CHRISTINA TOSI

Momofuku Milk Bar

The person responsible for Martha Stewart uttering the words, “I couldn’t wait to sample the Crack Pie,” Christina Tosi is the Andy Warhol of pastry chefs. But instead of riffing on Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup, Tosi uses commercial candy bars, sugared cereal, and other guilty pleasures of the industrial food complex for the desserts she invents for NYC’s three Momofuku restaurants and Momofuku Milk Bar. Her greatest hits have included the Compost Cookie: a chewy-crunchy, salty-sweet, hot mess of corn flakes, coffee grounds, graham cracker crumbs, potato chips, and butterscotch chips. And then there’s her “cereal milk,” which she makes by toasting corn flakes and steeping them in sweetened milk, and is used to flavor soft-serve ice cream, milk, and pie.

The 27-year-old, who modeled Milk Bar on Dairy Queen and told New York magazine she ate a bag of Doritos and Ben & Jerry’s for dinner the night before an interview, is a leader in the white-tablecloth backlash. Tosi’s desserts come from the same fascination with lowbrow food that has inspired the Bouluds of the world to open hot dog joints and the Jacques Torreses to erect ice cream stands. But where others are content to create yet another red velvet cupcake, Tosi is pushing haute-trash food away from kitsch into something truly new and different.

If you weren’t doing this what would you be doing?
“Eating cookie dough at home. Or being a truck driver with my dogs. Or renovating an old house and selling old clothes out of a little shop in the middle of nowhere. Or being a math teacher.”

Who was your biggest mentor and why?
“Wylie Dufresne [of WD-50, where Tosi worked prior to Momofuku] challenged me to change my way of thinking and really dissect the whys of my point of view and food perspective. [Momofuku’s] Dave Chang (don’t tell him I said so) for being a pusher and a doer, questioning everything, accepting nothing, breeding creativity out of the most challenging limitations, and making sure I’m always in just a little over my head.”

What was your most humbling moment in your current job?
“Opening Milk Bar with four people on staff. What were we thinking?”

BRYANT TERRY

Bryant-terry.com

Bryant Terry turns people on to ethical eating using stealth tactics. Take his most recent cookbook, Vegan Soul Kitchen, which combines two seemingly opposite ideas: veganism and African American soul food. With its festive recipes for things like black-eyed pea fritters with hot pepper sauce and musical playlist suggestions (with the fritters, it’s “I.T.T., Pt. 2” by Fela Kuti), it’s an enticing read. But it has an ulterior motive. “I think so often people see [the drive for local, seasonal, sustainable food] as a very white, bourgeois movement,” says Terry. In fact, his grandparents—and a lot of middle-class African Americans from that earlier agrarian time—grew and cooked fruits and vegetables and gave them away to their friends, neighbors, and church members in a kind of proto-CSA model. “I want to remind people that there’s a legacy in the African American community,” says Terry.

Before writing cookbooks, Terry ran a nonprofit that taught cooking and nutrition classes to inner-city kids in New York City. He’d been inspired by the Black Panthers, who in the 1960s had regular grocery giveaways in poor communities and free breakfasts for schoolchildren. This work led to his first book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Kitchen, cowritten with Anna Lappé. He contributed whimsical recipes for things like a Straight-Edge Punk Brunch Buffet, which counterbalanced Lappé’s essays about food justice. Whether he’s working on the ground or writing, Terry believes in affecting people’s politics by first bringing them together around the table. Or as he puts it, “Good food, not figures and stats, is the way to move masses.”

Who inspires you in the food world?
“The late Edna Lewis, for her strength as an African American chef who made a huge mark on the food world in the mid-20th century. Her way of approaching food, and the fact that she was so invested in celebrating the complex and diverse flavors of the South. The Taste of Country Cooking reads more like a memoir infused with recipes, and it really influenced me. I call what I do ‘recipes as autobiography.’ Every recipe in Vegan Soul Kitchen is preceded by a headnote that puts it in some kind of historical or sociopolitical context.”

Do you think the current fixation with meat in the food world is a bad trend?
“I’m not going to answer that! I don’t identify as vegan. I didn’t want to call my book Vegan Soul Kitchen, I wanted to call it Eco-Soul Kitchen, but my editor didn’t think people would grasp that. For me, it’s about action. Values. How you’re living in the world. How you’re showing up. Not labels, or condemning people for the choices they make.”

