Gilfeather Turnip

The Gilfeather Turnip is on the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste and is one of the featured vegetables in the Slow Food USA/Chefs Collaborative Foods at Risk/Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT) Grow-out taking place in New England. Despite the attempts of developer John Gilfeather to guard his stock and keep propagation to himself, some seeds did make it off of his property, and a few farmers have continued to grow the Gilfeather Turnip after Mr. Gilfeather died.

The Gilfeather is an egg-shaped, rough-skinned root, but unlike its cousins, it has a mild taste that becomes sweet and a creamy white color after the first frost. While the hardy Gilfeather turnip does well in nearly any climate, this touch of frost contributes to its unusual taste and texture. Developed and named after John Gilfeather from Wardsboro, Vermont, this turnip is one of the state’s unique contributions to cold weather agriculture.

Seeds are available from Fedco Seeds, whose site informs us that though the Gilfeather is called a turnip, it is, in fact, a rutabaga. They also say that the greens are tender (we all like a two-for-one vegetable when we can get one), it doesn't become woody even at larger sizes, and, as mentioned above, tastes better after frost, which is handy as it matures late in the growing season. Why not try it out in your garden? And if not, be sure to be on the look-out for it at farmers markets and participating restaurants later in the year.

Taste Memory: More on Eating it to Save it

For a quick overview of why the Foods At Risk/Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT) Grow-out project is so important, have a look at this video of Slow Food New Orleans founder and leader, Poppy Tooker, as she tours the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden and talks to farmers and food producers about endangered foods. Among other interesting stories told in the video, a grower of Gravenstein Apples tells Poppy that at the height of their popularity, 9,000 acres were planted in Gravensteins, and now, they are grown on only 700 acres.

Early Blood Turnip-Rooted Beet

photo courtesy of Old Sturbridge Village

As promised, we will be posting historical information on the RAFT (Renewing America's Food Traditions) Grow-out project food varieties. The RAFT Grow-out project is a joint effort of Slow Food USA and Chefs Collaborative whereby local farmers have committed to growing the endangered foods and local chefs have committed to serving the endangered foods on their menus at harvest time. In addition to the farmers' and chefs' participation, we encourage you to select a vegetable that you can grow in your garden or in a container. The more exposure individuals have to these foods, the more likely we are to be able to save them and preserve biodiversity in our food system.

The Early Blood Turnip-Rooted Beet is a variety that has been cultivated since the early 1800s and is prized for its sweet and tender flesh. The beet has very dark, violet-red flesh with lighter zones. The leaves are dark with bright red petioles. Even when it grows to a large size, the flesh remains flavorful, tender, and juicy.

It has a slight clove-like aroma and wonderful sweetness - light like a carrot, but without the intensity of sweetness that a carrot has. If you were to sample it raw, you would find it has an apple-like, slightly astringent flavor. It has a complexity of taste that starts with a cinnamon flavor and a hint of heat, followed by a tartness and rich, earthy finish. The beet is good both boiled and baked, and the leaves are an excellent cooked green. And that's an added bonus - it's two vegetables in one!

If you are looking for a beet that will overwinter well, the Early Blood Turnip-Rooted Beet is an excellent beet for cold-storage, keeping well in root cellar storage for 8 months or more.

It has a variable rate of maturity - between 48 and 68 days - which makes it somewhat challenging for commercial growers, but an ideal variety for individuals and smaller farms.

The Early Blood Turnip-Rooted Beet is a highly endangered variety and is on the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste.

In addition to growing the Early Blood Turnip-Rooted Beet, other actions you can take include requesting it from farmers at farmers markets - now is a good time to do so in order that they have time to plan - and requesting that your local grocery store carry the Early Blood Turnip-Rooted Beet.

Seeds are available from Old Sturbridge Village and Seed Savers Exchange.

Please feel free to post a comment to let us know if you or someone you know will be growing the Early Blood Turnip-Rooted Beet. We'd love to hear all about it!

Slow Food RI and Farm Fresh RI Movie Night, Wednesday, February 25

Slow Food Rhode Island and Farm Fresh Rhode Island are sponsoring their first movie night together on Wednesday, February 25 at Local 121, 121 Washington Street, Providence.

We will be showing James Spione's documentary, American Farm, about the upstate New York dairy farm that has been in Spione's mother's family for over 150 years. His cousin is the fifth generation to face the challenges of running this family farm, and has survived recession and pressure from agribusiness. Now that he is approaching seventy, and with none of his six children interested in assuming responsibility for running the farm, it must be sold.

