I wrote a Destination guide to Miami's startup scene for the July/August issue of Inc.
A vibrant immigrant entrepreneurial scene and a dash of the good life make Inc.'s No. 13 Surge City a hotbed for creativity.
Wet labs for biomedical startups, an emerging "elder-tech" scene, and a pipeline to Latin America are just a few of the reasons Miami is heating up as a destination for founders. If you have 24 hours in this Art Deco metropolis, here are the insiders to meet, up and coming neighborhoods to check out, and some insider tips on where to grab that watermelon cucumber margarita.
Startup Neighborhoods
Just eight miles from South Beach, office-tower-and-luxury-condo-plush Brickell is a financial hub-turned-startup magnet. "It's a little New York City," says Andrew Parker, CEO of elder-tech startup Papa, whose offices are headquartered in the neighborhood's WeWork.
Vibrant Wynwood marks the intersection of Miami's arts community and its tech scene. Galleries, cafés, craft breweries, and restaurants sit alongside coding boot camp Wyncode, Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) Miami, and co-working space Lab Miami.
With upgraded transportation options and the city's best new restaurants—NIU Kitchen, Alloy Bistro, and Soya & Pomodoro—Downtown has become a new draw for young companies. Startups including software firm Octopi are now sharing the area with cultural institutions like the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Red Flag
You can land seed and Series A funding here, but it can be hard to find growth-stage investors in South Florida, says Rebecca Danta, managing director at Miami Angels. And according to Brian Breslin, founder of tech entrepreneurship nonprofit Refresh Miami, one of the biggest challenges is finding and retaining talent: "A lot of our top-tier people leave and go to San Francisco because they can earn a much larger salary or because they want to put Facebook or Google on their résumé and build their pedigree."
Where to Talk Shop
One of the first third-wave coffee shops and roasters to open in Miami, Panther Coffee flaunts single-origin pour-overs, coffee cuppings, and founders and investors getting their caffeine fix in all of its five locations. Insider tip: Its Wynwood café is the buzziest.
Miami by the Numbers
$39.76 average direct leasing rate, per square foot, for office space in Miami-Dade County.
Source: CBRE MarketView Miami Office First Quarter 2019 report
The No. 1 U.S. metro area in percentage of immigrant entrepreneurs as of 2017.
Source: 2017 Kauffman Foundation Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs
40% growth for jobs in Miami-Dade County's tech sector from 2012 to 2018.
Source: Miami-Dade Beacon Council
Why bother working in Miami if you're not poolside at an Art Deco hotel with a watermelon cucumber margarita? Soho Beach House, the Miami Beach outpost of the London-based Soho House, is limited to members, their guests, and hotel guests, but you can pretend you're an insider at Cecconi's, the Italian courtyard-style restaurant on its ground floor.
The Players
The powerhouse duo behind Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) Miami and non-profit partner Venture Café Miami are Natalia Martinez-Kalinina and Leigh-Ann Buchanan. Buchanan, among other things, runs Venture Café's weekly gatherings for entrepreneurs and investors over an open bar and can't-miss programming. Martinez-Kalinina oversees CIC Miami, a co-working space for startups--including South Florida's only shared wet lab for biomedical startups--and runs its Latin American engagement program, which has agreements in five countries to bring investments to the city.
Felecia Hatcher is not only co-founder of Blacktech Week, an annual weeklong conference for minority tech entrepreneurs, and coding camp nonprofit Code Fever. She also runs A Space Called Tribe, a co-working space and urban innovation lab that serves black entrepreneurs in the Overtown neighborhood. Its venture-capitalist-in-residence program gives black entrepreneurs unprecedented access to VCs.
Companies to Watch
Papa provides seniors with "grandkids on demand"--vetted college students mostly in health care-related fields--to run errands or just hang out. Andrew Parker launched the app in 2018 and plans to expand beyond Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in early 2020.
Boatsetter co-founders Jaclyn Baumgarten and Andrew Sturner were Endeavor Miami Entrepreneurs of the Year in the tech category for their peer-to-peer boat-sharing platform, which operates in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and even the Andaman Sea near Thailand's Phuket Island.
In 2017, Olivia Ramos founded Deepblocks, which aims to master the art of closing a real estate development deal. Using A.I. and machine learning, it provides real-time analysis of financial and market data in combination with local building codes.
FRANZISKA BARCZYK
Recent Exits
Weston-based HR and payroll software firm Ultimate Software to a private equity group led by Hellman & Friedman, for $11 billion (2019).
Plantation-based construction software maker e-Builder to Trimble, for $500 million (2018).
Fort Lauderdale-based pet products provider Chewy to PetSmart, for $3.35 billion (2017).
Talent Pipeline
A digital and physical hub for the local tech scene, Refresh Miami hosts workshops and speakers for founders all over town. It's also a clearinghouse for jobs, startup news, and events--from Women in Miami Tech drinks to a Rise of the Rest pitch competition.
Founded by husband-and-wife team Johanna and Juha Mikkola in 2014, Wyncode was the area's first coding boot camp. It now has more than 700 grads--many with no previous computer-science background--who are working in over 300 tech companies, including local players like CareCloud, Magic Leap, and MDLive.
The first U.S. outpost of the global nonprofit accelerator-alternative, Endeavor Miami doesn't take equity and focuses on "scale-ups"--companies with the demonstrated business traction to deliver exponential growth--like edtech firm Nearpod.
It seems to me that many of the most creative cannabis ventures in my home town of Portland are run by women. I was pleased, then, to be asked by an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, UK to write this story on the female entrepreneurs who are rebranding cannabis businesses. (Think chic lifestyle boutiques rather than the bro culture that's so often been associated with this intoxicating plant.)
Since college, I've been a devoted Ani Difranco fan. If a CD were as delicate as a record, I would've worn away the grooves on Out of Range (1994) long ago. Some of her lyrics—so wise, so feminist, and so sexy—floor me to this day. I even introduced my great aunt Holly to her music. In the late '90s my sister and I took her to see Ani perform at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. I'm not sure what she thought, exactly, when she heard this small, fierce woman sing the lyrics to "Untouchable Face," but she looked momentarily shocked and then, a little giddy. (Holly was a song-writer and playwright, so I like to think a tiny part of her appreciated Ani, even though her use of the F-bomb to address a lover might have shocked Holly's refined sensibility.)
So...I was thrilled when my friend Jennifer Baumgardner asked me to review Ani's memoir for the Women's Review of Books. Here's the review, for your reading pleasure: Download DifrancoReview PDF
I wrote an insider's guide to Denver's start-up scene for the March/April issue of Inc. See here for the online version.
Many are drawn to Denver--Inc.'s No. 8 Surge City--for its laid-back, weed-friendly culture, which certainly doesn't stop with its plethora of cannabis startups. Here's everything you need to know about the city's entrepreneurial scene, from which investors to meet with to where to do Bend and Blaze yoga.
Hot Deal Spots
Entrepreneurs and investors take meetings at Denver Central Market, a warehouse-turned-gourmet food hall in the heart of the River North (RiNo) district, which flaunts a creamery, a butcher, a bakery, a fishmonger, and a wood-fired pizzeria. "It's slammed," says Tom Higley of early-stage accelerator 10.10.10, "but you can always find a seat."
The Commons on Champa, formed by a public-private partnership four years ago, is a hub for early-stage startups that provides free co-working space, with the option to rent out conference rooms and event space.
Cultivated Synergy is where cannapreneurs congregate. This lively co-working space in the RiNo district has communal workspaces, five private offices--occupants include a concentrates company and a payroll firm--and Bend and Blaze yoga. At night, it transforms into an event venue where even nonmembers can attend everything from beer tastings and bat mitzvahs to budtender-appreciation parties.
Neighborhoods
Tech execs and employees tend to work and live in bustling LoDo (Lower Downtown), given its proximity to co-working spaces CTRL Collective and two WeWorks, Facebook and Slack outposts, the commuter rail to the airport--and Kimbal Musk's restaurant, the Kitchen.
The RiNo Art District, formerly a manufacturing neighborhood, is home to design studios, architecture firms, art galleries, and startups, like online interior-design marketplace Havenly.
CBD (no, not that--the Central Business District) was once a neighborhood just for finance and energy stalwarts. Today, startups including Geospiza, Nanno, and Salt have colonized the area.
STATS
$27.02
Average cost per square foot of office space for the Denver metro area.
Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership
45
Number of co-working spaces in central Denver.
Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership
216
cannabis dispensaries and 272 indoor-grow locations reside in Denver.
Source: Excise and Licenses, City and County of Denver
Red Flags
The city has yet to see a unicorn. "We'll get seed and Series A funding, but then usually have to raise capital from the coasts," says Paul Foley, managing director at SmartCapital. When it comes to VC capital, Foley estimates that New York City gets 20 percent, Northern California gets 40 percent, and Denver gets a meager 0.6 percent. "So companies here exit earlier," he says. "You get faster, smaller exits."
The Players
Chris Onan, a co-founder of Galvanize, a Denver-based national coding school, is a strategy consultant-turned-venture capitalist who has invested in more than 200 companies. Onan can typically be found linking startups in the Denver-Boulder tech scene with talent or capital. "He's a superconnector," says Erik Mitisek, co-founder of Denver Startup Week. "He's our VC prince of the city."
Jenna Walker.CREDIT: Laura Murray
Jenna Walker was a professional photographer before co-founding online photo book Artifact Uprising. She sold her Denver-based company to VSCO in 2014, and recently became entrepreneur-in-residence of Techstars Sustainability in Partnership with the Nature Conservancy, which backs 10 entrepreneurs per year, like those behind Node, a Seattle-based company that makes eco prefab homes.
