Evil will always triumph because good is dumb

Okay, admittedly I've been looking for an excuse to use one of my favorite lines from "Spaceballs" for some time. ("Bikeable feast: the flame thrower" was too hard to work in. Maybe "Bikeable feast: the beercan stove." Kind of catchy, isn't it? Okay, back on point....) Well, yesterday as I passed a Mobil gas station, a Walmart, and a McDonalds crossing the border into Arizona, the opportunity to ruminate on the line in a blog posting presented itself....

There are a few empires that some liberals who will remain nameless might consider pure evil: Cargill, Monsanto, the pharmaceutical industry, ExxonMobil. Some might propose that these profit-driven, to-hell-with-humanity-and-the-planet businesses have no redeeming qualities. I am not addressing those particular industries, but a few who inhabit the next tier down: Starbucks, McDonalds, Walmart. These are corporations that have been crushing local communities for at least the past decade. They are crumbling, but not quickly enough for my taste. (Oops. I'm one of those liberals.) And yet -- and yet! -- they possess a few qualities that I have found to be helpful along my current journey. (Hey, when I'm biking through the desert -- food desert and otherwise -- I'm forced to make a little lemonade from the lemons I'm presented with. Mmm, fresh, cold lemonade.)

Starbucks may have squeezed most mom and pop java joints out of business in hundreds of towns across the country, spread abroad and desecrated the Forbidden City with the construction of a coffee shop within its walls (I almost cried when I saw this on a visit to Beijing back in 2002; I would not have deigned to sip a latte there for all the tea in...nevermind). The shops sell pretty pricey coffee, very little of which is fair trade (and with the amount of coffee the collective shops sell they have the potential to be a major player in reforming the coffee industry if they went strictly the fair trade route, but alas, no such luck), and go through disposable cups like nobody's business. However, they do have dependably nice bathrooms, free wifi, and a decent $1.50 espresso that one can sip very slowly while waiting for rainstorm #3 of the day to pass. And they don't seem to care how many packets of raw sugar and napkins I stuff into my pockets.

McDonalds may be -- with support from KFC, Taco Bell, and the rest of the fast food giants -- driving our country toward even more atrocious rates of obesity, high cholesterol, and diabetes, but the folks working at these fast food stops will fill up your water bottles for free and I'll be damned if they don't have clean bathrooms. In fact, I recall reading in one of my Lonely Planet travel guides a few years back that around the globe McDonalds has consistently clean bathrooms. I would wash my hair in those sinks. (In fact, I have.) I'm not sure I'd walk around barefoot in there, though.

And finally, perhaps the most notorious of all is Walmart. Fair wages and benefits for employees have been points of contention in recent years, and they may only have carried one single organic food item in the entire Parker, AZ store (a 16 ounce tub of Stoneyfield Farm vanilla yoghurt) in spite of all the press about the chain carrying organic products, but it's also a place where one can buy clean underwear (socks and underwear are where I draw the line for thrift store shopping) and camp in the parking lot for free (I just learned this the other day). I saw a number of RVs in the lot yesterday afternoon but I still had another 30 miles to bike so I kept going. (As for the underwear, I was desperate. Three days left until I would get to Aunt Cami's house with the blessed washer-dryer and the repeated handwashing of undergarments just wasn't cutting it in the desert. At $7.50 for a 3-pack, I'm hardly holding up the Walmart empire. Even so, perhaps I should do a little penance. Ash Wednesday is tomorrow....)

I'm not endorsing these groups. Hardly. But there are ways to use the fringe benefits the corporate giants offer as we spend the majority of our dollars elsewhere -- at local coffee shops, restaurants, farmers' markets, and food co-ops. Ha! Take that! Good will eventually triumph... and in the meantime I've got a handful of sugar packets to sweeten my lemonade.

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Always in season

A few days after my arrival in Seattle, Pam treated me to Sunday brunch at one of her favorite neighborhood haunts, A Caprice Kitchen. We enjoyed a fabulous meal, but I was enamored with more than just the charming ambiance and the inventive vittles. When I turned over the menu, there was a note from the chef stating her commitment to seasonal, local foods and a listing of each ingredient next to the farm, bakery, or dairy it came from. A woman after my own heart. I had to know more. I left a cookmark with our waitress and was just elated when chef Anne Catherine called to invite me for a chat.