The film is narrated entirely by the family members and chronicles the history of the farm as well as the social circumstances surrounding small family farming that have led to the decision to sell.

You can have a look at the trailer by clicking here.

As you may know, Local 121 is a restaurant that is dedicated to serving the best locally-raised food available. They work with local farmers to source the best foods from our food system, and, of course, support the wider community with events like this movie night. There will be a buffet of locally-sourced food available for $15 as well as a cash bar. Admission to the movie is free.

The room will open at 6pm and the buffet will be served starting at 6:15pm. The movie will start at 7pm.

Please RSVP to Local 121 at 401-274-2121.

We hope to see you at Local 121 on the 25th!

Eat It to Save It

We mentioned in last week's post that we're very excited about the collaborative effort of Slow Food USA and Chefs Collaborative's Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT) grow-out project. This year, the grow-out is taking place only in New England, and it offers we Rhode Islanders (and all New Englanders) a great opportunity to experience the tastes of endangered foods by purchasing them later this year at farmers markets and restaurants that feature these foods, and we are also fortunate because we can grow some of these foods ourselves in our backyard gardens and balcony planters.

Below is a list of RAFT grow-out foods for Rhode Island. If you click on the variety name, it will bring you to a seed source website for that food so that you can grow these heirloom varieties yourself. If you do have a garden, consider planting a plant or two of each variety - or even just a few varieties - and share the seeds with your neighbors. Please do spread the word - the goal for these foods is to repatriate them here in the region in which they originated, and the more individuals who take up the cause by sowing seeds, buying this produce at the farmers market, or requesting that their grocery store carry these foods, the better chance they have for survival.

RAFT Grow-out Varieties:

Early blood turnip-rooted beet
Jimmy Nardello’s sweet pepper
Sibley’s Pikes Peak squash
Boston Marrow Squash
Long Pie pumpkin
True Red Cranberry beans
Marfax bean
Gilfeather turnip
Winningstadt cabbage
Boothby’s blonde cucumber
Student parsnip
Wethersfield onion
Trophy tomato
Siberian Sweet watermelon
Stowell’s Evergreen sweet corn


There are an enormous assortment of foods that originated in New England - everything from fruit and nut trees, to chickens, to shellfish, as well as other vegetables - that are endangered. For the full list, please visit Slow Food USA's website to download a pdf on New England's Place-based Foods at Risk with more information on the RAFT project.

Also, to read a wonderful article on the Ark of Taste - created by Slow Food to raise awareness about these endangered foods and to keep them in production, therefore promoting biodiversity - and to learn where the title for today's post originated, please take a look at the FLYP website.

As winter slowly begins to wind down, we'll be posting more and more information on the RAFT project and the stories behind the foods. Once the growing season is upon us, we'll provide information on the farmers' efforts in growing the foods, and then, at harvest time, we'll let you know where to find these heirloom varieties - at farmers markets and on restaurant menus, and with your help, maybe even in grocery stores. We're looking forward to seeing the cycle unfold, and hope you'll join us in our efforts to restore these foods in Rhode Island.

Renewing America's Food Traditions, the Local Food Forum, and information on nominating a food producer to receive $10,000.

Here at Slow Food Rhode Island, we're busy planning our events schedule for the early part of 2009, and will keep you updated on those details here and by email (be sure to sign up to be included in the Slow Food RI email by joining us at Slow Food USA!).

Meanwhile, there are a lot of exciting things going on. We want to remind you that the fifth annual Local Food Forum is next Wednesday, February 4 at Andrews Dining Hall on the Brown University Campus. You can still register for the event through Sunday, February 1, and admission is free. It's a great opportunity to listen to and discuss plans for our local food system.

Slow Food Rhode Island is very excited to help Slow Food USA and Chefs Collaborative promote the Foods at Risk/Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT) grow-out project. The RAFT grow-out project seeks to help reintroduce endangered foods to their native regions. Rhode Island chefs and farmers will be working together on this project, with chefs featuring the endangered foods from the grow-out on their menus this fall. We'll keep you posted about those events, and, in addition to selecting one or two foods to champion here in Rhode Island, we will also be posting the stories of Rhode Island's own endangered foods here on the Slow Food Rhode Island blog, and will be doing community outreach to promote the growing of these foods by individual gardeners in addition to farmers. We think this is a very important project to help restore these foods to our region, fostering biodiversity as it does, and we hope to one day see these foods available not solely at the Farmers Market, but also at grocery stores and other retail outlets.

