Holy Mole!

It's Farm Fresh Guacamole

click to see spread full-size (PDF)
Illustration by John Gruen
design by alice shay and alexis smagula

By Julia Rappaport

IN THE HEART OF the nation's "Avocado Capital"-Valley Center, California-sit 25 acres of trees owned by the Lerner family, whose daughter, Amy, is a graduate student in Brown University's Center for Environmental Studies. While Brown has spent the winter waiting for the snow to melt, these trees have been waiting for a batch of their avocados to be picked, packaged, and stamped with the address of the university's very own dining halls.

The avocado is a single-seeded berry that can be traced back to the Aztecs, who considered it an aphrodisiac. According to the California Avocado Commission, in the 1920s, avocado specialist A. R. Rideout of Whittier, California planted the first seed of what would come to be known as the Hass avocado, the variety that today accounts for 95 percent of all avocados grown in California. Due to the Hass's rich taste, long shelf life, and yearlong growing season, it soon became the most popular variety of avocado. Today, approximately 500 varieties grow worldwide, although only seven-the light tasting Bacon, the plump Gwen, the pear-shaped Pinkerton, the buttery Reed, the shiny Zutano, the nutty Fuerte, and of course the Hass-are grown commercially in California.

Although the Lerners grow oranges, limes, grapefruit, and nectarines, the star crop of the farm in Valley Center is the Hass avocado. Their farm borders Fallbrook, a town largely indistinguishable from Valley Center but for one important difference: the festival. A curious visitor to the website of the Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce will learn that at this year's annual festival-to be held April 17-"everything you ever wanted to know about the amazing avocado will be revealed." Besides the expected food stands, culinary contests, and chats with avocado farmers, visitors to the festival will be entertained by the Little Miss and Mr. Avocado Pageant, the "Avo" Olympics (complete with pit spitting as well as avocado croquet), and the Avocado 500, the festival's crowning glory where participants build model cars out of avocados and race them. As the site proclaims, "it is definitely a day for the wearing of the green."

The regional preoccupation with avocados is not surprising given that the Avocado Capital, according to the California Avocado Commission, churns out 60 percent of California's crop annually. In Valley Center, the Lerners plant on 10 of their 25 acres. There are roughly 109 trees per acre. A single California tree can produce up to 60 pounds of avocados each year, or approximately 120 pieces of fruit. Do the math: the Lerners harvest roughly 75,000 pounds of avocados annually.

The couple may have been initially uncertain about their decision to take on farming -they each grew up in New York, raised their three children in Los Angeles, and purchased the farm four years ago, when they were both in their 60s. But when Carol Lerner tasted her first avocado from the farm, she was positive they had made the right decision. "If you've never had a fresh avocado with a little salt and pepper smushed on a matzoh," she says, "you haven't lived." These days, as the Lerners walk around their farm, some of the avocados appear almost ready for picking. They are only waiting for an agent from the Department of Agriculture to give them the "okay" to pick the fruit and send them on their way to Brown.

Going Local

Louella Hill, food systems coordinator for Brown Dining Services (BuDS), is part of the force that is bringing the Lerner avocados to Brown. Like the Lerners, Hill is committed to small farms that avoid practices and products that harm the environment. At Brown, she has been working towards incorporating local and organic produce, grown on farms like the Lerner's, into university dining halls.

Motivated by her love of fresh, organic food, Hill explains that she was always "into food." While growing up in Arizona, she spent many vacations catering and working in restaurants and found herself spending a lot of time throwing food away. This experience sparked her interest in, what she calls, "the link between the dinner plate and the environment." In the fall of 2002, while taking time off from her student life at Brown to farm in Italy, Hill began to find the agrarian roots that she realized she had abandoned in America.

In Italy, Hill, attending to prosciutto pigs and apprenticing with a cheese maker, "moved from sitting inside and studying to BAM! Pig poop." In this transition, she understood that she, along with the majority of Americans, had become estranged from the idea of getting her hands and feet muddy in the soil in order to serve the literal fruit of her labor for dinner that evening. Reinvigorated, Hill reenrolled at Brown in 2003. She contacted Community Harvest, a group of students that had gone to BuDS to request that fair-trade coffee be served in the cafeteria. When Ginnie Dunleavy, associate director of BuDS, heard their complaint, she explained that price would prohibit the switch to fair trade, but agreed to look into buying more produce from local farmers.