Ollie and I returned on Tuesday morning as Anne was getting things set up to accept deliveries from a number of local farms. Unpretentious and welcoming, she offered me a seat and a glass of local cider and in between periodically signing for deliveries shared a bit about how she came to run this small, all-local (with the exception of perhaps the salt and breakfast tea) eatery. Her background in cooking comes from a lifelong passion for food, years of working on ships as a chef, later attending the highly-esteemed Le Cordon Bleu cooking institute. She hadn't intended to open a restaurant when she came to Seattle, she admitted, but was looking for a space with a commercial kitchen to teach cooking classes and host regular, seasonal group meals. It just kind of happened.

As we continued talking, I admitted to my fascination with the direct link between the kitchen and local producers. I had even sought out a few of the farms listed on the menu at the Ballard farmers' market after leaving the restaurant, and a few of the vendors mentioned that some of their customers had discovered the products via Anne's menus. (She seemed genuinely excited to hear this.) When I asked how she selected producers, I learned that the locavore had established relationships with growers at the farmers' markets over many months, first doing her personal shopping there and then later sourcing ingredients for the professional kitchen. Because of her fierce devotion to local ingredients -- "Why would I use blood oranges from California when apples and pears are in season right here?" -- she's developing a reputation among local producers who are now seeking her out to feature their local veggies, wines, and more. While she tries out a new supplier now and then, Anne's loyalty to the farms who supply her all year long are the backbone of her operation. As these partnerships have flourished, she strives to work with what the farms have available. Because of her steady support farmers often ask if there's anything she would like them to grow. "No," she insists, "Grow what you want and I will cook it." Much like CSA members are given a box of "whatever the farm has" each week, the Caprice Kitchen may well be the truest iteration of an RSA I have encountered.

Chef Anne Catherine may be one of the few people I have met in my life who loves food as much as I do -- she relishes opportunities to experiment with fresh ingredients, cook up a storm, and share it with people. Even on her rare days off she can be found foraging for wild mushrooms or visiting farms. (She had just gone searching for chantrelles the day before I stopped in. Oh, if only I had known I would have tried to talk her into taking me along: I'm dying to go mushrooming!) The business, even now as the restaurant is about to celebrate its one-year anniversary on Thanksgiving, is more about reconnecting people with delicious, in-season food and supporting local growers than turning a profit. (The operation does make enough to cover its costs, so I'm hopeful it will be around for a long time.) I would be lying if I didn't confess that a small part of me kind of wants to linger in Seattle a bit longer to see what will be on the menu next week....

Farm to four-top

I've been hearing about CSAs -- Community Supported Agriculture -- for quite some time. Some years ago I recall my friend Yochi and I sitting on his living room floor discussing whether or not it made sense for us to split a CSA share from one of the few options in the DC area. (This was years before the Washington Post published a convenient list of CSAs in the area and back when I had a refrigerator. Ah, memories.) These days there are thousands of CSAs all around the country. It's exciting to see individuals, couples, groups of friends, and families making the decision to directly support their local farms by purchasing a share. But how about larger buyers like restaurants, that could really help boost the local farm economy by guaranteeing a market for small producers? Is it even possible to run an eatery that entirely (or even mostly) sources its ingredients locally? Well, it turns out the answer is yes. Enter, the RSA -- Restaurant Supported Agriculture.

In Chicago, I remember chatting with Derrick, of the scrumptious Lula Cafe, and learning of periodic chef visits to local farms, including the urban City Farm, and regular scouring of the city's many farmers' markets for seasonal ingredients. But the first time I heard the term "RSA" was when I was up to my elbows in bike grease from changing a flat tire and happened to walk into Julie's office where she was meeting with chef and local food advocate Dave Swanson in Milwaukee. The two were in the middle of a meeting (and, as I said, I was covered in grease) so I didn't chat for long, but the brief explanation I got from Dave was enough to inspire me to learn more about the farm-to-restaurant connection. The Milwaukee-based program fosters connections between farmers and chefs, and Dave helps interested restaurants work out the financial and logistical pieces of the puzzle. But there are also a growing number of bistrots who are independently working to source their food locally. As I've made my way westward, when I am fortunate enough to find a place that isn't too cost prohibitive for me to splurge on a meal (or, on occasion, be treated to one), I've been doing my best to learn how innovative restauranteurs connect with local growers. There are some common challenges among restaurants, but also viable models for success. In coming posts, I'll be looking into some of the innovative farm-to-table connections I've discovered along the way....