If you would like to read more about the RAFT project, please take a look at the Slow Food USA website, or the Chefs Collaborative website. If you'd like to purchase seeds to grow some of the endangered RAFT, or Ark of Taste, varieties, the Seed Savers Exchange website is the place to go. In addition to featuring background on individual foods, we will be posting a list of RAFT foods so that it's easy for you to track them down on the Seed Savers Exchange site.

Finally, if you know a farmer, business leader, or thought leader who is working to promote local food systems, The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has announced the first annual Growing Green awards to honor the work of a Food Producer, a Business Leader and a Thought Leader in the sustainable agriculture world. The organization will highlight extraordinary contributions that include innovation within an ecologically-integrated food system, advancement of sustainable food production, climate stewardship, water stewardship, the preservation of farmland, and social responsibility. We think this is a great opportunity to honor an individual who is making changes in our community in a unique area such as protecting biodiversity or leading a school garden program.

The following three categories are eligible to apply:

Food Producer: Farmers or other food producers, including aquaculture, who employ
innovative techniques to sustain agriculture, the natural environment, workers and
community; (this category includes a $10,000 award)

Business Leader: Entrepreneurs who effectively use the marketplace to promote sustainable food systems, develop infrastructure that enables producers to be more sustainable, or advance sustainable innovations anywhere along the supply chain from farm to fork;

Thought Leader: Visionaries who advance sustainability as it relates to food through creative research, public education, and outreach.

The deadline is next Friday, February 6, so you'll want to get on this quickly. For information on the nomination process, please visit NRDC's website at: http://www.nrdc.org/growinggreen/

Please visit the blog again soon as we will be starting to post the stories of RAFT foods in the coming weeks.

Providence Wintertime Farmers Market

If you haven't yet been to the Providence Wintertime Farmers Market, you've been missing a fantastic event. Not to worry, though, it continues every Saturday from 11am until 2pm at the Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket from now through April 25, but you should make a habit of shopping there. Don't wait until it's too late, you'll regret it. It's an impressive market, and one for which the farmers and food artisans, and Farm Fresh Rhode Island deserve a lot of credit for keeping the local food system flourishing throughout the winter.

There is a fantastic selection of locally produced foods at the market, and the market itself is abuzz with activity and an upbeat vibe. Last Saturday, the market was jam-packed with shoppers and vendors alike. A line had formed at the Naragansett Creamery stand, shoppers eagerly awaiting their turn to select locally-crafted cheeses like Atwell's Gold, Renaissance Ricotta, and Queso Blanco, among others.

Grass-fed pork and beef is available from a few farms, as are eggs and whole pastured chickens. If you're looking for obscure cuts of meat, the market is a great resource. I picked up some leaf lard and guanciale from Pat's Pastured, and plan to buy pig's trotters and beef tongue in the coming weeks. Of course, the farmers do have all of your "normal" cuts of meat, so by no means do you have to be planning to experiment with eating "everything but the squeal," as farmer Pat McNiff put it to me as he handed me my package of lard.


There is plenty of locally grown produce available, including apples, apple cider, greens, squashes, and root vegetables, and this was clearly well-appreciated, as the produce stands had many customers lined up with goods in-hand.

This being the Ocean State, there is also shellfish and lobster on offer from Matunuck Oyster Farm. I'm thinking any time is a good time for oysters - especially oysters from the waters off of our state - but maybe you want to make a plan for oysters on Valentine's Day? Or for a birthday celebration? Or simply to break up the monotony the winter brings? Your choice. Any reason is a good one.

There are plenty of gift-type items at the market, including soaps and infused oils, as well as homemade dog treats at Jack's Snacks, of which my dog was the happy recipient. She seemed to like the Squirrel Nut treat quite a bit, in fact.

And there are treats for humans as well - chocolates, pies, chutneys, jams, and freshly baked breads. Not to mention the treat that is the space itself. The mill building is beautifully restored and has floor to ceiling windows on the interior walls, so along with the meat, produce, cheese, bread, dog treats, and shellfish, there are permanent shops as well, including a book store and children's store, among others. You'll be amazed. And you'll go back again and again, for the great local food as well as the ambiance.

Take it Slow, and get yourself down to the market!