April McGreger
Farmer's Daughter
Hillsborough, NC
www.farmersdaughterbrand.com

 

I’m not selling fig preserves; I’m selling the story of fig preserves. – April McGreger

Previously a geology scholar, April McGreger found her way into the professional kitchen by way of making pastries at Chapel Hill’s Lantern Restaurant.  Following several years as pastry chef, April returned to her culinary roots of pickling, preserving and bringing to market seasonal and local farm-driven food under the Farmer’s Daughter Brand.  April grew up in a rural Mississippi sweet potato farm family and learned the traditional art of preserving and baking at the elbow of her mother and grandmother.  She sells a variety of products at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market, but is most well-known for her baked goods, Southern-style preserves, chutneys, and lacto-fermented vegetables, including real sauerkraut and authentic kimchi and barrel-fermented, deli-style pickles.

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: April McGreger, owner Farmer's Daughter – Hillsborough, NC
Date: May 15, 2011
Location: Home of April McGreger – Hillsborough, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Kate Medley
  
-----

Kate Medley:  So I’ll start out by saying this is Kate Medley interviewing April McGreger as part of the SFA Carrboro Farmers' Market Oral History Project. It’s May 15, 2011 and we are in April’s living room outside of Carrboro near Hillsborough?

April McGreger:  It’s in Hillsborough, but it’s closer to Carrboro.

Okay. I’ll get you to start out by introducing yourself, telling us what you do and telling us your birth date.

My name is April McGreger. I was born April 27, 1977 in Vardaman, Mississippi. I sell pickles and preserves and baked goods at the Carrboro Farmers' Market, and I’ve been selling there since May of 2007.

And give us an introduction to what is the Carrboro Farmers' Market.

Oh my. Well, the Carrboro Farmers' Market has been in operation for over 30 years now. It’s really sad that I don’t know exactly the date. We had our thirtieth year anniversary not too long ago.

And it’s a very well respected market in the State and in the country. It’s one of the few grower or producer-only markets, meaning that in order to sell something at the Farmers' Market you actually have to be the person who grew or produced, as in the jams, the food that you’re selling. I think it’s the only market in the State of North Carolina and one of the very few in the country where that’s the case.

----

For someone who has never been to North Carolina and the Carrboro Chapel Hill area, specifically, describe that town, that area, and how the Farmers' Market fits into that.

I think of the Triangle as being this perfect storm of educated folks. We have three universities at least in the Triangle and then numerous other community colleges and smaller private colleges and things in the surrounding area.

We have this prestigious academics and really amazing hospitals and healthcare—Research Triangle Park, so cutting-edge research, very educated and mostly affluent folks, so there’s money available to support this idealist food system. So we have this metropolitan area, but immediately surrounding it and even in between the different cities you very quickly fall into rural places and farm—old farmland and populations, which is essentially where we are right now if you look out the window.

And so part of this food movement I think has been to preserve that rural space, to preserve what’s remaining of the farmland, and that’s been very much what drives me. And I think it drives a lot of consumers, eaters, and shoppers at the Farmers' Market as well; this idea that not just lowering our food miles, but we don’t want the whole Triangle to become Cary or even Raleigh where we just have endless amounts of this urban sprawl. And so part of what it means to prevent that means to buy retail from farmers and from small producers like myself because that means the greater percentage of that dollar goes into the pockets of the farmers and the producers. And that provides more money to be a steward of the land and to prevent those farmers or producers from selling that land to developers. Farmers have to be able to compete with the value of the land, if that makes sense. It makes their prices go up, so in order for them to have a feasible business they need to have more money. It costs more money essentially to farm in places that are close to urban areas and not just in the center of the country where there’s relatively little competition for the for the land.

-----

How did you land here?

I came here in 2000, I believe, for Graduate School in Geology at UNC. So I came from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. I came to get a Masters Degree in Geology.

-----

The day that kind of changed everything for me in Chapel Hill, was the day that I went to a Food Not Bombs, which is essentially a radical free food picnic on the street that is part of an anti-war movement and a community-building exercise.

I went to a Food Not Bombs meeting at Internationalists Books in January of 2001, I suppose.

