Ariel Zevon: Laced with Determination, Making it Farm Fresh

By Mary Fifield

"Lacing the people back into the land that feeds them. Our mission at LACE is to provide a commons for family farms and their community where they can celebrate local food, LEARN from one another and build fellowship TOGETHER."
- Mission statement of Barre's Local Agricultural Community Exchange

Ariel Zevon, busy behind the LACE kitchen counter at her community Farm Fresh Market-Café, radiates an energetic blend of quiet focus - down to earth and friendly, yet clearly on the job as she kneads bread dough, elbow deep in the yeasty fragrant bowl, her four-year-old tow-headed twins, Max and Gus, happily circling her legs, comfortably underfoot. Opened in June, LACE is dedicated to connecting consumers to the neighbor-farmer down the road by selling small-scale agricultural produce and educating customers on the benefits of buying farm fresh, organic and local foods, LACE also seeks to foster community through various gatherings including dining, cooking, art, music, books and hand-crafts.

Zevon is no shrinking violet in the scope of her vision and practice, encompassing environmental awareness, history, and socio-economic innovation. Standing the traditionally competitive business model on its ear, LACE displays posters urging customers to shop at the Barre Farmer's Market on Thursdays and passes on leftovers from the cafe daily - for free - to anyone who stops in to inquire between 3and 4pm. They also deliver donations twice a week to the Vermont Foodbank - "whatever's here, usually a lot of bread, also milk and produce," says Zevon - as well as local folks' shared home garden overflow.

LACE's organizational status is part non-profit/outreach/educational, part profit. "For paperwork purposes the IRS forces us to [classify the farm fresh retail market as] a for-profit. Our objective is not to grow capital but to break even and donate any proceeds after costs back into community outreach," Zevon says. An example of this outreach is LACE's "Cook a Book" program, which Zevon describes as children reading a book about cooking and then they "come into the kitchen and cook a recipe...they get to see a spinach plant and then cook a spinach calzone. Another was about herbs and they made herbed meatballs.

Zevon gratefully describes the support and volunteers LACE has attracted from all corners of the Vermont community, locals and out-of-towners, farmers, students and children, non-profits, educators, environmentalists, artists, trades people, state and local officials, other entrepreneurs, saying, "the first initial surprise was how overwhelmingly welcomed we were." Of course, the most famous out of towner who was instrumental (literally and figuratively) in helping to create the memorable debut of LACE is musician and recording artist Jackson Browne, old family friend of Ariel's mother, Crystal, and god-father to Ariel. He played two sold out benefit concerts at the Barre Opera House and donated one of his guitars for the grand opening silent auction. He plans to return to Barre again to the community's delight and anticipation.

We talked with Ariel Zevon about the story of LACE and the talk and the walk of bringing farm fresh food to Central Vermont, in downtown Barre.

Vermont Woman: Why and how did you come to create LACE? Your vision and commitment to community is very broad and fearless.

Ariel Zevon (smiles with a low chuckle): I always say it was more the selfish reasons for the why than the seemingly, ah, other non-selfish reasons. We [Ariel, her husband Ben Powell, and their twins] moved to Vermont to farm ourselves, but [we] moved to Barre City - and didn't have any land to till! We'd moved from California where it's always farmers' market season and [it's] the land of Trader Joe's with great cheap, organic food... [to] here, having nowhere to shop except once a week in the summers that had really good local food at the farmers' market. We just saw this void between all the farmers, all the food being grown locally that I couldn't get my hands on enough...

And so, that's when it all started. I kept asking how does Trader Joe's do it? So, I just started studying agriculture and talking to farmers, volunteering, working on farms. I'd taken a course called "Growing Places" with the Woman's Agricultural Network. We had ended that with talking about how to write a business plan. I figured the worst that could happen is that I'd learn how to write a business plan. And that's honestly all I thought would come of it! I'd been a stay at home mom for three years and was sort of looking for something else, I guess, to put my brain to.

VW: You'd been immersed in raising your kids and you had this "try it," open mind?

AZ: I didn't really have any notion that it would really happen in actuality. I started going to the farmers' markets talking to farmers there, getting their perspectives and reactions to sharing this idea of having a place in town that was an outlet for farm fresh food. And then I just talked to anyone who had anything to do with agriculture, food, community outreach, nutrition... I mean, I talked to so many different people.

VW: So, it was a really broad perspective, you really cast a wide net. And had you done any community organizing before?

AZ: I wouldn't say community organizing ... I'd worked for non-profits for years. In Los Angeles, I worked with an organization that works with at-risk kids, the Virginia Avenue Project, in theatre - in my prior life, I worked as an actress (Zevon grimaces with a chuckle). I started when I was 19, [and] worked, I guess, for nine years with them. My mother has always been a political activist; with that mentality that you're always volunteering, doing community outreach. I was also coming out from the angle of I don't know anything about anything, like I'd never actually had my own farm, I'd never had my own business, never been an employer.

VW: So you were coming from a completely innocent open space.

AZ: Totally, yeah, and it was a great place to come from. From the get-go I'd ask please, tell me everything that you'd like to share with me, and do you think this is a worthwhile idea? The reason LACE has gotten as far as it has is purely because the reaction I got over and over again was: this is really great, Barre really needs this...so I kept, you know, sort of going with it. Kept waiting for the person who was going to say, nope, nah, give it up...but no one ever did.

