Farm to Fork Before Food Was Cool
ANNETTE TELLS TALES The celeb who crusaded against bad American food (in the early 20th century)
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Today’s post is my riff on journalist Stephen Hayman’s The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution (2020), which I warmly recommend to you. Mr. Hayman’s book was published during peak COVID, and so did not get all the attention it should have.
An American in Paris
When the stock market crashed in 1929, expat Americans Louis and Mary Bromfield had already started thinking of escaping from Paris, to where they had moved from the US four years earlier. Not that they wanted to avoid Paris all the time, of course, because they loved the company there. And in case you are wondering, they were doing great, despite the economy. Or Louis was, anyway: Mary often suffered from depression.
Louis’s books were critically acclaimed bestsellers back in the States. He even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927. While Mary was from a formerly rich northeastern family, Louis was a farm boy from Ohio. He first came to France to drive ambulances during World War I, and on a rare day off from his traumatic work with the American Field Service, went for a walk and found morel mushrooms, which a French cook sauteed for him in beef broth, the only thing he had to cook them in. They were good, too, perhaps eaten with cheap red wine. Food and France were already getting their claws into Louis Bromfield.
From Paris to Paradise, 1929
Paris was so cheap for Americans in the Twenties, Louis and Mary could easily afford a chic apartment and a maid. They entertained all the famous American expats: Ernest Hemingway (who was actually Louis’s frenemy, and was jealous of his success), witty and charming couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Louis’s good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald and his troubled wife Zelda, and many more.
But it wasn’t enough, and Ohio country boy Louis grew a little tired of all the big city hoopla. Not too far from Paris was the village of Senlis, once a major religious center in the Middle Ages, but no more. Now, however, one of its ancient churches, just a short walk from the train station, was the local farmer’s market, where you could buy vegetables like leeks, lettuce, and peas in the Nave (the main body of the church), and meat in the apse (the curved end of the nave), including live rabbits which the lady would club and skin while you waited. On one side of the transept (the crossbar, if you like) were piles of macarons, cookies, and cakes, and on the other, fresh local cheeses. Fish was stacked in the cloisters.
Sold. Louis and Mary bought an ancient priest’s house in Senlis, and supervised a huge team of French builders as they renovated. The garden looked like a wreck, but Louis loved flowers, and loved to eat, so it was only a matter of time before that was fixed.
Louis became fascinated by his neighbor, Monsieur Bosquet, a man with very little education who loved life: M. Bosquet drank wine and sang songs with his neighbors, relished his food, most of which he raised himself, and seemed to have found the key to a happy life. Louis thought back to his Ohio farm youth: Food was to keep you alive, and how it tasted didn’t much matter. Vegetable gardens looked malnourished because they were: There was so much land on an American farm, if you just scattered seed, something would come up, and who cared how food tasted as long as there was plenty of it?
M. Bosquet, on the other hand, carefully and joyously tended the two acres that fed him, his wife, and their three kids. Strawberries, artichokes which took up a lot of space (but Bosquet adored them, so there they were), fruit including apples, plums, and pears growing on dwarf trees. Bosquet kept chickens for eggs and meat, not to mention ducks, goats, and rabbits, all of which fertilized his plants. Bosquet was “a poor man whose life seemed rich”, according to Stephen Heyman, Bromfield’s biographer:
Bromfield envied Bosquet’s sense of rootedness—and he wanted to experience that life for himself. He had had enough of Paris and New York, enough of the Ritz bar, the parties in Biarritz, the literary cliques in Montparnasse. In Senlis, he wanted to spend his days with the sun on his back and the earth between his fingers. —Stephen Heyman, The Planter of Modern Life (2020)
Soon, alongside a French gardener he had hired, Bromfield was putting in a kitchen garden, full of herbs, fruits, and vegetables. Cauliflowers, strawberries, leeks, watercress, carrots, and salad greens, all grew in profusion, alongside American squash, corn, and tomatoes, and the colorful flowers Bromfield had always loved.
Back in Ohio, up to 1917
Louis Bromfield’s grandfather’s farm near Mansfield, Ohio, was nothing like these small heavenly gardens in France, in which the gardener communed with nature. Starting after the American Civil War, farmers became strangely distanced from their crops and animals. Increasingly, they didn’t grind their own wheat: They sold it to wholesalers, and bought flour for their own household use from grocers in town.
