My favorite heirloom ingredient of the moment is Duroc pork belly. It is deliciously rich, juicy and has a great combination of textures. We pair it with veal sweetbreads, artichokes, mushrooms and a red wine sauce. I love the superior flavor of heirloom ingredients and as a chef they make my job easy. Creating a memorable meal is simple when you start with the best ingredients.

We particularly like using heirloom ingredients because it keeps these really cool products going--it's 150 year old corn! There are lots of other vegetables like this, but it's great that we are able to preserve this history. Working with heritage ingredients allows us to connect to our past in some ways by using things that people used years ago. By doing this we can compare and contrast between current "convenience items" and items that not only taste better, but help local farmers as well.

If we consider the future of our food security as a world knitted out of a fabric of communities, saving seed and preserving our heirloom and heritage crops and livestock breeds is the single most important thing we have to do. The seed is the key to life, to food, to having enough to eat. Over the last generation, a handful of nefarious transnational corporations have acquired and consolidated control of the seed supply and have also managed to get patented, genetically modified seeds into the dominant market position. This means these companies control the key to our food supply. Our lifeline against the profit motives and greed of these multinational corporations is open-pollinated, heirloom seeds and heritage livestock breeds that are not patented, and owned by all of us as our collective heritage. Over the generations of seed saving by communities and farmers around the world, many cultures and microclimates developed their own unique varieties that suited their terrain, land, and water supply, and before industrial agriculture, most seeds were selected for taste and nutrition in addition to productivity, and uniformity (a condition required by industrial harvesters and processors) was not a concern. There's better flavor and nutrition, not to mention fantastic variety, to be had from traditional heirloom crops. Additionally, the genetic diversity has to be preserved for safety against famine, drought, and disease. If we lose our diversity of heirloom crops, in a crisis we are left to go to multinational "life science" companies for quick fixes in GMO's and we are at the mercy of their profit motives, not to mention the many unanswered questions about the safety and environmental impacts of GMO's, and the warning signs are many. There's not space here to discuss all the issues. As far as our use of heritage crops goes, starting with grains, we use on a weekly basis: Henry Moore corn, Carolina Gourdseed white corn, Carolina gold rice, Charleston gold rice, purple hull peas, sea island benne, bennecake flour, red fife wheat, sonoran red wheat, peelcorn oats, sea island peas, white navy peas, sobakoh buckwheat, and abruzzi rye. These are the foundation of our pantry and define the "field" portion of our flavor palette. Other grains come and go as chosen seasonally. At the market over the growing season, I am always looking for heirloom vegetables, and will always pick an heirloom over a modern variety. This shows itself particularly during the apple harvest, when every year we work with two dozen or so apple varieties for different purposes - calville blanc di' hiver, eposus spitzenberger, tolman sweetings, Arkansas black, Blenheim's orange, Wolf River, and on. Some are used for salads, some for baking, others for apple butter, and still others for chutney. To me, the most important mission is to work to preserve seed biodiversity, but the fun part comes in learning the story behind all of these seeds and discovering their properties in order to coax the best flavor, texture, and aromas out of them. We can all help save our heritage by eating it every day, and it's delicious, with a new discovery available nearly every day.