TTT Interviewee: Hillary Baum Session #1 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: September 22, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It’s September 22, 2009, and I’m with Hillary Baum at her home in Riverdale, New York. Good morning. Baum: Hi, Judith. Q: Why don’t we start this with your telling me where and when you were born and something about your early life, where it took place, what your parents were like. Baum: I was born in New York City in a hospital that doesn’t exist anymore on the West Side, and the first couple of years of my life I lived on the East Side of New York City, and then we started our moving around, which we did over several years when I was young, and moved up to New Rochelle, New York, and then the next thing I remember is we moved to Florida, where we lived till I was about five or six years old, and then we came back up to New Jersey for a few years, ultimately coming back into New York City when I was about eleven or twelve years old. Then I became very aware that the reason we kept moving around so much was because of my father’s career. Q: How did your father’s career necessitate those moves? Baum: Because he was going to work for different people in different places. And I realized, I guess, around that age how really important my dad’s work life was. Even though I don’t have specific memories of his being away from home a lot, I do remember as an elementary school kid that my dad was never home for dinner. [laughs] Then I understood, well, that had everything to do with the kind of work he did in the restaurant business. So for those first few years and actually for many years, my mom was the mainstay, the base, really, for all home life and a very attentive and very reliable kind of mother. I have two younger brothers. One brother is just a couple years younger, and then there’s a bit of a gap. So my brothers are Ed and Charles, with Charles being the older one of the two of them. We lived in Summit, New Jersey, and then we moved to South Orange, New Jersey, and it was around that time that my dad opened his first giant restaurant, which was the Newarker restaurant at the Newark Airport, and it’s then I understood that my father was very prominent and also that we could have incredible birthday parties as kids by going to some of these restaurants and having a sense of tremendous celebration and so forth in our lives that were very often associated with going to these places. Q: Before he opened the Newarker and started his own business, did he have jobs working for people? Baum: Oh yes. The Newarker was not his own business. He did not have his own business until very much later. Q: So what kind of jobs in the restaurant business did he have before that? Baum: I’m sure that somebody will correct me on this, but I think he started off being like the food and beverage director. He was basically doing a lot of the accounting work for, I want to say, Zeckendorf. One of his assignments was to take on a nightclub to make sure—I think they wanted this business to fail or something. I guess my dad must have worked for an accounting company first, and I think one of his clients must have been the person who owned the nightclub, and so he got involved in the nightclub business to begin with. Then when we moved down to Florida, he worked for Shine, and they had the Roney Plaza and the really famous hotel area just north of Miami, whose name is escaping me right now. Boca Raton. So I guess my dad must have run all the food and beverage operations in those places. Then he came up to New York and worked for Abe Wechsler. It’s a chain that doesn’t exist anymore that turned into Restaurant Associates, and so then Joe was at Restaurant Associates for many years until I guess I was graduating from college, so until 1969, 1970. It was during that time, between the mid to late fifties, in that time that the whole American restaurant industry really blossomed very much under his influence. But here I was, still a kid, and spent a good portion of time being very aware of the development of these restaurants and being in the restaurants, though my father had a very firm policy that his kids were never to go into any of the restaurants unaccompanied by one of the parents. There were other kids that were allowed to go in, and my father felt it was really bad for the morale of the staff and that we were never ever to do that when we were young. But one of my fondest memories is when they opened the Four Seasons, I remember that my mother—especially the grand opening of the Four Seasons was such a huge deal, but for every new season like it would have been, I guess, tonight, since today’s the autumn equinox, was a huge special event, which was a change of the seasons at the Four Seasons. It was a huge press event. It was a huge culinary event. Everything changed in the restaurant, the uniforms, I guess some of the plantings. I mean, everybody talks about how the color on the ribbon on the typewriters and the menu colors changed, and certainly the menus themselves changed to reflect the change in the seasons. But part of my memory is of my mother getting really dressed up to go for this big opening. It was a very big event, and it would happen on a seasonable basis. My mom spent a lot of time in my dad’s restaurants. So as I was turning into a slightly older kid and we had moved into Manhattan by then, and that was primarily because of my dad’s hours and his crazy professional life. My mother went back to college. She was developing as an artist. She was a sculptor, but she was also extremely involved in the North Side Center for Child Development. I guess she started there as a volunteer and then eventually got very involved there with young kids from disadvantaged social as well as emotional situations, actually. That’s what North Side Center was about. Q: Let me ask you about the Four Seasons. Did you understand what it was about? Baum: Oh yes, I did, as I described. I understood and it really had a huge impression on me. Q: Tell me about that. Baum: Well, that this concept of seasonality, it was so much a part of the concept of the restaurant, and so it definitely had a lot to teach a kid like me. I was very interested. I also was aware pretty early on, I don’t how early, but pretty early, that a lot of what was going on there was also this development of relationships with farmers. I remember my dad used to talk about these trips they would make to Pennsylvania and going to these greenhouses and how they had special things that were produced for the restaurant. I remember that, to me, that seemed like something very, very new and exciting. I don’t think I understood the significance of it at that moment, how innovative it really was at that time. Q: Was it his idea? Baum: Well, he was very much the creative force behind the restaurant, but he had a team of people that he worked with as well. I certainly wasn’t privy to those magic brainstorming moments, but there were a lot of people involved in the development of that, including Jim Beard was very involved at the Four Seasons, as was Mimi Sheraton. Maybe Barbara Kafka was involved, and I know she worked with Joe later for sure. Q: Did you meet those people? Baum: Yes, I met a lot of those people, and I got to know them more as I grew older, but I was a teenager. I was in junior high school and high school during those times. One of the things that is so funny to me is that there’s a bunch of people who I know who are my colleagues and my really good friends, and we would swear we were sitting back to back, you know, whether it was at the Four Seasons or at La Fonda del Sol or some place like that, because a lot of people who are really involved in food also grew up in those restaurants at the same time as I did, only, obviously, my relationship was a little bit different. Q: I worked in the Time and Life Building for a little while, so we were very aware of the La Fonda del Sol, but to us it was a place where people went for