What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this?
“I see myself having a progressive hip-hop duo with one of my best friends—Mike Molina—who has contributed poems to both of my books. Informing and enlightening people with mindful, socially conscious, uplifting lyrics, and very moving, sensual, powerful beats.”

SAM CALAGIONE

Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales

Walk into a corner market in any major city and look at the beer cooler. You’ll see labels with magic hats, yetis, and albino sword swallowers; labels listing ingredients like juniper, wild yeasts, blueberries, chestnuts. And yet, even in this wildly creative period of American beer-making, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales stands apart as being the most experimental: the Frank Zappa of the brewing world.

The Delaware-based brewer, whose company’s tag line is “Off-centered beers for off-centered people,” hit the national scene in the early 2000s with the award-winning Raison D’Etre, a dark ale flavored with spicy Belgian yeast, puréed beets, and raisins. Since then, there’s been Midas Touch, reverse-engineered from samples of a 2,700-year-old beer recovered from King Midas’s tomb; a malt liquor made from heirloom corn, with its own hand-stamped paper bag; and most recently, chicha. This ancient Latin American beer is made by chewing and spitting out corn kernels, allowing the enzymes in human saliva to start the fermentation process. (Boiling the mixture kills the cooties.)

Well-balanced and consistent, these weird beers are loved by critical beer geeks and newbies alike. And Calagione, a charismatic guy who once posed for a Levi’s ad, has a genius for marketing craft beer to the mainstream. He holds scores of beer-pairing dinners at high-end restaurants, and devises J. Peterman-esque narrative hooks for each brew.

Who are your mentors?
“Andy Warhol, Coco Chanel, even Hemingway, as far as making your words really concise and ring like a bell, and putting thoughts out there that were different and easily accessible. Julia Child, because the way she came to her profession was nontraditional. I would consider those people to be more my mentors than anybody in the craft brewing industry.”

What would you change about your industry?
“The fact that 80 percent of the domestic beer market is controlled by InBev and SABMiller, and collectively all the craft breweries combined have a 5 percent market share, is first of all the biggest bummer. But also the thing that most excites me is what’s happening in the food world: the locavore movement, and people wanting to support small, innovative companies. I think a lot more people’s eyes are opening up to what craft beer has to offer. It’s a great affordable luxury. To buy world-class wine you have to be a millionaire, and to buy world-class beer you don’t.”

How do you stay so fit drinking beer all the time and going to these fancy dinners?
“On the road I do yoga so I don’t have to pack a bunch of crap for working out. Also you get so beat up from traveling—you ache—and nothing makes you feel better. Getting in your head for 10 minutes in the morning, doing some Downward [Facing] Dog—it’s the ultimate hangover helper.

ROY CHOI

Kogi

LA’s Kogi barbecue taco truck became a seeming overnight sensation when it debuted last December, amassing long, hungry lines, coverage on food blogs and in the national press, and several copycats. It was a mobile hole-in-the-wall for those in the know: LA street tacos filled with Korean barbecue, broadcast via Twitter, only after midnight. Drunken kids coming out of clubs tweeted it to all their friends, proving you can rely almost entirely on Twitter to launch unconventional new restaurant ventures.

But Kogi would have been just a novelty act if the food wasn’t amazing. Which it was, thanks to Roy Choi. An intense former chef for the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Choi was tapped for the project by his old friend, Mark Manguera, who had the truck and the idea but needed somebody with the chops to execute it. Drawing on the Korean food he grew up with, Choi developed the truck’s crazy-good mainstays: barbecue short ribs inside soft corn tortillas, and the kimchee quesadilla. Then he ventured into even more creative realms: Last summer’s daily specials included a spicy Korean pork sandwich, pressed between El Salvadoran soft pillow loafs, with caramelized onions, house-made chile mayo, grilled heirloom tomatoes, and cheese. In a year when nouveau food trucks became the most buzzed-about trend in the restaurant industry, let Choi go down as the chef who nailed the concept as sure as a drunk craves tacos at two in the morning.

