Bonnaroo Day 3 - Rock the Grill! by diane

Saturday, June 14 - First, apologies for posting this a little late – yesterday (Saturday) was so incredibly busy, with so much going on, that we weren’t able to post anything up. What a day! Besides some great music like Pearl Jam and Jack Johnson (both very socially conscious), we hosted our very first, very intimate, Rock the Grill.

What is Rock the Grill, I hear you ask? Well, we here at Sustainable Table think that music and food are intricately related. You have your choice of local food and music, or you can choose industrial, mass produced food and music. And which is better? The local, obviously. What we’d like to see is the word sustainable or socially responsible also added in the descriptions about music and musicians, and we believe that the folks here at Bonnaroo are living up to that – this festival is massive, long, hot and humid, and it might be the most efficiently-run sustainable operation I’ve ever been a part of. (More on that in an upcoming blog post….)

Music and food also place us. Music ties us to a memory where food oftentimes ties us to a place. When I hear The Who, I think of being a teenager and traveling the country to see the band. I think of all the great people I met and the community I created around the music. When I think of certain foods, peaches, for example, I think of the peach tree in the backyard of my parent’s house. I think of summer and sunshine. Both food and music root us in our lives.

In addition, listening to great music and eating excellent food are also related. When you hear an amazing performer – whether they be classical or rock or country – it stirs up a feeling inside, a feeling for more sometimes, or a feeling of serenity, peace and joy. I personally can feel connected with everyone else through the music, knowing that I matter as an individual but that I’m also connected to something much bigger than me. When you eat local food, cooked well by a chef who knows his art, and grown by a farmer who honors his land and everything on it, you’re also experiencing a connection to something bigger. You’re brought together around a table to share in the experience, just as music fans are brought together to listen to a band.

And yesterday was about Rock the Grill. Okay, it ended up being “Rock the Grill…unplugged” for various reasons. First was the heat; second was the rain. It was so hot and humid on Thursday and part of the day on Friday, and our original spot was in an open area in the middle of a field. Combine that with a 4pm cookout time, and there was no way we would survive the heat that time of day, let alone cooking in the heat. (And we couldn’t change the time because acts like Jack Johnson and Pearl Jam were performing that evening.) So, first thing we learned was not to schedule a barbecue outdoors in a place that gets hot and humid and has no shade….

In case you haven’t read previous posts, the “we” I’m referring to is Sustainable Table and Farm Aid’s HOMEGROWN campaign. (More on what Farm Aid’s doing shortly….) We had booths next to each other so decided we would have a picnic behind our tents, where we could create some shade. Cornelia Hoskin, the HOMEGROWN Shepherdess, and Diane/Dawn from Sustainable Table decided to basically go with the flow and not overplan the event. We wanted to see if it’s possible to have a sustainable cookout or picnic at a festival of this size – something anyone could do either inside a festival or outside a venue in a parking lot. Simple ingredients, simple dishes, great flavor.

Our next challenge was the food. Both of us stopped at the Whole Foods in Nashville to pick up some ingredients – soy hot dogs, veggie burgers (we didn’t want to risk meat in the heat), condiments, and snacks. Organic things we thought might be hard to find around Manchester/Tullahoma, Tennessee. We planned to pick up fruit and vegetables at the Franklin Farmers Market in Tennessee.

The next lesson we learned was to check driving directions earlier than the night before an event. To our dismay, we discovered that the farmers market was an hour and a half away – in each direction. There was no way we could drive that far and be at the festival in time. So, plan B had to be developed. We searched high and low for a farmers market in the area and couldn’t find anything. In the end, we found a Kroger and a Walmart that had organic sections not too far from our hotel. Not wanting to go to the biggest store in the country, we visited a Kroger in Decherd, Tennessee.

I have to tell you, I’ve never heard of Decherd, Tennessee, and probably wouldn’t be able to even find it on a map, so I was a little nervous going there, afraid mainly that the organic section might consist of some organic carrots and nothing else. So we were pleasantly surprised to find out that they did indeed have some organic food – maybe not the selection you’re going to find in other large stores, but we were happy to see that they had a pretty good selection .

