Many people here remember Kristin Canty best for her provocative 2011 documentary, Farmageddon, chronicling government crackdowns on raw dairies and other small farms.
Kristin’s heart is still with small farms, except these days she is expressing her commitment to locally-produced food via a group of exciting Boston-area restaurants—she’s opened three since 2015. It’s perhaps fitting that she’s opened her grandest creation during this Thanksgiving week. It has the name Woods Hill Pier 4.
Woods Hill Table is the name of her original restaurant, in Concord, MA, featuring scrumptious pork and beef dishes from chickens, pigs and cattle raised at her bucolic farm in Bath, New Hampshire. (Her second restaurant is a casual Mexican restaurant, Adelita, also in Concord—one of the only Mexican restaurants you’ll come across that features locally-produced meats for its enchiladas and tacos.)
Given the close health and food-safety oversight that urban restaurants have to deal with, the only connection to raw milk she’s been able to maintain is providing a selection of raw milk cheeses from small New England producers. (Raw milk cheese aged at least 60 days is legal under FDA regulations.) Kristin remains an advocate of raw dairy, crediting raw milk with helping her infant children overcome serious health challenges.
The “Pier 4” part of her newest restaurant’s name is a carryover from a landmark Boston restaurant, known as Anthony’s Pier 4, which seated hundreds and in the 1970s and 1980s was a brassy gathering place for celebrities and politicians; it was thought in those years to be the highest grossing restaurant in the country. Her “Pier 4” version is on the same site, which has been rebuilt in just the last few years with condos and offices, and is a smaller and much more elegant eatery. One great keepsake from the old restaurant is a view of the Boston Harbor waters from every seat in the restaurant.
Whereas the original Pier 4 was all fish all the time, Canty’s Pier 4 features less popular fish, like hake, (though it does offer a lobster newburgh based on the original Pier 4 offering). My wife and I just visited the new place and found the food unbelievably well prepared, and interesting. I loved the hake, which was served raw (saviche), along with glazed pork butt , and a very rich lamb bacon pasta dish. The dishes are all served as either small or large portion plates that are shareable, as opposed to the traditional soup-appetizer-main-course approach.
As glamorous as it all looked on the evening I was there, as Kristin personally seated friends from Concord and elsewhere in the area, Kristin told me it’s been a lot of hard work. She moved earlier in the year from her house in Concord into one of the beautiful new condos above her restaurant, “and lots of days I don’t even get outside, I just go up and down between my condo and the restaurant.”
That’s what it takes, of course, to be successful at any new venture. The new restaurant has already begun attracting lots of local media attention, such as this preview in Boston Magazine.
The local write-ups focus heavily on the Pier 4 connection, which Kristin has encouraged by adorning the new restaurant with a few original photos of celebrities that were everywhere in the original restaurant. One thing the reviewers tend not to notice is the prominent placement on a table near the new restaurant’s entrance of Sally Fallon’s classic cookbook, Nourishing Traditions.
Wonderful news. Wishing Kristin Canty all the best with her latest small farm local food restaurant venture.
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Go Kristin! May your restaurants be packed and your food be whole! ❤️
Small Farm Extinction
https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-extinction/
Great news! Happy Thanksgiving, David and everyone. We are having a Mangalista ham, garden sweet potatoes and vegetables, mashed, and cranberries. We made the pumpkin pie last night, and it smells heavenly. We are so thankful here in California for buckets of rain, rain in the forecast for the next eight days!
Joseph,
Your story of farm tragedy can be addressed through a supply management system. Canada has one of the best in the world.
Supply of Milk is controlled by farmers at regional boards. Processors are forced to order milk from those boards at the Prices set by farmers. Supply is not produced unless it is needed. Smart and Efficient !
50 cow dairies thrive. So do 1000 cow dairies. So do the communities in which they are located. See http://www.californiadairycampaign.com for the SMISA Three Legged Stool.
The only problem is that prices have come up a little and that tends to slow or stop unified progress among dairymen that last year were hot for change.
Very short sighted indeed. I look forward to seeing how a Climate Conscious leadership change in the Whitehouse effects policy on consolidation. Trump is a climate denier among other things. His feud with china has killed fragile markets. Farmers voted him into office. Ignorant and very stupid move.
I hope farmers can wake up and help vote him out!!
Mark, You keep beating that same old horse… I’ll do likewise and comment on each of your statements individually…
“Your story of farm tragedy can be addressed through a supply management system. Canada has one of the best in the world.”
