Dining with the Washingtons
A Culinary History

"So far none of the forty-odd farmstead owners has put in a field of durum wheat, nor does any of them raise pigs, or milk a cow. None, in fact, has done more than keep a couple of horses and mow a few swaths of hay. But they will, they will. Miniature farming is the coming sport of the leisure class." – Noel Perrin, from Second Person Rural










With the great benefit of retrospect coupled by the sometimes more than a little frustrating view of things as they are today, we can reach certain points in history and say "that would have been a good place to stop, keep it as it was, then maybe some of the various consequences that came after would not have happened.  One of the dominant complaints circling in contemporary culture has been the condition of the food system in the U.S. Eleven years ago the Omnivore's Dilemma pointed out some very congenital problems with monoculture agribusiness, feedlots, and corn fed cows just as a few examples. Not everyone knew at that point at publication about the diet of petroleum, antibiotics and corn for cows. Not everybody would have visualized and understood that as farms have gotten bigger, so too has the need to wash crops with chemicals. Machines take over where the farmer and family once laid hands and paired age old training with good practices, rotating crops, keeping portions of forests in the fields, laying cover crops, letting pastures rest, and so on down the line.  Tobacco, at the time of the American Revolution, was becoming seen as high intensive and a mere export, no

sustaining the local community. Wheat production had become a more viable option and one that was very much recognized by Washington throughout the War campaign because of its great value to the Continental Army. Washington had already begun to transfer over resources to wheat and gristmill production but became, by 1791, interested enough in the new design of the fully automated mill design by Oliver Evans to rebuild his own mill by the new patent. Evans' new designs made the mill fully automated, from a bucket elevator system to take wheat to the top of the mill, "an automatic floor cooler, called a 'hopper boy,' prepared the flour for sifting. Cooling was essential because wheat

from Brandywine Village Delaware

meal became quite warm during the grinding process...These innovations greatly increased the efficiency of the operation while reducing the number of laborers needed." At this moment, as the milling trade was in full swing and ripe for innovation, it was an industry that served as an integral hub for local community life and created what we now enviously would call a closed loop system – the miller and the local farmer worked for one another, for both profit (the miller received his fee for processing...'miller's fee), and of course the farmers were able to turn their raw wheat to a viable product not only local trade (possibly international) but obviously for personal consumption, bread being a chief staple.  We can picture the millwright craft still in full swing. Someone has to observe the sight for a mill, determine location on water, then design an intricate but non-synthetic system of gears, pulleys, chutes and wheels so to take advantage of either running or impounded water. Farmers

still would have had to keep their eyes and hands on the ground, so to speak and because wheat is such a staple, it would not have ever become a 'flash crop,' here today, gone tomorrow. Put simply, preserving the small and local wheat business could have been viable for ever. The steam engine came soon after. Production swelled, and with that, eyes bulging at the prospect of profits and prestige. Here is a moment in history that the great agriculture writer Wendell Berry would signify as a time when the generalist in farmer becomes the specialist, and the food system has degraded ever since.  The generalist farmer, like Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of our founding generation, keeps his and her eye on everything still, the home garden, the landscape that is intricately associated with crops, native seeds, watering...and milling. The specialist is in charge of a farm that is a massive acreage farm that grows one primary crop. What to pay attention to? Making sure the crop grows and nothing else. To enormous for the farmer's hands to pick, machines take over from skilled and

invested labor. Crops might not get rotated, so no rest or reaccumulation of nutrients in the soil. The topsoil is either a producer or it becomes that synthetically. The corn that is grown is not used by the local community but is sent on a train somewhere down the line, thousands of miles away, to be used primarily as feed for cows that don't like it. The farmer must invest in very heavy and expensive machinery to keep this going concern alive, but gets low price. The farmer is indebted and growing something that has no connection to his neighbor. Washington and Jefferson might have been able to conceive of virtually anything that would become the future because of their foresight; but without very little doubt neither would have condoned the modern state of agriculture. Jefferson's political philosophy was based on an agrarian economy: keep it local, keep it educated, keep it engaged. Washington's single most candid passion was farming. It was the very thing, besides his family, that he harkened back to in his mind when going through the hundreds of difficulties throughout the Revolutionary War.  A new gristmill economy sounds quite quaint, but there is now a strong trend of growing of interest in not only folk crafts and trades but small subsistence farming. The first thing I'd do is build a grist mill.