At Farm & Table, all of us – managers, cooks, servers, bussers, bloggers, and everyone in between – pride ourselves in our knowledge of the food we’re serving and where it comes from, and we work hard to share that knowledge with our community. The connection between ourselves and what we put in our bodies is a sacred connection, and yet one we often lose track of in today’s day and age.
We are passionately devoted to bringing that relationship between the people, the land, and our sustenance back to us. Anyone who works at Farm & Table can identify the food we serve and where it comes from – but we’ve realized that there is a big difference between knowing where our food comes from, and actually seeing it for ourselves: standing on the land, seeing the crops, laying our hands in the soil, biting into a radish straight from the ground.
That’s why we’ve started a program, available to all our staff, of weekly field trips to the local farms that supply Farm & Table. Now, when you ask us about the asparagus on your plate, we can tell you not only that we know where it came from, but that we’ve actually seen it grow. We kicked off our field trips with a trip to ARCA Organics in Corrales with head farmer Sean Ludden.
Farmer Sean showed us around both of the properties belonging to ARCA Organics. At the first site we saw greenhouses full of tomatoes ready to be transplanted, and ARCA’s signature wheatgrass that they sell all over the city. We saw carrots with huge, green tops peaking out of the ground. We salad greens that were ready to be harvested, and arugula that had gone to seed – and tasted the sweet arugula flowers that had replaced the greens. Outside we saw beds of strawberries and pulled radishes from the ground that would soon make their way to our tables. Farmer Sean wiped the soil away from one of the roots and said that we could sample them, if we didn’t mind the dirt (we didn’t!).
At ARCA’s second, and bigger, property, Farmer Sean showed us rows and rows of tomatoes and explained why many of the rows were covered to keep out bugs, and showed us a field of asparagus that we and Farmer Sean speculated to be the biggest asparagus field in the city.
Farmer Sean was so welcoming and helpful and generous with his time – he answered all our questions about ARCA Organics. THANK YOU FARMER SEAN! We loved our trip to ARCA Organics and can’t wait for the next field trip!
