Geneva has become quite a town for foodies
Rooted in farming, Geneva now is a place to savor pig-roast dinners, artisan breads and gourmet chocolates
GENEVA — Geneva is a food town, and its food roots run deep.
No matter from which direction you approach this city that anchors the northwest end of Seneca Lake, you’re bound to see a lot of food in the making. Dairy farms, orchards, family-run vegetable operations, livestock grain and, increasingly, vineyards make up the landscape hat surrounds this small city and surrounding town of about 16,300.
It sounds quaint and bucolic, but Geneva is also headquarters to one of the country’s most prolific agricultural and food science research institutions. Cornell University’s New York State Agricultural Experiment Station has been studying ways to improve farming and food production since 1880. Without its various breeding programs, we would live in a world without Empire and Cortland apples, nutritionally superior orange cauliflower, the habanada pepper (a habanero that won’t make your head explode with heat), virus-resistant beans, and the Whitaker, a summer squash able to resist three viruses and a fungal disease.
If Geneva is where new apple types are created, it’s also a place where many of the world’s oldest apple varieties are grown and studied. The National Apple Collection at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit is off limits to tourists and the general public, but researchers and industry insiders look to ancient apple varieties from Central Asia and other parts of the world to unlock secrets that will improve the apples of the future.
“A lot of the produce that people use here (in restaurants) was developed at the Station at one time or another,” says Susan Brown, an apple breeder at the Experiment Station who assumes the associate director role next month. Producers, researchers and consumers have an interconnectedness that makes Geneva’s foodscape unique, she adds.
If it weren’t for the research of viticulture trailblazers such as the late Nelson Shaulis, who developed a vine trellising system known as the Geneva Double Curtain that has been used throughout the world, and Robert Pool, who founded Billsboro Winery, there would be no Finger Lakes wine trails and wine industry as we know it, Brown adds.
“Bob (who died in 2006) was the ultimate foodie,” notes Brown. With some help from contractors, he and his son built the outdoor brick oven where Billsboro’s current owners now hold their popular Pizza on the Patio events during summer.
Brown herself exemplifies that intertwining. As a Cornell scientist and Geneva resident since 1985, she has ushered in several new apple and cherry varieties to the market, and knows the history and lore of just about every restaurant and food store in town.
What has pushed Geneva from a food town to a foodie town? Wineries, says William Schickel, general manager of Geneva on the Lake, a century-old villa resort and restaurant where celebrities from Simone de Beauvoir to members of The Grateful Dead have dined and slept.
Post-harvest food production is also a firmly rooted part of Geneva’s economy, from the Seneca Foods facility where vegetables grown in surrounding fields are canned and sold under various brand names to The Technology Farm, where entrepreneurs such as Stony Brook WholeHearted Foods discover innovative ways to use waste products, such as making delicious culinary oils from seeds that would otherwise be discarded from pre-cut squash.
Geneva is also where a significant chapter in the history of institutional dining took place. When the Hobart College cafeteria teetered on bankruptcy in 1948, junior William Scandling of Rochester took it over with a couple of buddies. His senior year encore? Doing the same at Hobart’s sister school, William Smith College.
The trio went on to form the Saga Corp., a vanguard in college and hospital food service. (The Saga Corp was bought out by Marriott Corp in 1986; Scandling died in 2005.)
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