Spain has given the cycling world a cast of passionate characters: El Pistolero, the Eagle of Toledo, Big Mig and, of course, Carlos Sastre. Spanish all arounder Luis Ocaña was seen by Eddy Merckx as his only true rival. Spain is a country of passionate brilliance and its people and culture fueled Hemingway’s greatest literary inspirations. It gave us the works of Picasso and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. Nowhere though is Spain’s cultural diversity and brilliance more evident than in its cuisine.

Spanish food is a tapestry of regional specialties: the Basque bacalao, Andalusian gazpacho and the escudella of Catalonia. Spain’s cuisine reflects regional heritage and ecosystems, from seafood-rich coastal diets in Galicia to intense pork-laden meals from rural regions such as Asturias. And of course, from Valencia comes paella, a dish whose influence and adaptability have made it popular around the world.

“Ah, the paella,” says chef Frank Magaña, “the Spanish name both for the pan and the rice dish cooked in it. It’s a culinary pleasure that is unrivaled, in my opinion, by any other one dish meal. Paella is a feast of exotic flavors and textures created by the visual artistry of the pan and preparation itself. It’s a crowd-pleaser, and if done right, it can be a showstopper. It brings people together. The smells, the sights, the anticipation that the production creates. It’s honestly my favorite dish to prepare and I love serving up a huge paella for friends and family.”

In Washington state’s Puget Sound there’s a wealth of native seafood. Northwest-born chef Magaña, who specializes in Spanish cuisine, finds paella, at the roots of Spanish culinary tradition, a perfect way to celebrate wherever you might find yourself.

“Luckily, with the exception of a couple shelf-stable specialty products, it can be prepared with nearly all locally sourced ingredients,” he says, “so a quick trip to the market for some fresh produce and you’re well on your way. I love to add clams, mussels and prawns, especially having grown up here in the Northwest. As for the specialty products, a little pre-planning is definitely necessary as there are essential signature ingredients. Most items can be tracked down in specialty grocery stores without too much trouble.

“There are just a few specialty ingredients that the dish is built upon—bomba rice, saffron and the paella, the pan. The most important ingredient—bomba, a specialty rice from Valencia—is known as the best for the paella due to its high quality and its superb ability to absorb three times its volume in liquid. The rice is able to expand in width unlike other rice that expands only in length. A proper paella pan is shallow, wide, round and has two handles. The pan distributes heat evenly throughout the cooking surface so that the rice can cook evenly. I like to cook my paella outside over the barbecue—which is a big surface area—so I tend to choose a pan that fits my barbecue grill. The saffron, hands down the most crucial ingredient to the paella, is actually the stigma of the crocus flower. There only three stigma per flower and each has to be hand harvested, making it the most expensive spice in the world. In addition, I almost always use a heavy pinch of sweet Spanish smoked paprika.

“I’ve acquired some trade secrets over my career. One trick I’ve learned along the way with paella is to get a good sear on your protein before building your sofrito. Sofrito is the building block of a good paella—the vegetable aromatics. I have my own signature style that includes onions, peppers and tomatoes finished with fresh garlic and the smoked paprika. To extract maximum flavor from the saffron, I bloom it in the white wine for about five minutes. Lastly, I’ve been told by serious paella fans that the key to a good paella is the presence of the socarrat. This is the thin caramelized crust of rice at the bottom of the dish that every discerning paella fan would be willing to fight for. To develop a nice socarrat, the key is not to stir the pan once the rice has been added. Turning up the heat just before the paella is finished toasts the bottom, but this technique takes caution so you don’t end up with a burn.”

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In the city of Brindisi, southeast Italy, the top of the stairs in the old town marks the end of the Appian Way. It is one of many Roman roads that the empire used to conquer so much of the known world. Dating from 312 B.C. the Via Appia is the oldest and likely the most important of these engineering marvels. It was designed specifically to move military might to the city of Capua in Campania, where the Romans fought their rival Samnites in a war for Italian domination. Those battles and eventual conquest would open the door for Rome to rule the rest of the Western world for many centuries.