Erik Mitisek.CREDIT: Courtesy subject
Erik Mitisek, the chief innovation officer for Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and former CEO of the Colorado Technology Association, is indispensable when it comes to startups in this town. He co-founded Denver Startup Week, launched the Commons on Champa and the online booking agent Next Great Place, and is now president of financial software company IMAgine Analytics.
Brands to Watch
Jaclyn Fu and Lia Winograd launched Pepper, maker of bras for small-chested women, in 2017. "Most bra companies design for a single standard size: 36C," and then scale it up or down, says Fu. Pepper fixes the "cup gap."
If you're still searching for your ideal cannabis, order a genetic test from Green Genomix. The early-stage company, founded by Jackson Rowland, will send a DNA collection kit to analyze genetics like CB1 receptors, and then provide a report revealing which strain, consumption method, and ratio of CBD to THC is best for you.
Amy Baglan was on OkCupid and Match, but "it was such a sad experience," she says. An avid yogi with a regular meditation practice, in 2015 she launched MeetMindful, a dating app for the mindful-living crowd.
Founded by Bryan Leach in 2012, Ibotta makes a shopping app that allows people to earn cash back on everyday purchases. It's one of the largest consumer tech companies in Denver, with 500 employees.
CREDIT: Aaron Meshon
Talent Pipeline
University of Denver's Project X-ITE runs an entrepreneurship workshop series, an incubator, and an accelerator that has produced startups including Boobi Butter, which makes breast-care products and encourages women to get regular breast exams.
Accelerator and venture fund CanopyBoulder has invested in a slew of cannabis-related companies, including digital signage outfit GreenScreens and Würk, a payroll company.
Early-stage accelerator 10.10.10 invites 10 successful serial entrepreneurs to Denver to solve one of 10 "wicked problems" in 10 days. Graduates include Spout, maker of a device that can be used with a smartphone to analyze the levels of lead and other contaminants in a drop of water.
Recent Big Exits
$2 billion SendGrid, to Twilio (2018)
$1.68 billion ViaWest, to Peak 10 (2017)
$230 million Craftsy, to NBC Universal (2017)
Recently Funded Startups
Welltok, a health care software company, raised $75 million in 2018, bringing its total funding to a reported $251.7 million.
CyberGRX, a cyber-risk platform company, raised $30 million in 2018.
Galvanize, one of the largest coding schools in the United States, raised $32 million in 2018--bringing its total funding to more than $167 million--and then acquired San Francisco-based Hack Reactor.
Cathy Whims has been resurrecting the classic Italian Maialata celebration in the Willamette Valley for the past 7 years. I wrote about the colorful event—a festive celebration of food, community, and nose-to-tail eating—for Saveur.
When Dario Cecchini was a child, he looked forward to the day each year when the pig was butchered. "It was an ode to life, a moment of sacrifice," says Cecchini, the famed butcher from Antica Macelleria Cecchini in Panzano—in Italy's Chianti region. "We would take care of the animal for a whole year. They were part of the family. But then Carnevale would arrive. Carne is meat. So for us, it was a celebration of meat."
Cecchini is describing la maialata di carnevale, often shortened to maialata, the festival of the pig that is practiced in many parts of Italy, typically in the late winter or early spring, before Lent begins. This year, Cecchini celebrated his third maialata stateside near Portland, Oregon, where Italian-focused chef Cathy Whims hosts one each year for around 100 ticketholders at a nearby Willamette Valley winery.
Traditionally during maialata in Italy, family would arrive in the morning from far and wide to assist in the slaughter and butchering of a fattened pig. (Family members would help the host process a ready pig, and a week or two later, the host would help another relative do the same.) No part of the pig was wasted or is today: the entire animal, even its blood, is used in dishes. Some such as roasts or pastas are prepared and eaten that day—including crispy pork skins, uncured soppressata sausages (made with meat from the pig's head and feet), blood sausages, and porchetta. Other parts would be processed into long-lasting salami, pancetta, prosciutto, and other cured preparations, meant to last the better part of a year. Wine flows throughout the day as aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends labor in the kitchen. And at the end of the day, there is a huge celebratory feast for everyone who has helped prepare the meal.
"It was done anywhere where people are raising pigs, so that's practically everywhere in Italy," says Italian food expert Faith Willinger, author of Eating in Italy, Adventures of an Italian Food Lover, and Red, White & Greens: the Italian Way With Vegetables, though she adds that the name and culinary traditions are slightly different in each region. (In Sardinia, for example, porceddu, or suckling pig, is a primary focus of the celebration.) Daniele Vettorello, a bartender at Nostrana, an Italian restaurant in Portland, Oregon, grew up going to maialate in his village, San Giorgio di Lomellina (southwest of Milan in Lombardy), and still does. At his house, maialata results in friendly competitions over who makes the best salami, pancetta, and prosciutto—often judged by the ones leftover from the year prior. "The real maialata is more than a party," he told me, as we sat in Nostrana's bustling dining room with Whims, who is the chef-owner there. "You feed the whole family."
Whims first had her own experience while visiting a winery in Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia. She, her husband David West, and Willinger were staying at a winery, Le Vigne di Zamo, in Udine. “The winery had held a maialata and they had made this video pastiche of the photographs,” says Whims. “We got so excited about the idea. We thought, ‘How great would that be to do a version of it in Oregon?’”
When Whims returned to Portland, she contacted Rudy Marchesi at Montinore Estate. "I thought he'd be the perfect person because he's such a Renaissance man. He makes his own salami, cheese, and biodynamic wine, and has a beautiful winery." This past March was the seventh year of their Oregon maialata. Similar to how the celebration has evolved over time in Italy—you're no longer permitted to slaughter a pig in your home, for example—it evolves slightly each year in Oregon, too. Attendees drove up Montinore's long tree-lined driveway around noon. After coffee from local Caffe Umbria and a taste of burro del Chianti—lard whipped with Chianti spices, slathered on toasted ciabatta—everyone headed for the winery.
The first event of the day was a butchery demonstration with Dario Cecchini. As Cecchini broke the animal down into primal cuts, he gave an eloquent disquisition on the importance of the pig in Italian culture and the merits of being a butcher. As he spoke, transfixing the 100-plus gathered attendees, he would occasionally hold up a cut for all to see. "Prosciutto!" he said, at one point, holding up the pig's leg. Nostrana's in-house butcher Rob Roy and the Portland Meat Collective's Camas Davis broke down the remaining parts of the pig that Cecchini had begun
Montinore's wine flowed freely all day—the L'Orange, a blend of pinot gris and muscat ottonel, and the Rosso di Marchesi, a blend of teroldego, lagrein, pinot nero, sangiovese, and nebbiolo, were served with lunch. Chef Sarah Schneider and the team at the Nightwood Society—a female-owned private event space for farmers, butchers, and creatives in Portland—taught a sausage-making class. And Whims and Paolo Calamai of Portland's Florentine restaurant Burrasca taught everyone how to make gnocchi (Whims) and wild boar ragu (Calamai). The gnocchi and ragu were cooked and served as a snack. There was also a class on salting and preserving taught by traveling chefs Eric Bartle and Sarah Kundelius.
At the end of the day, guests migrated down to the wine cellar, which had been transformed into a romantic dining room with hanging lights, a candelabra, and an accordion player. Guests sat at four long tables, clinking wine glasses and sharing food family-style, some of which they spent the afternoon crafting. The first course, made by chef Rick Gencarelli of Lardo and Grasa, was an elevated pasta e fagioli, made with prosciutto, Ayers Creek borlotti beans, garganelli infused with Oregon black truffles, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and brown-butter gremolata—all topped with microplaned Perigord black truffles. The pasta was followed by a chicory salad with frisée, wild cress, and finely slivered blood oranges; Umbrian lentils with salsa verde; and roasted kale and sprouting broccoli from Gathering Together Farm. At last, the pork dishes arrived on platters: Tuscan-style porchetta (which Cecchini had prepared at the end of his demo), stinco di maiale (braised pork shank) prepared by Nostrana's Rob Roy, and pork-and-fennel sausages.
By the end of the day, the guests at Whims’ event had made new friends and connections, and bonded over this honoring of the pig and this coming together of family and community. For some, it even revived memories. A man from Sardinia approached Marchesi and shared: “Yesterday my wife said to me, ‘We’re going to this thing at a winery, and you’re gonna love it.’ I walked into the cellar tonight and I was instantly transported 6,000 miles to my mother’s kitchen.”
I got to profile Bertony Faustin, a fantastic winemaker here in Oregon, for the Makers issue of Food & Wine. See below for the full article.
When Bertony Faustin opened his Abbey Creek Vineyard tasting room in 2012, he’d regularly greet customers who’d then ask, “Who’s the winemaker?”
“When I’d say, ‘It’s me,’ they’d have this look of disbelief,” Faustin says. Faustin, who is black and hails from Brooklyn, knew he was the first recorded black winemaker in Oregon, but, he adds, he didn’t want to own it. At least, not until 2015, when Oregon was celebrating 50 years of winemaking. “All they were talking about was legacies, pedigree, the past,” says Faustin. “No one was talking about the future.”