Was there any dish you created that failed?
“With the exception of two or three dishes out of hundreds we created since we opened, everything has gone over really well. There was a mandarin-yogurt dish that didn’t go too well, though.”

If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?
“A lot of people do something for so long, then they say: I wish I could be a ballet dancer instead of an accountant. I’m like the complete opposite. I tried everything in the first part of my life. I tried to be a good student, son, tried out for sports. I tried to work in an office, at an investment bank. I did all these things that I guess normal people do, but I just wasn’t good at them! And so, from there, food is all I’ve done. I have no hobbies. Any spare time I have or creative joneses, I give it towards food.”

What would you change about your industry?
“In the last eight months of cooking for Kogi, I’ve learned that there’s nothing more important than seeing the expression on somebody’s face when you hand them food, directly. How great would it be if the best chefs in the world brought their food to the people? I don’t mean the people who can afford the food. I’m talking about the people who would never get the chance to eat at a Le Bernardin, or even a Lombardi’s pizza, or a Shake Shack! Kids in Queensbridge projects or South Central LA, who may never get the chance to eat great food from the hands of a master like an Eric Ripert or Daniel Boulud. Imagine if they brought that food down to the people? If we made that fundamental shift in the industry, it would change the framework of who we are as humans.”

DEBORAH MADISON

Deborahmadison.com

Vegetarian food was once sullen, stodgy, and centered around brown grains. Then along came cookbook writer Deborah Madison, and lo! She giveth the people balsamic vinegar, black beans with chipotle chile, roasted beets, and arugula salads. The self-described “painfully shy” native Californian worked at Chez Panisse before opening Greens in San Francisco, serving, as she says, “bright, sophisticated, delicious, and pretty” vegetarian food. The Greens Cookbook and its sequel followed, showering class and frisée salads onto two-plus generations of home cooks. And the hits kept coming.

Some griped that Greens’ recipes were too complicated (many of the lasagne dishes, for instance, require that you make both a béchamel sauce and a tomato sauce). But Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone changed the game again. The 1996 James Beard–winning bestseller “probably opened more eyes than any other cookbook in the ’90s,” said the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, with scores of easy techniques for preparing nearly every vegetable you could possibly think of.

Madison, who now lives in rural New Mexico where she has a garden and does yoga, also helped drive interest in the eating-local phenomenon. She roamed the country sampling farmers’ markets for the gorgeous, delicious Local Flavors (2002). And she even threw in a chicken dish or two. Madison is no longer a strict vegetarian, as long as the meat’s sustainably raised. As she has taught us, one doesn’t eat vegetables just because one doesn’t eat meat. One eats them because they taste really damn good.

What was your big break?
“One was going to Chez Panisse for dinner, then actually being able to work there starting the next day. It really set my imagination on fire. I was eating the foods I had always dreamed of but didn’t know they actually existed. The other break came when an editor from Bantam Books thought that The Greens Cookbook was a good idea.”

Who inspires you in the food world?
“Farmers and producers who are on the ground, working hard and getting their hands dirty. It’s not glamorous, even though what gets produced might be showcased in a glamorous setting. It takes such heart and perseverance to produce food. At least I imagine it does! Even my little vegetable beds are a challenge.”

What was the last most satisfying meal you had?
“French fingerling potatoes. I roasted them in this amazing ghee I’ve been using from Ancient Organics in Berkeley. They came out all crusty and golden. I served them with some crunchy salt and a big mess of rapini and a gorgeous local goat cheese—a pyramid with a layer of ash. [My husband and I] opened a bottle of Ridge Zinfandel. Simple, and so, so good.”

RYAN FARR

4505 Meats

Pastry chefs were the sexy dudes of the food world in 2008; Sam Mason and Alex Stupak, with their faux hawks and tattooed arms, showed up on the pages of every food magazine. Before that, it was so-called mixologists, gettin’ physical with their ice chisels and mint muddlers. But 2009 has been the year of the hot butcher. You can blame a lot of it on Ryan Farr.

Farr recently became one of the most talked-about chefs in San Francisco—peculiar because he has no restaurant, café, or traditional presence of any kind. He is a nomadic butcher, sausage maker, and butchery teacher, who peddles artisanal hot dogs at the farmers’ market, throws parties at bars where he roasts whole animals, and supplies cocktail bars and coffeehouses with little baggies of addictive deep-fried pork skins called chicharrones.