VW: How did you come to settle in Barre?

AZ: My husband and I met in Vermont in college. He's from Maine originally and when we graduated from Marlboro College, we moved to California, which is where I'm from. But I was very clear, after four years in Vermont, I knew it was where I wanted to raise my family. My mom had a house in Brattleboro at that time. Then we got pregnant and while I was pregnant I started looking online at real estate in Vermont. Ben and I found the best house in Barre. It was affordable, [though we did] not really know anything about the place. I had never even heard of it. I'd been to St. Johnsbury and Montpelier, but I certainly didn't know anything about the sort of Barre-Montpelier [she pauses, raising her both hands up and shrugging in a gesture of innocence, accompanied by a wry expression] Twin City....umm...rivalry…!

VW: What was your biggest challenge in developing LACE?

AZ: The [search for the right] space. It's been sort of like we've been walking the path, waiting for someone to detour us… [but] the doors just kept opening!

VW: How did you come to be who you are?

AZ: I grew up an only child with a single mother and we traveled a lot [and I was exposed to many] people who really knew their way around a kitchen, [including] a close friend who was a five-star chef - he was about creating art out of food. I spent a lot of my childhood in France which is again, as in [all of] Europe: there's a whole different relationship to food than there is here. I think that's the biggest influence on me as far as food and agricultural awareness. We lived in Paris, a big city, but every neighborhood has their own farmers' market that's twice a week, everybody shops for their fresh food every day...you don't go to Costco to get supplies for the month.

The flip side was we were living in Los Angeles when we weren't elsewhere. My dad [the late rock n' roller Warren Zevon] was always in LA. It [has] the juxtaposition of great fresh food year round because of the climate-but then, it's also like the fast food...mecca. So, I had BOTH, 'cuz, there was always the struggle for money and you know, single mom and all that stuff, so there'd be stretches where we'd be eating at McDonald's, you know? So... we knew that whatever we did had to be accessible and affordable.

Part of what I want to do to make it more affordable is draw people in - to gather as a community to do some of these labor intensive things, like shuck peas. Make it more festive, so I'm not paying someone $10 an hour to shuck peas, which I probably can't afford to do; rather, create events where it's going back to old gatherings around food.

VW: You're drawing on very old traditions like community harvests, barn-raisings...which, as a "business" strategy, is very innovative.

AZ: Yeah, we've had people coming in just seeking out, wanting to be a part of what's missing from our culture of late...that fellowship of living in a community, and it'd be nice to have some of that back!

VW: What, from your perspective, is unique about Vermont and its relationship to agriculture, the land, food?

AZ: Vermont, to me, is one of those places that still has a sense of purity, of being able to live sustainably with your family on the land: grow your own food, milk your own cow, you know what I mean? It's here, and although it's at risk, it's still salvageable, you can hang onto it here. But...now is the time to be careful, because it could be extinct if we allow that land to slip away into development.

VW: What do you think are the factors that help to make small-scale farming salvageable?

AZ: My hope is that efforts like LACE will help. I think it's time to think of new ways to support small farms. There has to be a new way of thinking because small farms can't sustain themselves in today's industrial food economy...needing to supply giant box stores, you know, huge quantities of food. And I just don't believe that that's the right way...we don't have enough control over the quality, it's so terrible for the soil, the environment...it's unstable and unsafe.

I get irate at the insanity of how we feed ourselves and produce food today. Why, as a people (in the US), we've been so willing to give up control of what we put into our bodies...myself included, I've been in that boat, before, completely, where the thinking was-I don't wanna know, I don't need to know, if I don't know, it won't hurt me! (Laughs) That's crazy!

Artist and musician Mary Fifield is a Barre resident.

Bonnie Beede and the Concentric Circles of Community

Bonnie Beede began working at LACE as a volunteer, and is now one of the paid staff. But it's much more than a job to her, it sounds, as she calls it her second home where she works with her "extended family" - not to mention the educational dividends she derives. "I've taken a lot about what I've learned about local produce and food and [have] applied it to my family," Beede explains. "It has become important to them as well; they're always asking, 'Mom, is this from your work? Is this fresh, organic?'!"

Now 28, Bonnie was born in Randolph and has lived in Upper Graniteville and Barre Town area since 4th grade. Through her life, she has paid many visits to 159 North Main Street - prior to housing LACE, it was the site of the Homer Fitts Department Store, a Barre institution for decades. "When I was growing up, we used to make special trips to shop at Homer Fitts cuz it was the only place where you could find certain specific female items!" Beede laughs knowingly.

"When I first started as a volunteer at LACE in May, I didn't recognize it," she says of Zevon's transformation of the space.

"Because this building has been such a big part not only of who I am now, but of who I was back then, I decided to [get] married here," Beede explains. "Ariel has talked about LACE being a community space, not just a cafe-market, [so] I decided to use my wedding as a form of publicity to make people aware of using this place for other things.

"The café catered and served everything. I came in and they had decorated the whole place, they were really on the ball!" recalls Beede. "We took some photos outside and some folks in cars driving by tooted and cheered when my husband and I kissed," she adds with a smile.