So Faustin—with the help of his filmmaker friend Jerry Bell Jr.—decided to make a documentary about Oregon’s minority winemakers. The film, calledRed, White & Black: An Oregon Wine Story, tells the stories of Faustin and several of his winemaking colleagues. Among them are Jesus Guillén, the Mexican-American winemaker at White Rose Estate who passed away in November 2018, but in just his second year as head winemaker, earned a 96 from the Wine Advocate for his “whole cluster” Pinot Noir; Jarod Sleet, now the assistant winemaker at ROCO Winery, who in the film was a cellar assistant at Argyle; Remy Drabkin of Remy Wines in McMinnville, Oregon, who worked her first crush in 1995 (at Ponzi) and is gay; and André Mack, a former sommelier at Per Se who now makes wines in Oregon under the Maison Noir label. A disparate crew, they have in common a desire to reach non–wine drinkers by making wine more accessible and less pretentious than how it is often perceived; the film vividly documents their ambitions and achievements.
The trailer for Red, White & Black: an Oregon Wine Story
Faustin himself could be called a maverick winemaker, though not because he’s a minority. His 15-acre vineyard is located in the urban West Hills of Portland, Oregon. When he decided to take over his in-laws’ vineyard in 2007, he had never had so much as a sip of wine. “I was like, worst case: I’ll make raisins!” he says, laughing. Now, after 10 years of winemaking, he’s got a sure hand. He works with six grape varieties: Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, Albariño, and Gamay Noir. Several of these wines sell out quickly. But Faustin is not much interested in chatting about terroir or skin contact. Geeky wine talk along those lines, he says, alienates the very people he hopes to bring into the wine-drinking fold. Instead, at his tasting room, hip-hop and R & B are the backdrop, creating a mellow, comfortable atmosphere for drinking wine—one where everybody feels welcome.
Three to Try
To purchase Faustin’s wines or plan a trip to the tasting room, visit abbeycreekvineyard.com.
2017 Abbey Creek Chardonnay Best of Both ($25)
This rich Chardonnay has a honeysuckle scent and balanced acidity. A blend of oak and stainless, it can please both camps of Chardonnay drinkers.
2014 Abbey Creek Pinot Noir Cuvée ($45)
Faustin sources the fruit for this elegant Pinot from his top block of estate vines for a wine with hints of blackberries and a silky mouthfeel.
2017 Abbey Creek Gewürztraminer ($29)
Only available on tap at the Abbey Creek tasting room, this slightly effervescent Gewürztraminer is refreshingly bone-dry and reminiscent of cider.
I was happy to contribute a hotel review for Travel + Leisure's 2019 It List, the magazine's favorite new and radically redone hotels of the year.
A room at the Hoxton in Portland, Oregon
Walk into the Hoxton in Portland’s Chinatown and you’ll feel like you’ve entered a stylish co-working space. Creatives are tapping away at laptops or taking meetings in oversized lounge chairs. The Portland property, like all Hoxtons, has an open lobby — you’re welcome to hang out even if you’re not staying here. Other famed Hoxton policies are in place here, too: free wi-fi, street pricing for the mini bar, and a complimentary breakfast bag hung on your door each morning. Rooms have a Northwest-chic vibe with wood paneling, vintage furniture from local shops, and art from Portland’s Upfor Gallery. Best of all are the trio of in-house restaurants, all managed by renowned chef Joshua McFadden’s company Submarine Hospitality (known for Ava Gene’s and Tusk). On the ground floor is La Neta, a superb vegetable-forward Mexican restaurant helmed by chef Johnny Leach, who turns out unusual dishes like acorn squash with mole, roasted Brussels sprouts with pomegranate, sunflower seeds, and aged cotija, and kale enchiladas. Ascend to the rooftop for Mexican street food at Tope, a lively taqueria with agave-infused cocktails, a rooftop deck, and — for those cold, rainy evenings — a communal fireplace. In the basement is a sultry Chinese speakeasy that features Soju-and-Baiju-based cocktails mixed with teas and Asian ingredients (pickled ginger, yuzu, wasabi, etc.) and Chinese-American fare like beef and broccoli and chop suey. Doubles from $95.
My new favorite Brussels sprouts dish in all of Portland!
The nifty floor in the lobby coffee bar, an outpost of Aussie café Proud Mary.
The healthy corner-store chain, which is known for grab-and-go salads and kombucha slurpees on tap, is based in Portland, Oregon, and now has three outlets. It's also a rising star in the convenience store market, which in 2018 accounted for $138 billion in U.S. sales, according to research firm Nielsen. However, the company's founder says its good food aspirations extend far beyond dominating the local-foods-obsessed Pacific Northwest.
"In the future, I hope that every urban neighborhood has a Green Zebra," says founder and CEO Lisa Sedlar. "Oftentimes, a neighborhood only has a traditional convenience store and there's no quality food to be had."
Six-year-old Green Zebra--named after an heirloom tomato that was bred in the Northwest--has a noble mission: make healthy food convenient and accessible for all. Sedlar came up with the concept--an inspired hybrid of Whole Foods and 7-Eleven--when she lived in Boulder and worked as a sales and marketing executive at a pharmacy and wellness company. From her office, which abutted the University of Colorado campus, she'd watch dumbfounded as college students returned from bike rides in the Rockies only to grab junk food at the local mini-mart.
She wondered why no one was making healthy snacks convenient to access, but she kept that thought in the back of her mind because in 2005 she was recruited to be the president of Portland-based grocery store chain New Seasons.
Then, in 2013, she made her move--opening her first Green Zebra in the North Portland neighborhood of Kenton. Since then, two others shops have opened: one in the Lloyd District and one at Portland State University. (A fourth opens in Southeast Portland in mid-2019.)
DANIEL CRONIN
As at 7-Eleven, snacks are within reach but instead of sugary slurpeesand hot dogs, you'll find superfoods like broccoli salad with kale, dried cranberries, cabbage, walnuts, chia seeds and ground turmeric, and chimichurri freekeh, an ancient grain that topples even quinoa in the protein and fiber categories. It's all made from scratch with local ingredients, of course. Each 5,000-square-foot store is also stocked with organic produce, a curated beer and wine selection, and regionally-sourced meats, milk, and cheeses.
Naturally, costs are higher at Green Zebra than at other corner-store chains, but Sedlar is attempting to tame them. The company partners with local farmers and brands to try to keep prices affordable--and it offers a 10 percent discount to SNAP recipients, 10 percent off for seniors every Tuesday, and 10 percent off for students every Wednesday. Ideally, the goal is to open in "food deserts," which are neighborhoods that are short on grocery stores.
Adam Haber, an avid startup investor based in East Hills, New York, came across Green Zebra on equity crowdfunding platform CircleUp. He met with Sedlar and admired her zeal for healthy food and walkable communities; then he visited the Kenton store as a mystery shopper. "The employees are engaging and believe in the mission. People really love working there," he says. "I couldn't find the chink in their armor." He has invested in the company twice. "I wish there were a Green Zebra in my town," he says.
Maybe, someday soon, there will be. Sedlar is amidst a Series B funding round to raise $10 million, and is planning to open three stores outside Oregon next year, starting in Seattle. Eventually, she hopes to expand to the East Coast.
While it will take many years before Green Zebra can reach 7-Eleven's level of market domination, with more than 9,000 stores, that's all right with Sedlar. Like the Green Zebra tomato, Sedlar's chain is OK with growing organically.
By now, the wine-drinking public is familiar with sustainability descriptors like organic, biodynamic, and even natural. They’ve been to LEED-certified wineries, and they may even have heard about a more holistic certification, called B Corps, which takes into account the way a business treats its employees, its environment, and its community. But a new wave of winemakers is working with ultra-sustainable practices—some of which are so groundbreaking they don’t even have a certification yet. SevenFifty Daily spoke with winemakers who are setting the bar with green building and agroecological farming practices to learn why they’re worth pursuing—and how they can help create a more sustainable future.
A “Living Building” Tasting Room
A few years ago, when Cowhorn winemaker Bill Steele was planning a new tasting room at his Jacksonville, Oregon, winery, he had a game-changing conversation with Stephen Aiguier, the founder and president of Green Hammer. Steele and his wife, Barbara, knew they wanted a green building. Aiguier listened as Steele talked about his aversion to chemicals in the field and in the cellar.
“We wanted a building that was consistent with our biodynamic farming philosophy,” says Steele, whose winery is located in the Applegate Valley AVA. “And Stephen said, ‘It sounds like you’re describing the Living Building Challenge.’” Once Aiguier started explaining it, the Steeles were all in.
The most rigorous standard for green buildings in the world, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) was formulated by the Seattle-based International Living Future Institute (ILFI) in 2006. It’s designed around seven performance areas, referred to as petals. Unlike other certifiers of green buildings, the ILFI won’t certify a building until a full year after it’s completed. That’s because some of the building’s petals—namely, energy and water—require 12 months of continuous occupancy before they can be shown to work in accordance with the challenge. The Energy Petal requires that the building produce 10 percent more energy than it consumes; the Water Petal requires (among other things) that 100 percent of the project’s water needs be supplied by captured precipitation or other natural closed-loop water systems.
There’s a reason it’s called a challenge.
For Green Hammer and the Steeles, it was the Materials Petal that posed the biggest challenge—it requires the architect to reject materials that contain any one of more than 800 chemicals on the International Living Future Institute’s Red List. Since there are no reporting standards for the building industry, this means the architect of an LBC project has to call each manufacturer to ask if its products contain any of the Red List chemicals. Aiguier spent more than a thousand hours on the phone with companies, asking questions about their products’ components and microcomponents. When making these calls, he says, “you sound like a crazy hippie. A lot of people essentially hang up.”
Barb and Bill Steele of Cowhorn. Photo by Clair Thorington.