two-, three-martini lunches and not for the likes of us. Baum: Well, that’s where I had my Sweet Sixteen. Q: Oh, my. Baum: That had a gigantic influence. Q: How so? Baum: Well, because the food was outrageous and so appealing and so different, the décor was like nothing anybody had ever seen, and all those little Alexander Girard scenes, all that incredible folk art that was in there was something of tremendous interest visually and also culturally. But also it was then, and really before, but it was then that I realized how significant my dad’s work was in terms of the artists and the architects and the graphics people and the advertising people, including, of course, the chefs who I haven’t really mentioned yet, but that he put together these incredible teams of professionals that all would come together under his direction, really, to create these places that I think he had very much envisioned, but I think was very much the product of this tremendous creativity that he brought together in one place where there was always a lot of give-and-take amongst the people who were part of this team. Q: What was the attitude toward food like in your home? Baum: Well, it took me a while to figure out that my father was not a chef, that that was not what he did. My mother was a wonderful home cook. I think certainly a lot of it was self-taught, but also she was able to take classes with Jim Beard and went to some of these early tastings, and she took classes with Paula Peck, Albert Stockli and others. Q: You mean for the restaurants? Baum: Yes. She participated in that. I have found like notes from that had to do with Albert Stockli’s recipes for the Four Seasons and other places, and so I know my mom was involved. But as kids, we always had home-cooked dinner on the table every night, and dinner was a very important time and everybody had to be at the table. When my dad was around, it was a big family joke, but the only time we would see my dad when we were young was on Sunday mornings he didn’t go anywhere. That was time when he was home, and the big joke was that he always liked to tease my mom about how long certain things were in the refrigerator. So he’d go into the refrigerator and he’d start pulling things out, and the big thing that Joe would do was he would make an omelet of whatever he could find, and we had to eat it. [laughs] But then, actually, my dad got much more involved in cooking and the pleasures of outdoor cooking and grilling and so forth. They had a country home in northern Westchester in North Salem, and that’s when my dad was in the kitchen and at the grill and got really involved, and we used to do these incredibly delicious, fabulously fresh meals but as a family. They had a giant kitchen. We were all in there all the time, all cooking together, and it was quite, quite wonderful. Q: Jim Beard’s grilling book was one of his very earliest books. Do you think that that had any impact on your father’s grilling? Baum: I don’t know. [laughs] I can’t really say, you know. My father was certainly a wonderful instinctive cook, but he didn’t always have time to do that, and a lot of the way we saw food at home very often reflected his personal likes, but a lot of that time what that meant was a big spread of various things, you know, always vast platters of tomato and onion salads and stuff like that that was always next to the seventeen different kinds of herring that would be on the table or something like that. But a lot of the tremendous generosity about food that was expressed through the restaurants was very often expressed in our home, especially around special events or Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, all those kinds of things. They were always things we’ve always done in our own home and they’ve always been extremely influenced by my dad. So I have socked away menus, insane shopping lists from when we went on family trips and we took coolers of stuff with us. Like my son’s Bar Mitzvah, it was like insane. It was all over the outside here. There was a whole tent that was all from Russ & Daughters. [laughs] Still close friends, even though my parents are gone for many years. Anyway, it was crazy. And even for my own wedding, it was somewhat of a potluck. My father’s friends brought dishes. Q: That’s wonderful. Now, what kind of friends were these? Baum: These were people like Jim Beard and Alfredo Viazzi and a bunch of other restaurateurs who actually came and brought the dishes for my wedding. I have to admit I couldn’t taste anything. I was too excited, but I hear it was great. It looked great. [laughs] Anyway, the influences at home were on many different levels around food and interest in food, but also the interest in presentation, the interest in sourcing. When Joe opened one of the restaurants at the [World] Trade Center, downstairs next to the Big Kitchen was one of my favorite restaurants, The Market Bar and Dining Rooms. On the menu they listed not the producers, but the purveyors. Q: And that was early. Baum: This was like in the mid-seventies, ’76, when they opened everything in the Trade Center, and so I don’t know. I assume that Jim Beard had worked with him on all the places, but in particular I know he did Windows on the World. So did Michael Whiteman, [Barbara] Kafka. Zraley and others. There was the Big Kitchen down there, which probably was one of the first what we now call food courts, but a lot of that preparation that they did for that, I know I have the pictures, they went to Europe, they went to the great marketplaces in Europe, and that was the kind of thing that they used for influence in terms of how they put together the Big Kitchen. It was very interested because I worked for my dad at various times. As influential as he was in terms of my career development, actually my mother had a huge amount to do with one of the biggest steps I ever took in terms of how my work has evolved, and that is, I went into the food business not with my father, but with my mother. [laughs] Q: Tell me about that. Baum: In the early eighties, my mom had started a business with her very, very close friend Florence Aaron, and they had started to make—they had a mustard. They were starting to make condiments. My mother got real serious about this business, and I got really interested in it and I really wanted to do something with her at that time. So I joined her, and then my brother came in on the business for a while. So for about three and a half years we had a business called Life Spice. Q: At what point in your education was this? Baum: Oh, I was an old person by then. I was a mother. I was way out of school. Q: Where, in fact, did you go to school? Baum: Cornell, as my dad did, as one of my brothers went. My daughter went (not my son). There’s just a whole family line. My husband went. We all went to Cornell. Q: But in the ordinary arts and sciences or in the cultural— Baum: This was a very big point of contention in the family. I wanted to go to the hotel school. My father did not want me to go to the hotel school. He wanted me to have a liberal arts education. He felt very, very strongly about that. And I was really interested, so I went into arts and sciences. Then after that, I was really interested in back of the house—what I neglected to tell you is that, I mean, amongst other things, about my grandparents. My grandparents, my father’s parents, were in the hotel business. So they had a big hotel until the early sixties in Saratoga Springs. They owned it for fifty years. That’s where my dad and his siblings really grew up. Especially during the summer season, they were in Saratoga. Q: What was the name of it? Baum: The Hotel Gross & Baum. It was a kosher hotel, and there was a big dining room. My grandfather was like the front of the house, and my grandmother was the back of the house, and she ran the kitchen, she ran the dining room, she ran the housekeeping. My grandfather took care of the guests and my grandmother—and there was another brother that was involved, too, I