Local yokels

My friend Sheffy brings up a good point, and it's something I've been trying to work out for myself for some time: what does it mean to eat locally? Here are some of the explanations I've encountered....

Geographical

When I went through Ithaca, NY, a few months back, the local farmers' market had a requirement that farmers could only sell things they grew themselves, and there was a 50 mile radius from the market within which the farms needed to exist. At the Seward Co-op in Minneapolis, MN, some items in the produce section with 'local' tags listed not only the farm and town but also the number of miles the food had traveled. In my quick survey, most of these were under 50 miles. (In case you're wondering, the items from California, Hawaii, and Chile did not have mileage listings.) In a chapter of "Deep Economy," Bill McKibben attempts to 'eat locally' for one year as an experiment. The criteria were largely geographical in nature: he tried to purchase and consume seasonal foods from Vermont for an entire year. Barbara Kingsolver, in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," attempts a similar feat in her year of growing (or buying within a short drive -- 10 miles, was it?) food for her family. Distance that the food travels from its origin (generally under 150 miles) seems to be the focus of 'locavore challenges' around the country.

Philosophical

A number of farmers I spoke with explained that 'local' is a term that is used as shorthand for a set of values, much like 'organic' as a category used to have certain associations back in the day. Like 'organic,' what defines something as 'local' varies depending on the values held by the person you ask. (What 'organic' actually means technically, since the USDA has established a checklist, is a far cry from the Back to the Land organic farming philosophy of the 60s. Some of the early principles have fallen to the wayside with the rise of what Michael Pollan calls 'industrial organic' -- operations that don't use lab-manufactured chemicals or seeds in their fields but who do not espouse the focus on land stewardship, natural resource conservation, or seasonal polycultures that the early organic food movement advocated.) 'Local' actually seems to be more about knowing how your food is grown -- having a relationship with the producer -- and eating seasonally (which implies that the food is seasonal where, or near where, you are living, so it's also still somewhat linked to geography).

Economic

There is a commonly held understanding that the food money spent within a local community largely stays within that community, changing hands multiple times to support a number of small businesses. (Whether 'community' means the village, the township, the region, the state, the country... it depends on who you ask.) I am not against a global economy, mind you -- some of my favorite wines are from South Africa, France, and Australia; I buy Italian olive oil and balsamic vinegar -- but I want the majority of my food dollars to go into the pockets of the hardworking farmers in my area. Not giant food processing conglomerates. Not Walmart.

Thus, in my mind, what it means to be 'local' is partly geographical, partly philosophical, partly economic in nature. These are fluid categories, interconnected and complementary like a functional ecosystem. But I don't claim anything close to the final word on this. And so, as the blog readership now appears to extend beyond my parents and former students, I'll stop here and pose the question: what do *you* think it means to buy and eat locally?


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The carnivore's dilemma

One of my dad's greatest fears is that I'll become a vegetarian again.

There is a precedent for this: when I was 15, I stopped eating meat one day and didn't touch it for five years. (Much to my mother's chagrin. She thought I was just trying to be difficult. I was a teenager, after all. Meanwhile, dad would try to sneak it into things: anchovy paste in the rattitoille, chicken broth in the rice. I would have none of it. Stubborn? A bit.) I had decided, after much deliberation, and being around a best friend who had been a vegetarian (and for a brief period, a vegan...until I brought her back to the dairy dark side with a pint of Phish Food) for years, that I could enjoy a perfectly healthy diet without an animal's life being claimed to feed me. The decision to stop eating meat came about because it made sense for me at the time. I could not come to terms with the process of meat production for food. I couldn't accept what I knew of the way the animals lived and died.

I started eating fish on occasion my last year of college, and about a year later was eating red meat again. The change was born of necessity: I had joined AmeriCorps, where the combination of a collective food budget (calculated at the local poverty line) and physically intense projects like 10-hour days of building hiking trails and houses as we trained as forest firefighters meant that I moved from eating cheese and tomato sandwiches to devouring anything that wasn't nailed down. I needed the calories.