Annette’s Aside: And suddenly I think of the reverse of that, like Meadowlark Organics (NOT a paid placement, I don’t so those). This small farm run by young farmers is about forty-five minutes from my home in Wisconsin, and supplies me with a dizzying range of flours for baking. Not long ago, they started milling their own grain. It’s wonderful, far better than supermarket stuff, and they do mail order, but I recommend saving food miles buying from your nearest farm: Living in south Georgia, I bought fresh flour from a retired community college professor who ran his mill on a fancy old-school steam engine. And it was awesome stuff.
In late 19th century America, someone was getting rich from farm products, but it wasn’t farmers. As factory owners and merchants began building big mansions, young people on struggling family farms, like Louis Bromfield, wondered why they were working so hard to raise corn and hogs: Surely their future was in towns, and big money? The factories filled the air with soot and carbon dioxide, and the fishing streams with chemicals. Mass production in America promised luxury for more and more people, but at what Louis Bromfield had already decided as a teen was a horrendous cost. And Bromfield’s family? As costs rose, They lost most of their land anyway, leaving only his grandfather’s struggling farm and a small house, which is where Louis grew up.
Before World War I, Louis Bromfield had dropped out of Cornell University to try to save his family farm. He learned, though, that sending apples wrapped in tissue paper to the East sometimes resulted in a loss: Every middleman on the way took a cut, and some took an even bigger cut if they claimed that the apples arrived damaged. How would Louis or any farmer know if that were true, or if the middlemen were lying? Bromfield’s dairy made a loss, while the owners of the factory that canned his milk got rich.
Annette’s Aside: I get this all too well. My books are no longer sold through a certain massive online bookseller because they took 55%, and did not cover the cost of shipping books to them, AND returned damaged books AND (last straw) began adding arbitrary fines for alleged violations of rules that either weren’t violated or we didn’t know existed. Order through my website, and you not only get a discount on a set, but I’ll sign them for you.
To try to make a profit, Louis began to corral his cattle in the barn and feed them corn, instead of letting them wander and eat grass. Now his farm looked like a factory. He hated it. He sold the farm, enrolled in journalism school, as his mother had wanted, dropped out in 1917, and went to France to drive ambulances in the trenches. Later, after the war, when he was already a successful author, Louis returned to France, bringing his wife Mary and their kids.
France 1937-8
After the joys of the 20s, and in the increasingly foreboding atmosphere of 1930s Europe, Paris and Senlis were not enough for Louis Bromfield. Even as he became more and more French, Louis remained an American. Another war in Europe seemed increasingly likely. Louis would sit by the fire and dream of going home to the States, and starting a new, very different kind of farm.
He and Mary became friends with the recently abdicated King Edward VIII of England, now known as the Duke of Windsor, and his American wife, Wallis Simpson, who were living in exile in France. But the friendship soured as the Duke and Duchess’s enthusiasm for Hitler grew. Their luxurious way of life and their repellent politics grated on Louis Bromfield. Expat life in France had grown stale, and distasteful to him. The rush of the British and the French to appease Hitler, to give him what he wanted to avoid a war, appalled him.
In 1938, Louis, Mary, the kids, and their Scottish nanny, packed up and fled for America.
Louis Bromfield and the Way We Eat Now
You may be wondering where I am going with this story. Louis Bromfield, forgotten author, who loved food and liked to garden, an Ohio farm boy who had seen real farming vanish into an industrial nightmare of processed “foods”. What does he have to do with us?
Think of what you plan to do with food this week. Maybe it will be all processed foods from supermarkets, factories, and fast food joints and restaurants, because who has time to cook? Or maybe you’re uneasy with that these days. Headed to the farmer’s market? Spreading some grassfed Irish butter on your toast? Eating sausages made from scratch by a real butcher? Bringing home a quarter of a cow for the freezer from the farmer in the next county? Chowing down on local ice cream or salad? You may have noticed that what we eat in America has started (just started) to change, and the older you are, the more you have noticed. A friend of mine recalled in her thirties, back in the 80s, eating hamburgers her grandmother made in the 70s, served on Wonder Bread, spread with Crisco, fake lard.
We at least can agree now that this is kind of gross.
Look, I am hardly an advertisement for healthy eating. But I make every calorie count these days: Tonight is local duck breast from the freezer, which I butchered myself a few months ago, with freshly-picked asparagus from a gardener who leaves it outside her house with a margarine tub for cash on the honesty principle. I make stock from the bones of my expensive pastured chickens, which I buy from Nico Bryant, a veteran turned farmer who loves to wear a silly chicken hat. His chickens are amazing, and cost about $22 each. So to balance out the cost, I break up fresh chickens in summer (something I learned from a YouTube video), freezing them in individual portions, and saving the backs and giblets for stock as needed. I save roasted whole chicken carcasses in winter, and make loads of stock in the super-quick Instant Pot. We eat homemade soup a lot in winter, and having stock in the freezer means each pot of soup is already half made before I even start. Even one of Nico’s chickens each week is far cheaper than eating out, and way better than huge tough, woody, supermarket chicken breasts, cheap and plentiful, but kind of disgusting.
