My son, Bill Niles, is a souse chef at one-of-a-new-breed of restaurants in the San Francisco area that rely on the organic produce, fruits, and humanely raised meat from farms within a few hundred miles of the Bay area. The restaurant — Bar Tartine, part of the nationally recognized bakery of the same name — creates dishes of a new cuisine emerging from the Bay area that is both authentic and equal to fine cuisine in other part of the US. Chris Kronner, Bill’s executive chef, as well as chefs from the Bay area have created a culinary scene that is distinguished for a number of important reasons, not the least of which is because it’s profitable using foods that are raised and killed humanely and without toxic chemicals.
Souse chef Bill Niles on the line
It also creates the economic basis for a countryside that is, on one hand, lovely and inviting while also being productive and profitable for the people of the area.
Bill and I discussed this as we made our way up the Cohansey River in my 16 ft. Carolina Skiff. The air was heavy with humidity, but we were cool as we counted bald eagles between Greenwich and Bridgeton. I saw once again the beauty of this river landscape, marsh sprawling up to low hills of farmland bisected by wooded streams that extent far inland. This farmland was once the vegetable and fruit capitol of New Jersey — Jersey tomatoes, grapes, peaches — the best garden in the Garden State. Sadly, now it is a land impoverished by a seemingly never-ending chain of bad fortune and bone-headed political and natural resource management. The farms are mostly devoted to high- production, low profit margin crops, landscaping plants, and the ubiquitous Roundup-Ready soybeans, corn and wheat. But from the river it is a pastoral scene highlighted by eagles at nearly every bend in the River.
Google Earth view of the Cohansey River from Delaware Bay on the lower left to Bridgeton on the upper right.
We asked the question, how do you transform this ravaged, but intact land back to wealth and prosperity, back to a landscape of farms that earn high profit by creating healthy product, that treat the land like the living being it is? How did a vibrant organic agriculture start and persist in the Bay area? Like New Jersey, farms are farms, animals are killed and slaughtered, crops are harvested using machines and workers. There is irrigation and warm weather. Unlike New Jersey, Bay area producers use methods to control pests that are less harsh and nontoxic to the soil. They also grow a cornucopia of varieties of the standards — tomatoes, greens, cucumbers, melons that we see here in our local markets like the Marlboro market near Greenwich, New Jersey.
But they also produce new and odd vegetables that pique the interest of the chefs of San Francisco who find places in their menus as farm produce and meats comes to the market. This appears to be the main difference. What anchors this daring farm economy is the chefs and restaurants of San Fran and the Bay area, the most prominent being Alice Waters. 
Alice Waters of Chez Panisse the “godmother of California cuisine”These chefs seek flavor through the ageless art of cooking and the recognition of the unique flavor that comes from food well tended, humanely raised, and varied. Most use fruits and vegetables only in their appropriate season and celebrate unique geography or soil that imbues food with different tastes. In effect they celebrate their land by recognizing it as a living entity.
How do you bring that understanding to South Jersey? Here it fair to say most see the land as a foe to be conquered using chemicals and genetically modified plants to create low profit margin crops and see all other methods as trendy or impractical?
Good question for another post.
