From Brown’s Field: A recipe for vegan polpetta with sake lees

In the sunny, pre-pandemic summer season that now feels like a distant dream, I joined the Future Food Institute on a special field trip to Brown’s Field, an organic farm, café, shop and guesthouse on the Boso Peninsula. After an 80km-long train ride from central Tokyo, our group of sustainable food lovers from around the world (who we affectionately called “Food Shapers) arrived in a sea of green and were soon greeted by happy goats and the farmers Junko Kobayashi and Minto Brown, the sweet son of photographer Everett Kennedy Brown and macrobiotic chef Deco Nakajima who started the farm in 1999. To this day, Brown’s Field continues to preserve and celebrate Japanese slow living and serves as a peaceful escape from busy urban life.

So we toured the traditional Japanese farmhouse (called a kominka) and the fragrant fields of wheat, rice and plums. We enjoyed nagashi somen, a fun practice of catching noodles as they slide down a bamboo shoot and engaged in an enlightening talk about sustainability and climate change. That day, so serene yet enlivening, ended with a macrobiotic cooking class and a feast of freshly picked produce and playfully prepared dishes.

While some foodies went out into the field to harvest, I volunteered in the kitchen where I made the Italian / Japanese “polpetta” with my Future Food…