Eigensinn Farm’s Fertile Ground for Regenerative Coffee
Summary: A personal account of my experience spreading awareness about Cafe Solar® regenerative coffee at Chef Michael Stadtländer's annual Wild Leek and Maple Syrup Festival. I wrote this story on my own to promote this coffee program and provide an insider view of an Eigensinn farm event, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in a unique, top-quality, farm-to-table food experience.
Experiencing an Eigensinn Farm event is like coming home to a family meal; One is left with that warm, fuzzy feeling along with a side of the tough, yet necessary conversation. It’s a safe space for expensive tech. I lost my phone in the vast sea of people at this year’s Wild Leak and Maple Syrup Festival and suffered zero heart rate increase imagining someone pocketing it. No one here cares about phones. Plus, all the chefs and attendees, including the 100 healthcare workers invited this year (a show of pandemic goodwill), are a part of this “food family”. I found my phone within 30 minutes of eating and talking. Someone had handed it over to Chef Michael Stadtländer; The man of the hour.
His face is mostly covered by an oversized, woven triangle; A traditional Asian farmers’ hat, likely an influence of his Japanese wife, Nobuyo Stadtländer. He’s serving up his own ice cream recipe, “Ontario maple syrup and wild ginger crocant with rhubarb, apple and black current compote”. Sous-chefs in training work diligently by his side and Stadtländer himself moves speedily and with purpose. It’s an unseasonal 27 degrees Celsius in this wide open farmers’ field and it IS ice cream, after all.
Guests are busy wining and dining on gourmet food grown within a few farmers’ blocks, seated picnic-style at mini tables that were crafted with fallen logs by Stadtländer himself. Oysters (not local fare) are there, since we apparently can’t live without them (Toronto is, surprisingly, the largest consumer of oysters per capita worldwide), and the shuckers at Oyster Boy have absorbed every detail of their sourcing and are happy to share. Smiling all the way through serving upwards of 300 guests in one shot, by the time the renowned chef reaches our coffee stand streams of sun-kissed faces have already emerged from the farmers’ field with bellies full.
Coffee reunites a boisterous crowd at the end and sparks some of the more uncomfortable conversation topics (i.e. deforestation and poverty in growing regions) at a time when spirits are running high. This is fine with Stadtländer. After all; “Eignesinn” when translated from German means “self-willedness”, “the quality of having an own mind without being prone to change it”, and “self-sufficiency”. As a chef striving to serve the best food, for him that means understanding how to grow the ingredients and how to be a good farmer to the land.
Stadtländer has supported the Cafe Solar® regenerative coffee program for years; A coffee program spearheaded by coffee farmers in Honduras using solar-powered coffee mills in conjunction with reforestation. Farmer to farmer; It’s been the only trusted local coffee served at his events, including the annual Wild Leek and Maple Syrup Festival, ever since it started around the same time as the birth of the Southern Ontario farm-to-table food movement, also with Stadtländer as a founding leader some two decades ago. Fertile ground for regenerative coffee is located right under the “Holy Tree” on Eigensinn Farm—Not for growing coffee, of course (since Canada is much too cold) but for cultivating coffee awareness.
From this “sacred” post, we (my coffee company and I) engage people in discussion around green coffee production; Which always forays into talk of coffee roasting and brewing. The questions are good and many. Coffee is an easy conversation starter; And our discussion focuses on how Cafe Solar®’s unique program is fixing some of the major social and environmental issues in coffee.
Every year, rain or shine (and sometimes even snow, be warned) the Wild Leek and Maple Syrup Festival brings together a uniquely eclectic group of food-lovers, producers and advocates. If one is attentive and inquisitive, they’ll learn things like how our coffee habit is wiping out forests in tropical regions; That Canada has a burgeoning sturgeon farming industry (a Jurassic fish variety!); And all the lovable mischief ostriches get up to during mating season.
Once the event ends and guests trickle out, Nobuyo’s Japanese-inspired meal is the ultimate comfort food for the chefs. She’ll push a bowl of deliciously sea salty soba noodles forward as she glides around the cutlery tree center-piece of her own kitchen in a flurry of smiling energy. Does she need coffee? I’m thinking maybe not.
Does her farm & restaurant need coffee? Let’s just say that if Eigensinn could be supplied with nothing but Cafe Solar® regenerative coffee Stadtländer would be glad to hear it. It’s not an issue of there being no demand for a more sustainable product; It’s more of an unbalanced market supply coupled with a too-little-consumer-awareness issue. Similar challenges that have faced the local food movement since its inception.
Driven by his desire to succeed and thrive, Eigensinn Farm, plus Stadtländer’s trusted local farmer circle are able to supply around ninety per cent of the ingredients on the menu; However, coffee is inherently not local. Plunging a wide diversity of seeds into the ground, beans, peas, kale, squash, corn; Coffee is not one of them and never will be. But this place is helping cultivate a different kind of coffee seed; One of hope for a future with regenerative coffee (a.k.a. Coffee production that helps restore—rather than replace—its tropical forest habitat). If there’s any local chef that can help spread this message, it’s Canadian culinary icon, Chef Stadtländer; And if there’s any local (Toronto) farm with uniquely fertile ground for sprouting seeds of change, it’s Eigensinn.
It’s 10:00pm and a group of us are still hanging out, drinking cider by the light of a single bare bulb emanating from the barn. Stadtländer emerges from the house, “So will you be staying over for the night?” We have options; The trailer near the pond or camping out anywhere on his acreages made up of farm field, forest, and larger than life mixed-media sculptures. It’s tempting, but it’s already dark and tomorrow’s Monday. As we make our way down the gravel driveway, crickets chirping loudly, we pass a giant, 20ft-wide and 10ft-tall, bursting with empty wine bottles; A scene straight out of a seaside fantasy; And one more striking, yet friendly, reminder of our consumption as we wave goodbye.
