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A Vermont Picnic

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Pictured Recipe: Maple-Mustard Baked Chicken

The heirloom varieties of beans, tomatoes, potatoes and corn that would have been on the table are among the foods RAFT has deemed worth reinvigorating for their unique contributions to both our culinary and broader cultural heritage. “We, as humans, have not been given roots as obvious as those of plants,” says RAFT founder Gary Paul Nabhan. “The surest way we have to lodge ourselves within this blessed earth is to know where our food comes from.”

Anyone can play a role by searching out RAFT foods to grow or eat. Soon after Tom Stearns, 33, first started saving and growing heirloom seeds as a hobby in 1995, he was given some flint corn, which he named Roy’s Calais after the man and town from which it came. The next year his passion became his profession when Stearns established High Mowing Organic Seeds in northern Vermont, now a national mail-order organic seed company with over $1 million in annual sales. “Preservation is not just keeping something in a seed bank somewhere,” Stearns says. “Having someone actively farming it is the best way to preserve it.”

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