I did not used to eat like this in America. I did not haunt farm stands and farmers’ markets. I did not know or care where my food came from, or who grew it, as long as it was tasty and cheap. And then I realized how much more I enjoyed life with good food when I would go back to the UK, where the national reputation for bad food has long been out of date, even if British food still isn’t what it could be.
A few years ago, I heard a woman praise the pastries at a well-known US coffee chain, these terrible defrosted things from a factory, that made me feel ill after I ate them, and I suddenly realized: Our tastebuds have been corrupted. I love to eat. But not like that. I began baking more of my own baked goods, buying flour from a nearby farm in Wisconsin, where two young former chefs from New York now live on the land, mill the grain, and share recipes. As early as 2008, I was taking American college students to farmers’ markets and cheese shops in London, trying to educate palates as well as minds, to show them that while real food is unfamiliar at first, it’s worth getting to know.
If you have found yourself eating differently than your parents did, or even if you have not, you might want to know why. You already heard part of the answer: Industrialization, mass production in 19th century America, led to the era of supermarkets, of cans, packets, frozen stuff, of looking around to see which supermarket is selling the chicken cheapest this week, of sick chickens spreading illness to us, of food that no longer tastes like food. Of endless factory recalls. And our obsession with superfoods when honestly? People who eat a variety of foods in places where food is raised traditionally live longer and better lives than we do.
I’m not the only person who thinks about this, and I didn’t invent any of this thinking. But Louis Bromfield did.
Bromfield Back in Ohio, 1938
In 1938, Louis Bromfield drove around rural Ohio, looking for a farm. In January, 1939, he found it, buying 600 acres, including a small house.
Not that a small farm house would be enough for the famous writer with three kids and a staff. He didn’t demolish it, however. He began to add to it. His little farmhouse ended up a sprawling mansion of 19 bedrooms, and six baths, 137 feet long.
But the house isn’t why I have introduced you to Louis Bromfield. It’s the farm. The food.
He called the place Malabar Farm, in honor of a trip that he and Mary made to India, where they feasted on Indian food.
When the snow melted in Ohio, Louis Bromfield looked on in dismay and disbelief at what had been lurking beneath. The land wasn’t fertile. It was also eroded. The old worn-out sheep died after birthing lambs, which Louis and Mary’s daughter Ellen, age 7, fed cow’s milk from a Coke bottle. The goats Louis bought ate book manuscripts, which has got to be symbolic as this writer began to morph into a farmer. He didn’t trust other farmers in the area, who seemed to be done down by poverty, and unwilling to change what they did.
But he had a vision. He called it The Plan. Malabar wasn’t just 600 worthless worn-out acres that had lost up to 75% of its topsoil. It was the beginning of a new world, one that drew on the best of the old, before industrialization ruined agriculture. He wanted farms like he had seen in France, everything from wealthy vineyards to his poor neighbor Bosquet’s lush two acres, that kept him fed and happy.
Bromfield wanted to grow everything and anything, to go against impersonal modern agriculture with its specialized crops of corn or beef cattle. He wanted chickens, ducks, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and every possible vegetable and fruit. Eggs, butter, milk. Strawberries and cantaloupes. Malabar Farm would have it all, it would can, freeze, dry, and store its surplus, and be a shining example to American farmers and their customers of how to farm, how to live with the seasons, how to survive, how to thrive, and how to live.
His workers would be housed rent-free, and supplied with foods like coffee and sugar they couldn’t grow. They would also be paid a small salary, plus a share of the profits once Malabar Farm became profitable.
And having made all these plans, Louis Bromfield went to Hollywood, where he was working on a movie script.
Meanwhile, his farmer-manager, Max Drake, got to work, following “Mr. B’s” instructions. Drake even got help from a New Deal program to provide the farm with free workers to restore the soil, so Malabar could be a “demonstration farm”, using the latest science and technology.
When “Mr. B” returned from Hollywood, he was thrilled.
Louis Bromfield’s crusade was not only going to be about food, but about the very land itself. This was about conservation, about caring for the environment, and about farming that didn’t destroy the soil and its farmers’ lives. This was sustainable agriculture, as we would say today.
And Bromfield and his team were not alone. In Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold was already at work with New Deal funding to restore the watershed and the soil of the land. In England, Albert Howard was moving toward “organic agriculture” before WWII. In 1936, the FDR administration was on board, and produced a movie about the devastating effects of modern farming in light of the Dust Bowl: The Plow That Broke the Plains.
