Tuesday, Day Two
It is a beautiful, sunny early fall day when we take off across Wisconsin to Lone Rock. I have breakfasted on an egg and some apple juice. It seems that without bread or pasta, I’m hungry all of the time. (Larry has admitted that he has taken a spoonful or two of honey at night to take the place of his usual sugar fix.) But we can’t feel too bad on this lovely fall day with the tops of the trees are just beginning to turn yellow. We munch carrots and Honey Crisp apples. Thank God for carrots and apples! Eating has become very simple. I think about my farmer grandparents, how my grandmother used to wax poetic over her home grown potatoes. I thought it was because she was so Scot/Irish, but maybe it was because they had done such a good job staving off hunger.
In Lone Rock, Gilbert Williams is waiting for us near his grain cleaner. He bought the cleaner at auction. ”I can clean 40 bushels an hour,” he says proudly. When the seed comes in he has to separate out the chaff. He mostly deals in rye which he explains is a cover crop for farmers so that the soil doesn’t run off during the winter. But he buys local grains, some of which are used for feed and some for human consumption. Maybe he’ll be able to sell the left over rye to make local booze someday. He smiles at the thought. He’s been at this about a year now and has a partner, Jen Lagueflow, the woman we bought the pancake mix from at the market in Mineral Springs.
But he needs to be able to expand to really make a living at this. So he and his wife are hoping to buy a mill so that he can mill his own flour. Now, he sends his grain to Jeff Ford at Cress Springs to be milled and then it’s sent back to him. What would make his flour better, I ask?
His grains, he says, start from organic seed which is hard to come by and come from wheat that is grown on Taliesin, the former frank Lloyd Wright property, where he once worked as a gardener. The eight acres of wheat are part of the 800 acres owned by Otter Creek Organic Farm. (He says eight acres of hard wheat can produce 483 bushels.) Furthermore, his flour still has the bran in it instead of it being sifted out and used as horse feed, and the wheat will have been fertilized with a micro nutrient balance producing a grain with more nutrition and great taste.
He takes us into a neat, clean building next door where he has the flour stored in coolers. Now, he says, he has hard wheat–bread flour, and rye flour. His rye he says is sweet, not like the sour rye we’re more used to, but he hopes to have some spring wheat ground in a few weeks, a lighter wheat with more gluten used to make pastries. And he hopes to be ready to ship his products by Christmas.
By the time we start out for home, we’re starving. We eat more apple slices and carrots. Knowing a zillion facts about wheat does not put any in the stomach. But no problem. We’ve located a general store and a local co-op six miles away in Spring Green. “Why am I so hungry?” I ask Larry. “Lots of people on this planet would be delighted to have what we have to eat.” Then I sit there still feeling deprived because we can’t make a quick stop and grab something, food probably not that good for us anyway.
Passed the bait shop and on down the road back to Highway 14, and soon we are pulling in behind the General Store and Café in Spring Green, a cheerfully painted old fashioned wooden structure. The local natural food co-op behind the store has closed. When I ask the girl at the counter of the General Store what local food they’re serving, she frowns in concentration and then calls into the kitchen. In the meantime, I explain what we’re doing. Another young woman comes out of the kitchen, thinks a moment and says, “We just stopped using local tomatoes yesterday, so no, I can’t think of a thing. Now, all our vegetables are from Cisco.” (A huge wholesaler.)
My heart drops.”Nothing?” I manage. The two young women are clearly interested in what we’re doing. One even takes down the name of the book that started it all.
The manager not so much. When Larry brings his cheese to the counter and tries to engage him in a conversation about our difficulties in finding local flour, the manager walks off without a word and goes toward their pancake flour, but Larry stops him by saying that we already have some. “Oh,” says the manager and offers nothing else.
Across the street at the tea shop, the owner greets my inquiry by saying, “How about just made locally?” She makes all the pies and cakes for sale. I gaze at them hungrily and explain the project. I’d probably have forgotten about the cinnamon and sugar in her pie and just scraped out the apple filling which she assures me is local, but lucky for me, it’s gone. I tell her about the guy down the road making flour, but she says he can’t supply her with enough. She goes through 50 lbs. a week. But she wishes us well.
Back in the car we go, but a few minutes later, getting hungrier and hungrier, we pull off into Pecks Farm Market. Outside are huge bins of pumpkins, squash, and other vegetables. But I barely glance at them. I am on a serious quest for food we can eat right now. Inside, we wander from aisle to aisle. I gaze hungrily at stuff I never eat: potato chips, candy bars. An elderly man waits on us, and we, not very hopefully, explain our mission. He takes us right over to a line of food in jars that look homemade and come from Pennsylvania. I show him the label.“Gee, guess I never really looked at it,” he says. But he genuinely tries to be helpful and by the time we leave, we have purchased a jar of pickles, a couple of pumpkins and some cheese curds. We devour the cheese in the car along with more apple chunks, and we start for home. There will be no stopping at a favorite restaurant tonight. We need to get home in order to eat.
One of the new experiences I’m having is feeling hungry in a country full of food that others are buying and eating, but not me. And it’s humbling.