But the Green Hammer team persisted. Fortunately, the ILFI has a product database of nontoxic building materials (made without Red List chemicals) called Declare. High-profile companies—Etsy and Google, for example—have publicly signed on to using Declare products in their buildings. As a result, materials vendors are starting to reformulate their products and be more transparent about what’s in them.
In May 2018, Cowhorn’s tasting room became the first winery tasting room in the world to be named a Certified Living Building. And it’s not that other wineries haven’t tried. Sokol Blosser, which had already achieved a U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification for its barrel cellar in 2002, aimed for LBC with its new tasting room but was unable to achieve certification.
When I was a kid at the beach with my grandma, I remember staring at her feet, aghast. Her toes were gnarled and deformed. Not only did she have angry-looking bunions—her big toes were torqued almost 180 degrees sideways—her baby toes were permanently scrunched up (what I later learned were called “hammertoes”).It’s no wonder she had difficulty walking.
I always saw my grandma’s Franken-feet as a cautionary tale against heels: don’t wear cramped high heels—as she always did—and you won’t develop bunions. So for most of my adult life, I opted for sensible yet stylish flats—clogs, sandals, boots. I only wore heels to cocktail parties, art openings, and weddings. And yet ten years ago, I was still developing bunions.
But what if running shoes, not high heels, were to blame?
I ran cross country in high school and college, completed the New York City marathon in ’97—and at age 45, still run several times a week. The Saucony shoes I’ve unquestioningly worn for 30 years—like most running shoes—have a tapered toe box (that is, they get narrower at the toe) and they also have elevated heels.
Wearing this sort of running shoe year after year is a recipe for bunions, says Portland-based podiatrist and long-distance runner Ray McClanahan. Read my complete article at Runner's World.
Wearing Correct Toes and wide-toed shoes will keep bunions at bay
Turns out, there's lots of money to be made by servicing the companies that are growing and selling legal weed. I wrote this piece for the November issue of Inc.
Marijuana has had a shady past, but it's on the cusp of having a very conventional future. In 2017, U.S. consumers spent $8.5 billion on legal cannabis, a number projected to grow to $23.4 billion by 2022. With that growth has emerged an entire ecosystem of startups that support the less sexy side of cannabis. Not the luxury dispensaries or rose-hued vape-pen companies, but the infrastructure that keeps them going--from software systems to package-design firms. As legalization continues to spread--it's now permitted in 31 states, Washington, D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico--so will the B2B industry solving cannabis's thorny challenges.
The Instagram Effect
Advertising regulations vary from state to state, but most national publications won't accept ads--and neither will Facebook. Instagram, however, generally does not flag cannabis content, so it has become a critical marketing tool.
Cannabis journalist Ricardo Baca has Grasslands, a well-respected cannabis PR firm in Denver. New York City-based North 6th Agency represents a handful of cannabis companies including BDS Analytics and venture fund Canopy, both in Boulder, while San Diego-based CMW Media focuses on pharmaceutical cannabis.
How High Will You Get?
In states where cannabis is legal, every bit has to be tested and labeled for levels of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the substance that produces a high) and CBD (cannabidiol, which does not produce a high), along with, in many cases, pesticide residues, contaminants, and fungus. If a farm's crop doesn't make the grade, it's not allowed to sell it.
A handful of regulatory-driven testing labs have launched, including Cascadia Labs in Oregon, Pure Analytics in California, and Evio Labs, the largest publicly traded testing company, with nine sites.
The Future Is Female
Since female plants produce much higher levels of THC and CBD than males, growers always cull the males. Traditionally, cannabis growers "grow out" crops, which takes six to eight weeks, to determine the sex.
Portland, Oregon-based Phylos Bioscience, which is mapping the genome of cannabis online at the Galaxy, sells a DNA "sex test," which allows growers to quickly and accurately identify sex. "It saves a lot of money spent on feeding, watering, and lighting the males," says Phylos co-founder Mowgli Holmes, who has collected samples from 80 countries, making Phylos's database of cannabis genetics the largest in the world.
Kevin Cavenaugh's Fair-Haired Dumbbell looks like the kind of kinetic building you'd see in Barcelona or New York, and it's been controversial in Portland
It's not easy writing about your own city as a travel destination. First off, when you're limited to 800 words, you're bound to leave out so many amazing restaurants, bars, shops, and other businesses. And even though I mention Portland's rising rents and the homeless crisis in passing in this Bloomberg Pursuits article, I wasn't able to give those subjects their due. (Bloomberg Pursuits, is after all, meant for a luxury audience.) That said, I feel this short piece captures something of the evolution of our city. With movers and shakers like Laura Moulton at Street Books, Stephen Green at PitchBlack, Kevin Cavenaugh at Geurilla Design, Emma Mcilroy at Wildfang (and those who didn't make it into the final version of this story like JoAnn A. Hardesty, Rukaiyah Adams, & Danielle Outlaw) my hope is that our city is on its way to a more equitable future.
Three Portland high school students are reinventing sex ed
{A shorter version of this story appeared in the September issue of Portland Monthly.}
When 18-year-old twins Milena and Sofia Ben-Zaken and their friend Tess Waxman, also 18, were at Sunnyside Environmental School, their sex ed instruction was laughably brief. "We had one day on puberty in the 5th grade," Milena recalls. “We didn’t really have sex ed in 8th grade, either, except for on the 8th grade retreat,” Sofia says. It wasn’t until their first year at Northeast's Grant High that they finally had a thorough sex ed class. By then, they said, a lot of their classmates had already been sexually assaulted.
This absence of meaningful sex ed is not uncommon in Portland Public Schools. Though Oregon has long had sexual health education requirements—with new, more progressive standards passing in 2015—many teachers cop out because they feel unqualified or uncomfortable teaching it. When Jenny Withycombe, PhD., joined PPS as “teacher on special assignments” for health and physical education just two years ago, sex ed at the middle school level was hit or miss. “It was sometimes happening, sometimes not,” she says. “More often not.”
Tess (second from left, 2nd row), Sofia (second from left, front), and Milena (far right) founded Let's Talk last year as a way to teach their younger peers about sex (in all its forms), birth control, body issues, STIs, and consent.
In the fall of 2016, the Ben-Zaken twins and Waxman set out to change that. With the guidance of their English teacher, Susan Bartley, the young women met every Monday, interviewing a cross-section of their peers about what they wished they’d learned in middle school. The resulting curriculum—they dubbed it “Let’s Talk”—is inclusive and robust. In addition to covering the basics of birth control, STIs, and sex (in all its varied forms), their lesson plans cover LGTBQ+ issues, body positivity, and consent. Over the past two years, they and a handful of their Grant High classmates have taught the lessons to 7th and 8th graders at Sunnyside, Laurelhurst, and Mt. Tabor.
Whitycombe was so impressed by a class they taught at Laurelhurst that she welcomed them on as “community partners.” She champions Let’s Talk to middle school teachers throughout the district. “They had clearly put so much time and effort into it,” says Whitycombe. She was also delighted to see the middle schoolers unusually at ease discussing sexual subjects with kids just a few years older than them. (Needless to say, that’s not the case when their math or science teachers cover the subject.) “We’re more their peers than their superiors,” says Sofia, who says they all served as counselors at Outdoor School, which served as an inspiration.
As any sex educator knows, props help break the ice. “Sometimes, if they’re really quiet, I make them pass around the herpes pillow,” says Milena. When she tosses it to a kid, they have to answer a question. The young women also use a plush “Sammy the Sperm” and 3-D replicas of the male and female reproductive systems. But Waxman’s favorite part is passing around the anonymous question box. The rule is that everyone must put something on a piece of paper—even if it’s just a drawing or a smiley face. That way, more students ask real questions. Even jokey questions, though, are an opportunity for education. “We get a lot of jokes about pulling out,” says Milena. “And we talk about how that’s not a sufficient method of birth control or a sufficient way to protect against STIs.”
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, their lesson on consent—which they wrote two years ago, when they were juniors—seems especially crucial. Waxman will spice things up with a food metaphor. “I’ll say, ‘OK, Pretend you’re making someone a sandwich. You would want them to have what they want on the sandwich, right? Like, should I put mustard on it? Would you like this?’” If a group seems super uncomfortable, Milena says she reads directly from the lesson plan, which has examples of what is not consent. The list begins, “People CANNOT give consent when under the influences of drugs and alcohol. If someone sounds uneasy it does not count. If someone is pressuring someone into a yes, it does not count. If someone clearly states their limit or needs, do not try to bend them.” At the end of the unit, kids share something they’ve learned. “A lot of times it is about consent, which is cool to see,” Waxman says.
The trio are off to college this fall—Sofia is going to Occidental, Milena to Barnard, and Waxman to Mills College—but they’ve trained about 10 classmates to teach Let’s Talk during the 2018/2019 school year. Whithycombe—who says many PPS teachers, especially if they aren’t health teachers, are anxious about teaching sex ed—couldn’t be happier. “I think when the teachers see it [high school students teaching sex ed], it takes some of that fear away,” she says. “The word will keep spinning!”
I wrote a feature on the amazing MHC alumnae who are running for political office for the summer issue of the Mount Holyoke Quarterly. Some are running for Congress, others are running for state representative or school board.
Since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, record numbers of women have declared their candidacy for elected office. This season, Mount Holyoke alumnae are both on the ballot and behind the scenes.
Emily Martz ’94 left her job as deputy director at the Adirondack North Country Association to run for U.S. Congress in her conservative upstate New York district. The decision came, in part, out of a conviction that Democrats weren’t successfully communicating that they represent white, working-class people. “In my area in particular, which is 97 percent white and low-income, Democrats as a party did not articulate that they stand for their own constituents,” says Martz.
