OrganicArts is the name of my local food and flavor consultancy, which I began in 2010. I seek out premium New England ingredients and producers and share what I learn with educators, non-profits, businesses and neighbors. The word Organic here refers to the power of good food to connect all communities of life. The word Arts here refers to the artisan path inherent in farming and cooking. - Odessa Piper
Read the recent The New York Times article featuring Odessa’s workshop at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen
How to Get Behind the Scenes at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin? Take a Baking Class.
Photo Credit: Elaine Glusac
“A Prairie School design fan, weekly baker and servant to my sourdough starter, I signed up for “Grain Cookery and Baking,” led by Odessa Piper, the now Boston-based chef who owned the seminal farm-to-table restaurant L’Etoile in nearby Madison for 29 years.
Read a recently published article after returning to the Dane County Farmers Market in Madison, WI.
“Odessa Piper visits the Madison she helped make” in the publication Isthmus
Nadia Alber of Ducks in a Row Family Farm, left, and Odessa Piper. Photo courtesy Wall Graber
“Though she lives in Boston now, restaurant icon Odessa Piper remains a quintessential Madisonian of a certain type: one of those “seekers” who found her way here in search of meaning, mission and connection to the land. Also, for the inspiration of like-minded souls.” Marc Eisen
Odessa speaking about her favorite fruits Black Currants, In The Market
Learn about the amazingly intense and useful fruit and it’s integration into Midwest Agroforestry.
Head Downeast for Wild Blueberry Weekend August 5 & 6 At Smithereen Farm in Pembroke Maine
Join us for hands-on fun with Blueberries in the timber-frame kitchen and out on our certified organic barrens on Youngs Cove Road.
Chef Odessa Piper will offer hand-pie and galette demos and be on hand to answer your questions as our creations bake in the wood oven. We will look at ways to put-by blueberries and all the fruits of high summer for year-round use, and debate different thickeners for pies, preserves, or savory uses. Bring your questions and/or pie trauma.
A hand-out of recipes, preservation tips and pie wisdom will be available for everyone who drops in. Odessa will be ‘ in residence’ in the kitchen from 10am to 3pm
What I mean by “Organic Arts”
Organic is an endless cycle of resource replenishing and recycling, where the concept of waste does not exist. Organic describes entire ecologies better than it ever can ever be used to describe one thing. How do we employ a word that goes on to make infinite connections? Organic always stood for reciprocations between the soil and eaters long before it became a certification program of the US Government. Tragically the USDA Organic Brand allows animals to be confined in factories, and plants propped in soil-less mediums. These ‘efficiencies’ go on to prop up a false economy that we consume at our peril. This is an entirely avoidable error.
I encourage everyone who eats to understand, and take a stand, to defend the true meaning and purpose of organic, and fiercely defend the mystery and power of the word. Any fool can drown in abundance, the art is how to thrive.
What is perennial agriculture
In the working landscape there are many ways to produce food. One extreme is to plow fencerow to fencerow with profound soil loss and industrial methods that contribute to climate change. The other is hunting and gathering like our ancestors did in otherwise undisturbed wilds. Perennial agriculture is a practice of agro ecology that finds its roots in indigenous foodways that incorporate regeneration with harvesting and eating. Agro Forestry is a type of perennial agriculture where plants such as hazelnuts, currants, apples, elderberries, shad bush, blueberries and chestnuts provide harvests over many years without plowing the soil.