Hello from Waterbury, Vermont!!
I’m just going to say first that this place is
GORGEOUS. Surrounded by mountains,
breathing the fresh air, trees everywhere I turn, this feels like heaven, and I
absolutely can’t believe it’s only a few hours from Boston. It feels like another planet.
James and I picked up the rental car this morning – a trusty
“mid-size SUV” that we promptly drove back to the house, and folded down the
back seats to see if we would actually fit into. Turns out, we do, though James is pretty
tall, so I definitely have more stretch-out space than he does. We loaded it up with our clothes, toiletries,
sleeping bags, and the cooler that I packed with some food and water for the
first few days. It’s not going to stay
cold for the whole trip, but we figured we’d buy ingredients for sandwiches for
the first few days, and save some bucks on breakfasts and lunches.
Then – off! We got
onto I-93 North, and started the adventure.
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| The two adventurers and our trusty steed/home for the next 5 days. |
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| The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge. I LOVE taking pictures of this bridge, it's so easy for them to be gorgeous. |
Our first stop was Concord, New Hampshire, where we stopped
at an Eastern Mountain Supply for iodine tablets for the mountain climbing
adventure that will take place on Wednesday.
I mean, we’re planning on carrying plenty of water, but I can get mighty
thirsty when I’m NOT trying to scale a mountain, so I’m just not taking any
chances with that one. Better safe than
sorry, and I’m also pretty stoked to feel majorly outdoorsy when I’m treating
my stream water, haha.
We followed that with a quick trip to Market Basket. Now, that whole experience is worthy of another
blog entry entirely. I’d never been to
one before, and all I have to say about it is CHEAP FOOD and tons of it. Crazy cheap.
So we got a few things that we wanted for lunches, and blasted towards
the state house. (Now, just a point of
clarification for my West coast friends: over here, people call their state
capitols “state houses”. Yeah, I
know. I don’t get it either.) Concord’s had a gold dome, same as Boston’s,
and we ate our picnic lunch outside, right next to it.
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| James and the delicious spread |
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| Sammiches! |
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| Glory shot. The rolls were from Clear Flour Bread - a bakery near my house that I've blogged about before. Incredible baked goods of all kinds. |
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| J and I at the capitol in Concord. |
It was sunny, a perfect temperature, and I was in sandwich and chocolate cake heaven. We packed up, took some pictures, had a short but polite conversation with a man who approached us on the street and tried to save our souls for Jesus, and blasted towards Montpelier, Vermont, and the third state capitol on our list for that day.
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| An Irish CAT? ...only in New England, ladies and gents... |
Montpelier, VT: small, beautiful, also has a state house
with a gold dome. We came, we saw, we
took a few pictures (one that turned out to be an epic fail, trying to get a
jumping picture, and having some user error issues with knowing when the timer
was actually going off), and we moved on.
We had an appointment with a few men about some ice cream in Waterbury.
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| User error in the timing function of my camera. This was going to be a cute leapfrog jumping picture. Instead it is a little bit weird and a little bit awkward, and so representative of James and me that I'm posting it on here anyway. |
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| Montpelier, VT |
That’s right. We had
to make the Ben and Jerry’s factory tour before it closed for the night. We zoomed up to Waterbury, got immediately in
to the 4:50pm tour, and were learning about the history of some pretty amazing
ice cream within minutes.
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| Deliciousness lies ahead! |
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| In the bathrooms - Vermont granite. Yes, I'm into food, but I think that it would be great to source a lot of things more locally - food and otherwise. |
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| Shameless selfie in the bathroom...or I guess I could just say that I was trying to showcase the Vermont granite, hahaha... we all know the truth. :) |
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| James is super stoked on this tour about to start... |
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| ...as was I. |
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| Our tour guide. He was enthusiastic as all get out. It was great for us, but I simply couldn't imagine having that much energy every single day. |
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| cows |
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| cows |
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| MORE COWS! ALL COWS ALL DAY! |
Production wasn’t happening when we got there, but we got to see a bird’s eye view of the floor anyway. Then we moved on to the tasting room, where the first thing that caught my eye was the sign that said we’d be tasting Stephen Colbert’s signature flavor, AmeriCone Dream, which is already one of my favorites. The second thing I noticed was the framed and prominently displayed kosher certification for the tasting room of the factory – not the scoop shop that was in the next room, not any of the ice cream anywhere else, just the scooped samples in that tasting room only.