-----

And through Internationalists Books, which is sort of a radical bookstore, pretty political, politically engaged—there were a lot of young people. One of the people that I met on that same day was Jay Hamm who has been a mentor for me in terms of politicizing my food awareness and food choices and those sorts of things.

-----

And this time I had gotten really interested in food and had become an avid shopper at the Carrboro Farmers' Market, and Jay Hamm was a seller at the Carrboro Farmers' Market. One of the things that I was critiquing the market for and had noticed about the market and just about the Triangle culture in general, was that I had come from Mississippi and taking a lot of the cultural food stuff for granted and had moved here a lot of these people were from cities or suburban, like the people my age and the people that I was hanging with. I was like, "How come there are no peas at the market? Where do you get peas from?" And people didn't know what I was talking about when I said peas, by which I mean field peas—like in the black-eyed pea family, but I don’t mean black-eyed peas. I mean fresh or green peas, like purple hull peas, or, you know, Crowder peas, or Speckled Crowders.

-----

I saw that there were all these choices—all these foods that I had never really seen, you know, locally grown and fresh before, like carrots and escarole and radicchio and all these European vegetables and stuff that were very exotic and high end or whatever, but there was this lack of southernness. Part of that is because as a population there was a lot of turnover, and most people who live here aren't from here. It is a place that’s very disconnected to its southernness, lots of transient folks here. And so I saw that the population was missing out on its southernness, but I didn't want to lose those things. I wanted people who enjoyed iced tea and shelling peas and knew what fried corn was and that ate cabbage and cornbread and all those things. I wanted that to remain part of my life and I think I was really homesick for my grandparents cooking and even my parents cooking and things like that.

So I had started getting more and more interested in food.

-----

And Phil and I were dating by this point, and he was the person who had encouraged me to give food as a profession a chance.

-----

So I took that advice and I wrote a resume, and I wrote something about selling myself on my food passions and just went to Lantern Restaurant, which had just recently opened, and I really liked it.

-----

And it was a restaurant that actually has an Asian focus but with this idea of using locally grown ingredients and seasonal food, and it was also a kitchen that was almost at that point almost exclusively run by women, which I was also really impressed with and really liked that idea.

-----

And part of my job as a Pastry Chef at Lantern was sourcing all these local foods and really being in-tune with the seasons. The process of really looking for the best fruits that were available in the area and then working with those fruits and developing different recipes for those fruits—and that became my passion as a Pastry Chef—the local fruits and things and particularly those that were kind of associated with Southern identity. I loved to do stuff with muscadines and scuppernongs and one of the things that I realized was that I was really good at doing that because not everyone who owns restaurants in the South actually grew up in the South. And because I was this wild child from the country, I had grown up eating muscadines and scuppernongs as a kid in the woods, and I had a certain kind of relationships to these foods, so it became my goal to put muscadines, scuppernongs, sorghum, all these Southern foods on the menu of an Asian restaurant owned by a New Jersey-ite—just as appreciation that these ingredients, even though they’re iconic Southern ingredients can compete with what was much more revered, which were European or California kind of ingredients.

-----

Anyway my idea was even though maybe Chez Panisse has a hazelnut ice-cream, but we shouldn’t be doing hazelnut even if we are a fine-dining Asian restaurant. We should still be using pecan because they’re just as good as any hazelnut or better in my opinion and we can get fresher, better ones. I was trying to use Southern ingredients in non-Southern ways, like making Southern ingredients fit into an Asian menu. So we had a fig and scuppernong mochi cake, which is the Japanese glutinous rice flour cake, things like that, that were just kind of off the wall where instead of using a red bean paste with green tea ice cream, I did a boiled peanut-like paste with green tea ice cream, so using these iconic Southern ingredients, which actually boiled peanuts are also very traditional and important to Asian cooking in general.

So it was also about finding these things that were very Southern that actually were common threads between the cultures—different Asian cultures as well and highlighting those things. At some point, I began to tire a little bit of working nights and had become very much of an avid shopper at the Carrboro Farmers' Market and part of that as a shopper I would critique—we have all this amazing produce but we still are lacking in terms of like prepared food vendors, we need more people who are using local produce and making higher quality prepared foods. And no one was doing fermented foods, which I had gotten into and was interested in those types of things, and I really wanted to leave the restaurant world. I was trying to figure out what I would do and I just thought, "Oh, well I’ll sell fermented foods at the Farmer’s Market and baked goods," because I already had a reputation as a Pastry Chef.

