.

The people who live in this community are resilient as they try to bring back the dried-up waters and create shade. Amanda supports them through educational and motivational means as they discuss the cycles of climate and solutions for climate change. At first, doubt and confusion about having a woman teach in a male-dominated culture were a challenge, but they began to build trust in one another as they took risks together.

For vacationers at Playa Viva, it can be a transformative experience, with 100 percent solar power and 50 percent of farm produce making up 30 percent of what’s used in the hotel kitchen.

Personally, Amanda worries about the global picture, but her place in a smaller locale allows her to make an even bigger impact as she creates leaders and looks for opportunities.

Brandon Bir

Brandon Bir, Crimson Cup’s director of sustainability, travels more than 100,000 miles annually to visit coffee communities, improve their sustainability, and help create a fairer and more responsible coffee future for farmers. In other words, he teaches, trains, and sustains.

In Papua, New Guinea, for example, where farmers pick beans only when they need money, he taught them how to mulch, use more circular and sustainable forestry techniques, and effectively manage byproducts. In Peru, global warming is forcing farmers to keep moving further up geographically to grow coffee. So, he showed them how to ferment, dry, and elevate coffee beans to improve their quality and allow farmers to quadruple their money per pound.

Cultural traditions vary, with some families not wanting to send their children off to the coffee plantation to attend school; in South America, family units are incredibly important. In some places, there is no internet and, in them, people may not use the word “sustainable,” but they’ve been incorporating sustainable practices for millennia that others can implement.

Because of climate change, farmers must either adapt by incorporating hybrid approaches to address drought conditions or leave the industry. Coffee production as we know it today will not exist by 2050, and Brandon does what he can to help farmers transform into more long-term models of production.

Brandon tries to be intentional about his behaviors, but he admitted to feeling guilty about some of his practices: throwing away coffee filters, for example, or driving twenty extra minutes to get the biodiesel fuel he uses. He tries to always focus on the people behind the products he uses, never consuming without also considering what went into creating that product.

In general, Brandon is an optimistic, cheerleading type of guy although it was hard not to become pessimistic during the worst of the pandemic. He also revealed what revives his optimism: being around young people and their knowledge of sustainability.

Jamie Simpson

Jamie Simpson is the executive chef at the Culinary Vegetable Institute (CVI), an innovative place that he calls a center of unparalleled inspiration. The land where the CVI now stands was once lake bottom soil, which was enriched by sea creatures over the centuries. Today, he can stroll through the gardens, identify special ingredients of the day, and put them on a pedestal as he and others at the farm celebrate the seasons.

One of the farm’s greatest strengths is its diversity, both in people and in specialty crops grown. This diversity helps to protect the farm against the ravages of climate change, such as when storms hit; they may lose some vegetables, but they won’t lose the farm.

What Jamie appreciates the most in his daily garden walks is the opportunity to think about using all of the parts of a plant throughout its life cycles: roots, leaves, stems, fruits, blossoms, and pollen. He looks to find new ways to be less wasteful, and he loves when he can inspire other people to take this lesson with them in unique ways.

When asked about his relationship with Farmer Lee Jones, Jamie called him a brother, father, best friend, business partner, leader, and mentor who comes up with the best one-liners. When asked about the future, Jamie called himself a realist who recognizes that there’s always going to be waste and unexpected suffering from random climate-related events. That’s why, he believes, we have to remain adaptive and flexible and why conferences like Roots 2023 are so valuable: as people inspire other people and their ideas impact one another, this can help to create a better future.

Transformative Path Forward

To heal our land and continue to produce our food in a time of climate change, regenerative farming, and other sustainable practices are key as people like Amanda, Brandon, Jamie, and the entire farm team at The Chef’s Garden revolutionize the way we nourish ourselves around the world.

As an industry, it is imperative that people adapt practices to reduce food waste, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and ensure that agricultural land is used as sustainably as possible. Now is, therefore, the time to explore where our food comes from, how it is grown, and how tending the land the right way improves the health of the soil, the food we consume, and the planet.

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First, here’s some context into the documentary’s development. During the pandemic, filmmaker Laura Gabbert and trailblazing food writer Ruth Reichl were each working independently on projects connected to the food industry. When they collaborated, the result was Food and Country, where passionate, inspirational changemakers in the industry “met” with Ruth via Zoom to share their stories.

As film review site Variety.com summarizes the documentary, it features a “thoughtful and strikingly personable cast of characters from across the U.S. . . . in the shadow of the pandemic. Some are chefs, bakers, restaurateurs. Others are independent farmers, ranchers, and even kelp harvesters. Some work in big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. Others make their increasingly fragile living working fields or rearing herds in Kansas, Nebraska, Georgia, and Ohio. Their collective insights tell us a great deal about our food system and serve as a warning. Yet their devotion to the work—and often their employees—is heartening, even humbling.”