Wrong… Canadian supply management with its price setting powers and over inflated quota values is not a solution to the current “usury based system” that demonstrates contempt for diversity, focuses on cheap food and treats farmers as subordinates, be it a capitalist system and even more so a socialist one… A question that North American consumers ought to entertain… is it in their best interest and should they consider dishing out more disposable income on average for food comparable to Germany at 12% or perhaps Mexico at 25%. Currently the US consumer pays 6.7% and the Canadian consumer pays 9.5%?” As I previously stated, “There are respectively two main reasons why we are loosing dairy farms in both the US and Canada… decreased milk consumption and government cheap food policies that encourage economy of scale management practices.
“Supply of Milk is controlled by farmers at regional boards.”
This statement is grossly misleading and in fact incorrect… The supply management system was introduce by government statute… regional boards do not control the supply of milk… the bureaucracy responsible for managing the provincial boards to which the farmers pay lip service and huge salaries owns that responsibility.
“Processors are forced to order milk from those boards at the Prices set by farmers.”
Again, this statement is misleading… The milk travels directly from the farmer to the processor (usually the nearest one) who is then paid by the milk board and who then in turn pays the farmer (based on a milk pricing formula) a dollar value for milk that must be approved by a consortium of government, processor, consumer, and farm representatives.
“ Supply is not produced unless it is needed. Smart and Efficient !”
This again is a misleading statement… Currently, and at least for the last three years, dairy farmers in Ontario have been in an oversupply situation… As the following article states, “Canadian dairy farmers are grappling with a glut of milk, forcing them to turn growing volumes into low-cost pig feed and sometimes dump it on farms or in sewage systems”.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/milk-surplus-forcing-canadas-dairy-industry-to-dump-supply/article25030753/
Indeed, the payout for unprocessed fluid milk has been reduced and quota, for which the farmers paid a hefty price (as much as 30,000 dollars per cow). is being systematically taken away from them.
“50 cow dairies thrive. So do 1000 cow dairies. So do the communities in which they are located.”
Canadian dairy farms are becoming larger, and as I previously noted the number of cows per farm has risen by about 205 percent, and the volume of milk produced per farm has increased by 547 per cent … Indeed, a trend that lends itself to confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and that in turn leads to compromised milk quality!
As I previously demonstrated, the loss of dairy farms during the last 30+ years in Canada parallels that of the United States. During the same time frame (1970-2017) the number of dairy farms in the USA declined by 93% while in Canada the percentage decrease was 91% (virtually the same amount). Supply management did little to prevent the loss of dairy farms across Canada and the loss of dairy farms has compromised the infrastructure of many communities across Ontario where I live… especially in those out of the way communities where farm suppliers and dealerships used to be a dime a dozen back in the 60s and 70’s. Today these suppliers and dealerships are scarce and many farmers are compelled to travel great distances to out of the way locations in order to acquire service and products.
Charlotte Smith, 3 Cow Marketing
https://www.3cowmarketing.com/
One of the most Influential Women in the World in Food & Farming will be speaking at Rutgers on Tuesday Dec 3rd as keynote with Annie’s Project:
https://nofanj.org/event/annies-project-farming-in-new-jerseys-cities-and-the-urban-fringe/
Anonymous Commodity Farmer or Artisan Farmer with a Face, Who Is Your Farmer and Why?
Joseph Heckman, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
http://a-c-s.confex.com/crops/2010am/webprogram/Paper61341.html
The resurgence of interest in local food systems follows from the failure of the industrial production and marketing system to satisfy hunger for traditional farm fresh foods. The seeds of the local food movement were sown long ago by organic farming pioneers. In the 1930’s, Dr. Weston A. Price described the physical degeneration he observed in peoples around the world when commercial foods displaced traditional diets. Renewed interest in the teachings of this nutritional pioneer is creating demand for whole unprocessed nutrient dense foods, especially meat, milk, and eggs, produced by animals on pasture. Around the same time as Price, Albert Howard was developing organic farming methods and declared “fresh food from fertile soil” a “birthright”. In 1942, J.I. Rodale predicted “One of these fine days the public is going to wake up and will pay for eggs, meat, vegetables, etc., according to how they were produced.” Demand for fresh organic food naturally favors local sourcing. Community supported agriculture, cow sharing/leasing arrangements, and private buying clubs are attempts by consumers to ensure personal food choice and survival of their local farmer. A heirloom economy of traditional foods, raw milk production and cheese making are the antithesis to industrial commodity farming. After hosting a University seminar series on raw milk and informed consumer choice, I fielded numerous inquiries about how to find the right farmer. Raw milk drinkers are discriminating about source and farmer reputation for cleanliness. Other questions concern animal breed, pasture, A2 milk, and organic certification. Food price is generally the least concern. People who are particular about what they eat are elevating artisan farmers to a professional status above the image of the average commodity farmer. Finally, the urban farming movement – keeping few chickens, a family cow or goat – marks the ultimate local food system.
Thank you for sharing about this wonderful effort! Best wishes to Kristin on all her endeavors. May all her hard work be handsomely rewarded.