Midwest Foods Goes to FAB: Notes from Charleston

If you care about where food is going, this was the panel I haven’t stopped thinking about. The lineup alone tells you how seriously FAB takes this topic: Dana Cowin was the moderator – the longtime former Editor-in-Chief of Food & Wine, now the founder of Progressive Hedonist, a platform built around fighting the climate crisis through food and joy. The voices sharing were Chef Adrian Lipscombe of Uptowne Cafe & Bakery and founder of the 40 Acres Project; Ann Marshall of Charleston’s High Wire Distilling; Jenni Harris of White Oak Pastures; and Terri Terrell, Culinary Director of the Utopian Seed Project. Their message: preserving agrobiodiversity isn’t a nostalgia project. It’s the root of innovation on farms and across supply chains, championing diverse crops and practices to strengthen sourcing strategies that benefit people, communities, and the planet.

A few facts they shared that put things in perspective: in today’s commodity food system, a farmer receives roughly 14 cents of every food dollar. The average age of an American farmer is approaching 60. And we’re losing farms and farmland at a pace worth paying attention to for anyone who eats.

The panel also reframed the definition of “local,” which is always interesting in the context of our work at Midwest Foods and our place in the food system at large. Everywhere you turn, local farms are touched by forces far beyond their fence lines, from trade policy to the New World screwworm, dormant since the 1960s and now creeping toward Texas cattle country. Meanwhile, consolidation has narrowed the choices we think we have: roughly 85% of beef packing in America happens at just four companies, two of them foreign-owned, and post-WWII commoditization shifted agriculture from pursuing the highest quality to meeting a minimum standard. The empowering flip side: policy change can happen at the hyper-local level, and it starts with getting to know the decision makers in your community in casual environments. As one panelist put it, no one likes being asked for a favor by a stranger. Relationships first, always.

The most candid part of the conversation was about funding, which the panel named as the greatest challenge facing this work. Farmers and food organizations described grant applications stalling over the very words that define their missions: diversity, sustainability, regenerative, even “women.” One panelist shared that after her application for a grant was initially denied, she ran it through AI just to change those key words, and it was accepted following a second submission. The question hanging over the room, “do we give in?”, doesn’t have an easy answer. Some are choosing to step away from federal grants entirely; others noted that even partnering with organizations that hold federal grants comes with new considerations. The practical takeaway was unanimous: diversify your funding sources.

Far from doom and gloom, though, the panel was also full of hope and ingenuity. I was especially taken with the work of the Utopian Seed Project, the Western North Carolina nonprofit behind the Trial to Table event series, which Terri herself oversees, so we heard about it straight from the source. Trial to Table presents experimental crop trials directly to chefs, who create dishes from the trial crops for ticketed, educational food events where the farmer talks about the crop and its challenges, attendees taste the different varietals side by side, and community gets built around the table. Sometimes these farmer-to-table dinners are the first time the farmers have ever tasted their own crop prepared by a chef. Their ultracross collard work, crossing multiple varietals for resilience, productivity, and year-round growing, is a glimpse of what the future of food could look like: diversity as the key to everything.

I left thinking hard about how to bring this model home. We already work with a network of farm partners across the Midwest, so what would it look like to build something like Trial to Table with them –  connecting our growers and chefs the same way, around our own table? That idea is coming back with me.

What makes that kind of model worth chasing is that the economics of local and heirloom varietals can actually work. High Wire Distilling’s Jimmy Red corn is proof that value-added crops can command seven to nine times the commodity price when chefs, farmers, distillers, and communities connect directly. That same spirit of connection ran through my favorite moment of the whole panel, which happened off-stage: meeting Claudine Nayan of Amber Waves Farm, the teaching farm in Amagansett, New York, and hearing how they’re helping people build farming businesses that actually work. It tied a bow on the throughline of the entire conversation: chefs need to know how things grow, and curiosity is the most renewable resource we have.