The aura of excitement around whatever Farr does is testament to the public’s current fixation with carnage and all its trappings: slabs of meat and big shiny knives. But it’s also thanks to Farr’s image-consciousness (in a good way). At a recent pig cookoff, he served raw, house-cured bacon hung on a wire with clothespins, flanked by female attendants in matching feather hair ornaments. He created a set of limited-edition letterpress posters in honor of the chicharrones, with his fingerprint in lard on the back. And in a breathless New York Times story about the “rock star butcher” trend, he quipped that he dreamed of meeting New York’s reigning hot meat man, Tom Mylan, to “throw a 300-pound pig in the middle of a room full of people and just tag-team it with him.” Now that’s sexy.

If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?
“I have no idea. Maybe a washed-up singer for a Guns ’N Roses cover band? I’ve always been a G’nR fan, and I can see that.”

Did you have a mentor?
“Not really. I’m kind of self-taught when it comes to butchery. I have no back knowledge of USDA cuts and how you break down a steer or pig the same every time. I’ve always been into making sausages: charcuterie, salamis, and all that stuff. I left [the restaurant] Orson to start my own business. I didn’t know exactly what it was, I just knew it was going to be around meat—a smokehouse or butcher or something. I was just following my stomach and to see where I ended up. I’ll keep pushing it until I’m not hungry, and I’m always hungry. I just ate lunch and I’m already thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner!”

What excites you about your industry?
“There are lots of people out there like myself who want to make things for themselves and write their own rules, and we’re all supporting each other as artisans. I’m just focusing on sausages, butchering, and chicharrones, so when we go to the market, I’m using mustard and kimchee my buddies make, hot dog buns from Acme, and sauerkraut from Cultured Organic. I’m buying it from these guys, but I’m also [telling my customers], ‘This is where it’s coming from.’ In a restaurant, it would be all under my name, because I’m the chef.”

RICHARD BLAKELEY AND JESSICA AMASON

This Is Why You’re Fat

Richard Blakeley was a web video editor at Gawker.com and Jessica Amason an editor for AOL’s culture blog when they launched This Is Why You’re Fat, a crowd-sourced photo blog of some of the most calorific dishes created by modern man. Burgers between doughnuts. Pancake towers with bacon mortar. Twinkies and Cheetos stadiums. A cross between a traffic accident and a supersized, laminated Denny’s menu, This Is Why You’re Fat received 7 million hits in its first month. Within the year, the pair had a book deal. (This Is Why You’re Fat came out October 27.)

The genius of the site, and probably the reason it’s been criticized for being a gratuitous time suck, is its total lack of subtext. Arch name aside, the blog was designed by Blakeley and Amason to be bare bones, with no commentary or information about themselves.

“One person might have taken a photo because they thought it was heinous and totally bad for you, another person might be proud of this creation they made,” says Amason. “We tried to be a one-stop shop for all these items, and not preach to anyone about them.”

The result is a fascinating historical document of modern America’s torturously conflicted relationship with food. We know what makes us fat, but when it comes to fried foods, bacon, melty cheese, dough, frosting, and goo, we are transfixed, done for.

Did you grow up eating the kind of stuff on your blog and in your book?
Richard: “No, I was raised by vegetarian hippies in Marin [County, California].”
Jessica: “I didn’t either. I come from a family of athletes—I was a competitive swimmer—and we were always really aware of nutrition in terms of training.”

How did you translate a user-submitted photo blog into a book?
Jessica: “We have added value with recipes and stories from creators of some of the dishes. I think another exciting thing is a lot of these people have been inspired to write their own cookbooks. They want to share their creations.”

Do you have any favorite contributions?
Richard: “I’m a sucker for the names of the stuff. One of my favorites is Sweet Peeptato Pie, which is multicolored Peeps on top of sweet potatoes.”
Jessica: “I do think the meat creations that are like feats of engineering are particularly nasty. The ship made entirely out of meat, for example.”
Richard: “It sails upon a tuna salad that they food-dyed green, with bacon sails.”