However, Big Hollywood studios saw this film as New Deal propaganda, and wouldn’t show it in the chain movie theatres they owned. But The Plow That Broke the Plains was released in independent picture houses, and about eight million people saw it.
Malabar Farm was riding a wave, and Louis Bromfield was in his element. After a new society, the Friends of the Land, was formed in Washington DC in 1940, Bromfield apologized for having missed the first meeting. But he invited the group to Ohio to see Malabar Farm. He led a caravan of about 100 cars through the state, to see the damage done to good farmland by strip-mining coal, and neglect and mismanagement.
By the time the convoy got to Malabar, the procession had picked up random cars with West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Kentucky plates. Bromfield and his caterer in Mansfield had expected 150 for lunch. Now there would be 500. A phone call to Mansfield, and one insanely overworked caterer later, and shrimp salad, potato salad, ham, sandwiches, beer, and more were laid out for the masses on tables on the lawn.
People’s lives were changed that day, when they saw the progress made at Malabar Farm.
Malabar also drew famous visitors, most notably Humphrey Bogart and Lauren “Betty” Bacall, plus Bacall’s mother as chaperone (the couple weren’t yet married, and Bacall was 20, which made her a minor, while Bogey was 45). They returned a few months later in 1945, and after collecting a license at the courthouse in Mansfield, Bogey and Bacall were married at Malabar, with Louis Bromfield as best man.
In the years after World War II, Malabar thrived, using sustainable ecofriendly farming techniques, such as intercropping (growing several different crops in the same field). Each year, about 20,000 people came to see what was being done there. Farmers, gardeners, school parties. Bromfield, in work clothes, took his visitors to the highest point on the property and gave them a speech from what his assistant jokingly nicknamed Mount Jeez. There were hayrides, picnics, and singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic by the fire.
Sounding the Alarm About DDT
I lived in Georgia a long time and I never saw a firefly. DDT had killed them, that’s what people said. I was afraid to learn more.
DDT was a miracle pesticide that slaughtered mosquitoes and, unfortunately, almost every other insect. Louis Bromfield was not enthusiastic. He wrote in 1944 that very little was known about DDT, and that it might be dangerous, given that it was made from poisons, and that Americans were rushing to adopt something they didn’t understand. By 1951, he had read the science, and seen DDT’s effects. Studies suggested that DDT accumulates in human bodies. That it could lead to cancer. And yet, he said, American gardeners and farmers had adopted it without asking questions. And DDT was on virtually all the food in grocer’s shops.
Worse, he said, by killing beneficial insects like ladybugs, DDT upset nature’s arrangements: a dead ladybug could not eat aphids, which weren’t much bothered by DDT. Some insects, like barn flies, were rapidly evolving to resist DDT: The barn flies that had a natural immunity to DDT survived, thrived, and bred.
Influential scientists and gardening experts told people to ignore Louis Bromfield.
Turned out, he was right.
He also spoke against chemical fertilizers, which wore out the soil. He wasn’t an organic farmer: he valued scientific intervention as well as tradition and nature. But he took us closer to organic farming.
Louis Bromfield died in 1956. Malabar Farm is now an Ohio State Park. Think of its legacy, and Louis Bromfield’s, every time you go to your farmer’s market, add natural fertilizer to your garden, or hesitate to spray your veggies with the latest miracle substance.
A Pilgrimage to Malabar
This post originally appeared in May, 2021, in the early days of Non-Boring History. Free reader? I also write on Saturdays for paying annual and monthly subscribers, who get priority for my newest and best material, plus access to more than 500 posts at the NBH site.
I wrote a second post after I visited Malabar Farm in Ohio, to report from the ground:
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Read
Stephen Heyman, The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution (2020) Heyman is a journalist, and his book is popular history. In other words, it’s very readable! If I have hooked you, you will love it. There’s so much more in the book than in my post! Louis Bromfield is the most famous writer you never heard of, and his contribution to the food revolution of today is enormous.
Louis Bromfield, Pleasant Valley (1945) and Malabar Farm (1948) I’ve not read either of his books about the farm, so let me know what you think if you do. Even his biographer considers them weak. That said, Bromfield lost his reputation for literary fiction as he became known as an author who churned out trashy novels that women like, which, honestly, may not be as damning as the critics alleged . . .
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Visit
Malabar Farm State Park, Mansfield, OH
Spectacular view from Mount Jeez (get directions from the Visitor Center), great visitor center with a talking parrot greeter. Check Facebook or call for the latest before you fly into Columbus!