But then it became a really long road of trying to figure out how to do that because no one was doing, and the North Carolina Department of Agriculture didn't really want to—know how to regulate that. And anyway so that was part of what began the process of trying to figure this out and figure out what would it take to bring these types of food to market. And that’s how Farmer’s Daughter was born. I saw a need in the community for this type of business. Just as a shopper I would have bought those types of products or would have been happy to see those types of products—both fermented foods and, also like I had said, working with these fruits in season brought back a lot of memories of my mother and my grandmother both making lots of Southern style preserves too.

-----

What’s the role that the Carrboro Farmers' Market has played in your business?

It’s played a huge role. First of all, the name Farmer’s Daughter came about initially because I am a farmer’s daughter but my father, my parents, my family are all in Mississippi. The Farmer’s Daughter is meant to be literal as well as sort of proverbial in that I’m now in this area, the Triangle part of North Carolina. And many of the farmers that I’ve developed relationships with at the Farmers' Market before I was ever a vendor there myself were non-traditional farming families. They may be two women who own a farm. They may be you know a single woman who owns a farm. Maybe you know just people who have never had children like Bill Dow who is like a retired doctor, just a lot of farmers who had been my suppliers through Lantern were just not what I had grown up with as a traditional kind of farming family.
And so for that reason, without this extended family, this idea of the farm being this unit of someone grows the produce, someone preserves the produce—we had a lot of farmers who maybe had excess produce different parts of the year, but they neither had the extended family, or the labor for people, or the skill of how to preserve and put up those products, and the buzzword, to do value-added products. So I thought of myself as the person who had those skills and now here I am, the Farmer’s Daughter, 800 miles from the family farm—this whole idea that I would be these farmers’ daughter, I would take the product that they grow and then as a small-scale manufacturer I would make these products and that would be the basis of my business.

So the farmers at the Carrboro Farmers' Market started off primarily as my suppliers. They were my father farmer. They grew the produce, and really amazing produce, and that being what’s the most important I think in terms of making the best products. You can't take a supermarket strawberry and turn it into really amazing strawberry preserves. So if I’m going to make award-winning products I have to have award-winning produce to begin with. And the Carrboro Farmers' Market is a source for the finest produce in the world—it’s amazing the stuff that you can get there, the freshness of it.

-----

So yes, perfect produce, amazing—the basis for our products that being a major thing, but then also they were an inspiration for me—they were the community I think that I had really—part of moving to North Carolina, one of the things that I—it took me a really long to feel like North Carolina was my home.

I didn't have a connection to the land here—which meant I didn't have a connection to place. My family has lived in Mississippi for six generations on both sides. And I really missed that. I missed the multi-generational aspect of my community in Mississippi, and I really felt the sense of loss when I moved to North Carolina. And so the Farmers' Market became my source for a multi-generational community. I mean that’s one of the most valuable things about the market for me and why I wanted to be a vendor there—is that it really is this family, huge family, dysfunction and all you know. It really is this big family.

And then there’s the customers at the market—the Farmers' Market I think is a great place to experiment with different products. So through my stand at the Carrboro Farmers' Market—it’s been a great place to experiment with what products people react to: what are the most popular products, you know, what is there the most demand for, what products even are the most profitable. So in terms of growing my business beyond the Farmers' Market, the market has just been a really great place for market research or that type of thing. We have [Sighs] a very educated clientele at the market—it’s just a great place both because you’re the person who made the product and you’re the person who sells the product.

There aren't a lot of opportunities for that in our current market. Most products that we buy are totally anonymous and even in restaurants, the people who cook the food are not the people who sell the food, are not the people who hear the criticisms or the praises of the food. So this idea selling directly to your customers—it’s extremely educational and the opportunity I think, which is one of the main reasons that I really wanted to be at the Farmers' Market and one of the reasons that I have—even though it’s really hard [Laughs], one of the reasons that I have stayed and what has been like my passion has been this access to people—this idea of changing food culture. I’m not just selling chocolate chip cookies—I think I’m very different from mass market stuff for the reason that I’m selling products that I want—I have a lot of expectation for the consumer as far as them understanding my products, wanting them. I’m not selling fig preserves; I’m selling the story of fig preserves. I’m telling the history of fig preserves, of why these whole fig preserves are important to us as Southerners and our identity, and how my mother made them this way, and how you know they’re made from a very particular variety of figs that grow in the South that are extremely perishable, that if you don’t live in the South you don’t get these kinds of figs.