guess, in the business office there, another brother of my grandmother’s. But I was so influenced. I mean, some of my fondest memories, strongest memories, are from crazy things at the hotel in the summers when we used to go up there, because my dad would stick us all in the car, and we had to go several times. Then I guess it would finish at a Jewish holidays when they would be closing, and then they would leave. My grandparents would go to Florida by that time in the winter. But not only did they have like this giant kitchen in the hotel, but one of the houses on the property was the corner house, and that’s where the family lived, and there was another kitchen there. But in the hotel there was the walk-in, and I spent a lot of time as a kid, I remember so clearly, being in the walk-in, and the smells and the barrels coleslaw and pickles. So that’s like totally in my blood. Q: For the purposes of this project, why don’t you explain what a walk-in is. Baum: The walk-in, it’s a big commercial refrigerator that you literally walk into, and then hopefully the light goes on when the door closes behind you, because it’s very frightening that you think you’ll never get out. I used to follow my grandmother in and out, and also my father, because then he’d come for visits. I don’t think I had any particular interest that was different from another kid; it’s just that I grew up in it. It was very much part of me, and then when I went through college, there was something in the back of my mind. I actually went to Europe and went to Paris, and I thought, you know, I think I’d really like to get involved in the back of the house, but it was a pretty tough time. Q: As a what? As a cook? Baum: Yes. It was a pretty tough time for women in the restaurant business then, and I felt that I wasn’t getting the support and encouragement I really needed at that time from my own family. In retrospect, it’s so strange because I really consider myself quite outspoken, but it really influenced me. I really felt at that time that my father did not support that. I couldn’t get past that. Q: Did you know why? Baum: I think it’s because of what I’m talking about, is because of kitchen politics, and my father, as I was growing up, had definite boundaries about what was his business and what was not appropriate for us to be part of. So in 1964, for the World’s Fair, for example, I wanted to work at the World’s Fair. My dad got me a job interview with some other company. It was like that was so strange to me, but it was all about Joe having boundaries that eventually were broken down, but at that time he didn’t—I don’t know. Maybe it was just me, but my brother Charles broke through earlier than I did. He worked for the company as a teenager. Q: Were there different boundaries for you as a girl, do you think? Baum: Maybe. [laughs] I hate to say that, but it may be true. I actually see that that had a huge influence on me and that the way I finally cobbled my way through to build my own career in food had a lot to do with doors not opening when I thought they should have. It’s true of anybody, though, these turns in the path. My whole relationship to the food business and the restaurant business and the food industry is something really different that I really carved out, because I felt that there wasn’t a space for me there in a way that, at least in my own thinking, my own constructs, wanted it to be. Q: Tell me about Life Spice and what you did with your mother and Florence Aaron. Baum: With Life Spice, I fell in love with food production and I was in charge of production. So what that meant was I was in charge of helping develop the recipes, which were turned into formula, real formulations. We worked with the consultant to help us scale up. I was responsible for finding the factory lines. We had to produce in a food factory. Q: And these were spices? Baum: These were a line of condiments, sauces and dressings, and we had, I guess, six products. I would have to go negotiate with the factories. They wanted to co-pack, you know, where they would take your recipe and then bring you the finished product at the door, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to be on the line. I wanted to be working with the people who were making the food, and I wanted to oversee it. So I just fell in love with food production. I really liked it. I thought I could never cook the same thing twice, you know, the way I cook them, but with something like that, you had to cook the same thing twice. You had to cook it the same time thousands of time for consistency’s sake, and then that became the whole craft to me, was trying to continue to go for the same tastes. My mother was doing the marketing and the PR and stuff like that, and we did a book. Q: What was that called? Baum: It was the Life Spice Cookbook. It was a breakthrough product in the sense that it was made without salt and without sugar, and so part of its marketing was based on that, that it was really salt-free, and that was just at the moment when there was this interest in and awareness about all the sodium in processed foods. So my mother and her friend Florence got very interested in showing that you could do it and it could still be really flavorful, and they wanted to meet that challenge. So then I came in and helped my mother really fulfill her vision of what she wanted to do. It was a crossover product in that we marketed it to the brand-new kinds of supermarkets that were coming in there, which were like this combination of fancy food store and supermarket that they had in Washington as well as in New York and Boston and all the big cities, but we were also selling to the specialty food stores and the natural food stores. So we were breaking through in a couple of areas. That’s where I learned all about food marketing and the supermarket industry and how unfriendly it is to the small producer. So that had enormous influence on me. Eventually, without coming up with a whole lot of reinvestment into the company, we decided to discontinue for a variety of reasons. My mother and I had different visions of how to do the business. I wanted to have one of these tiny little white trucks that said Life Spice on the outside, where I could take it from my own little factory and drop it off at my little store route like in New York City. I really wanted that, and that was not my mother’s vision at all of the kind of company she wanted to run. So that was one of the reasons that we kind of discontinued it. But then I understood that that was a value of the authentic farmers’ market, because it gave the producer an opportunity to sell directly to the consumer without having to pay twenty gazillion middlemen, and you could tell your own story to your consumer, because our story was a complicated story, and it wasn’t something that was going to sell itself on the shelves, which is another reason we had to really discontinue it. Q: At the New School panel, you spoke about going with Jim Beard in Paris, I think, to markets. You were younger, so you must have been going to France with your family. Baum: Well, yes, and I was also there on my own, but I did go on this one trip with my family where we went to rendezvous with him at Les Halles. Q: At the market. Baum: At the market, and at the crazy famous bistro where some of the people eat the tripe soup and some of the people eat the onion soup, which is another story. But anyway, yes. Q: But did you know him at that point before? Baum: Well, sure, because I had known about him and he had been to my home. Q: Noticeably. [laughs] Baum: Yes. I knew all about him and I knew to be incredibly thrilled to be there with that person at that place at that moment in history with my father. It was very, very significant. Q: Even then you were aware of that? Baum: Yes, I was aware of that, because I knew the market, I think, was ripped down shortly after that. I must have been reading at the same time, because one of the books that really influenced me a lot was Delights & Prejudices, and I was just realizing that the copyright, I think, is ’64. So that’s my coming of age of all of this, really, because I was just at the end of high school. Q: Is this copy that you have now the original copy of it? Baum: Yes. So this really influenced me a lot, and there’s a whole discussion in here about markets. I don’t know literally if I read it before I was there with him or what, but it was just around this time when there was this expanding consciousness about food and where it was coming from, and I knew that my dad played a huge role in this, but I knew that Beard did too. So ’64, ’65, well, that’s when they did the crazy Gas Pavilion Restaurant at the World’s Fair. That was one of the first presentations of American regional menus, and also that’s when they must have been working on the project in the Midwest with Bradley Ogden of the American Festival Restaurant, and I was actually there in Kansas City recently. Q: Let’s just go back to Les Halles for a minute. You actually walked around the marketplace wit him? Baum: Yes. Q: What was that like? Baum: Well, it was a really long time ago, but I remember being in these areas where all the cured meats were. Somehow that really stuck in my mind, you know, like these vast displays of cured meats and certainly cheeses, and there would have been produce too. But I do remember the enormity of it and understanding that that was there to supply restaurants, you know, that market happened in the middle of the night because it was there to supply restaurants and retail and all of that. So I got it. I understood about how food came to the city and how food came to the table and the different steps along the way, but I remember also being completely awestruck by the scale of it. I’d never been in anything like that before. After that, and even in my career, believe me, I’ve been in plenty of wholesale markets. In fact, there’s a whole opening happening tomorrow in a project that I’ve been really involved with here in New York City. Q: What is that? Baum: Well, now they’re calling it Greenmarket Wholesale, or the Wholesale Greenmarket, I think it’s called. But it’s at Hunts Point, and it’s really the first major step in the revitalization of the New York City Wholesale Farmers’ Market. Q: How have you been involved in it? Baum: I was on the advisory committee. What we haven’t gotten to yet is the fact that I’ve worked with Bob. I worked with Bob a long time ago. Q: Why don’t you explain who he is again. Baum: Bob Lewis, who is now special assistant to the Commissioner of the Department of Ag and Markets for New York State was the co-founder of the Greenmarket program, and after, I guess, a year or so of founding or co-founding Greenmarket, then he moved to the state agency and developed a whole direct marketing area for New York State. So after my mother and I decided to close the business, I wrote Bob a letter and said, “Bob, I’ve lived upstate New York. I understand what’s going on with agriculture. I know how important the markets are for the farmers, but also markets are really important for small-scale producers like I just was. I know that if I could have sold my product in Greenmarket, I would have had a completely different kind of business. I know what it’s about, and I really want to support it, and I want to get involved.” I told him about my food background and what could I do. I think he was very excited that I had actually been in the food production business for like three years and I knew about marketing and sourcing and all of that stuff, so he immediately was able to make a connection, because there was somebody else in New York City who needed somebody to come and work and help them get a market development project off the ground. Q: This was when? Baum: This was in 1985. It actually was right around the time when Jim Beard died. It must have been right after he died, because shortly before he died—I might have spoken about this, but one of the things that I did, which was so meaningful to me, was I took my parents’ car and I went and I picked him up at his brownstone and I took him. We were going to go to the market together. I took him to the Union Square farmers’ market. Q: How spectacular. Baum: Right before he died. So I took him over there and we were walking around together, and it was like unbelievable. Everybody was coming to greet him, including the manager of the market, so that was like a huge deal and it was so meaningful to me. We shopped together. We walked the market together, shopped together, and then, of course, I brought him home. I had this whole relationship with him through my dad and then also separately through my mother, and he helped us with our ideas about our business and about our cookbook and contributed some recipes. So I had my own relationship with him, which was really special. Q: Where would these contacts take place, on the phone, at his house? Baum: Many times at his house, but also he used to come to my parents’ weekend home when I was in college, which would have been around the time we traveled in Europe together too. He played a big role in starting this insane tradition in my family, was that he wound up with Black Forest cake in his face. I think it must have been his birthday or something. For the weekend, he was at my parents’ home, and he got a cake in the face, and the cakes were coming fast and furious. Every weekend, Albert Stockli, you see, who was my dad’s chef for many, many years in the beginning of the RA empire, and he was the first chef at the Four Seasons, he had an inn in Connecticut and he would drive over. It was a big joke because he kept bringing these Black Forest cakes. It was a gag. And my father and he and my dad, they were like big practical jokers. So as part of an extension of this, it happened, and Beard got this cake in the face. Well, after that, it became a family tradition whether Jim Beard was there or not, and it went on for many, many, many years. Q: How did he react to that, the cake in the face? Baum: He laughed. Everybody laughed. It was like so outrageous, and the fact that my dad would do it was, like, it was perfect. It was really great. So, yes, there was a lot of joking, a lot of gagging. And my mother was very mischievous and she was in on a lot of it. Q: Could you describe, so far as you knew it, the relationship between Beard and your father and Beard and your mother? Baum: I knew that Joe and Jim, they conferred, but I didn’t realize until a bit later how long that relationship really lasted and all the different projects they worked on together. So I think it was a relationship that spanned at least thirty years of colleagues and some kind of paid relationship as well. So I think that Beard had a huge influence on Joe. Q: In terms of what? Baum: Well, in terms of his sensibilities about food and about all the menu development and also some of the conceptual stuff, I would assume also. But my dad was running the three-ring circus. He was the impresario. He was pulling all the pieces together. But Beard was pretty close in, I think, to the core, and there were a few other people who were too. There was a time when there was just this incredible creative outburst of restaurant after restaurant after restaurant. So now I look back and I understand a lot more about Beard’s development and the relationship there and the relationship around the food. Q: Which had to do with fresh farm product or what? Baum: Well, it had to do with a certain sensibility about freshness and about seasonality and about a certain kid of simplicity, I think, and that was very ingredient-driven, but also there was this concept of tradition, too, I think, in terms of American food and this whole idea about regionality that became also a very big theme for both of them and projects that they did together. So it was a complex thing. I’m not really an historian. It’s only through a child’s eyes, believe me, but when I go back and read some Beard stuff, recipes and discussions, I can