A small food
revolution
“Teaching kids how to feed themselves and
how to live in a community responsibly is the
center of an education.” — Alice Waters
un fact — Having been a journalist
since I was 17, I’ve gotten to pen
some amazing stories through fi rst-
person experiences.
• won a reporters’ pool to be “co-pilot”
on one of the Blue Angels
• camped with volcanologists in
Honduras at the rim of an active volcano
• helped a veterinarian near Pecos round
up and vaccinate wild mustangs
• took some veterans down Highway
One in Vietnam on our motorcycles
• made several 250-foot dives with
SCUBA-clad scientists in the Sea of
Cortez
• one round
of boxing with
one of George
Foreman’s
sparring partners
• spelunked
GO BENEATH THE
with cavers
in Southern
SURFACE WITH
Arizona at a
PAUL HAEDER
just-publicly
announced
cavern system
Th en there are the articles about chefs,
farms, wineries and breweries.
Spending hours on three occasions
with JT — chef/ owner of Coast & Vine
in Nye Beach — I dig back to my roots in
sustainable farming, farm to fork activism
and working around people who build the
culture of healing mind and body with
healthy, clean food.
Jonathan James Trusty ( JT) is a 47-year-
old master of many culinary arts, as a chef,
sommelier and coff ee expert. When we
kick around a rural county like Lincoln and
smallish towns like Newport and Lincoln
City, stumbling upon a sustainable, healthy
and socially/ethically conscious restaurant
is a fi nd.
JT’s serious about supporting local
farms, food producers, foragers, cider, wine
F
DEEP
DIVE
and mead purveyors.
Th e relationship between restaurant and
grower is one JT not only encourages, but
he believes a tsunami-risk area like Lincoln
County should be developing deep, long-
lasting socially-dynamic communities in
order to build resiliency to stave off some of
the disastrous eff ects of an earthquake and
ocean deluge.
When he fi rst started in the food and
drink business, in 1990 near Sacramento,
JT conjured up secrets of coff ee growing-
roasting-brokering by going down to the
Bay Area to get his hands into those coff ee
beans.
“My mom will tell you this story how
when I was 11 or 12, I was cooking meals .
. . nothing like what she was cooking in our
kitchen. You know, 1960s Betty Crocker
stuff . It was the late ’80s and we were eating
McDonald’s for lunches at school and
we thought that was just wonderful,” JT
says with a laugh, emphasizing the words
“poisoning us” in many of our conversations
stories recanting our broken food system.
He recalls mother Deborah (Toledo
librarian) and dad Robert (director of the
Blue Water Task Force) taking the kid JT
into wine country — the renowned Napa
and Sonoma valleys.
“You know, all of that stuck from age
fi ve on. In fact, this restaurant is actually
the product of that early exposure and
education.”
From espresso café to getting deep
into the wine industry, to working with
amazing chefs like Alice Waters, JT gives
benediction to his mentors and his young
staff , who he calls “the kids.”
Moon, sun, air, water, fi re
While pouring some incredible Scribe
Winery chardonnay (Sonoma Valley) and
Day Wines pinot noir (Dundee, Oregon),
JT rises to the occasion as both proponent
and practitioner of biodynamic wine and
food.
He tells me that biodynamics actually
occur in the vineyard before winemaking
takes place. “It’s simple --rain, sun, soil,
moon.”
Th e bottom line is “clean, organic,
natural,” which is how JT runs his kitchen
— a dream started when he was a child
stomping around those farms, orchards and
vineyards in California, now a place ravaged
by drought, fi re, deluges.
We toast the fourth-generation of
farmers and vineyard tenders at Scribe, for
this amazing organic wine, a gift of 120
acres that include perennial crops and nut
trees.
Deep Dive will continue online, as I
explore JT’s years in France; his US Coast
Guard days; and the new iteration of Coast
& Vine — the quintessential oyster bar. His
big push is being part of the Central Coast
Food Trail and connecting a foraging-to-
fork ethos to his purchasing of products, to
cooking, then connecting many aspects of
our Native American brethren on the Coast
and in the region to the entire food web.
Read on at www.oregoncoasttoday.com.
•••
Paul Haeder is a writer living and working
in Lincoln County. He has two books coming
out, one a short story collection, “Wide Open
Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” and a non-
fi ction book, “No More Messing Around: Th e
Good, Bad and Ugly of America’s Education
System.”
oregoncoastTODAY.com • facebook.com/oregoncoasttoday • February 14, 2020 • 5