What impressed us even more was that the clerk, who was maybe around 18-20 years old, knew the organic selection and also knew where most other food came from. We figured we’d look for both local and organic selections – and we ended up with cabbage (organic), cucumbers (local), tomatoes (local), peaches (Georgia, local enough), Vidalia onions (local), and a whole cart full of goodies.

Again, this wasn’t exactly what we planned, but we made do – and we still were able to get a selection of both organic and local food. And what’s stuck with me the most is how knowledgeable the clerk was. Not only was he young, he worked in a large corporate store – and yet he really seemed to care about where the food came from. I wonder how common this is around the country now – and if it’s happening because so many people are starting to ask about where their food comes from.

So, bags in hand, we arrived at our booth in the Planet Roo section of the festival and started creating. With oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, we were able to create an amazing salad with greens, walnuts, goat cheese, blueberries, apples, cucumbers, avocados and other tasty vegetables. We simply used what we had and created a dressing around it. We also created a fruit salad with peaches, oranges and grapes and coupled that with a delicious coleslaw with grated broccoli and carrots, chopped red cabbage, soy mayonnaise, and crushed red pepper. For a drink, we hand squeezed lemons, added agave nectar, water and some ice and had great-tasting on the tart side lemonade.

For the main course, we had access to a camp stove, a burner traditionally used just to boil water – but we were able to cook soy hot dogs on skewers. Our veggie burgers weren’t cooking properly so we improvised and created veggie burger chili, using organic jarred pizza sauce we’d happened to buy at the Whole Foods a few days earlier. And the highlight of our cookout was our pizza – cooked in a solar oven! The group Carbon Shredders was displaying a solar oven in the booth next to us, so they happily put our pizza with sauce, tomatoes, organic mozzarella and mushrooms in their oven. Unfortunately, the sun wasn’t too hot so it took quite a while to cook, but we can say we all ate our first solar oven pizza! And it was delicious.

Our second pizza had a goat cheese base and was topped with organic spinach, tomatoes and grapes. The sun had just about set at this point, so it wasn’t cooking properly – but the Planet Roo Café a couple booths down from us happily agreed to finish cooking the pizza in their oven. Talk about working together!

So we filled ourselves on pizza, veggie chili, soy dogs, salad, fruit, and coleslaw – what an amazing meal to have created on the grass in back of a tented booth! And if we can do this, anyone can cook great food anywhere they are! And the nicest thing about the whole event is that when we found ourselves in a bind, all we had to do was ask for help and people all around us did what they called. This is the definition of true sustainability – community coming together to help each other out.

So Rock the Grill…unplugged was a huge success. We not only fed ourselves, we offered food to other vendors and people who came by until it was gone, groups like Carbon Shredders, Oxfam America, Sequatchie Valley Institute, and Conscious Alliance. We even had some leftover lemon, tomato and avocado which we gave to some concertgoers who were camping there so they could make some guacamole at their tent. We also gave away things like our recovered wood charcoal that couldn't be used because we had to change from a barbecue to a picnic, so everything we bought was put to good use, or recycled for someone else's use. Also using compostable cutlery, plates and bowls made cleaning up easy - and guilt free! All we had to do was put them in the compost bins.

This first event was purposely kept small so we could see how we managed making food in an environment like this, and we were very successful (and especially proud of how we were able to improvise when it was needed…). We hope we can continue to Rock the Grill – we’ll keep you posted and let you know what happens with the concept. Until then – summer’s here and it’s time to get outside and enjoy all the great food becoming available from local sustainable farmers. We’ll see if we can recreate some of our recipes and get them up online – until then, you can check out some great summer recipes on our Summer Grilling and Camping Recipes page. Grill on!

And if you'd like to see what the folks at HOMEGROWN had to say about the picnic, read their post here....

Article Tag(s): sustainable table, bonnaroo, bonnaroo 2008, homegrown, farm aid

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