What is in this article?:
- Pastures of Plenty: Organic farming—in living color
- Farm-to-table catering and events
- Bringing it all back home
Whether you partake in the delicious full-flavored menus from Big Bang Catering, or come to a field-to-table event at their Pastures of Plenty farm, you’ll get more than fantastic, healthy food: you’ll be thrilled by the many vibrant colors of their farm-grown organic flowers. Reported by Organic Connections, the magazine of Natural Vitality.
Farm-to-table catering and events
The first idea was to add a catering business, which Davis and partner John Howlett had already been doing part time. The second idea was to host farm-to-table events at the farm—which in those days had hardly 
been done.
“When Sylvia and I became a couple in 1989, we were climbing Wheeler Peak in New Mexico,” Davis recounted. “On the way up we had this highly energized conversation about, wouldn’t it be amazing to have a place we could call ‘field to table’? We didn’t even know the term farm to table. It could be a place where we’d have big gardens and we would grow food and cook it right on site. We would serve on beautiful wood tables, like can be seen in France and Italy, and decorate with all the flowers.” It was an idea that remained dormant until Davis decided to expand his business, when it then found its place and has since developed into a highly successful full-service farm-to-table event facility.
It’s not surprising that Davis pursued and found his dream in Pastures of Plenty: it was in his blood. “When I was quite young, my dad had read the famous book about pesticides, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson,” he recalled. “He subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine back in the late fifties and sixties, and we had a garden. My mom was a wonderful French cook, who would prepare meals from the garden and wild harvest. Food was an important part of our growing up.”
Davis went on to pursue great cooking all over the world. It was this sense of fine cuisine that carried forward, and these international flavors have now found their way onto his menus.
For Davis, natural food had never meant boring food. He first made sure it was introduced at Alfalfa’s Market. “Early on, people were eating a lot of raw tofu and weird brown rice with no flavoring,” Davis said. “I didn’t actually ever get the difference between what I grew up calling gourmet food and what was being called natural food, other than a lot of it kind of sucked; it didn’t taste very good and they didn’t really know how to cook it. One of the things 
Alfalfa’s did was blend gourmet foods and natural foods.”