It also grieved her to see political discourse in America become so polarized. “One of the big reasons that we had the results we did in 2016 is because we just weren’t talking to each other,” says Martz, who majored in history and minored in politics at Mount Holyoke. She began having as many conversations as she could with people who had different political backgrounds than her own. By May, she had decided to run for the U.S. House seat in her district: New York’s 21st.
Martz was one of a record-busting 467 women running for seats in the U.S. House this year,* according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. (The previous record had been 298, set during the 2012 election cycle.) Record numbers of women are running for other political offices as well: In mid-May, for example, 47 women were running for governor, including Stacey Abrams, who on May 22 won Georgia’s primary and could become the nation’s first black female governor if she wins in November. There’s also been a surge of women running at the local level, for state Senate and House, city council and school board. Most of these female candidates are left-leaning: 352 of those 467 women who ran for Congress are Democrats. And all of the alumnae we were able to identify for this article share this party affiliation. The 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump — a candidate with no political experience — over Hillary Clinton, who had many years of experience, including eight years as senator from New York, has for some been a motivating force.
Mount Holyoke women have long pursued careers in public service — some as elected politicians and others in appointed positions. The first to come to the minds of many alumnae is, of course, Frances Perkins, class of 1902, who was appointed secretary of labor by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. But Mount Holyoke has also produced a host of other well-known alumnae who have held political office, including Ella Tambussi Grasso ’40, who in 1974 was elected Connecticut’s first female governor, New York congresswoman Nita Melnikoff Lowey ’59, who is currently serving her 15th term, and Elaine Chao ’75, current U.S. secretary of transportation and secretary of labor under President George W. Bush. To identify alumnae who may join the ranks of these whose stories and legacies we already know, we engaged with clubs and Facebook groups, put out a greater call on social media, and searched the Alumnae Association’s directory. We found several women who are running for office — some for the first time — and others with careers in the political arena.
The 2017 Eagle Creek fire is seared into Oregon winemaker Michael Garofola’s memory. Since February 2017 he had been working with a 0.61 acre block of Dolcetto for his Cutter Cascadia label in the von Flowtow vineyard on the west side of Hood River, and the fruit was just beginning to ripen. On September 18, the fire was raging. Hood River was on Stage 2 evacuation notice—locals might get a call at any moment to drop everything, grab their family members and pets, and get out. In the meantime, Garofola—who leases this block and farms it solo—was thinning fruit and taking samples.
“You’re out there with a bandana over your face in the vineyards,” he says. “The sky is orange. It’s just like what you imagine the last skies over Vesuvius looked like. It’s dark. It’s eerie.” That particular day, Garofola didn’t get the call. “I did my work for the day, packed up, and drove back to Portland.”
During the fire, which started on September 2 and wasn’t fully controlled until November 30, the grapes were going through véraison—the onset of ripening, when the berries change color. “If the fire had happened a month before, it wouldn’t have been a problem,” explains Garofola. “But post-véraison [the grapes] are ripening, losing acidity, but their skins are becoming more porous.” The porousness makes it easier for the skins to soak up the smoke. Phenolic glycosides contained in the smoke, such as guaiacol and eugenol, which are initially bound with sugar, break apart and become volatile during fermentation.
the Dolcetto vineyard during the fires [Credit: Michael Garofola of Cutter Cascadia]
A Smoky Vintage
Most winemakers and critics abhor the taste of so-called smoke taint, using descriptors like “burnt,” “medicinal,” or “wet ashtray” to describe it. But instead of letting the grapes sit on the vine—as some neighboring growers did—or selling them off to the bulk market (a common practice at bigger wineries when smoke taint is detected), Garofola decided to go ahead and make a rosé and a red under his Cutter Cascadia label. Earlier this month, he released 30 cases of his rosé, called Strawberry Mullet, to Portland area shops including E&R Wine Shop, Division Wines, and Pairings Portland. He’ll bottle his red in late July.
“This is the climate of the vintage, without a doubt,” says Garofola, who is also the sommelier at Beast in Portland. “It’s not something I want to happen every year, obviously, but at the same time, I did with it what I felt was the best for the wine.” That is, he manipulated the wine as little as possible. After forest fires, some winemakers use carbon filtering, reverse osmosis, or manufactured yeast strains to mitigate or mask smoke taint, but not Garofola.
Making wine without such processes or additives was “the most authentic thing for me to do,” he says. “I’m not apologizing for the smoke. I’m not the one who started the goddamn fire! I’m just leaning into it.” Garofola says the smokiness of the rosé, which had almost no skin contact, is muted. The red—which obviously will have had more skin contact by the time he bottles it at the end of June—is a little riskier. Right now, the wine conjures a vivid sense memory for Garofola. “It reminds me of a tobacco shop my old man used to take me to in Indiana,” he says. “It smells exactly like black cherry tobacco.”
Hiyu Wine Farm winemaker Nate Ready is also unapologetic about his smoky 2017 vintage. He grows over 100 varieties at his main vineyard, five miles south of Hood River—this was the site that was most affected by the fires. In fact, Ready believes there’s a delicacy to these wines that comes from the fire, which delayed ripening and—because of the cover of smoke—created lower-alcohol grapes with a finer thread of acidity.
“The wildfires are totally part of the terroir,” says Ready. “That’s what’s so cool about wines—they reflect the culture and the ecosystem. And living in the West, we should get used to it. This is going to be part of the flavor of living in the West.”
Ready dislikes the term smoke taint because it labels a smoky character as a flaw. The smoky nature of his 2017 wines has made him more attuned to élevage, the progression of wines as they ferment in barrels. “You’re looking to take the wine to a place where these things express themselves in the cellar and evolve to a place where—Oh!—it’s more stable and compelling,” says Ready. “For sure, it’ll still change in bottle, but in ways that are more subtle.” As a result, he will probably hold the 2017 wines in barrel longer than usual. (Nothing has been bottled yet.)
Ready plans to talk openly about the forest fire’s effect on the grapes at tastings and in his newsletter. “I would just say, ‘There was a fire in 2017 and you can taste it in the wine. You can taste it structurally,’” says Ready, whose wines—he makes rosé, white, and red—are bottled under his Hiyu and Smockshop Band labels.
A Rauchwein for Aging
Barnaby Tuttle at Teutonic Wine Company in Portland is a little more brazen. Last year he committed to buying Riesling grapes from Laszlo Regos at Pear Blossom Vineyard in the Columbia Gorge. Needless to say, he didn’t anticipate a devastating wildfire—or that the grapes would come back from the lab with an exceptionally high sensory threshold level of guaiacol. Knowing that the chemical guaiacol was concentrated in the skins, Tuttle pressed the wine—whole cluster—as fast as he could. “And then I thought, ‘Hey, let’s have some fun. Let’s make a deliberately smoked wine!’” Tuttle recalls.
Tuttle explains that he and his crew crushed the fruit, did pigéage, or punch-down, and gave the wine four days on the skins. The result, which he bottled in April and calls Rauchwein (“smoke wine” in German), has an ever-so-subtle smoky scent. “I can feel it texturally on the palate,” says Tuttle, who has made enough Riesling to know what the mouthfeel should be. “And then, in the finish, there’s a kick that makes me think of mezcal.”
But the Rauchwein may become smokier over time. Teutonic’s tech notes for the wine say it’s meant to age “a long time.” Knowing that the smoky phenols may become more prominent as the wine ages, I ask if that concerns him. “I hope the taint grows in bottle,” he says. “I suppose there is a point [at which] the taint could be overwhelming, but it would have to grow exponentially for it to be a distraction. Maybe there is a risk to making interesting wines?”
After the winemakers grapple with the effects of the smoke and fire, however, it’s up to the retailers to sell the wines. Some retailers are talking up the smoked character of the 2017 vintage; others, not so much. Jeffrey Weissler, owner of Pairings Portland, has been pouring Garofola’s Strawberry Mullet for guests and is almost sold out. “People like it,” he says. “It’s an interesting, delicious, funky wine.” But he doesn’t push the forest fire angle. “It’s a sore spot for a lot of winemakers,” he says.
But Brent Braun, the sommelier at Portland’s OK Omens and Castagna, does talk to guests about the two smoky rosés he has on the by-the-glass menu at OK Omens. One is Strawberry Mullet and the other, a Dolcetto rosé made by winemaker Darryl Joannides of Viola Wine Cellars in Portland. “People love them. Especially the Strawberry Mullet because it’s so intensely smoky,” he says. “It’s so obvious. It’s fun!” Viola’s Dolcetto, on the other hand, is “lightly smoked,” says Braun. “It hits the classic notes. It’s a pretty light, refreshing patio rosé.”
Michael Wheeler of PDX Wine distributes Teutonic’s wines to restaurants and wine shops across Oregon and, when he’s doing a tasting, likes to talk about the smoky smells and flavors that resulted from the forest fires. “Or as I like to call it, terroir from the sky,” Wheeler says. “Taking what nature gave and making a true, full terroir wine—land and air. A pure wine of nature and the vintage.”
I was on Katherine Cole's the Four Top again—a marvelous podcast about hot-button topics in food and drink. You can listen to our wide-ranging discussion about climate change and wine, the wildfires (and wine), and why rosé should also be enjoyed in the winter, below. The other guests were climatologist Dr. Greg Jones, writer Jordan Michelman from Sprudge, and Katherine herself.
I did a Q&A with the director of Linfield College’s pioneering Oregon Wine History Archive for SevenFifty Daily.