really see. Jim loved to tease my father, because I think there were times when my father’s palate was—he was very adventurous, let’s put it that way. He was really adventurous and could probably eat any kind of pickle, or something like that. [laughs] But Jim had his limits, you know. But Joe was like pretty broad, let’s put it that way. And he used to laugh at Joe sometimes about what my father would eat. But, I mean, obviously there was a tremendous respect and a great deal of conviviality as well in the relationship. He was a friend, too, so he’d been invited and accepted invitation to Passover Seder at my house. I had the nerve to invite him to come to my Seder. Q: When was this? Baum: This would be in the mid-eighties. But, unfortunately, that’s when his health was really very, very up and down. I mean, I even had my dining room painted because he was coming. But at the last minute, he actually couldn’t make it. He was in the hospital. Q: Let’s go back to Bob Lewis. Baum: Bob directed me to meet with this guy, and the guy hired me. So for a year I was really— Q: This guy, what was his job? Baum: I really don’t want to name him. Q: No, but it’s the job that’s more important. Baum: The job was he was the head of a downtown development group, let’s put it that way, in a part of the city. I was like a consultant to them for a year, working on this market development concept and the restaurants for it and writing RFPs because I had done that. I worked in Central Park for a while and worked with Betsy Barlow and was involved with the concessions in Central Park. So I knew how to do those things, and so I worked with them for a year. Then at that time, I also was helping them with their—they had a farmers’ market. So I got really involved in planning special events and working with those farmers and other people in the community, and that’s when I really learned how to operate a market, because I worked there for a year. They opened their farmers’ market a year before Greenmarket started, actually, in Manhattan. This was in Jamaica, Queens. Q: Who was the director? Baum: It was under the umbrella of this downtown development group. So then the year ended, and I called Bob and said, “Hey, Bob, my contract’s over. What am I going to do now? Do you have any way for me to continue with this work?” And he said, “Oh, there’s been hiring a freeze. The only thing I have is an intern line. Do you want it?” And I said, “Yes.” So I probably was the oldest intern they ever had. [laughs] So I worked in Bob’s office and we researched state support for farmers’ markets all over the country, and I did the first survey of farmers’ markets and their state support when I was working with Bob, so that was like in ’85 or something like that, ’86. We were trying to get a handle on what was going on all over the country so we could also see what we were trying to do in New York from this overall perspective. I became an expert on farmers’ markets because I had done this survey, much of which was conducted, actually, by phone. I had to find the right person in every single state to tell me how many markets they had and if they were wholesale markets or retail markets and if there was any legislation supporting what they were doing. So we had to amass this incredible knowledge about this. Then after a while, I was asked to join Project for Public Spaces, and I was the founding director there of what’s still called the Public Market Collaborative. So that’s when I started working on conferences, really. I came in as the first public market conference was being planned, which was held at Pike Place Market in 1987. Q: Who ran the Project for Public Spaces? Baum: Fred Kent. He still does. In fact, Joe and Mike were on their board, but it had nothing to do with my being there, I have to say, as much as my father influenced me. It was always do it for yourself, kind of, in terms of making my way in my work. Anyway, so Fred hired me, and it was like a huge step for me, because I had this program to direct, we were writing a big grant to HUD, and we then did consulting all over the country on public market halls as well as open-air farmers’ markets, got involved with wholesale markets and worked on the Dallas Farmers' Market, and we started to work on this book called Public Markets and Community Revitalization that I’m a co-author of, that was published in the mid-nineties. During that time, we did the Pike Place conference. Then we did another conference in New Orleans in 1991, which was an international conference on public markets, and then right shortly after that, my colleague and I left Project for Public Spaces and we founded Public Market Partners in 1991, and we continued doing a lot of this work all over the country. Q: What was the attitude toward public markets around that time? Baum: Well, a lot of public markets had disappeared. Q: You mean the really old ones? Baum: Yes, the market halls. Pike Place had come through this enormous decline and rebirth, and that’s why this conference was being held there, was to really celebrate Pike Place Market and learn from their experience. Pike Place was the place where people would go to understand the potential of the public market that included a farmers’ market. It wasn’t exclusively a farmers’ market. It was this mix of farmers and purveyors and small food businesses and restaurants and wholesale and retail and a variety of related businesses, which really created a market district. So, anyway, Ted and I—he was a former partner—he and I did a lot of the writing for this book, and we also did this book with Project for Public Spaces, and it’s still one of the authoritative books. It’s really written for sponsors of markets and people interested in defending them. Q: We take this kind of thing for granted now, but in the early nineties that must have been pretty groundbreaking. Baum: It was. It was very groundbreaking work. Q: Did your friends connected to all of this not understand what you were doing, care about what you were doing? Baum: Yes, I think they cared about what I was doing. My kids could never understand what I did then or what I do now. [laughs] That was a big joke. But what was happening at the same time, and it’s now documented by the USDA, is where there’s this explosion. We were there in the really beginning. We were doing this work and documenting this work as it was just taking off. Bob was one of the key figures, with Barry Benepe, on the city and regional level and then on the state level and now on the national scene. So his influence is just gigantic in terms of this. I was there at the beginning to really help us get our arms around what was going on, and so also we could talk about it, and we could promote it, and we could really, in a way, protect it and see its role in protecting local agriculture, which I was very dedicated to because of my experience living in the country and seeing the disappearance of farmland in Delaware County, what was going on with the dairy herds and the decline of the dairy industry. So that really affected me, and when I came back to New York then, I could really see the role that markets could play in helping to stabilize that. So I saw markets from a lot of different perspectives, but also as somebody who is totally and utterly mesmerized by the beauty of the product that’s coming in, as a cook and as somebody who has some knowledge about production both in terms of growing but also in terms of processing. So then you know what happens in the finished plate in a restaurant and blah, blah, blah. All of that stuff is stuff that I’ve been completely seeped in all my life, so my passion for markets comes from a really, really deep place, and it drives me today in the work that I continue to do, even though it has a different twist to what we’re doing now. In the early and mid-nineties was when this thing started to really expand, and it’s still expanding today. So every year there are more farmers’ markets in, let’s say, New York City and New York