elba onion festival

Elba, NY, population 670 in town, maybe another 600 in the village. A small town by anyone’s measure and the place where I spent my first few school years and every summer until I was 21.

I lived in the village part of Elba, what seemed to me a massive area of farmland and sparsely spaced houses. But just like everywhere else, the old Miller Road of my youth has been subjected to the pervasiveness of new home building that occurs on farmland everywhere. Farmers grow old, tire of the long days, and, with no one willing to step up and continue to farm the land, sell the property off in one acre plots, the perfect size for modular homes and above ground pools. So it goes that factory built homes invade the unique landscape of hand built structures meant to stay in the family for generations, not just until the divorce.

My summers in Elba were mostly filled with work. Working on the Starowitz farm until I was 17, then taking a grocery store job at Bell’s while I finished my senior year at LeRoy High School. When I turned 18, it was factory time for me. Every day after school I would walk to Bok Industries where my Mom also worked. Every night after school I put rivets in three ring binders, pressed bales of recycled vinyl and cleaned toilets. I had already told myself that this was my life, and I had to get used to it. Then I went to college and ruined this whole scene.

The usual signal that my summer was coming to an end was the Elba Onion Festival, a pre-Fall celebration of the one product that the small town of Elba was supposedly well-known for – the onion. There were other celebrations in neighboring towns for other crops, processes, industries and whatever, but I really stuck to this one festival every year.

Usually held in the beginning weeks of August, the festival came to indicate a time to reflect on the previous several months of work and the return to school. It was pretty common for me to request time off from my jobs during this particular weekend. It was a time to catch up with people I hadn’t seen over the previous year, or even maybe for a couple of years. It was time to play a low stakes game of DARTO (yeah, just like BINGO), gorge myself on mini-donuts and Polish sausage, bet quarters on white rats that ran around a spinning wheel (dropping into various colored holes) or hang out near the beer tent late at night waiting for someone “on the inside” to toss unopened cans of Busch beer over the fence.

The festival had at its heart a fundraiser for the town’s volunteer firefighters and rescue squad. Every year their was a raffle for a brand new car, a Cadillac in the old days, but now a Ford Mustang, real Western New York type vehicles.

Small bags of onions were given to all the folks who came and bought tickets for the raffle. I always grew up under the assumption that the onions were from Elba farms and farmers, but it turned out that the onions (at least back in the eighties and early nineties) were from California and were most likely “old crop”. I shudder to think of where the onions come from now, these one pound bags of goodness, symbolic of the local community, most likely trucked in from the heavy onion producers of Central and South America. I can only hope that this isn’t the case and the onions they give away now are the real deal, locally farmed, harvested and bagged.

The food disconnect back then was more apparent than ever, just the fact that you can hold a celebration of your town’s biggest product and think nothing of importing that product in order to give it away with every raffle ticket. I’m sure the irony was not lost on some of the organizers of the event, but as they say “the show must go on.”

But good things are happening in Elba. One of the state’s largest organic farms in located in Elba. Porter Farms currently runs a CSA for three hundred or so families and delivers to Whole Foods and Lexington Food Co-op in Buffalo. The farm is right around the corner from where I grew up, but it has only been growing organically since the late nineties, after I had moved away.

There is also a large farmer’s market in Batavia, NY that operates twice a week. Last time I visited the market there were several organic farms represented, something I would have never seen when I lived there. The momentum for local and organic is getting into every small town out there. When they see the success, more farmers are willing to give organic a try and more small town consumers are pushing them along. The local food movement can only have a positive effect on the folks still farming and also encourage a new generation to get back to the farm and maybe grow some onions.