Chef Rick Bayless: Top chef supports local farmers

Bayless has cultivated his sense of taste extremely well. He is an award-winning chef-restaurateur, cookbook author, and winner of season one of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters. Chef Bayless has done more than any other culinary star to introduce Americans to authentic Mexican cuisine and to change the image of Mexican food in America. His best-selling books have been hailed as some of the finest available on Mexican cooking. His first Chicago restaurant, the now famous Frontera Grill, resulted in his being selected as Food & Wine magazine’s “Best New Chef of the Year” in 1988; he has since opened two other eateries also highlighting Mexican cuisine, Topolobampo (fine dining) and XOCO (a quick-service café), and continues to win prestigious awards for his cooking. His television series Mexico—One Plate at a Time is currently in its fifth season on PBS.

Bayless has added his name to a growing list of other great chefs, such as Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Dan Barber and Suzanne Goin, in his passion for local and sustainably grown produce. “History bears witness that great cuisines spring only from healthy local agriculture,” Bayless told Organic Connections. “The great cuisines of the world—France, China, Japan—all come out of great local agriculture. You don’t usually find places that are not known for great food having much great local agriculture.”

The evidence of Bayless’s conviction in this regard shows in the way he operates his own restaurants. “We build our various dishes based on what we get from the farmers,” he said. “We don’t incorporate the ingredients—we build on them. But that’s what you have to do if you want to do cuisine of a region; you don’t sprinkle them over a dish or something like that. We build around what the farmers bring us.

“Again, that’s exactly the way that cuisines develop. Cuisine doesn’t develop from somebody saying they’re just going to dream up a dish; that’s like building your house from sand.”

Frontera Farmer Foundation

The Frontera Farmer Foundation and its support of local, sustainable farmers began with a need Bayless had for fantastic-tasting produce—specifically, spinach. Not long after he opened the Frontera Grill in 1987, something happened that he wasn’t prepared for. He wanted more of a particular farmer’s spinach that he found outstanding. The farmer, however, couldn’t afford to produce more of it because he didn’t have the money to buy another hoop house in which to grow it. So Bayless made a deal with the farmer: his restaurant would finance the hoop house, and the farmer could pay them back in spinach the following year.

“That turned into a no-interest-loan program that we established in our restaurant,” Bayless related. “Eventually we decided we wanted to take that idea and turn it into a grant campaign not-for-profit organization for which we at the restaurant raise all the money. We have done exactly the same thing as we did with those original farmers except that they make grant applications to our foundation. Once a year we announce the number of grants that we’re giving out. They are small—usually someplace between five and twelve thousand dollars—but they really help these farms to build the infrastructures they need in order to become more profitable and productive.”

Since the Frontera Farmer Foundation’s beginning six years ago, they’ve awarded in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a million dollars to small midwestern farms, covering such essential needs as tractors, watering systems, transportation vehicles for deliveries, and more.

“Basically we’re just helping small farms to grow so that they can become sustainable in terms of providing a livelihood for their families,” Bayless said. “We saw too many of these farms going out of business because they could just never put together enough money to buy the equipment they needed to run a really productive farm. And through the years we’ve watched them grow and grow. We’ve seen a number of them get one grant, then come back two or three years later with an idea for a second grant. Or, maybe their children decide they want to add something to the farm and the only way they can do that is to get the equipment to do a new project. So we’ve given grants to a lot of kids—meaning teenagers to about mid twenties, who are the second generations from those farms—which have helped to keep these farms very lively.”

Local Produce and Fine Cuisine

In the time Bayless has had his Chicago restaurants, he has seen a definite correlation between the growth in local, sustainable farming and the rise in quality of the Windy City’s cuisine. “The fact that we are now known as a really great restaurant town speaks to the importance of local great agriculture,” Bayless said. “When I opened the Frontera Grill 23 years ago, there were no farmers’ markets; now there are farmers’ markets everywhere and multiple ones during the week. Back then Chicago was an okay place to go for restaurants but not a great restaurant town. Now that we have all this great local agriculture we are also now a great restaurant town, and you can’t go to any decent restaurant in the city that doesn’t have farmers’ names on the menu and farmers’ market salads and dishes that are celebrating the local season.”

