Foodie Farm tour, Carbondale, IL, Sept 22

Foodie Farm Tour

Neighborhood Co-op offers food and farm tour featuring the culinary history and agricultural diversity of Southern Illinois

A unique food and farm tour will take place on Saturday, Sept. 22 that will highlight the culinary history and agricultural diversity of Southern Illinois. The tour will feature a regional cookbook; an author and regional food historian; an outstanding chef; a winery and three local, sustainable farms.

Called the Foodie Farm Tour, the event will kick off at Kite Hill Winery, located just six miles south of Murphysboro right off Highway 127. The tour, organized by the Co-op, will begin with a presentation by author and local food historian Bruce Kraig. Following Kraig's talk, a healthy Co-op lunch will be served prior to the three-farm tour. The farms on this tour will feature SIUC's student-run organic farm (LOGIC), Country Sprout Organics, and Greenridge Farm. Fresh food will be gathered at each farm and taken back to Kite Hill, where Chef Bill Connors will lead a cooking class to teach how to best prepare delicious, farm-fresh produce.

The dishes prepared by Chef Bill will be inspired by recipes from a fascinating cookbook called “Plain Cooking – Illinois Country Style.” Authored by Williamson County native Helen Walker Linsenmeyer and originally published in 1976, “Cooking Plain” was recently re-published by Southern Illinois University Press. This self-described “good indigenous cookbook” not only contains recipes from back in the day, but is peppered with interesting facts, advice and anecdotes from Walker Linsenmeyer's culinary upbringing.

The book is available at the Co-op and at a special discounted rate for those who sign up for the Foodie Farm Tour. For more details, please visit the Co-op's website at www.neighborhood.coop.

To get the tour started Bruce Kraig will offer a presentation about the culinary history of Southern Illinois. Kraig, who penned the foreword for the newly published “Cooking Plain,” has been researching indigenous foods in Southern Illinois for years.

Following a lunch provided by the Co-op, the tour will head toward three small sustainable farms in the vicinity of Carbondale. Tour-goers will learn about the history of each farm and their own unique growing techniques. At each farm, a wealth of produce will be freshly harvested, which will then be brought back to Kite Hill and prepared by the group under Chef Bill’s supervision.

The first stop of the tour will be the LOGIC farm (Local Organic Garden Initiative of Carbondale), a budding student-run farm where young aspiring farmers can learn how to grow food sustainably. The food raised at the small farm is used by the university to feed students, making for fresh, healthy, low-carbon footprint meals.

Greenridge Farm will be the second stop on the tour. The farm has been an ecological anchor in Southern Illinois for 30 years and was an early adaptor of organic and sustainable farming techniques in the region. This farm focuses on botanical diversity and grows a wide array of specialty crops, herbs, flowers and more.

Following the visit to Greenridge Farm, the tour will bounce over to Country Sprout Organics, where heirloom watermelons and specialty produce are featured. The USDA Certified Organic farm is owned and operated by Bruce and Maryanne Chrismann, who have a long history of growing food in Southern Illinois.

Southern Illinois has a long history of feeding the entire state of Illinois. The local food movement has been generating more and more interest in diverse small-scale family farms in lieu of more narrowly focused large-scale operations. This tour will not only feature three great examples of small-scale farms, but provide a historical context to indigenous regional cuisine as well. To top it all off, folks will get to learn how to prepare a world-class meal using fresh, local ingredients with Chef Bill in the cozy confines of Kite Hill Winery.

The entire tour will begin at 11 a.m. at Kite Hill Winery south of Murphysboro and end around 6 p.m. back at the winery. The tour includes Bruce Kraig’s presentation on the culinary history of Southern Illinois; lunch provided by the Co-op; a tour of three local, sustainable farms; and a cooking class led by Chef Bill Connors. Cost for the tour is $50 for Co-op owners and $60 for non-owners. People may sign up with a Co-op cashier in the store or may register online by visiting www.neighborhood.coop.