Join The Utopian Seed Project for our inaugural ‘Trial to Table’ fundraising farm feast, hosted at Franny’s Farm in Leicester NC. Our mission is to support diversity in food and farming, and this feast will showcase the crops and varieties from our 2019 trials.

Chef Stephen Goff (Aux Bar), Jamie Swofford (The Chef’s Farmer), and Keia Mastrianni (Milk Glass Pie), plus local collaborating businesses, will create a myriad of marvelous dishes designed to showcase a range of culinary possibilities with foods known and new (note: we don’t claim to have discovered anything new, but are certainly helping our community rediscover lost foods and flavors).

All funds raised from the feast will go towards supporting future trials and work by The Utopian Seed Project, so please come along and bring a friend for an evening of food and fun that will enrich your palates and our local food system.

Dr. David Shields, culinary historian and champion of flavor, will be our guest of honor. Dr. Shields will offer a short keynote address to help ground us in the importance and history of the food we will share.

This farm feast will offer ‘grazing stations’ with a panoply of foods. We encourage you to sample the diversity that our trials can offer.

Some highlights include:

• The Pickle Plate: Steve Goff is known at the ‘Pickle Guy’ for good reason. We’ll have okra kimchi, cowpea green chimichurri, sweet potato leaf kraut, pickled cowpea pods and more…
• Experimental Flours: In partnership with OWL Bakery, we will have okra seed sour dough, sweet potato bread, okra seed and cornmeal savory muffins and more…
• Roots: among other things, we will have preparations of taro, sweet potatoes, arrowroot, yacon, turmeric and the American groundnut.

This is just an overview of some of the initial brainstorming around this fabulous feast, and we hope it’s clear that you don’t want to miss out!

Tickets are $65 and limited. We also have a small amount of ‘Help a Friend’ tickets for $130. If you are able to afford it, then this higher ticket price will directly support our ‘Scholarship’ tickets.