Thanksgiving Thursday

By Mickey Friedman
May 7, 2014

We of The Best Small Town in America are more than lucky. Because, for us, Thanksgiving comes not just once each year but once a week. That is, if you make your way to Taft Farms for Thanksgiving Thursday.

Now I’ve made fun of the everywhere farm-to-table label but Taft Farms is the real deal. A real farm. With two tables.

My friend Bob is always looking for places to eat, to sit, and read. Once a week we try to go out for an affordable lunch. We’ve had terrific lunch specials at Route 7 Grill and the Marketplace Café in Sheffield.

Bob took me to Thanksgiving Thursday. He loves Tuna Tuesday, but knows I love turkey.

Quite frankly it took me a while to see anything besides the pies at Taft Farms. For years I’ve been addicted, one pie better than the other. Hot and homemade. When I was younger, I never thought about the calories. Now I try not to even see the blackberry. It’s there, I know, waiting for a special occasion but if I keep my eyes on the specials board I can pretend it’s just some diabolical, delirious pie mirage.

I haven’t yet made it to Tuna Tuesday.

“It’s excellent tuna,” Bob told me. “Not out of the can. Chunkier, meatier, tastier. Personally, if you forced me to choose, I’d have to go with Tuna Tuesday. Because I eat a lot of turkey at home so it’s not as big a treat for me, and their tuna is something special. Abundantly flavorful.”

For those of you who haven’t been to Thanksgiving Thursday, I get my special on Taft Farm’s homemade rye. You’ve got your delicious sliced turkey, stuffing, lettuce, and cranberry sauce. I get some mayo. It’s so good, I usually take a half-pound of sliced turkey home with me.

Thanksgiving Thursday was particularly delightful this winter, when it was more than cold outside. Because inside it was warm, a greenhouse warm. Reminding me of my grandmother and her geraniums.

Now Taft is bursting with beautiful colors, its own botanical gardens.

“It’s the total ambience of the place,” Bob said. “The tropical experience. You’ve got light, you’ve got warmth, and the flowers. A long corridor of color. Yellow and orange and blue. There’s some red. Beautiful whites. There are cactus.”

Bob has gotten to know the Taft Farm turtles. “I talk to them,” Bob said. “About the kind of day they’re having. They seem to like each other. Climbing on each others’ backs. Playing games. It makes me feel better going there. I don’t have much to say to the rabbits. But I love the turtles.”

This past Thanksgiving Thursday I went over to the turtles. They almost immediately seemed to sense that I knew Bob. And any friend of Bob’s … So within seconds all four of them came to the surface to chat. Necks craned, eyes alert. We chatted until I heard my turkey calling

It’s not often that lunch is a learning experience. But Taft Farms is a seven day a week, twelve month a year family farm and they want you to know what the farming life is like. According to their flier, Taft Farms is a place where “fresh means we plant, grow, and harvest a wide variety of produce just for you … where we sow the seed, reap the grain, mill the wheat, and bake the bread that feeds your family … [and] where supporting the farm means preserving the land for our community and for future generations.”

The Tawczynski family has been doing this for five decades. And as Dan writes: “I admit, there are days like when floods ruin our fields, like when a spring hail storm wipes out our strawberry crop, like when our bills are high and our income low, like when our barn succumbs to fire, darkening our memories of the past and challenging our dreams for the future.”

But along the way: “So many young people have found jobs at Taft Farms. Our crops have helped stock kitchens of the best restaurants in the Berkshires as well as the food pantries in community shelters.”

Then he answers the question he must have heard many times: “Why do we persist? We farmers in this part of the country are fighters. We fight enemies we don’t even know, and unlike conveyor-belt agronomists, we can be hardest hit by the onslaught of mother nature. I guess there is truth in the line from Emerson’s hymn, ‘where once the embattled farmers stood.’

“We’re fighting to preserve our land. We’re fighting to grow our own food, without pesticides and chemical interventions. We’re fighting to provide our families, neighbors, and community with fresh, local, homegrown and homemade fare.”

It’s not often Emerson comes along for lunch. When you can have delicious food and make a difference. And give thanks.