Farm Dinners: Hands


		China and Veronica have been cooking, gardening, foraging, preserving, and writing about food together for the last year. Along with Nate Ready and Aaron Hirsh, they created Meadow Lark Farm Dinners in an effort to connect food and community — and to bring it all to the table in the field.

Veronica Volny. After an itinerant childhood in continental Europe — working in a Bavarian Biergarten and foraging for mushrooms with her Czech relatives — Veronica moved to San Diego to attend college, and surf. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Stanford University, and did postdoctoral research in conservation genetics of marine mammals at UC Berkeley. Veronica serves on the board of The Vermilion Sea Institute, a non-profit organization. Together with Aaron, she teaches VSI’s field course, ‘The Ecology, Evolution, and Natural History of Baja California.’ In Boulder, Veronica collects her neighbors’ apples to brew cider, chases swarms of bees, and bakes organic whole-grain treats for her horse.

China Tresemer. China spent her childhood in Boulder and New England. She started her cooking career at age eight when she opened a restaurant on the beach, serving sand-crusted jellyfish pie and seaweed salad. China lived in New York City for three years, where she earned a degree in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design and studied cooking at Slow Food USA and La Cuisine Sans Peur. Thereafter, she moved to Europe, and worked in Italy and Morocco with Peggy Markel's Culinary Adventures. China has cooked for campers in the woods of Vermont, for an improv-theater troupe on a farm near Toulouse, and with a handful of Berbers in the Atlas Mountains.

Nate Ready. Nate grew up in California's Napa Valley and graduated from Pepperdine University with a degree in Greco-Roman Wrestling and a thesis on Transcriptions of Baroque Oboe Concerti for the Piccolo Trumpet. He spent several years as a sommelier at Thomas Keller's renowned restaurant, The French Laundry, and then moved to Boulder to help start Frasca Food & Wine. While at Frasca, Nate earned his Master Sommelier Diploma, a feat accomplished by fewer than 100 sommeliers in North America. More recently, Nate has grown a beard and has been working in viticulture and farming in Italy, California, and Boulder — and studying for his self-certification as an agricultural theorist.

Aaron Hirsh. Aaron is a writer and biologist, and a Boulder native. He is also our premier dishwasher. Aaron studied biology at Princeton and earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was a founder of the biotechnology company InterCell, and serves on the board of Roberts & Co. Scientific Publishers. Aaron is also director of the Vermilion Sea Institute, a non-profit organization that fosters sustainable and enriching relationships between human societies and the ecosystems that support them. During the past five years, Aaron has turned his attention to writing for a broader audience. His essays on science and the environment have appeared in literary journals and in The Best American Science Writing. In collaboration with Veronica, Aaron teaches 'The Ecology, Evolution, and Natural History of Baja California,' a field course that has inspired him to begin writing his first book — a literary account of travel and science in the Vermilion Sea.

Bella the Bus. Bella was born in 1995 in Silver Lake, Indiana, and served the Rochester School District for thirteen years. She found us on eBay, and moved to Boulder in January of 2008. After outrunning a snow storm on Interstate 80, Bella spent a happy month being refurbished in Lafayette by her good friend Bill Young (of gypsycoach.com). Bella looks forward to her new life as a mobile kitchen and to visiting all the farms.