JOSH VIERTEL

Slow Food USA

Before Josh Viertel came along, Slow Food USA was without a center. Though it had tens of thousands of paying members across the country, mostly highly educated epicures who revered Alice Waters and ate stinky cheese, it was a loose conglomeration of local “conviviums” organizing the occasional sustainable-food event.

Viertel, a young activist who had headed up Yale University’s complete revamp of its dining halls (the university fired Aramark food services, replaced its corporate-ag goods with produce from local farms, and started an on-campus student farming program), is changing that. Hired in October 2008 as the nonprofit’s first president, he’s mobilizing Slow Food USA’s membership to do nothing short of reform national food policy. “Legislators are happy to see farmers’ markets increasing. But that doesn’t spur them to make the hard decisions they need to make,” says Viertel.

He helped stage 307 potlucks, or “Eat-Ins,” in communities across the country on Labor Day, to draw attention to the National School Lunch Act that’s up for renewal this fall. (The organization’s platform is that more money should be allotted per child.) Next, he’ll try to get members to make noise about revamping the Farm Bill when it’s up in 2010. As a devotee of Alice Waters himself, Viertel doesn’t want Slow Food abandoning its older mission of celebrating things like heritage pig breeds; he just believes hard work and the pleasures of the table can—and should—coexist. “If you do activism well,” says Viertel, “it’s supposed to be celebratory.”

What are you looking forward to in the coming months?
“I’m really excited to see the Obamas keep on talking about sustainable agriculture, and making these issues more public. Seed sales and canning supply sales are off the charts. When you look at that, it’s hard to show that that garden at the White House made a difference, but I think it did. I’m also looking forward to making roasted parsnips.”

Who was your mentor?
“In college, I was writing a lot about physical work, and I didn’t even know if I liked it! So I took a year off and went to Sicily and worked on a farm. There was an Albanian refugee shepherd there named Agro, who herded sheep and made cheese, and had a way of living in the world that I didn’t have. I was almost envious of his fluidity of connection to things, and his ability to build things. He taught me the value in work, and how privileged we are that we get to choose.”

What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this?
“Maybe a fisherman. There’s a great migration of fish on Jamaica Bay near JFK [International Airport in New York]. Striped bass, albacore … it’s really cool to catch a fish with a 747 taking off above you. I have a tiny rowboat that folds up that I put on top of my Jetta. I go out there and fly-fish with my fly rod. My friends think I’m crazy.”

SANDOR KATZ

Wild Fermentation

Fermented “live” foods are the next bacon. There’s Kombucha, the fizzy health tonic made from a Himalayan fungus. Homemade sauerkraut is being served as a side at artsy barbecue joints in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. You’ll find kimchee stuffed inside a croissant at New York City’s Milk Bar. These unpasteurized, rustic preparations, made, essentially, by purposefully letting food rot so the beneficial bacteria in the air leave behind sour flavors and a healthy zing, are ancient. Live fermentation and old-fashioned pickling, using just salt and the air rather than vinegar, were ways of preserving foods before refrigeration, from meat to milk to vegetables. But the recent fermentation craze among chefs and DIYers can be directly traced to Sandor Katz, whose 2002 book, Wild Fermentation, is still the most exhaustive, info-packed exploration of the topic ever written.

Katz, who calls himself Sandorkraut, lives off the grid in a queer intentional community in the mountains of Tennessee and teaches workshops all over the world. His book, which is a cross between a cookbook and a science-experiment manual, is a compendium of years of research from cultures around the world. Besides covering pickles, sauerkraut, kimchee, miso, tempeh, beer, and breads of many kinds including sourdough, there’s obscure stuff like chicha, a Latin American corn beverage made with human saliva now being adapted by the brewery Dogfish Head (see Sam Calagione). “There’s a hunger for this information,” says Katz, whose recent Portland, Oregon, workshop saw 25 people approach him with samples [of fermented things] they’d made. “A mystique, and a little fear.”

If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?
“I would be spending more time cooking and gardening. My cooking really is just all about the garden—what there’s a lot of. Over the summer I made pesto every other day. I’ve been playing with some new ways of cooking squash. I recently saw Julie & Julia, and I can’t wait to make boeuf bourguignon!”

What would you change about your industry?
“A lot of the laws that are ostensibly in place to protect the public health in food production actually have the effect of inhibiting and preventing small entrepreneurs from starting food businesses. There is no reason why people in Georgia need to be drinking Kombucha that comes from California.”

