Edible Travel: The Cape Cod Road Trip
Join us on our summer road trip to Cape Cod as we explore the food and culture in some of the 15 towns that make up the Cape. Our guest and guide is Dianne Langeland, who along with her husband D...
Meet Our Publishers: Dianne and Doug Langeland of Edible Cape Cod
Before you started edible Cape Cod, what were you doing professionally?
Before Doug and I started edible Cape Cod, I was the Senior Director of a corporate philanthropic foundation, which I help create in early 2001 for BEA (now part of Oracle), where I had been a marketing executive for many years. I loved the job and my colleagues, but the foundation was in maintenance mode and I was getting restless for a new challenge. Doug was a pharmaceutical executive who was ready for a lifestyle change as well.
What inspired you to start edible Cape Cod?
We read about edible Ojai in the 2004 Saveur 100 (they were number 22 under the headline “Newsletter Concept We Wish Would Crop Up Everywhere”) and thought, that would be a great thing to do for Cape Cod. We had a second home there and were looking for a way to make it our full-time residence. Edible Ojai publishers, Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian, received such an overwhelming response to that small mention in Saveur that they decided to start a company to help others start their own edible publications. Of the 100+ inquiries they received from around the world, we were lucky enough to be selected to be their pilot. In May 2004, Carole and Tracey drove cross country with an SUV packed to the gills with cameras, computers, printers, two cases of wine, and a large dog, and spent two weeks driving up and down the Cape with us, taking photos, interviewing subjects and writing stories. Less than two months later we held our first issue in our hands. It takes my breath away to think about how quickly we went from zero to 60, but we’ve never looked back.
What has surprised you the most about Cape Cod's food culture?
Frankly, when we started publishing edible Cape Cod, we were concerned that after we wrote about cranberries and cod we would be out of content. When we started publishing there was one farmers’ market on the Cape and we had to go “over the bridge” to pick up our weekly CSA share. This was before the local food scene really took hold, and boy has it evolved, both here and nationally since then. Twelve years later, there are farmers’ markets every day on the Cape. There are CSAs, CSFs and even a meat-and-cheese subscription program. A lot of new farms have cropped up—we even have cows, something I would have sworn we would never have again on the Cape. We have so many more food and beverage artisans and chefs who are passionate about featuring local foods as often as possible, with more coming on the scene all the time. What a difference a dozen years has made! And I’m fairly confident we’ve only written about cranberries once.
Who's your dream interview -- the one person you'd love to spend the day with and feature them in the magazine?
I would love to interview Jacques Pépin. We’ve been big fans of his since his first television series on PBS. Doug was fortunate enough to have been taught by Pépin when he attended the La Technique program at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan in 2000. Years later I met Pépin at a book signing and told him about the connection. He was so excited to hear that Doug was part of the edible family, as Pépin had met Tracey Ryder at some culinary event and was a big fan. Love his passion, his talent (both in the kitchen and with a paint brush), his humble, warm personality.
Tell us one of your all-time favorite stories you've published in edible Cape Cod.
One of my all-time favorite stories is “The Vines that Bind” by edible Cape Cod Senior Contributing Editor Tom Dott, about an annual wine-making ritual behind a candy store on Main Street, Hyannis. It was one of Tom’s first articles for us, and he won an EDDY Award for it in 2008 (our first for editorial). I just reread it and it still cracks me up.
Edible Travel: The Cape Cod Road Trip
Join us on our summer road trip to Cape Cod as we explore the food and culture in some of the 15 towns that make up the...
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