The difference Bayless has seen between chemical-industrial and local, sustainable farmers has to do with the care they take with the soil and their crops. “If somebody is working organically, they realize right away that they’re a dirt farmer, they’re not a vegetable farmer,” Bayless remarked. “They have to create really, really healthy soil. From that healthy soil will spring lots of great stuff. But if they don’t have healthy soil, then they never are going to have great produce. So when people take that care with the soil, they usually take amazing care with the stuff that soil produces. Then what they’ll do is look for interesting varieties of things to grow, and they’ll pick them at their absolute peak of ripeness or perfection. Then they’ll wash them carefully, pack them beautifully, and they’ll bring them to you.

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The stuff is like jewels because they love it; they have nurtured it. But when you look closely, you see that first of all they have nurtured the ground that gave it to them and they then nurtured the product out of that ground. And when you take this much care, it’s not man over nature; it’s man with nature.”

The Intimate Connection

Another reason Bayless sees the need for supporting such growers is the vital connection between the growers and consumers. “There’s a crucial relationship between the person that made the food and the people who consume the food,” Bayless explained. “That’s the connection that has to be made; it’s not necessarily the food itself, because food is the conduit. We say that all the time in our restaurant—that food is always the conduit. For human beings, I firmly believe there has to be a direct connection between the source of their food and the food itself. It’s extremely important to be able to have some interaction with the people who created or nurtured along that food so we understand, as human beings, that we are part of the cycle of nature; we’re not just partaking of the results of the cycle of nature. And that’s what you learn by that.”

In creating his non-profit Frontera Farmer Foundation, it was this exact argument that finally convinced the IRS to grant the foundation non-profit status. “The IRS kept refusing our not-for-profit status because they said it made no sense: we wanted to be a non-profit organization that actually supported for-profit organizations,” said Bayless. “They kept claiming that if we were not-for-profit, then everything we were dealing with had to be not-for-profit. We argued that the one really important thing about farms is that they create community, and that they’re going out of business unless we can help them to build an alternative agricultural society. After going back and forth with the IRS a number of times, they finally gave us not-for-profit status because they understood that our argument was about creating community. That community happens at the farmers’ market when the urban dwellers can have that direct contact to the source, the people who created their food for them. It also happens within the farming communities, where those small farmers are the backbone of those societies.”

What Others Can Do

To anyone who asks, the answer Bayless gives to what the ordinary consumer can do in supporting local, sustainable agriculture is very simple.

“There’s only one way: buy from the local farmers,” he said. “It’s all about supply and demand. The more demand there is, the more supply there will be. Anyone who makes excuses like the ones you sometimes hear, such as ‘It’s only for the elitist,’ or ‘It’s too expensive,’ or ‘It’s hard to go because you have to carry your groceries out of there,’ stuff like that, they’re not helping to create a strong local agricultural economy. I’m not trying to sound elitist at all, but the people with the money have to invest their money where their heart is. If they do that, then we’ll find that the prices will begin to drop and the local farmers will become competitive with the grocery store. Right now the economies of scale are so wacky. You can buy the mass-produced stuff from California, or wherever, a lot cheaper than you can buy the locally produced stuff—only because of economies of scale. There’s no other reason that it’s that way. If the people with the money can invest in paying a little more for their food so that we can develop stronger midrange or midsize local farms, the prices of things are going to come down. They’re already coming down.”

Testament to the work Bayless has done through the Frontera Farmer Foundation is probably best expressed by one farmer who benefited from the foundation’s help:

“The capital improvement grant from Frontera Farmer Foundation was a blessing for our farm. The timing couldn’t have been better. I was so moved by this generosity that I drove the 270 miles from our farm to Frontera to personally meet and thank the people who provided this to us. I found hard-working folks, dedicated to quality, safe and sustainable food, very much like myself.” —Farmer Mike Hansen, Gifts from the Good Earth.

For more information on the Frontera Farmer Foundation, visit www.rickbayless.com/foundation.

Chef Bayless’s book Fiesta at Rick’s is available through the Organic Connections bookstore.

For more about Rick Bayless, his restaurants, cookbooks and recipes, visit his website at www.rickbayless.com.