The Farmhouse Supper Served by Lamplight

A few times each summer, certain Vermont farms clear a space among the fields, set a long table, and invite guests out to eat where the food was grown. Lit by lamplight as the sun goes down, these on-farm suppers have become one of the season's most sought-after experiences.

The setting is the whole idea. Diners sit surrounded by the crops and animals that produced their meal, often with the farmer and the cooking chef both on hand to explain what they're eating and how it was raised. It collapses the distance between farm and table entirely — there is no distance left to collapse.

The meals themselves are usually served family-style and built around whatever the farm has in abundance that week. As dusk falls and the lamps are lit, the whole affair takes on a magical, communal quality, part dinner party and part harvest celebration. Guests leave with more than a full stomach; they leave with a face and a place attached to their food, and a memory of eating it beneath the open Vermont sky. It is farm-to-table at its most literal, and its most romantic.