It's been about a decade since I started eating meat again. I don't cook much of it, but I do eat it. And if I do say so, I make a pretty mean lamb curry (with dried fruit, cinnamon, and rose petals). When I buy meat or order it for dinner, I ask a lot of questions. I want to know as much as I can about the life that the animal led on its way to my plate. Was it free to roam around and fulfill its animal nature -- grazing, rolling in the mud, drinking fresh water, lounging in the sun? Did it experience a humane death? If I wanted to, could I meet my meat and see how it's raised?

Following a delightful potato pancake brunch at the couple's inn earlier today, I had the opportunity to learn about Fountain Prairie Farm's grass-fed beef operation from the man himself, John Priske, and meet the herd. John told me about the challenges of raising the heritage breed in Wisconsin: comparatively few buyers are patient enough to wait for the animals to get to an appropriate age and weight, and generally only chefs able to appreciate the superior quality of the meat are willing to pay a fair price for it. Because the Madison area has a number of restaurants and events focused on local, sustainably-raised food, the farm does okay. But it's not just about financial sustainability. It's about respecting life and treating the land and animals the right way. John believes in his animals living full lives, well beyond the average lifespan of other breeds of beef cattle, and because of this he is unable to justify selling animals too young, especially veal calves -- "their lives are cut too short" -- even in the face of a market that generally treats cattle as nothing more than animals to fatten up as quickly and cheaply as possible for our fast food nation.

I've had some of the meat raised on the Priskes' farm -- marinated short ribs at the Sassy Cow event yesterday; burgers at the UW Slow Food dinner tonight -- and it is superb. I suspect I will continue to grapple with eating meat, but I do feel pretty strongly that if I am to continue to do so, I want it to be raised by people like John.


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Picnic update

So in just a few hours (too few, I think at times, and a moment later think too many -- that's the adrenaline, I suspect) the bikeable feast will begin!

For those who are thinking of meeting us at the picnic site around lunchtime -- noon-ish -- let's meet at the Great Falls Tavern Visitors Center (between locks 19 and 20), just shy of mile marker 15 on the C&O tow path. There looks to be a car entrance near Rte 189 (Falls Road). It may be a bit later, depending on how quickly I move with all of this stuff and how my sacrifice to the eggbeater pedal gods works out. What? You can't tell me I have to leave my complete collection of antique anvils and lead bricks behind.... Sure, they add a little weight, but next to the cooking stuff I have with me, they seem to take up less space. (How do I pack for a year on a bike, you ask? Many, many times. Luckily the dancing shoes still made the cut.)

I'm just doing a few final adjustments on Ollie now. She's looking good. Steady. Confident.

See you cyclists at Thompson's boat house around 9, and the rest of you at Great Falls!
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Critical mass

These days everybody seems to be talking about buying -- even growing -- food locally and sustainably. For awhile I thought this might be just because of the people I tend to hang out with, but I'm not so sure any more. I got into a fairly detailed discussion at the bank the other day with one of the account managers who was telling me about the vermiculture his family has been practicing for decades on their farm in Cali, his home town in Colombia. (Way more interesting than discussing my checking account, to be sure.) This chat simply would not have happened a year ago.

I was just this morning catching up on a backlog of articles and blog postings I have been meaning to read. (The fact that there is such a plethora of writing out there on sustainable food is exciting in itself.) There was a long piece in the New York Times Business section that lauded the progress that the organic food movement has made in recent years, but implied an impending Congressional smackdown of the progressive food consciousness generated by the Obamas and Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack. (I'm intrigued that the 3-page article appeared in the Business section rather than, say, the weekend magazine. Telling, I think.) An article reprinted on the Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles site (one of my favorites these days) posits that change is coming, but slowly. The key seems to be making this a more broadly supported social movement, rather than a foodie fad. And it needs politically savvy leaders. In a critique of the NYT piece, Tom Laskawy, a Grist guest blogger, seemed to concur. He offered cautious hope. My [albeit ham handed] summary of his argument: Things are moving in the right direction. The great failing of the NYT article was the way it seemed to minimize the growing collaboration between the sustainable ag, fair trade, international development, climate change, public health, nutrition, and food safety folks. People are beginning to buy into the idea that all of these things are related and that they need to be addressed. Food is the linchpin. We're moving toward a tipping point. Soon, policymakers will have to start listening in earnest.