And because I’m having direct relationships with all of my customers, you know, these stories—this history behind the food—is as much a part of my product line or my mission as a business as is just selling the product.

Okay. Give us a sense of to be a vendor at the Carrboro Farmers' Market, what does that entail? Like what is that schedule like?

[Laughs] Okay. So it really depends on what you’re making and what your standards are I guess. [Sighs] As I said, when I started the market I was doing a lot of baking, and I still am a baker even though I keep trying to retire from baking just because of the grueling schedule. And since I have had my son who is now six and a half months old, it’s been even harder to maintain that schedule.

The market begins on Saturday mornings at 7:00 a.m., but there is no official start time to the market. That means that the customers who insist on getting the very precious first asparagus, or the wild plums, or the whatever is kind of new and different and extremely limited quantities—or maybe there’s people who want to avoid the crowds. There are customers who show up to market at 6 o'clock when I get there to set up. It's already kind of humming with customers. I’m always amazed at that.

I won't sell product that has been baked and frozen. That’s something that you could do as a market vendor and definitely some vendors do that. But, particularly things like biscuits and scones, I really would only like to sell them hot, so [Laughs] I wish I had ovens that I could take to the market and be selling hot biscuits. One of the things that I love the most and I would love to be able to sell at market is just a traditional Southern style biscuit, but I won't do that because they’re just not that great when they’re not hot. To me they don’t meet my standards

-----

Who are your customers? Who are the market customers?

Most of my customers tend to be middle-age and more women than men. And I feel like that’s just because that’s what most of the Carrboro Farmers' Market customers are—there definitely are a lot of young families but I probably am not the popular vendor for people buying treats for their kids.

I mean definitely my pickles and sunshine buns and things like that are popular with children but it’s really not what I’m targeting. I’m trying to tell a story with a lot of different products and it’s not just the sweetest gooiest thing. I want my products to be—I don’t mean that others are more yummy, I want them to be really delicious. But I want it to be something that’s not just about instant gratification, but as something that is going to feed your soul or feed your mind and not just be this gooey sweet thing that you eat while you’re shopping and then you’re done thinking about it until the next week.

-----

I probably have more women between the ages of about 40 to 60 than I have any other customers. I have customers whose children have autism, who are interested in fermented foods because there’s been a little bit of research that supports that. I have cancer survivors who are interested in fermented foods and things like that. I have people whose mothers and grandmothers made preserves but they don’t make them who are interested in more of my Southern style products. And then I have lots of little old ladies who really love scones so [Laughs] I have lots of that. I mean my mother loves scones, so I have a lot of my mother shopping at my stand. It seems like a lot of those types of customers.

But there are some young folks. Every one of my products I feel like has a different target customer. And I do these syrups and I give out recipes for making cocktails and—this past week, I had strawberry hibiscus syrup and strawberry honeysuckle syrup, and I had recipes for making different cocktails. So I have like a younger clientele that buys those products. And also I sell these sunshine buns which are like sticky buns, and I sell New Orleans style iced-coffee and all of those things draw I think a younger clientele.

-----

My product line is very much about my personal relationships with food and my personal explorations with those types of things and so for that reason that’s my dream job. And then the second reason that the market is so important to me is like I said, it’s been very much about that idea of community and it’s been how I have been able to find my home in this place. I mean I still feel more Mississippian than North Carolinian but probably if I was in Mississippi I might feel more North Carolinian than Mississippian. It’s like what you’re longing for very much so is your power. You always miss what you don’t have.

I think in order to really feel at home in a place you have to have friends and connections with people who aren't just like you. And so the market is a great place for me. And as someone who grew up in a really rural area and had lots of— country people are my people. And so the market is one of the few places I think that I’m able to encounter country folks and there are vendors at the market that really remind me of my grandfather and that those have been really important for, for filling a lot of voids that I had I think in my life when I moved here.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.