In SevenFifty Daily's Unsung Heroes series, we profile behind-the-scenes professionals in the drinks industry who are essential to making businesses function but who don’t normally get the spotlight.
Archivist Rich Schmidt (right), behind the camera.
In 2011, Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, established the Oregon Wine History Archive, an ambitious project to chronicle and preserve all aspects of the Oregon wine industry. Since then, Linfield—which has also hosted the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) every summer since 1987—has become a significant hub of wine education. In March of this year, after a $6 million gift from Grace and Ken Evenstad of Domaine Serene in the Dundee Hills, it became the first liberal arts school in the country to offer an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in wine studies.
The archive, located in a climate-controlled room at the Linfield library, houses everything from old photos and receipts to wine country guidebooks from the early ‘80s and land-use planning maps. “It’s a sweet space for a college of our size,” says Rich Schmidt, the director of archives. The archive’s online component is growing too. It currently contains over 200 oral histories—video interviews with winemakers, viticulturists, and others immersed in the state’s wine industry. SevenFifty Daily asked Schmidt about the genesis of the project, why Eric Asimov made the cut, and which oral histories will always stick with him.
Love the Wild's clever packaging. The delicious sauces are frozen in the shape of hearts.
I must admit: as an Oregonian who has subscribed to a wild salmon share for the last 3 years, I'm not a fan of the idea of farmed fish. I had this naive and outdated notion that all fish farms are crowded, dismal places, teeming with sea louse. In 2010, I had read in Paul Greenberg's book Four Fish, The Future of the Last Wild Food that farmed salmon had a terrible feed-to-conversion ratio: typically, farmed salmon need to eat six pounds of wild fish for every pound of flesh. But that has changed over the past eight years as some fish farms have found alternative feeds.
According to the Global Salmon Initiative, the average salmon farm today has a feed-conversion-ratio of 1.3:1. Kvarøy Fiskeoppdrett in Norway, which a sustainable seafood company called Love the Wild began sourcing from last year, is replacing fish meal with microbial proteins, algae-based oils, and grains, making their feed-conversion-ratio an impressive 0.47 to 1. I write about Love the Wild in the June issue of Inc. (pg. 48 if you have a subscription). Here's a PDF of my piece.
Meanwhile, I'm not quitting my Fish CSA, but I'm also going to be more open-minded about trying sustainably-raised farmed fish. Even Paul Greenberg agrees that we cannot live on wild fish stocks alone. Last year he was interviewed for NPR's the Salt about his Frontline documentary the Fish on my Plate and he said, "People often compare wild fish to farmed fish, but what we should really be doing is comparing fish to other forms of protein." Beef is way more resource-heavy than farmed fish. Love the Wild founder Jacqueline Claudia told me something similar.
"I’m not trying to win against wild fish. Truth be told: It’s some of my favorite fish. For me, it's farmed fish vs. farmed pork, farmed chicken, and farmed beef," she told me. "Great farmed fish is your daily driver—that’s what you eat during the week. On the weekend you get something wild and sustainable and you celebrate its terroir."
I wrote about Ben Jacobsen and his Oregon-harvested artisanal sea salt for Inc.'s May issue.
Netarts Bay, a protected estuary on the Oregon Coast, is an ideal spot to harvest salt. [Photo: Carlos Chavarría]
While attending business school in Copenhagen in 2004, Ben Jacobsen fell in love with Maldon sea salt, the flaky finishing salt prized by chefs. Returning to the United States--landing in Portland, Oregon--he was shocked to find that no one here was harvesting anything like that high-end sea salt.
After his mobile-app-discovery startup went belly-up, Jacobsen began lugging 275-gallon wine totes of seawater from Netarts Bay back to his home in Portland, where he re-created the laborious (and messy) process of evaporating the water to make salt. "I destroyed cookware and pots and pans and made a mess in the oven and everything else," Jacobsen says. "It was definitely a learning experience." Today, his category-defining American flaky sea salt is the favored salt of celebrity chefs.
The process of salt-making is now much more efficient at Jacobsen's 6,000-square-foot production facility on the Oregon coast, where the company has built custom equipment. Jacobsen's 42-person crew harvests 18,000 pounds of salt per month, which is then sent to the warehouse in Portland's Central Eastside to be packaged and shipped out to Williams Sonoma, Whole Foods, and thousands of other retailers across the country. "Like the people who went to California 240 years ago and wondered if it was possible to grow grapes and make wine there," says Jacobsen, "we're the first in our category to make great salt in the U.S. mainstream."
Every so often an assignment comes along that takes you out of your typical beat, making you so honored to be a journalist because it allows you to meet wise and captivating people and learn about their work and their passions. This was one of those moments. I got to profile Rukaiyah Adams for Bon Appetit's Healthyish series on "Superpowered Women"—women who are redefining wellness in their communities. As I spoke to Rukaiyah over lunch at her southwest Portland home, I realized that we have a lot in common: she's a runner, she invests in startups run by women and people of color (I don't do that, but I write about them), she loves Oregon wines (particularly Antica Terra) and she longs for our city to be a place where everyone is included in its successes. I learned a lot from interviewing her.
When Rukaiyah Adams left a New York City–based hedge fund in 2010, a non-compete clause forced her to take an extended break from work. Missing her mom, who had just been in a car accident, she flew to her hometown of Portland, Oregon.
“I went for a run in Forest Park. It was raining lightly, and the sound of rain tapping against the leaves, the smell of soil...” and that’s when it came to me: I am not a New Yorker.”
Nine months later, she packed her bags and moved to Portland, a decision that had major ripple effects. Not only did living in Portland reignite her relationship with David Chen, a lawyer in the Bay Area, it helped her switch gears professionally.
“I could make ten times more in New York, but I was past the mastery part,” Adams tells me, as she putters around the kitchen of her 1920s English-cottage-style home, making us lunch. “I needed to develop a point-of-view.” In Portland, she landed a job as director of investment management at the Standard, a financial services group, and, in 2013, was appointed to the board of the Oregon Investment Council, the state pension fund.
Today, Adams, 44, is the chief investment officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, the third largest foundation in Oregon, with assets of $788.5 million. Started by Oregon grocery store magnate Fred G. Meyer, the trust gives away roughly $35 million a year to Oregon-based social justice and advocacy organizations, equitable education and affordable housing initiatives, and environmental programs. These grants are only possible due to the success of the Meyer investment portfolio, which Adams manages.
“Rukaiyah is tackling big, thorny, important, often fraught issues,” says Eve Callahan, an executive vice president at Portland-based Umpqua Bank and long-time admirer. “And she’s doing it with such grace and generosity.”
But when I ask her what she does at Meyer, Adam’s reply is pithy: “My job is to make the money.”
Long runs in nature—she loves jogging along the Willamette River as well as in 5,200-acre Forest Park—help keep Adams poised in her high-pressure position. “Believe it or not, being healthy and having outlets is pretty important to the technical requirements of the job,” she says as we sit at her marble kitchen table, eating iceberg lettuce with goat cheese, sliced cucumbers and radishes, and shaved carrots, along with avocado smeared on toasted sourdough. “If the person managing money is pulling out her hair and crying, it generates a lot of stress!”
In high school, she played basketball and soccer, and, at Carleton College in Minnesota, she was passionate about rugby. Running has even spurred radical investment changes that have been good for the Meyer portfolio.
More recently, Adams has shifted Meyer’s strategy from a more traditional one of investing in global markets to mission-related regional investing.
“Historically, Meyer has focused on venture capital and accelerators—which has done quite well,” says Adams. “But, looking back over who has benefitted from that investing, it’s the same people who normally benefit.” Over the past year, Adams has stepped up investments in businesses run by women and people of color. In 2016, she invested $2 million in Nitin Rai’s Elevate Capital, a fund that invests in Pacific Northwest startups led by women and minorities. (Elevate was a seed investor in feminist tomboy clothing company Wildfang as well as in Hue Noir, a makeup company geared to people of color.)
But sexy startups only comprise a small part of Oregon’s economy. “The reality is that most brown people and people of color are employed by small businesses. And we need to grow those businesses,” Adams says. At the moment, Adams has her eye on a few businesses around the state. She’s particularly keen to invest in firms that bridge the urban-rural divide. “They don’t know it, but I’m watching them closely,” Adams says, conspiratorially. “I’m watching how they respond to stress. How they manage their time. How steady they are over time. When you invest in someone, it’s like getting married to them.”
On that subject, on New Year’s Eve, Adams wed Chen in an elegant ceremony at the Parker Palm Springs. Adams paused as she sliced vegetables for our salad to show me some photos: One of her and Chen all dressed up in their wedding best, looking radiant and joyous; one of Adams hugging her mom in front of a decorative concrete screen wall.
Several times during our interview, she tells me with pride what a fabulous cook Chen is. The youngest of three boys (by about a decade), he spent a lot of time at home with his mom, who taught him to be confident in a kitchen. He has a habit of leaving a cookbook lying on the kitchen counter—Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok, for instance, or Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty—with a note: “Pick a recipe.” Adams grabs the Pok-Pok cookbook and flips to Ricker’s recipe for Vietnamese turmeric-marinated catfish with noodles and herbs, and I glimpse a note she scrawled beneath it commemorating that he made it for her on Valentine’s Day last year. Adams says their division of labor is simple: she takes care of the baking and roasting, and he does all the cooking. (She happily does the dishes.)
