Tour Bus Chef

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September 15, 2025

Think back to school days when your class took an excursion to Washington, DC. Maybe it
was in connection with your civics studies or American History class. From Mount Vernon to
the White House, from the Capitol Building to the Smithsonian museums, history came alive
and memories were made.

If you’ve ever chaperoned a group on such an adventure, you can appreciate the planning and coordinating effort required to create a meaningful experience — keeping everyone together, attending to special needs, shepherding the group from place to place.

You may remember the bus ride, the hotel room, the Apollo 11 capsule. And you may remember a restaurant that provided sustenance for all that energy required to keep up with scheduled activities.

This is where Primo Family Restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, shines with a reputation as a destination for coaches full of enthusiastic tourists.

Owner Jim Nicopoulos has heard tales from tour guides about waiting outside a restaurant with 80 fifth-graders for 40 minutes. Once inside, they waited another 30 minutes before their food was served.

Not so at Primo. The staff has perfected the art of serving 6 coaches at a time — 300 guests — in 29 minutes. They’re served in a dedicated banquet room, while normal restaurant business continues simultaneously in the dining room.

As a former delivery driver in Washington, DC, Virginia, and Maryland, I brought meat, eggs, and milk from Polyface and other farms to restaurants and small local grocers. Primo was on my route.

During tour season, Jim would call to give me the lowdown on the dinner schedule.

“I have buses coming at 5:00, another group of buses at 6:00, and a final group at 7:00. Can you be here before 4:30?”

The food served at Primo is prepared fresh.

There are no instant mashed potatoes, no microwaved frozen pre-cooked foods, no pre-made sauce packets.

Jim explains, “There are a lot of moving parts to getting a cooked meal to your table. How many people are involved in that process? When you create a dish, you must begin from where you source it, who will bring it. That’s probably 10-15 people who handle it before it gets to you. It could come on a jet, a boat, a tractor-trailer, or a van.

“When raw proteins arrive whole from the farm, it takes physical labor, expertise, and creativity to prepare it for the table.

It goes through another 8-10 people before the plate is clean & ready for service again. Someone has to order it. Someone has to check it in. Someone has to store it. Someone has to take it out and begin processing it. Someone has to get it ready for service in portion control. Someone has to cook it. Someone has to carry it from kitchen to table. Someone has to carry empty plates back and load the dishwasher, run the washer, empty it, & stack the dishes. It’s a cycle.”

So the next time you see smiling faces on the National Mall, groups of tourists, young and old, soaking up the history, consider that they will be dining somewhere. Imagine the choreography of producing their meal: truly a miracle for which to be grateful.

To learn more about Jim and his amazing restaurant, you can read my post: "Drone Pizza Deliveries and Outer Space Restaurants".

May you be deeply nourished,

Susan

Events of The Month

Check out upcoming events on the farm this month!

Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

Tour Bus Chef

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Events of The Month

Duplication

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