She envisions a new tourism built around food
She is among the wave of corporate émigrés enriching the Cape. Along with her husband, Dianne Langeland has joined thousands of 45- to 65-year-olds who are saying “enough” to big-business stress and “yes” to quality of life.
She has traded in highway commutes, transcontinental flights and cell phone calls at 10 p.m. for a new journey that is part self-exploration, part entrepreneurial adventure and part legacy-building for a community she loves.
The community is Cape food – cooking it, writing about it, talking about it. It is constructing a new philosophy surrounding Cape edibles that combines a publication, farmers’ markets and partnerships with chambers and colleges. It encompasses a vision that strives to redefine Cape tourism to include gastronomy in ways familiar to Tuscany and Southern France, but with a regional twist that acknowledges aquaculture and hydroponics.
With their new magazine, Edible Cape Cod, Langeland and husband Doug are rapidly becoming leading promoters and organizers for a food economy they believe can coalesce around a common platform and shared mission – and emerge as a world-class culinary destination.
Their common dream has redefined their marriage. It had been a life often separated by jobs on separate coasts, she in California for high-tech companies like BEA Systems, he in New Jersey’s pharmaceutical industry. Even when they finally consolidated on the East Coast, Langeland’s marketing job had her flying to California all the time.
They had lived peripatetic, often separate, lives ever since they married in Cambridge and had their honeymoon on the Cape Right after they got married, Doug moved to Ithaca, New York, for graduate school and Dianne moved to Washington, D.C. for a job relocation.
“Over all these years, we collected lots of frequent flyer miles and stock options, but did not cultivate a great relationship,” she said. Eventually, as they headed toward age 50, burnout replaced ambition.
With their financial future secure, the Langelands did what so many on the Cape have done – especially in the wake of 9/11. They quit, in order to take stock of their lives and priorities, prepared to live on savings with no income.
Doug took a sabbatical to enroll in the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan. They bought an apartment on Hanover Street, smack in the middle of Boston’s mecca for Italian cuisine.
Food was forming as their organizing principle, but it wasn’t until 2004 that they saw a small item in Saveur magazine about a new publishing enterprise out of Ojai, California, called Edible Communities that spotlights growers, producers, restaurateurs, bakers and other food-related businesses.
Doug wrote a heartfelt letter to founders Tracey Ryder and Carol Topalian, who not only liked the idea of a Cape destination, but drove cross-country with their printers and cameras to help the Langelands set up the franchise, print the first edition and build their Web site.
“At that time, they really hadn’t thought of expanding their enterprise,” Langeland recalled. “But they were intrigued by Doug’s letter – especially since one of the founders had come to the Cape as child.”
In two years, the Langelands have published 12 issues of Edible Cape Cod from their Cummaquid home. Contributions come from a half-dozen people, including Chelsea Vivian, who moved here from Ojai; Andrea Seddon, who works full time for the Barnstable Land Trust; and Tracy Anderson, co-owner of the Wine List in Hyannis.
After years when they could go a whole month without seeing each other, the Langelands marvel at how well they are working as partners. “Of course, I did wonder how it would play out working together,” Langeland said. “He is very high-powered, but my strengths are different. He is the financial type; I am marketing. He has surprised me with his edits of my stuff. We edit each other.”
Meanwhile, Edible Communities has expanded to 23 other locations, from Boston to Brooklyn. Ryder and Topalian require the Langelands to publish four times a year with a 55 percent editorial ratio. “What the founders didn’t realize at the time was that within two years, they would have circulation among more than 20 magazines that equals the third largest distribution of a food publication in the country,” said Langeland.
More than a magazine, a community
“Really, this is a labor of love. There’s not a lot of revenue associated with Edible Cape Cod. Advertisers are small businesses. We actually are thinking of making it a nonprofit organization,” Langeland said, only weeks after the Hyannis Area Chamber of Commerce presented the Langelands with its new-business-of-the-year award (along with Cape Business Publishing).
“So why are we doing it? We did the corporate thing. We did the hard work, and we want to enjoy our lives,” she said. “But more than that, we want to transform our lives. We lived in Chatham, New Jersey, for 12 years. We did not know a soul. We did not know our neighbors until 9/11.”
Chatham was among a number of wealthy suburban New York communities devastated by the World Trade Center tragedy, with hundreds of cars abandoned at train stations when their owners never returned home.
“I had been on Flight 93 the week before,” she recalled with a shiver.
The Langelands realized they had the financial security to “make a difference where we want to live.”
It could be the mantra for thousands of similar transplants here.
While they publish a magazine, Langeland uses the word “community” to describe both their business and their personal mission.
Their publication proves a lymph system for the community. It is a quarterly presence that builds a common platform for thousands of Cape Codders connected to the diverse food industry. Inevitably, Edible Cape Cod can prove to be a worldwide marketing magnet – especially with its Internet counterpart, www.ediblecapecod.com.
That community-building mission has taken on real roots with two initiatives. One is partnering with the Hyannis Main Street Business Improvement District to develop a downtown farmer’s market. The other is working with Jim Miller, director of Cape Cod Community College’s Hospitality Institute, and the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce to found the Cape Land and Sea Harvest.
“It was pulled together in only three months,” Langeland said about the three-day event occurring last fall across multiple Cape venues and involving scores of restaurants and food establishments from Falmouth to Provincetown.
These individual events are all part of an emerging vision shared by many in the Cape food establishment, especially the Langelands: There’s a new reason for tourists to visit here.
And the new culinary tourist is not bound by the summer season. Even in the winter, there are lures such as bed and breakfast cookie tours, chowder contests, cooking cooperatives, wine tasting experiences, cooking classes presented by local chefs and even the Osterville Chocolate Fest.
“The Cape is known for its food and fresh products, from fish to native species. When you travel to Italy, you can actually go to an olive oil ranch and vineyards. When people break bread together, they share more than the food. That should be our strategy here,” said Langeland.
When she attended a Destination New England event last year with the Hyannis Area Chamber of Commerce, many Europeans asked if there were food tours available on the Cape. They wanted to go out with oyster fishermen and lobster trappers.
Langeland points to cranberry bogs, fish piers, vineyards, herb farms and new ventures such as Cape Cod Beer, Nantucket Wild Gourmet and Smokehouse in Chatham and Kayak Cookies.
“Actually, we are hoping to develop a food itinerary for tourists. We don’t want to own it, however. I don’t want to work that hard,” she laughed.
“We are trying to keep raising the bar. First there was the magazine. Then, the farmer’s market. Now, it’s on to culinary tourism. This year, we will work to brand Cape Cod food, which will include stickers that can easily identify which products are grown right here.” The Langelands are working on this initiative with local establishments, such as Ring Brothers and Roche Bros. markets.
“We have so much going for us” on the Cape, said Langeland. “We just have to learn how to take advantage of it.”
Originally published in the March/April 2007 issue of Cape Cod.
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