What was the most humbling moment in your current profession?
“I’m continually humbled by being reminded just how limited my knowledge is. This woman emailed me about her cucumber pickles turning pink. I know there is a phenomenon of pink sauerkraut—there’s a great research paper written in 1925 about that, concluding that it’s a different bacteria than the usual ones, regarded commercially as an inferior product, but harmless. I don’t know whether the pink growth on the cucumbers would be the same thing.”

DUANE SORENSON

Stumptown Coffee

Duane Sorenson calls himself a “cuddly family guy.” For a cuddly family guy, he inspires a lot of vitriol. There are many people in New York uttering the refrain: “There was PLENTY of good coffee before Stumptown got here, and he’s trying to act like he brought it.” But those haters are wrong. He kind of did.

We’re in a golden age of coffee, where young people are hard-core geeking on single-source beans, home roasting, and even the brand of contraption previously known as a coffee maker. And Stumptown is one of a handful of specialty roasters responsible for the craze. After spreading his delicious beans around his native Pacific Northwest and along the West Coast, the Motörhead-loving Sorenson decided to rock New York City, infamous for (and proud of) its weak, pansy coffee. In 2008, he uprooted himself to Brooklyn, opened up a local roastery, and managed to insert his beans into some of the coolest coffeehouses, restaurants, and specialty stores around the city. Then he opened his own café in the bottom of the chic new Ace Hotel. Yeah, there were other good coffee places starting to open in town, but few had locally sourced beans, or Sorenson’s flair for showmanship. (Baristas at the Ace’s café wear ties and vests, like 1930s-era barbacks.)

Sorenson will most likely be the man credited with showing New York what good coffee tastes like. Even if New Yorkers won’t admit it.

How did you develop your palate?
“I was raised in Seattle, and my father was a professional sausage maker. He was always pointing out specialty foods. We had relationships with dairy farmers, butchers, cattle raisers, and spice dealers. In high school and college I worked in coffee carts and coffeehouses but then got an apprenticeship at a roaster. I found I had an enthusiasm for wanting to roast the best coffee I could. So I dropped out of college.”

Who inspires you in the food world?
“Marlow & Sons, for the quality of their food, how they team up with their producer partners, and their casual vibe and design. Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo [Frankies Spuntino, Prime Meats], who are dear friends and business partners, and Taavo [Sommer] of Freemans. I enjoy what he’s doing with the restaurant, clothing line, and barbershop. I got my mustache trimmed there the other day.”

What was the last most satisfying meal you had?
“A liver and onion sandwich at Prune, yesterday, for lunch. It was just really great.”

NOVELLA CARPENTER

Ghost Town Farm

While some city dwellers were beginning to dabble in backyard chicken–raising, composting their organic vegetable scraps, and maybe getting really crazy with a rooftop beehive or two, Novella Carpenter had grander ambitions. In the late 1990s, this Seattle transplant moved to a crime-ridden area of Oakland, California, with her mechanic boyfriend, Bill, and started a full-scale farming operation on a vacant patch of earth next door.

On the lot, which didn’t even belong to her, she grew everything from fava beans to watermelons, and raised bees, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, pigs, and goats, which she slaughtered and ate for food at times. Then, in 2009, she wrote a memoir about it, called Farm City, ensuring her place in history as one badass urban farmer.

The book, with deadpan humor and a lack of sanctimony, describes the grittier side of urban farming. Carpenter’s turkeys roam free down the streets among drug dealers and “tumble weaves” (cast-off hair extensions from the local prostitutes). And when Carpenter slaughters a bird for Thanksgiving, she finds bits of glass in his gullet.

Unlike many other sustainable-food memoirs from this time period, Farm City doesn’t feel like it was dreamed up in a book agent’s office to capitalize on the green trend. Carpenter’s challenges (decapitating an opossum that attacks her fowl, dumpster diving for rabbit feed) don’t seem contrived, and are therefore more affecting.