Michael Bracey, the film’s outreach strategist, led the conversation at Roots, with Ruth and Laura helping to direct it.

Heart of the Pandemic

When Ruth went to the supermarket and saw empty shelves, she was astonished. This, for her, truly spotlighted how Americans took food for granted—and she recognized this as a pivotal moment. How we ultimately react to this time in history, she believes, will play itself out in momentous ways that we can’t yet predict with certainty.

Ruth had never used Zoom before, but she got an account, and relevant clips of her conversations over the next two years appeared in the film.

Angela Knuth: Knuth Farms

The film captures the time Angela and her husband were transitioning their traditional farm, Knuth Farms, to an organic one. Angela was more enthusiastic about the process than her spouse. Food and Country showed the tension the family went through as they made the transition, which helped to demonstrate how it really does take time to get the soil where farmers need it to be.

For them, the process began in 2018, and by 2020, they were certified organic. At that point, they did well, and Angela appreciated how they could leave their farm to their sons with better-quality soil. At Roots, Angela described setbacks and expressed how they’re still in the midst of a learning curve, including learning how to combine organic farming with regenerative farming.

Minh Phan: Porridge + Puffs

Minh Phan was the first person Laura reached out to, and, in Food and Country, Minh shares her frustrations about her restaurant, Porridge + Puffs, in ways that Ruth called “incredibly frank.” Minh recognized the need for financial literacy around the economics of the restaurant industry for workers and diners alike. In the film, Minh rates the food at her restaurant at A- but levels of service at C- or even D, acknowledging that she was only at 20 percent of where she wanted to be; getting front-of-house workers was a particular struggle.

Through experiencing the pandemic, Minh recognized a need for a paradigm shift to get everyone on the same page at her restaurant. She also realized that she truly is a performer, one who can’t perform at the same level every night.

Reem Assil: Reem’s California

Reem’s California underwent a significant change during the pandemic years, one where the restaurant became a worker-owned cooperative where employees would share both the risks and the rewards. Although restaurant owners had sold their businesses to employees before, Reem wanted to stay in the business and grow the restaurant with the employees. Because this model was unusual, investors didn’t know how to react and neither did the people experienced in forming cooperatives.

Reem and her employees have worked hard to reimagine and reinvent their restaurant but have often encountered market and industry restrictions. Her employees are still with her, though, as they attempt to share burdens and build resiliency. In retrospect, Reem believes that she’s invested in her people in ways that might be detrimental to the business and realizes that she’s still on a journey where she attempts to balance ideals with practicality.

Common Thread

Throughout the panel conversation at Roots, participants noted how their journeys, triggered or enhanced because of COVID-19, are still ongoing. Solutions are partial, not complete, as they continue to strive for a reimagined model for our food system. The film was made available for attendees that evening.

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People have enjoyed the majestic fragrance of violas over the centuries. “Praised by Greek poets” in ancient times and woven into that culture’s mythology, violas became associated with the Virgin Mary and represented humility in the Renaissance period. Worn at glamorous balls and opera performances in 19th-century Paris, Queen Victoria of England also adored these blooms.

When you use violas in your dishes, you can include stories about the flower’s history and legend and allow diners to enjoy their beauty, sweet perfume, and honey-vegetal flavor that comes with a touch of lettuce. Each of the varieties of this edible flower is distinguishable in flavor and gorgeous coloration. You can choose the hues you want based on the dish you’re building to customize it down to the tiniest detail.

Options include the following:

• Banana cream viola: blooms range from pale and creamy to vibrant yellow

• Blackberry sorbet viola: so deeply purple that they almost appear to be black

• Blackberry swirl viola: ranging from pale to dark, this bloom features stunning purple with touches of gold

• Blue raspberry sorbet viola: comes in rich shades of purple

• Blueberry cheesecake viola: gorgeous shades of purple turn white with a golden center

• Blueberry cream viola: delicate cream beauties with intense purple and gold centers

• Blueberry lemon sorbet viola: intense contrasts between purple and yellow with gold in the middle

• Blueberry swirl viola: another study in stunning contrasts; this time, it’s in purple and white

• Burnt honey sorbet viola: golden hues blend with luscious brown hues

• Lemon meringue viola: amazing shades of yellow with touches of vivid purple

• Mixed viola: get the best of the day’s harvest with this brilliant rainbow of blooms

• Orange marmalade viola: eye-popping shades of orange in beautiful variations of hue

• Plum sorbet viola: crowning touches of beauty in lovely shades of purple

• Pomegranate viola: appreciate rich purple and vibrant yellow hues

• Red raspberry sorbet viola: lovely swirls of purple with a yellow and white center

• Red raspberry swirl viola: multiple shades of purple with a contrasting white and then golden center

• Rhubarb lemon viola: vivid yellow and gold centers surrounded by rich purple shades

Contact your product specialist today to get precisely what you need for your culinary creations!

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