From the Roman column that traditionally marks the ancient road’s endpoint, stairs lead down to the harbor and the deepblue Adriatic Sea. For a town of Brindisi’s stature, outsized historical consequence is provided by the Roman column and the stairs—named for epic poet Virgil, who died in 19 B.C. in the building to the right of the stairs, if you’re coming down, or one that once stood there. As the Roman Empire declined, so did Brindisi’s strategic importance, until the Crusades of the Middle Ages made the port and harbor one of Italy’s busiest, once again sending soldiers to war.

At the top of the stairs, across from the place where Virgil died and just past the column, there’s a seafood restaurant in an orangish, yellowish stucco building. The frutti di mare is as fresh as they come, plucked daily from the Adriatic. They are delicately prepared with a very light touch—though the gregarious chef is missing three fingers from his right hand, the result of a knife accident.

A short ride outside of Brindisi in the Puglian countryside there are groves of olive trees as ancient as this region’s history. Olive trees, gnarled and bent, which have lived here for more than a thousand years, still produce olive cultivars like Coratina, Peranzana and Ogliarola. These olives offer a variety of flavor profiles but tend toward spicy, brisk finishes.

The trunks on some of these trees are massive, gnarled and sort-of frightening looking—you can imagine them coming to life at times. The ground, covered in tarps, is strewn with olives most days and a man sorts olives in a makeshift shaker out of the back of a tiny pickup truck. This is the only job he’s ever had. He started working these family groves as a young boy and today, well into his 70s, he’s still here, standing guard among these ancient trees.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the importance of olive oil in the Mediterranean basin, which includes southern Europe and northern Africa. Olive-tree cultivation dates to 6,000 B.C. and its prominence remains ever present on tables throughout Italy, France and Spain.

Olive oil has been a major component of Mediterranean diets, as an important source of fat and flavor, for eons. Extra virgin olive oil has taken center stage as the staple of a lifestyle and diet that has become the envy of the rest of the world, and even an intangible cultural heritage recognized by Unesco.

While olive groves are found all around the Mediterranean, nowhere does this viscous gold hold such a fundamental place at the table and in the soul as it does in Italy. And Puglia produces much of Italy’s olive oil market; and while not all of the trees are ancient, many of them are and they face an uncertain future.

A bacterium named xylella fastidiosa could mean doomsday for these ancient olive groves. The ulivi secolari, as these ancient trees are known, have watched as the history of modern Italy and Europe has developed around them. There are about half a million such trees in Puglia, centuries old, some in the millennia. They are under existential threat from this bacterium, spread by a local bug long thought of as harmless, which basically infects the tree’s ability to take water from its roots by globbing up the xylem (the tubes that transport water throughout the tree) and starving the trees from the inside out.

A full 15 percent of the world’s olive oil comes from Italy and about 40 percent of Italy’s export market is supplied by Puglia. This is both an economic and cultural problem for the region—more than a million trees were lost by 2019. And the problem is spreading to France and Spain as well as North Africa. Scientists and farmers have come together to try and stave off this tiny menace, looking at both cutting-edge scientific approaches and old-school Apulian home remedies.

A region and a country’s history and culture hangs in the balance.

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In Emmaus, Pennsylvania, you will find that some of the most important roots of American cycling are certified organic. This is where the enigmatic J. I. Rodale established a family farm in the 1940s, motivated by global politics, his family’s business interests and concerns about his own personal health. Rodale became interested in exploring the idea of growing his own food in a way that would help him proactively address some of the health issues that plagued many of the male members of his family. He set about understanding what went into the practice of farming and agriculture and, more specifically, the way our food was grown. His curiosity and commitment would lead to his founding the United States’ organic movement.

After purchasing and reinvigorating a dilapidated 63-acre farm just outside of Emmaus, Rodale began experimenting in small plots on how different approaches to planting and fertilizing affected the yield and quality of the food that grew. What has become more conventional knowledge these days, and what Rodale found, is that growing food organically without the introduction of chemicals saw similar yields and a wealth of other benefits to the soil, surrounding ecological systems, water tables and the consumer.

Rodale’s mission soon turned from simply organic farming practices to a broader healthy lifestyle when in 1942 he launched Organic Farming and Gardening magazine, which would later become Organic Gardening. It began a publishing business that would go on to include Prevention, Runner’s World, Men’s Health and Bicycling magazines, all with a healthy lifestyle bent.