Adams also loves Oregon wines, particularly winemaker Maggie Harrison’s Antica Terra. (“All I do is hug the bottles when I get them,” Adams says.) But her weekday routine does not allow for leisurely meals—at least until dinner. Like many other West Coast investors, she’s up by 6:00 a.m. to check the markets. “So even if I’m not at work, I’m working.” If she runs in the morning before work, she’ll grab a yogurt or piece of fruit on her way out the door. “I love those shredded wheat things that have sugar on top, which I probably shouldn’t eat, but they’re delicious,” she says. Once at the Meyer Memorial Trust office in the Pearl District, she’s at her desk for a few hours, and then around 11:00 a.m. she goes for a 20-minute walk. “I usually have to miss lunch, then I have to gobble it standing up at the sink,” she says. In an effort to eat more mindfully, she’s started bringing leftovers. By around 3:00 p.m., she’s ready for a cup of coffee and a walk—without her phone. “I like to smell the city and see people,” says Adams.
Lately, though, she’s working on cutting back. “2018 is going to be the year of no. I have two talks to give this year, and that’s it,” Adams tells me, with what sounds like resolution. But you get a sense that this woman would never be satisfied sitting on the sidelines.
When Adams moved back to Portland in 2011, she found a city in flux. Always a majority-white city, Portland was gentrifying at a rapid clip, with black and brown families being pushed out to the suburbs. A fourth generation Portlander—her great grandmother moved to Portland from Louisiana in the late 1950s—she had already witnessed gentrification first hand. Walnut Park, the neighborhood she grew up in, is now known as the Alberta Arts district.
As we eat, she tells me the devastating history of Lower Albina, better known today as the Rose Quarter. A vibrant African American and immigrant neighborhood full of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches, it was affordable and easily walkable to downtown and the neighborhood known as the garment district (now the Pearl). In the late 1950s, the city declared the area blighted and leveled it, making way for the Interstate, Memorial Coliseum, and a hospital that never materialized. Residents, including Adams’ great grandmother and the German family she rented a room from, were forced to move out. It was an act of racial injustice that many Portlanders are still smarting from.
Adams is now on the board of Albina Vision, a coalition of community leaders and developers that aims to redevelop the Rose Quarter with affordability, equity, and walkability in mind. If Adams and the rest of the Albina Vision board get their way, the Rose Quarter will have a public connection to the Willamette River (right now, the lovely bike-and-pedestrian Eastbank Esplanade ends abruptly at the Steel Bridge), a walkable street grid from the 1950s, and affordable housing as a form of reparations to the families who were displaced.
Adams pauses and her voice drops to a whisper, so that I need to lean in to hear her. “My grandmother wrote in her Bible, ‘Dear God, I hope I’ve made the right decision in bringing my family to this place. And someday, I hope that one of my children has love, meaningful work, and safety.’” says Adams. “And I am that child.”
From grower Champagnes to Oregon producers, niche interests are fueling subscription services
Wine clubs are nothing new. They’ve been around since at least 1972, when the the Wine of the Month Club was founded. Even publications like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Nation have wine clubs. But over the years, this sector of the wine industry has stagnated, according to Paul Mabray, a veteran of the successful wine tech startups Wine Direct and VinTank.
Until recently, that is.
A flurry of hyperfocused online wine clubs have launched over the past few years and appear to be thriving. There’s a wine club for organic and biodynamic wine. There’s one that focuses exclusively on Oregon producers and one that ships only Champagne; there’s even a club that singles out wines from women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. These subscription wine clubs are startups that are either self-financed or financed by investors (that is, they’re not financed by wineries).
“The subscription economy is in full force,” says Mabray, who is known in the wine industry as “the dean of digital.” “It’s a whole new rebirth of this thing that wineries have been doing for the longest time.” Though there are no statistics for subscription wine services (aka online wine clubs), Mabray, who is on the board of the startup Clubzz, a wine subscription management tool, says this sector is growing “very strongly.”
The rebirth of online wine clubs echoes the popularity of subscription services in general. Consumers are now buying personalized wardrobes on Stitch Fix, new razor blades on Harry’s Razors, and gourmet dinner ingredients on Blue Apron. Even Amazon has gotten in on the action with Subscribe & Save—customers get 15 percent off when they order the same staples on a regular basis. Consumers love the convenience, personalized service, and (in some cases) discounts. “And for companies,” says Mabray, “subscription services create a predictable revenue stream.” A recent survey by McKinsey & Company shows that the subscription economy has grown by more than 100 percent a year over the past five years, with the largest retailers generating more than $2.6 billion in subscription sales in 2016 (up from $57 million in 2011).
Etty Lewensztain launched Plonk Wine Merchants in 2010 as a highly selective online wine shop. “It was a digital version of that cool wine boutique in your neighborhood,” says Lewensztain. “I was getting rid of the wines that are a waste of time.”
But the unique wineries and offbeat grapes she featured on the site were so little known that customers were stumped. “They didn’t know the brand or recognize the varietal,” Lewensztain says. “So we decided to choose wine for people.” Sales with the wine club quickly outpaced à la carte purchases, and in 2013, Lewensztain rebranded Plonk as a wine club. (Though she’s added a wine store back onto the Plonk site, it’s mainly where current subscribers go to reorder wines they’ve loved from their shipments.)
Today Plonk Wine Merchants features wines that have been made with organic and biodynamic grapes—though Lewensztain stresses that she’s not dogmatic. “Some are certified; some are not,” she says. “We’re not religious about every single wine needing to be Demeter-certified.”
The same goes for natural wines. Though she’s generally a fan herself, she’s wary of selling the “interesting” but not mass-consumer-friendly type of natural wines. “You know—the kind that have particulate matter floating around in them,” she says. “I think those wines are better suited for an on-premise atmosphere where you can have a sommelier explain the wine to you—and take it back if you don’t like it.” But her litmus test is that the wines be made well and sustainably, with no sprays in the vineyard. “Authentic wines that are not made in a boardroom and tinkered with with Mega Purple and so on,” Lewensztain says. “We’re really not into that style of wine.”
Some recent popular bottles include the Balla Geza Fetească Neagră from Romania and a Pojer e Sandri Nosiola from Italy’s Trentino region. Plonk’s monthly shipments of 4 or 12 bottles include shipping costs. The 4-bottle shipment is $110, and 12-bottle is $285, making it the better deal, at $23.75 a bottle. Plonk features wines only from existing wineries (there are no private-label wines). Though Lewensztain would not disclose how many members Plonk has, she said the business has grown “quite a significant amount” over the past five years. Like other online wine clubs included in this article, Plonk does not accept marketing dollars from wineries. “We are self-funded,” says Lewensztain, “and we definitely don’t take any sort of payment.”
Plonk Wine Merchants provided inspiration for Carrie Wynkoop, a political strategist based in Portland, Oregon, who founded the wine club Cellar 503 three years ago. Says Wynkoop, “Lewensztain does a good job of explaining wines in a non-snobby way.”
But Wynkoop created Cellar 503 mostly because it was something she craved. “I have a big passion for Oregon and for Oregon wine,” she says. “I was sitting on the beach with my husband, and I was like, ‘I just want someone to send me Oregon wine to my doorstep.’ He said, ‘There you go: That’s your idea.’” Six months later, she had launched Cellar 503, focusing on small-batch winemakers (fewer than than 10,000 cases a year) and bottles under $30. The club, which Wynkoop and her husband funded through their own savings, is breaking even right now, with roughly 300 club members, but Wynkoop says they’re on track to make a profit in 2018. Though 40 percent of Cellar 503’s members are from Oregon, the remaining 60 percent hail from 28 other states—an indication of Oregon wine’s prominence on the national stage.
Wynkoop loves ferreting out small producers that the wine-drinking public would otherwise not know about, saying, “I like to call myself a little PR agency for the small guys.”
Each month, to keep things fun, Wynkoop sets a theme. January was “Italy in Oregon,” so she featured wines like a 2014 Primitivo from Cana’s Feast and a 2016 Vermentino from Troon Vineyard. February—“We Love Southern Oregon!”—included bottles from little-known wineries like Simple Machine in Talent (near Ashland) and Nicole Reese in Medford. In May, to celebrate Mother’s Day, Wynkoop features women winemakers. Members can choose to receive shipments of two or four bottles, either monthly or quarterly.
After experimenting with prices, Wynkoop now has a flat pricing structure. “One of the things members said was irritating was that [the price] was different every month,” Wynkoop says. So now, two bottles of white are always $45, and two bottles of red are always $55; mixed is $50. (Shipping is an additional $19.99, though club members in the Portland area can pick up their wines at a monthly free tasting at the Cellar 503 tasting room.) Because Wynkoop wants to feature wines that are approachable and affordable, bottle prices never exceed $30. “I want folks to feel comfortable opening them on a Wednesday night,” she says, “[and] not feel they need to save them for a special occasion.”
But there is a wine club at the “special occasion” end of the spectrum too. SommSelect, founded by Master Sommelier Ian Cauble in 2014, focuses on premium wines—the kind of high-quality bottles you’d find at Michelin-starred restaurants. “There are a lot of people in this space who are discounting,” Cauble says. “[But] nothing incredible is ever 80 percent off.”
That said, for premium wines, SommSelect’s half-case prices are hard to beat. The club offers a monthly “educational blind-tasting kit” of six wines (three red, three white) for $199, or Somm Six, also $199, a monthly shipment of six of Cauble’s favorite wines (a mix of reds, whites, and rosés). Shipping is included.
