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But her work site today is unusual: She's standing in a field on her organic farm in upstate New York, chopping vegetables that were harvested only a few feet away. And her running commentary isn't exactly standard either. "We have to respect food," she tells her guests as they carefully cut up carrots and onions. "We have to think about all the people who don't have what we have here, and treat the food nicely." Finally ready, the soup is ladled into bowls and lifted to half a dozen mouths simultaneously.
"How does it taste?" Neumark asks.
A little boy takes a tentative sip, then runs into the field and spits it out. "Like poison!" he calls, delighted with himself. Everyone cracks up, including Neumark.
The boy arrived at Neumark's Katchkie Farm this morning with his classmates and teachers from PS 180 in Harlem. They've already collected eggs from the chickens, repotted seedling tomatoes, and picked vegetables, all as part of a program called the Sylvia Center, which Neumark created to show city kids where real food comes from and what it can taste like.Most of these kids have brought lunches from home that are heavy with processed food, soda, and sweets, plus snacks with brand names and bar codes. Just getting them to think about food that comes from nature rather than a supermarket shelf will require some prodding from a woman who loves cooking, eating, gardening, and, above all, kids. Luckily, Neumark is perfect for the job.
And yet there isn't a single person in this boisterous group who knows why it is so important to her to have kids running around her fields, even if they dis her homemade soup. The Sylvia Center is named after Neumark's youngest child, a daughter who died suddenly five years ago.
"There was a girl here today," Neumark says as the children start to make their way back to their bus. "I saw her silliness and her vivaciousness, and it reminded me of Sylvia. And that's great. It's not sad. There are times I hear laughter and I hear Sylvia."
Neumark is 54 years old, trim and strong, with short gray hair and an assortment of funky glasses. She is the sort of person you can tell certain things about, even if you're only passing her on the street. You can tell, for example, that she is essentially a joyful woman but that the joy has been consciously chosen and hard-won.
Having grown up in a family of four kids, Neumark wanted four of her own with her husband, attorney Chaim Wachsberger. Sylvia, born when Neumark was 42, was a character right from the beginning.
At two, she announced that she was a dog named Mae Mae and instructed her parents and siblings to walk her around on a leash. She loved animals, adored her sisters and brother, and was so close to her father that he insisted she would be the one to take care of him in his old age.
But one Saturday night when she was six years old, Sylvia suddenly complained of a headache and lost consciousness, the victim of a weakened blood vessel in her brain that could be neither predicted nor treated. Two days later, she was in an irreversible coma. Her parents finally took her off life support.
"What I remember most about those two days was telling the other kids that their sister was dying," Neumark says. "Bringing them to the hospital to say goodbye was the hardest thing I've ever had to do."
Whenever something went wrong on a catering job, Neumark always knew what to do. Once, during an outdoor event under the Brooklyn Bridge, a hurricane-force wind lifted an entire dinner tent and dropped it, sending shattered glass everywhere. Neumark had a new buffet up a scant ten minutes later, and the guests who hadn't fled enjoyed a memorable dinner under the stars.
But no one, Neumark especially, knew how to deal with the death of her child. None of the books on bereavement she read could even get close to her grief. She knew it was irrational, but she felt, she says now, "like a loser. What kind of mother lets her child die?"
But the loss she feared most was that of her daughter's memory. "How do you keep this child's place in your life, in a way that is joyful? I had to be able to talk about her so that she wouldn't just disappear." It was especially important to Neumark that she somehow preserve her daughter's name; she didn't want people to stop saying Sylvia. And she wanted to memorialize her child in a way that would reflect not her tragically premature death but the person she had been in life.
Neumark had been talking about a farm for years before buying Katchkie Farm (Katchkie, Yiddish for "duck," is the family nickname for son Sam). For caterers, out-of-season produce is a major expense; having a farm with greenhouses would provide her expanding business with tomatoes and micro-greens all winter and allow her to harvest crops to fit upcoming menus. But the Sylvia Center (including its satellite kitchen and weekly greenmarkets in Manhattan) is clearly Katchkie Farm's heart.
Sylvia had been, in her own words, a "helpful human," and Neumark believed that the center would make a fitting tribute. "It seemed very natural," she remembers. "I know she would have loved the idea of activities that are good for people and for the environment."
Of course, simply being told that certain foods are good for you is not going to convince children to change their eating habits. But Neumark has seen that when kids plant and weed, harvest and cook their own food, the lesson takes root. There was a home run moment last year, she says, when a girl who'd been to Katchkie with her class spotted a zucchini at the greenmarket and asked her mother to buy it, promising, "I'm going to make you breakfast in bed tomorrow." The girl had brought together her experience at the farm and her life at home. "She reached out to her mom with such excitement that we all felt the connection click," Neumark says. "I would have loved to come for breakfast the next day!"
Will the boy who was nearly "poisoned" by the freshest of all vegetable soups be similarly converted? There's no way of knowing, but at the very least, he now has an idea of what vegetable soup is supposed to taste like. Maybe, one day, he'll be willing to give it another try. Maybe he'll actually like what he tastes, and that will be one more kid connected to the planet and to the wonders of fresh food and his own body.
"I wanted to inspire and create and hear the laughter of children," Neumark says. When she's on her farm, listening to birds, feeling life happening all around her, she says, she feels comfort and some measure of peace. "That's my personal takeaway. My selfish takeaway. I see the name, the Sylvia Center, and she's there. She's with me every day."
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