Robert Rodale would succeed his father in running the family’s various companies; and in addition to his business acumen he was an American Olympian and part of the 1968 U.S. team in skeet shooting. His interest in the bicycle was born of his experience at the Olympics in Mexico City and upon his return to Pennsylvania that interest germinated into the construction of an Olympic-caliber velodrome in nearby Trexlertown that he promptly donated to the local parks program.

These days it’s known as the Valley Preferred Cycling Center, but it will always be T-Town to those who know it. The velodrome has developed and launched the cycling careers of Olympians and professional riders alike and is a giant part of the cycling culture that persists here. Hosting UCI track events, developmental leagues and a general atmosphere of healthy competition and good clean fun from the track to the beer garden. Eddy Merckx and Patrick Sercu rode the T-Town velodrome in 1978 as guests of the Rodales. They stayed on the family’s property in Emmaus and were chauffeured around by then 16-year-old Maria Rodale in her mother’s powder-blue Cutlass with white interior.

The Rodale Institute has moved from the family farmhouse to a nearly 350-acre farm in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where the farm and gravel roads offer some spectacular riding. The Rodales have gone on to become one of the single largest advocates and drivers of organic farming in the United States. The entire premise of their on-site operation is to run side-by-side tests growing organic produce next to produce grown “conventionally” to let the results make the case for the benefits, as well as the urgency and necessity for an organic approach to agriculture on a large scale.

For the average American farmer, adopting organic farming has a positive impact on the produce they grow, the soil on their land where they grow it and, perhaps most compelling, their own economic bottom line. Organic certification allows farmers to charge a premium for the food that they bring to market. In today’s economy it is likely the only way that small farms survive into the next generation.

While many of us are aware of what we’re consuming and the detriments that can be caused by putting produce grown with pesticides in our body, there’s a fundamental environmental stewardship at stake; and the Rodale Institute has moved from a focus on simply organic to exploring the benefits of regenerative organic agriculture. The approach is a whole-system farming method, focusing on the cultivation and maintenance of healthy soils, a series of humane considerations for livestock (from the ability to graze freely to how they are fed and sheltered), and the safety, treatment and compensation for the people who work on the farm.

From an urgency point of view and on a global scale, topsoil degradation is an issue on par and tied up with climate change. Most scientists agree that on our current path all the world’s fertile topsoil will be degraded and barren within 60 years. Erosion and deforestation are certainly culprits, but intensive, chemically modified farming on an industrial scale is the major reason for the planet’s soil degradation.

The folks at the Rodale Institute have gone beyond making the case for these approaches on their farms and are aggressively working with other farmers and state legislators to help them understand and adopt regenerative farming practices. Rodale has more than 70 years of organic farming experience and its mission is to impart the lessons learned to farmers all over the world. Right now, more than half of organic produce consumed in the United States is imported, whether it’s corn from Turkey or the U.K., or soybeans from India.

One of the biggest hurdles for farmers converting from conventional to organic farming is the three-year transitional period between using chemical inputs on your farm and being able to be certified organic. Navigating that period and the sense of uncertainty can be intimidating and makes many farmers hesitant to take the steps necessary to move toward organic. In 2020 the state of Pennsylvania became the first in the nation to pass a farm bill at the state level. There were major focuses of the legislation at increasing organic agriculture in Pennsylvania and Rodale was a major partner with the state, creating a consulting service at the Rodale Institute to assist farmers in the transition. Funding in the bill made it free to Pennsylvania farmers, and Rodale promised Governor Tom Wolfe that they could get 10,000 acres into transition within the first year.

In that inaugural year Rodale was instead able to get 40,000 acres of Pennsylvania farmland into organic transition. It’s able to help committed farmers navigate everything from changing out equipment, record keeping and navigating weed control to gaining access to new markets and benchmarking soil samples—all of which makes the process less overwhelming. Every farmer who undergoes transition will see the value of their land and produce increase, with their soils, workers and families set up for healthier futures.

The journey toward a sustainable food model in the United States still has miles to go, but its first and most important pedal strokes were turned over in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, in one of America’s cycling culture epicenters.

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