The result was the local apples that appeared among the oranges and bananas two years ago. Dunleavy says that students ate three times as many of them when the apples offered were grown nearby. The year after the apples, Hill's last as a Brown student, the campus started hosting its own farmers' markets. Local tomatoes and corn began to arrive.

To commence the local corn's arrival and in order to reduce the time required to remove their husks, the staff at BuDS hosted a shuck-off on Wriston Quad. 15 teams made up of students, staff, and alumni donned t-shirts that read, "I got shucked at the Ratty." When the whistle blew, members of each team dashed across the quad to reach the 10 to 12 bushels lined up on the other side. They grabbed the corn, ran back to their tables, and the husks started flying.

From Local Apples To Roots And Shoots

The year after she graduated, Hill was hired by BuDS. In addition to local produce, she brought in bread from Seven Stars Bakery, corn meal from a local farm, and fresh, cold apple cider from a nearby orchard. She started the "Roots and Shoots" line at the Ratty, which serves healthy, fresh food options, began to provide locally produced "Rhody Fresh" milk twice a week (an innovation that brought a dairy cow to the Main Green earlier this year), and introduced trips for students and staff to Rhode Island farms.

This past fall, Dunleavy decided to accompany Hill on one of these "Harvest Tours." She was working and sweating in a row of tomatoes with two other students from Brown and the three of them began talking about farming. One came from a big wheat-producing farm in the Midwest. The other, Amy Lerner, said that her family owned an organic avocado farm in southern California.

That got the wheels turning in Dunleavy's mind. On the ride home, she leaned over to ask Hill whether the idea of community harvest, a notion that had previously centered on buying from farms in the area, could be more than just a strictly local movement. She wondered whether it couldn't also extend into the broader Brown community. "So I'm thinking to myself," Dunleavy explains, "that it'd be kind of fun to call her parents, bring their avocados into the cafeteria, and not just put them into guacamole." If Brown did this, she wondered, could we consider the avocados to be locally grown? "For me, I think they are," she says. "Maybe because they're organic and come from a small farm. They're reaching our goal of providing a certain type of product."

The delighted Lerners agreed to donate the avocados and labor if Brown would pay for the shipping. So this month, the Community Harvest Program in Providence will team up with the Lerners in Southern California to bring the first-ever avocado festival to the Ratty.

The Festival

Although the festival promises to draw less of a crowd than the Avocado 500 in Fallbrook, those that worked to get from local apples to organic avocados are buzzing with excitement. The pamphlet that Hill distributed to the BuDS staff is, appropriately enough, titled "Holy Mole! It's Farm Fresh Guacamole!" It describes the mission of the Community Harvest program as an effort to increase the amount of sustainable, locally grown foods offered on Brown's Campus. To anyone that would have doubted the "local" nature of Californian avocados, it explains that purchasing fresh avocados from a student's family farm fulfills a goal of the program. Avocados from the Lerner Farm "expand our idea of what local is," the pamphlet reads. "Avocados do not grow locally (in Rhode Island). This farm is an extended part of the Brown Community."

Hill admits that she does not know quite what to expect from the festival, planned for early April, because the Lerners cannot be certain of when the avocados will ripen and therefore, they do not know exactly how many will be shipped. Despite this, John O'Shea, BuDS' executive chef, has started planning how he will shock students' taste buds by serving fresh avocados instead of the pre-made guacamole occasionally served at the salad bar. He hopes that there will be enough of them to make a salsa with mango, diced red peppers, cilantro, lime juice, salt and pepper, and of course, fresh, organic avocado pulp. He plans to cut the remaining avocados in half, scooping out their pits, and filling them with a seafood salad.

Already, Hill has been joking with another BuDS employee about having an avocado-peeling contest similar to the "shuck-offs" of previous years. One can only imagine slimy avocado rinds flying around the dining hall in the place of soft, silky cornhusks. She envisions how she will enjoy "the rich, decadent, green butter." She will mush the butter on a piece of bread and sprinkle it with salt. "This," she says, thinking of her upcoming avocado meal, "is the essence of life."

JULIA RAPPAPORT B'06 likes to cut her avocados in half and eat 'em straight.

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