The Food Chain

Tracking your meal’s ingredients, step-by-step, from farm to table

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Beefing Up

There’s something strange about staring your dinner in the face, but it’s what cattle farmer Matt Gottwald does every day. Click on the pictures below to follow the process.

Maybe I'm Amaized

Travis Milton stands on three-quarters of an acre of land, just a patch of the small Oilville farm that supplies to Pasture, Comfort and Charlottesville’s Pasture Q. It’s barren now, but in the thick of corn season, he’d be standing in tall stalks of the Cherokee White Eagle he plants each March.

“It’s predominantly the corn that the Cherokee took with them on the Trail of Tears from central Appalachia towards the Midwest,” the Comfort chef explains. “And it’s one of the most versatile corns you’ll ever work with.”

Milton’s not exaggerating. This heirloom variety can be harvested in summer and served roasted on the cob; or dried on the stalk in late fall and wrung for its kernels to be prepared as grits, hominy or cornmeal; or planted the following year to grow a new crop.

Kidding Around

Oh, look at that!” coos Rona Sullivan. A goat is giving birth in Middlesex County, where the Sullivan’s Pond Farm co-owner and I are surrounded by the very goats providing milk for the farm’s esteemed Bonnyclabber cheese.