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| Basically, I freaked out when I saw this. So cool. (Enter this under things you just don't see very often on the West Coast.) |
The tasting room is certified by KOF-K, one of the United States’ foremost kosher certifiers, located in Teaneck, NJ, and the certification expires in March of 2014, meaning that even if no processes change at the factory, a rabbi will have to come up to Waterbury to re-certify the tasting room in about 8 months. There’s so much more to know about kosher certifications, but as soon as I was getting ramped up to tell James everything I knew, the tour was over, and we left the building to get some real sized ice cream scoops.
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| Then there was this - information about the Fair Trade USA fair trade certified ingredients in the ice cream we were tasting. In AmeriCone Dream, the vanilla used in the recipe is Fair Trade Certified. |
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| This look from James says several things: 1. Stop taking pictures of me. 2. No, I don't care to hear about the particulars of kosher certification right now. 3. There are screaming children and babies EVERYWHERE and I just want some ice cream. |
I got Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz (apparently because I never wanted to sleep again) and James selected the Salted Caramel. I got a small, and it was two massive scoops – more ice cream than I thought I wanted, needed, or could possibly handle. Well...yeah. Took it down. No problem. J
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| Post ice cream, so good. |
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| This was behind the factory, pretty cool to have the labels on. |
Then we climbed a little hill in back of the factory to their Flavor Cemetery – a little plot where retired/expired flavors have placards and rhyming couplets written about them. It was cute – and there were lots of flavors there that I would have loved to taste that are no longer being made.
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| Believe me, after all that ice cream, the short walk wasn't unwelcome. |
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| James thought he'd race me up the steps. |
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| I couldn't even begin to imagine the Ben and Jerry's factory in a place as beautiful as this before I saw it with my own eyes - it was so peaceful. |
One thing Ben and Jerry’s is known for is their resistance to and advocacy against using milk from cows treated with rBGH, or recombinant bovine growth hormone. (Also known as rBST or recombinant bovine somatotropin.) Basically, it’s a hormone given to cows in order to increase their output of milk. Now, I know that sounds wonderful – more milk, right? Well, there are some serious issues. Now without getting too graphic, let’s just make sure everyone is on the same page here. Cows give milk through their udders. Udders are, well, overworked and underpaid to begin with (just ask any new mother – all my friends are having babies, and I read enough baby blogs to know this even without firsthand experience.)
So there’s the cow, already hooked up to milking machines or getting milked by hand a few times a day, which I’m sure isn’t barrels of fun, and you’re injecting hormones into the cow that will make her produce even more. Suffice to say, there are plenty of gross things that can be introduced into milk from cows given this hormone besides the hormone itself (which is plenty controversial, as many hormones and antibiotics are). Use of this hormones have been proven to correlate to more instances of mastitis in the cattle, and when your cow has mastitis, you have to give her antibiotics to clear the infection.
There is a lot of controversy about rBGH, but it’s worth it to take a look at the labels on the dairy products in your fridge. I’ll try to post about rBGH more in detail a little later, it’s pretty fascinating. Ben and Jerry’s had a bunch of information about rBGH posted up all over the property, and it was awesome to see people stopping, looking, and educating themselves.
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| TEACH ALL THE WORLD ABOUT FOOD THINGS!! |
After we left the factory, we drove into downtown Waterbury,
and stopped in at the Prohibition Pig, an incredible place that deserves its
own post for the crazy/amazing experience.
I came expecting pulled pork and beer, and left full of so many other
things…that were so much better.
Day 1: Part Two coming up soon!
Until then, happy eating!
-Bethy
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