A farm in the middle of Arlington, a tour with my daughter, and what it means to know exactly where your food comes from
By Gloria Dawit-Puri, RN · Belle Vie™
Last fall, my daughter and I went looking for a farm in the middle of Arlington.
I should tell you what we did not find. No fields. No barn. No fence with a hand-painted sign. Just an ordinary building off South Four Mile Run, the kind you pass without a second glance — auto shops on one side, a doggy daycare nearby. The space had once held a storage facility for legal documents. We almost drove past it.
Then we walked in, and there was a farm.
Rows of plants, stacked toward the ceiling, growing in real soil under lights — lettuces and herbs and root vegetables, carrots and turnips coming up out of the ground exactly the way they are supposed to. My daughter stood there taking it in. She has seen vegetables her whole life. She had never seen them growing. There is a difference, and you could watch it land on her face.
That is the thing I keep coming back to. We have spent a generation making food abstract — wrapped in plastic, trucked in from somewhere far away, anonymous by the time it reaches the table. A child can grow up never once seeing where dinner begins. That afternoon, mine did. Not in a photograph. In the room.
The farm is called Area 2 Farms, and the idea behind it is contained in one line: move the farm, not the food. Instead of shipping produce across the country to reach you, they brought the farm into the neighborhood. What you eat is harvested and delivered within about ten miles of where it grew — counted in hours, not days on a refrigerated truck.
What makes it unusual is the soil. Most indoor farms grow their greens in water, because water is easier to control. Area 2 grows in living soil, which is harder and slower and far more honest — and it is the reason they can grow real root vegetables and odd, wonderful things like wasabi arugula, not just trays of lettuce. The people doing the growing trained for this; one founder studied controlled-environment agriculture, the other runs the science of it. They are, in the most literal sense, your neighbors. And they open the doors on purpose — they do not want the farm hidden. They want a child to walk in and see a carrot come out of the dirt.
Before we left, we bought a Thanksgiving box. Organic vegetables, grown a few miles from my kitchen, picked at their peak. We brought it home and it went onto our table for the holiday — greens and roots and herbs that tasted like something, that lasted the whole week, that I could trace back to a building I had stood inside and a person I had met.
I think about that more than I expected to.
Most of you know the way I work. In my practice, I am relentless about what is in a product, where it came from, who made it, what they left out. I read every ingredient list. I will not put my name on something I cannot account for. That is not a marketing position. It is simply how I was raised to move through the world — to know what a thing is made of before you trust it with your skin, your body, your family.
Food is no different. Maybe it is the first place it should have started.
There is a particular peace in knowing where something comes from. Not a label promising it. Not a word like “natural” doing the work that proof should do. An actual place you can drive to. A person who can answer your questions. A row of vegetables growing in soil, close enough that the distance between the farm and your table is something you could walk.
That is what I want my daughter to carry — not just that we ate well one Thanksgiving, but that she knows it is possible to live this way. Awake to where things come from. Unwilling to take it on faith. Choosing, on purpose, what comes into the house.
That is a beautiful life. Grown close to home, and set down on the table between us.
La belle vie — on our terms, in our neighborhood, at our table.
Area 2 Farms is located in Arlington, Virginia, and delivers across the D.C. metro area. You can tour the farm, see what’s growing, or reserve a seasonal share at area2farms.com.