State. I think there are like, I don’t know, you’d have to ask Bob, but there must be at least three-hundred-something markets in the state now and about a hundred markets in New York City, I guess a little bit more than half of which are sponsored and operated by the Greenmarket program. But there are all these other sponsors who have begun programs because the markets have so many benefits and values to offer to both urban and rural. So markets are really a win-win situation, but the market hall is a much more difficult beast than the periodic open-air market. It’s much more difficult. It’s much more expensive. It’s harder for something like that to survive in a state that is how it was meant to be, if you know what I mean. Q: When I first got involved in following this, I don’t know, maybe five or six years ago, I became aware that each of the individual states was also tracking the growth of the markets or the rebirth of the old market halls and how they were used either as market spaces or non-market spaces, but it was interesting me that by then things were online and that you could, in fact, follow the development. Baum: Well, a lot of that is from the work that—I mean, honestly, it’s work that Bob and I started together and then was continued through the early nineties, which I was very involved with. So I really think that I feel sort of like a grandma of a lot of this, even though, I mean, it was happening simultaneously. It was like this thing happening all over. It was this consciousness that really picked up really, really fast. People were so ready for it. But they weren’t ready for it in the beginning, but I think by the nineties it really started to really, really take off. Q: What were your parents’ reactions to what you were doing? Baum: Well, they were interested. They were certainly interested in what I was doing. I’m sure on a certain level, I know they were tremendously interested. A running theme with me always was how involved I was going to try to be with my father’s business, but here I was, I had totally my own identity out in this crazy world of farming, food and farming. Like what’s that about, you know? So it was definitely a new place to be, but I was totally supported by my parents in that work, and they certainly understood the value of it to the community as well as on an individual level, and it was very fulfilling for me. So I know that that was a good thing as far as my family was concerned. Q: What was this thing your father formed for the forum on the future series? Baum: Before I tell you that, I want to tell you one thing. When they opened the World Trade Center and they started on the ground floor with the Market Bar & Grill and the big kitchen and this place called Eat & Drink, they had to get people to go there. They had to do special events on the concourse. So what was the first thing my dad did? The second Greenmarket. He invited Greenmarket to set up. He had a farmers’ market inside, which, I guess, has since grown. And moved outside the Trade Center. So it’s just so interesting, because when they built the Trade Center, a lot of that whole area, they had to displace the markets from down there. So part of his concept for the Market Bar & Grill was to hold some of that history in on the ground floor in that restaurant and in that place, and so that’s one of the reasons that the farmers’ market was there and why there was all this recognition, not for the producers on the menu, but the purveyors. So they had a standard menu where they listed the purveyors, and they would write the specials that came from that purveyor. Every day or every week, that would be brought to everybody, or on the big board was the purveyor and the name of the meat company and like that was completely new, completely new. Q: How long did that last, the market? Baum: That restaurant? Q: No, the markets inside the building. Baum: I don’t know. I’m not really sure how long it lasted and when it moved outside. I really don’t know the exact history of that, but I forgot that that was very significant, so that was so much a part of my dad’s consciousness in terms of what he was doing. I don’t think I knew it then. I didn’t know that till way after, the connection. After I had been in my own business for a while and I had been consulting all over the country and then started operating markets in New York City, I operated a market in the South Bronx and also in East Harlem for years. Actually, before I moved on from that, I had started to work and I wanted to really work for my dad. So we did an analysis for him, my partner and I, of the percentage of fresh produce that they were bringing in. We tried to trace either how much they had that was local or how they could improve their sourcing so they could have more local food. Q: “They” being the Trade Center restaurants? Baum: Yes, but also the Rainbow Room. So I got very involved in looking at these numbers and working with people in his controller’s office. I was very fascinated by this. So I thought it made more sense for me, instead of being out on the street trying to pull the customers to the farmers, because that’s what I thought I was doing by operating these markets, I really saw that, that I really wanted to do more work for farmers, but nobody could pay me. I actually done some marketing jobs for the Watershed Ag Council and with the farmer, did an incredibly great campaign. But to continue to do that work, I thought I was better off if I could convince my dad to hire me so that I could pull product into the restaurants instead of pulling people to the food out on the street. So I went back to work for him part-time the last couple years of his life, just when he was opening—I was there when they opened Windows the second time. It was during that time that he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the CIA, and there was a lot of fundraising that was done in his honor to benefit the endowment funds at the CIA but also to start a program called—it was supposed to be like a think-tank program--the Joe Baum Forum on the Future. Q: And what were they thinking about? Baum: Well, they were going to decide what they were going to think about. They created this shell. So one of the special projects I worked on with my dad, because I still wasn’t going to ever wind up in the back of the house except as the produce police, as they called me, was to work on the Forum of the Future. So I worked on it intensely with him, doing a lot of research about the topics and what it could look like, what the format could look like, would it be a one-day thing, would it be a series of small talks, bringing people together, things that would be of importance to the restaurant industry. I worked closely with Irena Chalmers at that time, who was a consultant to my father, and some other people. We worked on it for about a year and a half when my dad got very, very ill. This was in conjunction with the CIA. I wanted this thing to take place at the CIA and he really wanted to have it at Windows. He wanted to have it in the restaurant. We used to have these gigantic arguments about all of this, and, unfortunately, he died before we could do the first one. However, I was so deeply into this and I so believed that this could happen and we could do something really significantly, that I went to the CIA myself and with my mother, actually. So it wasn’t really totally myself, but we did it together, and said we’d like to continue this program in Joe’s name. Q: How did you describe what the program was? Baum: Well, they knew what it was. They were all involved in these conversations about what it might be, but we hadn’t put the pin in it. We hadn’t really formulated exactly if it was going to be on all different topics. Irena was really hot on it should be about the water supply, and there were other things that I felt were really pressing, whether it was about what was going on with the fisheries or other things that really came to bear in the restaurant setting as well. But