What’s your typical day like?
“Spring and summer, I get up at 7 a.m. to feed the chickens and milk the goats. Sometimes I almost fall asleep while milking because their udders are so warm and I can rest my head on their flanks. Then I feed the goats, make some Lapsang Souchong tea with goat milk and honey, and, if it’s hot out, I’ll water the vegetable garden and check on the rabbits. Then I go to work at the biodiesel station, or my office, which is 10 blocks away from the farm. After work, I feed the goats again, check on the rabbits (they live on the deck), and make dinner. The rest of the night, I work on writing projects, canning, cheesemaking, or making sauerkraut. Sometimes Bill and I will go to San Francisco and haunt the wonderful bookstores there, then dumpster dive for the rabbits and chickens at Rainbow Co-Op. In the fall and winter, I’m usually not milking, and I don’t have to water the garden, so I write and read more.”

Is urban farming a fad, similar to the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s?
“I can see younger twentysomethings getting into urban farming, but then they see it’s a lot of work and isn’t glamorous, so they’ll get bored and wander off to the next thing. I think that’s fine. But now that 50 percent of the world lives in urban areas (and growing), more people are going to want to raise food in cities. I worry that too many urbanites are fearful of urban farms, and they will try to pass laws to prevent us from keeping goats in the city, for example.”

What was the last most satisfying meal you had?
“I was just visiting Bob Cannard’s farm in Sonoma [Cannard supplies to Bay Area restaurants like Chez Panisse and Quince], and we picked Padrón peppers, then fried them up on a hot grill, sprinkled them with salt, and ate them by the dozen. I love that simplicity and frankness, sitting on the back porch with friends, talking about rabbit breeding.”

MATT TIMMS

Matttimms.com

Four years ago, Brooklyn-based actor and comedian Matt Timms hung hand-drawn posters around Williamsburg advertising a chili cookoff beneath an illustration of a warrior princess riding on a war pig. (“I wanted people to say, ‘What’s that D&D character doing on a chili poster?’” says Timms.) The idea was to get a bunch of amateurs to show up to Bar Matchless with their most original chili. Ticket-holders would get to taste all the dishes and pick the winner. Timms had been hosting chili parties in his home for years, and wanted to “blast” his “living room out into a greater space.”

When the evening arrived, there was a line out the door.

Since then, not a good-weather weekend goes by that New York City doesn’t see some kind of cookoff—a home-brew- and cheese-themed competition, a cassoulet contest, or a “Ramen-off”—from somebody following in Timms’s footsteps. And the phenomenon has spread around the nation. San Francisco had three cupcake bake-offs in October alone.

Timms’s events, still the most regularly occurring, have included themes such as bacon, tofu, salsa, and cookies. Entrants are rank amateurs (in a New York Times article, one judge observed that a competitor’s green tea tofu brûlée looked “like snot”). But the contests’ jovial, “Let’s just wing it!” spirit is their biggest selling point. Timms believes they are an inspiring attack on the deflated, couch-potato America Michael Pollan writes about, the one that watches the Food Network and doesn’t cook. Says Timms: “The seriousness of highfalutin food events, and food in general, has gotta go.”

Who was your biggest inspiration growing up?
“My mom. She made chili every year at this big party, and it was so good. I could have lost my virginity to this girl. We’re about 15 or 16 years old. She was trying to get me to go into the bedroom with her. I had a bowl of my mom’s chili in my hand. I looked at her, I looked at the chili. I looked at her, I looked at the chili. Then I took a bite of chili and dropped her hand. It was one of my biggest regrets, but that chili was so good!”

How can your contestants afford to cook for so many people?
“Typically the chefs pay to make 250 bites, or samples’ worth, of food. It’s not an extraordinary thing to ask people to do that. It can be, based on what the food is. But as I’ve gotten bigger and a little bit more press, I’ve been getting sponsors. For the Lamb Takedown on October 4, the American Lamb Board [gave] the contestants 10 to 15 pounds of lamb—any cut they want[ed].

Do you agree with the characterization of your events as “hipster”?
“I don’t think they really have a demographic. You got a lot of fun twenty- to thirtysomethings, but then again, some contestants are like Ida, a 50-year-old woman who is president of the local Star Trek fan club. [The rock band] TV on the Radio came to one—it was so dope! They were just in a crowd of people discussing so sincerely and seriously all the different recipes they tried. So, it wasn’t really the odious hipster event you may have imagined.”