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The Chicago Reader
The Food Issue: City Farm
From a Chicago couple, a Wisconsin organic farm that understands its urban customers
By Lisa Shames
Bob Borchardt's family goes way back with food. His great-grandparents owned a store that sold produce, meat, and dry goods in Pilsen in the 30s and 40s, and his grandparents ran a restaurant and bar where his grandmother made hearty midday dinners of braised meats and spaetzle for the truckers coming in and out of the nearby South Water Market. In the 90s Bob took over his father's company, which serviced restaurants with specialized tasks like maintaining professional stove hoods. And five years ago he started up Cuisine Populaire (cuisinepopulaire.com), a new-media and video-production company that makes DVDs on global food, wine, and culture. Some of them feature his brother, Bradley Borchardt, a Bangkok-based chef.
In 2005, watching one of his company's own videos about a organic farm in Argentina that has its own restaurant and packaging facility, Bob and his wife, Jennifer—who'd briefly attended cooking school but was working in textbook publishing—realized they were looking at something like their ideal business model. "We knew we wanted to help bring people back to a greater level of engagement with what they're eating," says Bob. "Understanding how and where it's grown... Read the full article here.