by the time I could really follow up on the CIA with this and they had agreed to go forward, and we were going to do it up there, because I pushed hard, I wanted to do it there, because I really wanted it to be an academic atmosphere. It wasn’t really academic, but I really wanted it to be in an educational setting. I’m sure I would have lost if my father had still been alive, but, anyway. So what they did was they said, “Okay, we’ll do it here, and this is the person you’re going to work with, this person.” Who is this person? It’s Ann Cooper. So Ann and I planned the first Forum on the Future and then we right into planning. We did two in a row, and they were successful, but they were very controversial, also, for the CIA. Q: Because of the subject matter? Baum: Yes. There was a lot of debate going on, and there was also movements about what constituted healthier eating, what did that mean in terms of where things were being sourced and also how things were being presented and the percentage of meat to other things on the plate, and things of that nature. So, anyway, to make a long story short, I decided to take my program away from the CIA and try to do it on my own. So I brought the program to New York with the encouragement of both Michael Batterberry—primarily Michael Batterberry really convinced me to do this, and he said, “You know, you really should talk to my friend Dorothy Hamilton.” So we did, I did, and got into a very good business relationship with her and was able to hold the first Baum Forum in New York City in 2002. Thank God I had taken time off and I decided not to do it in 2001. I didn’t have time, and it would have been in September 2001. Q: So it was held— Baum: It was held in September of 2002. Q: At— Baum: It was held in Lower Manhattan. I held it in Lower Manhattan in particular because of what had happened, trying to bring business back to Lower Manhattan, and I had it in a variety of venues, and it was gigantic. Q: Was this with Dorothy Hamilton? Baum: Yes, she was basically a partner in the crazy, gigantic—this was a humongous conference. Q: The first subject was what? Baum: No, it’s multi subjects, like the other two had been. It was everything. But I had all the top names. Those three conferences, you know, it was a who’s who of people in sustainability as it related to food and agriculture. Q: That was the general overall theme? Baum: Oh, yes, it’s always been the theme. So I had Michael Pollan twice. I had Gary Hirshberg. I had Alice Waters twice. I had Judy Wicks. I mean, really, it’s a very, very long list of people who are very well known now, and they were just on the rise. Some of them were quite well known then and others were on the rise. Then after that, after I did my third one, I was like exhausted, and so I decided to do smaller-scale programs, and I started doing programs, after a brief hiatus, at the CUNY Graduate Center with a very, very good friend and colleague who was the director then of public program and continuing education. Then I did a whole series on ingredients and sustainability, and then I started cobbling together these classes on food systems planning, the first ones that were taught in that kind of a setting. That was just when Pratt was just starting. People were just starting to look at food systems planning, like at Pratt. Q: So when would that have been? Baum: Oh, gosh. This was like 2003 and ‘04, something like that. Q: I ask you that in part because I’m interested in how the conversation about all of this has changed, and when, to your knowledge, more of the general public started to be interested in, well, even knew what food systems were. Baum: How did that happen? Well, it was around the time we started the Food Systems Network, so a lot of the learning about that actually came from Bob and other people. So there were people really, like me, who had very broad perspective about different parts of food production and food marketing, and other people who were involved in the sort of nutrition end of things. There were a bunch of people who had actually been in the restaurant business who did these career changes, like Fern Estrow and other people who went into the more sort of community-health-oriented aspects of food, and then other people involved in the emergency food system. Q: Again, why don’t you describe what the Food Systems Network was when you conceived it. Baum: Well, I wasn’t actually an early conceptualizer of it specifically, but I went to like the first meeting or the second meeting, so I was in there in the very beginning. But it was an idea that had grown up, that was sort of coming to the forefront through some other people, and it was also related to this brand-new movement called the Food Policy Council movement. But what we wanted to do was to bring people together who were involved in different aspects of the food system. It’s the same thing we always said, it’s to foster collaboration and to foster activism and to really develop a voice and to make sure that there was a relationship between all the food that the farmers had to sell and all the people who were in New York City who could partake of that food at any income level. So from my perspective as having one foot really in that perspective from the region, from my experience living upstate and doing all that market work, but also then understanding the community aspects of it from down here, to me, Food Systems Network was a way to bring a lot of these things together. Then since then, of course, a lot of very interesting projects have evolved, and now one of the things that I’m so interested in, first of all, is introducing young people to food and farming and food systems, in terms of their understanding of the world, but also so they can effect positive change in terms of the food systems and the conventional food industry, but also that it’s a path for tremendous reward in terms of work. So with my forums, what started to happen was, I got really interested in the School Food Revolution and decided to do a very small program, which was sold out. Then I did a conference. Q: When was that? Baum: This was—oh, gosh, I’m going to have to look at my website. But my first School Food Revolution Conference was when I was still at CUNY. Q: Okay, I’ll check that date. Baum: I have it right in here. Then that sold out. That was like three or four hundred people who wanted to talk about the School Food Revolution. But then I had to change venues again, and I had to move from CUNY because there were changes at the Graduate Center, and I developed the next two conferences with my colleagues in the nutrition department at Teachers College. They were collaborators for two years. The first one, I just did it on my own, really, at CUNY, and then the next two were at Teachers College on the School Food Revolution, which included gardening and related projects and perspectives and so forth. With the last two conferences there, we made a big point to get young people to come and do some presenting work and talk about also what it meant to them to be involved in this work. So at the end of my second conference at Teachers College, I was listening to the final closing panel of these young people and their mentors, and I just said, “That’s it. I’m not doing these conferences anymore unless I’m working with youth, and I want to teach youth how to do these conferences. They can do their own conferences, but I’m not going to do any more talking heads.” I’m a grandmother and I have young grandchildren, and I thought, you know, this is for them. This has to be about the future and about them. So then I got this idea that I wanted to really work with youth, and then evolved into the Youth Forum we did last year in conjunction with the New York City Food and Fitness Partnership, where 90 percent of the people who attended the forum—and there about five hundred people—were under twenty-five years old. Q: Oh, my goodness. Baum: So we so surpassed our goal. We had youth doing the presentations. It