It’s all tied together, respect for the forest and for ourselves, for what we put into our bodies.” In our own little way we’re part of that movement. “It’s just a little thing we can do as producers to put real food out there, and Vermont is a real greenhouse for these kind of ideas. The Cantors are proud that their product is “real food” and contains no artificial ingredients. “In all that we do, we seek to manage the forest in a way that sustains it, and our future as sugarmakers,” Stephan writes on Deep Mountain Maple’s website. Deep Mountain Maple employs local people to boil and package their wood fired maple syrup, and their customers in New York and Vermont know they are buying products that represent and enhance the place where they were made. The Cantors’ maple syrup is made without pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers of any kind, and their maple trees are healthy thanks to constant, generous rain and snowfall and the Northeast Kingdom’s rich, rocky soil. The Terra Madre Conference promotes local foods whose production have a positive impact on their environment and community, and the Green Market chose Howie and Stephan as delegates because Deep Mountain Maple embodies this ideal. For me that’s a big part of it, reconnecting people to their food.”
We came to understand that we like the real marketplace, and the whole idea of a farmers’ market, especially in an urban place, where people come and meet the people who are producing the food they eat. And we’ve been standing on the street for 26 years, talking to our customers and hearing how people feel about food and maple syrup. “It is the largest urban outdoor farmers’ market in the country. “We’ve been going to the Green Market in New York City for 26 years now,” says Stephan.
The idea of educating people about the source of their food has always been part of the Deep Mountain Maple philosophy. In Torino, they will have the opportunity to sample Slow Food from around the world and educate the international Slow Food community about Vermont foods. The Cantors are in Italy as representatives of New York City’s Green Market, a network of farmers’ markets in Manhattan and Brooklyn where they have been selling their products for 26 years. This week the Cantors are far from their home in the woods at the Terra Madre International Slow Food Conference and Festival in Torino, Italy, along with Marisa Mauro of Ploughgate Creamery, another one of Juniper’s Restaurant’s featured local cheese producers. Their farm, Deep Mountain Maple, lies three miles outside of the tiny village of West Glover, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border. Though born out of state, Stephan in Georgia and Howie in Massachusetts, the Cantors are truly at home in their nearly one-hundred-year-old sugarbush in the Vermont woods. Howie and Stephan Cantor have been producing maple syrup in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom for over 25 years. Maple syrup, Vermont’s famous indigenous treat, is a perfect example of Slow Food: it reflects the environment and community of the place where it is made, takes time and skill to produce, and is best when consumed in a leisurely fashion, like over homemade pancakes late on a Sunday morning. Today, Slow Food International has thousands of members around the globe and promotes the slow production and consumption of indigenous foods through workshops and conferences. The Slow Food Movement began decades ago in response to the construction of a McDonald’s in an Italian town that prided itself on the local cuisine. It is a global, grassroots movement with thousands of members around the world that links the pleasureof food with a commitment to community and the environment.” “Slow Food is an idea, a way of living and a way of eating.
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