Agribusiness is a tough nut to crack. What can we do? Grow things. Cook things. Support responsible producers of our food. Talk to people about it. (Am I sounding like a broken record here?)

One of the more inventive variations on eating local, in my humble opinion, comes out of San Francisco: a Community Supported Forage (CSF) box. It riffs off of the idea of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangement -- a chunk of cash up front for a supply of whatever is locally harvested over a number of weeks. They're playing my song. Wild mushrooms? Really?? I've been too nervous to try mushroom foraging on my own, due to my fear of inadvertent self-poisoning. (I had some crazy Danish friends back when I lived in Mexico who used to go all the time. They admitted to having 2 designated mushroom taste testers -- human canaries, if you will -- with them on each fungus hunt. I wonder if I was being recruited as one of these.) Ah, but if someone who knew what they were doing would supply me with seasonal fiddleheads, morels, and wild blueberries -- or even let me tag along -- well, that sounds divine.

Finally, I've been in conversation in recent weeks with Zeke of Washington's Green Grocer, who has always marketed an organic produce box, and now is offering artisanal breads and cheeses (yum!). With all of the interest in local produce these days -- if the tripling of crowds at the Dupont farmers market on Sundays is any indication -- I've been pestering him to offer a "local produce" box, a subset of the weekly organic box along the lines of the $29 "dogma box" now available in the Boston area. (Ah, my people.) This may mean some weeks of stockpiled potatoes, apples, and rutabaga, but you can always do the "will call" rather than the "weekly" box. Or get creative with your recipes. Is the interest out there? I think it is.

Do the right thing

I've been having a lot of opportunities to feed some of my favorite people lately, at least a few each week: wine dinners, soup dinners, impromptu dinners, the occasional weekend brunch. (These are above and beyond the weekly dinners with my buddy Mitch, who not only lets me take over his kitchen but also has a working TV and doesn't make fun of me too much when I urge my favorite characters in Lost not to listen to Ben! He's not to be trusted! Oh. Sorry about that, I get excited.) I have been making an effort to experiment with as much local, seasonal, organic produce as I can these days. I feel proud to be supporting local producers, but beyond that I love the challenge: my days are filled with roasting beets, sauteeing sunchokes, inventing new ways to incorporate potatoes into, well, whatever I can (there are so many potatoes, in fact, that I have sometimes secretly snuck them into friends' handbags and backpacks), baking apples, braising rainbow chard, and figuring out what to do with things I had never cooked before, like rutabaga (I like roasting these with honey). It's like Iron Chef... without the fabulous cookware... or competition. (I win.)

A few of my recent dinner guests have apologized nervously, sometimes sheepishly, for having brought something that was not local/seasonal/organic (let's just call it "LSO" -- I'm feeling silly typing it out every time). It's prompted a number of interesting conversations, along with apologies from my side for giving the impression that any friend gracing my table with their presence -- or some food or beverage that they have been kind enough to contribute -- would be unwelcome. Goodness!

As much as possible, I have been trying to stay as close to LSO* as I can in my own cooking. It's not always possible. I mean, if I happen to have a bottle of good Armenian cognac around, I should use it, right? (It was a gift and I discovered that it is great to flambe with. I'd like to dispel any images of me guzzling it.) I also have a soft spot for lemons in my water. Sure, I buy lemon juice, but it's not the same. And I drink a lot of water, so I generally buy lemons by the bag. I make concessions. French wine, say, or coffee, coconut milk, almonds. When I deviate from my LSO model, I make the decision to do so deliberately, and I'm okay with that. (Incidentally, my cousin Sonia mentioned that she'd heard somewhere that, environmentally speaking, a bottle of French wine often has a smaller carbon footprint than a California one, since French wine is shipped rather than flown. I should look into this, though, and see if it might be the case for my favorite South American vintages as well. I love California wines, too. And Italian ones. And... well, I don't want to give the wrong impression so I will stop talking about wine here.)

I think the trick is something that I hear most often in the context of my yoga class: mindfulness. Basically, it means being aware of our thoughts and actions. Making the best choice for ourselves at the time, being gentle and forgiving with ourselves when our choice isn't ideal. Like when I need fresh lemons in my water. I'm not moving to Florida. (I do try to buy organic when I can, at least.)

*See how catchy it is? You read it first here, folks. Someone call the OED!