was peer-led workshops. We had exhibitors who had opportunities to offer youth in food farming and active living, whether they were mentorships, internships, or actual jobs, and we had some really stirring performances at the end. It was just enormous. We worked with a group of youth, a changing group of youth. Six weeks before the actual conference, we had kids involved in planning the actual conference and then they worked the day of the conference. So we carried them along and worked with them on a creative level as well as an operational level. Q: How did you find them? Baum: We recruited them through the Food and Fitness Partnership, through Food Systems Network, and through some one-on-one contacts that we had. I had two twenty-five-year-olds working for me on the project team, and one of them in particular was a specialist in youth development and had worked with a lot of these kids. So it was a very, very specific ask for young people, but the response we got was overwhelming. We never thought we’d get so many kids. We’d have forty young people and their mentors at every single planning meeting. It was unbelievable. So it really hit a nerve, and it was of really great interest. Q: Do you have any thoughts on why so many kids have responded generally to this movement, why they’re interested in it? Baum: I think it’s like a whole lot of reasons. Some of them are interested in it because it gives them some control in their own life, in terms of their own bodies and their own health, and they really understand the connections. Other kids got into it because they could get internships, they could get jobs doing it, and then they got really interested in it. I think there’s a great deal of respect that’s awarded these kids who get involved with it, so I think that there’s a lot of give-and-take in terms of this work, that it gave kids something really constructive to talk to their neighbors about. There’s incredible conversations that go on across the farmers’ market table, and I think there’s great joy in growing food and cooking food, and the kids are enjoying it. So I think it’s really a combination of things, but I really think that it’s such a positive and constructive thing, and it’s become really rewarding for a lot of kids on a lot of different levels. But some kids have tremendous challenges because their home life does not value it in the same way or their— Q: Or supportive. Baum: Yes. So a lot of times there are going to be kids teaching at home as well as in the community, which is pretty extraordinary, and these kids feel a lot of responsibility and a lot of accomplishment by doing it. So as a component in youth development, it’s tremendously successful in addition to its other values. Q: How have your own children responded to your work and your interests? Baum: My grandchildren or my children? Q: Your own children. Baum: Well, both of my children are really involved in the food and restaurant business at the moment. [laughs] So our daughter and son-in-law just opened a local market or grocery and café in West Philly, which has a very established culture of local food and good food in West Philadelphia, but they’re doing tremendous work right now. I mean, their local stuff is like flying off the shelves, their dairy, their meats, their local cheeses. They’re doing really extremely well. I’m extremely, really, really proud of them. They took this giant leap by opening this business. It’s only two weeks old, and it’s really filling a need not only in the residential community, but it’s filling a need in the community of producers. They’re reordering from these tiny producers who have never seen orders the way they’ve been able to place them, so that’s really, really exciting. Q: That’s very exciting. Baum: And our son, well, of the two of them, he’s the one that actually has been trained as a sous chef. He’s not cooking, but he works. He’s a liaison between a company that owns a well-known brand of a high-end chain of restaurants, and he’s the liaison between the brand owner and all their new construction sites. So our son is project manager, but he’s totally involved in developing restaurants. Both my kids were close to my parents, but my son in particular was very, very influenced, I think, and very close to my dad, and actually did a big report on Joe and his restaurants for one of his college courses at Syracuse, but really takes to the world of restaurant development. He has back-of-the house experience as well as this other work that he does, so it’s very, very interesting. So both the kids right now are totally involved. Q: What’s next for you now? Baum: Well, that’s a good question. I’m actually getting more and more involved on a more and more local level in my own community. I was one of the founders of a CSA with Hawthorne Valley Farm here in Riverdale. We are just finishing our fourteenth year. Q: Of the CSA? Baum: Of the CSA. And we’re the first CSA in New York City to go year-round on local food, twelve months a year. So we go six months of weekly deliveries in the summer and six months of monthly deliveries in the winter, and we’ve created a huge network of farms that we’re involved with here, but it’s also at Neighborhood House where we located our first youth market. Working with Greenmarket, we opened a youth market at Neighborhood House. So it’s the same location. We have it on the same day as CSA. Q: Neighborhood House is where? Baum: It’s here in Riverdale. Riverdale Neighborhood House. It’s a settlement house. This is a group of us in this community. Then we convinced Greenmarket to open a second youth market down in Marble Hill, which is a very underserved neighborhood that’s immediately adjacent to Riverdale. Q: Underserved in terms of access to fresh food? Baum: Access to healthy local fresh food, and there’s all kinds of issues, health disparity issues, in Marble Hill. What we did for both youth markets is employ kids from the community to staff them, and they’ve been just like tremendously, tremendously successful. They’re also places of redemption for WIC coupons and EBT food stamps and all those things are coming to both of these markets, and these are places that didn’t have access to local food before. But also in the community we’re looking to expand part of what we’re doing into possibly get involved with a project that would involve youth and seniors in creating healthy snacks for the after-school programs and the Senior Center. So we’re going to probably start with some baked goods as a training, and hopefully we’ll get the funding to really become a supplier and distributor of healthy snacks that would include our becoming the buyers of local produce as well as other local products to qualify for the federal reimbursement for these programs. So that’s a new project. So it’s very interesting, because, in a sense, part of my focus right now is becoming more and more localized in terms of local food systems in my own community, and that was something that wasn’t really that—I mean, I was doing it, but not in a really focused way, so now I’m doing it in a more focused way. I’m very active in two organizations. One is, of course, on the board of the Food Systems Network, NYC, but I’m also co-chair of an international committee for Les Dames d’Escoffier, which is called Green Tables. So we’re trying to encourage and document similar kinds of projects that our members are involved with in twenty-seven chapters around the country and Canada. Q: It sounds like you have a lot on your plate. Baum: Yes, and the other thing that I’m trying to do very hard is, we donated my father’s papers and archive to the New York Public Library. Q: What a great idea. Baum: Yes. So we’re hoping that’s going to become available to the public in a very short period of time. Q: Thank you. This has been so interesting and really informative. Baum: I’m sure I skipped giant pieces, but I’m sure that’s plenty for you to go with. Q: This is great. This is really terrific. [End of interview] Baum - 1 - PAGE 1