But most of the company’s business comes from à la carte ordering. Every day, SommSelect sends out one to two detailed emails telling the story of a wine—profiling its winemaker, the estate’s history, and its appellation. David Lynch, the James Beard Award–winning wine writer and former wine director at Babbo, Quince, and more recently, St. Vincent, was hired as SommSelect’s editorial director last year, and he and other writers help Cauble compose the lively, absorbing profiles. (Cauble’s deep tasting notes are included, as are food-pairing recommendations.) Customers can either snap up the featured bottle on the spot or build a custom order for later shipment. (Members get free shipping if they buy roughly $100 worth of wine.) The custom order ships after 60 days or once it has reached a 12-bottle case—whichever comes first.
“We’re offering wines that people are fighting to get a taste of,” says Cauble, noting that when allocations are small, the emails go out only to the company’s top 500 customers. Some examples of upcoming wines that will be offered to all email subscribers are Nicolas Joly’s Clos de la Bergeries Savennières 2014, for $55, and a 1990 Frog’s Leap Merlot, for $150.
Cauble would not divulge the number of club members SommSelect has on a monthly basis, but 20,000 people have signed up to receive the free daily emails. He says business has been growing by 20 to 30 percent per year since 2014. “We are making money,” Cauble says, “but everything is going back into the company.” SommSelect has new offices in Sonoma, California, and is expanding its warehouse as well.
Last fall, after the wildfires in Northern California, the writer and brand strategist Amy Bess Cook posted a list of women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. “I wanted to bring attention to female wine entrepreneurs,” she says. “There are plenty of women in the wine business, but we’re not in departments of upper management.” Cook’s intent was to create awareness so that consumers could funnel their dollars to these women-owned businesses. After getting positive feedback on the site, Cook, who had operated a wine club at Tin Barn Vineyards, decided to start Women-Owned Wineries, a club dedicated to these wines. It launched a few weeks ago, financed so far through a crowdfunding campaign. The club’s current focus is on the 51 wineries on the WOW Sonoma site initially, but Cook says that it will eventually grow to include all women-owned wineries in the U.S. Bottles will start shipping in May.
Niche wine clubs like these illustrate the continuing fragmentation of the wine market, says industry analyst Rob McMillan, the founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division and the author of the annual State of the Wine Industry report. But they may prove to be exactly what the discerning consumer desires. “The need is there to get these small wines to consumers,” McMillan says. “The wine lovers that are out there want these. If you can be a trusted curator, that has value to consumers.”
I wrote about mead for the April issue of Food & Wine.
I'd always thought of mead, the ancient alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey, as a cough syrup–like draught from Chaucer’s time. But a recent tasting organized by Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, author of The Art of Mead Tasting & Food Pairing, changed my mind: I sipped meads that ranged from a dry sparkler that reminded me of a refreshing rosé, to a marionberry variety aged with chile peppers. Turns out, mead has as much range and variety as wine—and just like its grape-based sibling, it has terroir as well. And there’s never been a better moment to try mead. There were only about 30 meaderies in the U.S. two decades ago, and today, there are over 500. Want to taste the trend? Start with a visit to one of these great craft mead taprooms.
James Boicourt and Andrew Geffken founded Charm City Meadworks in 2014 and have just opened a new facility with 10 meads on tap. Outside the tasting room, their still meads—evocative of wine—come in 500 ml bottles; the carbonated ones come in 12-ounce cans. (Distribution is currently limited to the D.C./ Maryland/ Northern Virginia area.) Favorites include basil lemongrass, sweet blossom, and the seasonal mango comapeño, which packs some heat.
Brothers Nick and Phil Lorenz make 15session-style meads (carbonated and less than 10 percent ABV), the most popular of which is “Sting”—made of freshly juiced ginger and white clover honey. (It won a gold medal at the Mazer Cup.) They’re also experimenting with sour meads (fermented with Brettanomyces and lactobacillus) and braggots (mead fermented with malted grains). If you can’t get to their Philomath tasting room, rest assured: their meads are distributed to 10 states including California, Georgia, and Texas.
Ash Fischbein has his high school English teacher to thank for his mead career: he read about the beverage in Beowulf. “Back then, it was more about, ‘How can I get my friends drunk?’” laughs Fischbein. Now, Fischbein and his cousin Matt own Sap House Meadery, where their stand-out melomels — mead fermented with fruit — win awards at the Mazer Cup International mead competition. At their new mead pub, lined with rough-sawn pine, you can taste mead cocktails, mead- mosas, and (on Friday nights) pair dry semi-sweet mead with oysters.
Greg Fischer was six when he began beekeeping, so it’s hardly surprising that he became a mead-maker, opening Illinois’ first meadery 17 years ago. At Wild Blossom Meadery’s posh tasting room, you can try bourbon-cask aged meads like Sweet Desire, a blueberry mead, and a Barolo-style red, Pyment, that’s co-fermented with grape skins.
Co-founded by Nike veteran Ellen Schmidt-Devlin, the University of Oregon's 18-month sports product management master's program on designing, producing, and marketing sports products connects aspiring entrepreneurs with angel investors at Oregon Sports Angels, founded by fellow ex-Nike employee Kate Delhagen.
Portland Community College's intensive, 14-week "Getting Your Recipe to Market" course ends with students pitching products to local grocery chain New Seasons. Pitches that ended up on New Seasons' shelves include TanTan Foods' vegan Vietnamese sauces, Salsas Locas Mexican Foods, and Brazi Bites, gluten-free cheese bread.
$98,146
Average salary for a software engineer
Source: Glassdoor
$33.67
Average price per square foot for office space in the Central Business District
Source: Melvin Mark Commercial Real Estate
78
Number of Certified B Corps in the greater Portland area
Source: B Lab
12
Number of co-working spaces in Portland
Source: Glassdoor
Who to Know
Angela Jackson
CREDIT: Courtesy Ecotrust
Angela Jackson is the executive director of Portland State University's Center for Entrepreneurship and its business accelerator, and co-founder and managing director of the Portland Seed Fund, which invests in early-stage Pacific Northwest-based companies. PSF's portfolio consists of 78 companies, including Indow Windows (which makes energy-saving window inserts), software firm Cloudability, and apparel maker Wildfang. Successful local exits include Better Bean, GlobeSherpa, and eyewear startup Sightbox.
"Because our initial investments are small, we are able to take risks that others feel they cannot," says Jackson. "We're in it for the long haul."
The news anchor encourages women in the wine and spirits industry to speak up and demand action
When Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson came forward in 2016 with sexual harassment allegations against Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, there was no MeToo hashtag or Time’s Up movement. “It was an excruciating decision,” says Carlson. “I felt like I had jumped off a cliff by myself.” In an inspiring keynote address at the Women of the Vine and Spirits Global Symposium Napa, California, this week, Carlson encouraged women to have the courage to speak up about sexual harassment and sexual assault in their workplaces.
Speaking Out
Like many women, Carlson has endured sexual harassment and assault throughout her career. She was harassed by a stalker for four years early in her television days. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote a book in which he referred to her as Miss Piggy for being overweight when she was Miss America in 1989 (she was, in fact, 110 pounds). She was also sexually assaulted twice, in her 20s, while starting out in the television industry. The first time, she had cold-called a high-level TV executive. He spent the day showing her around the offices, making calls on her behalf, and then took her out for dinner. In the backseat of a cab, though, he attacked her. “All of a sudden he lunged [at] me and was on top of me and his tongue was down my throat. I screamed for the driver to stop and let me out of the car,” says Carlson. “At the old age of 22, I didn’t realize that breaking into the television business also meant letting him break into my pants.”
The second time, she was in Los Angeles, meeting with an agent. “Again, we were in a car—he grabbed my neck and he forced my head so hard into his crotch I couldn’t breathe,” says Carlson, adding that she managed to escape.
“Only recently did I realize that these cases weren’t actually harassment—they were assault,” says Carlson. “But like so many female survivors, I thought, ‘I’ve got this. I’m okay. Just move on, Gretchen.’ I bought into the myth that somehow I’d asked for it, and thought I wouldn’t be believed if I told people anyway.” It took Carlson 25 years to call these two instances assault out loud.
So while she encourages women to speak up about sexual harassment and assault—and also urges men to speak out when they see it happening in the workplace—she realizes how tough it can be. When Carlson’s complaints went public in 2016, she was most concerned about the impact her case would have on her children, who were 11 and 12 at the time. “They were of paramount concern to me,” she says. “My face was constantly on the news, and they were going to school.” But ultimately, she says, she underestimated her kids. Her daughter came home from school bewildered by all the gossip but said, “Mom, I felt so proud to tell them that you are my mom!” And when her daughter finally stood up to two kids at school who had been taunting her, she told Carlson, “Mommy, I found the bravery and the courage to do it because I saw you do it.”
I attended the Oregon Wine Symposium last week here in Portland and reported back for SevenFifty Daily.
At the 2018 Oregon Wine Symposium this week, Nielsen’s senior vice president of beverage alcohol practice, Danny Brager, announced that Oregon has the fastest-growing wine industry of any state. The state’s annual wine sales increased 17 percent in 2017 (over 2016) compared with 2.3 percent for Washington, 3 percent for California, and 2.8 percent for the U.S. overall.
One of the most interesting panels of the two-day symposium was “What’s Next for Oregon? Exploring Oregon’s Changing Wine Landscape.” There were three official panel members: land-use expert Richard P. Mendelson, from Dickenson, Peatman & Fogarty; Liz Thach, MW, a professor of wine and management at Sonoma State University; and Chris Tanghe, MS, the chief instructor at GuildSomm (and Wine Enthusiast’s 2017 Sommelier of the Year). But on the spur of the moment, moderator Bree Boskov, MW, of the Oregon Wine Board asked Ken Wright (of Ken Wright Cellars) and David Adelsheim (of Adelsheim Vineyard)—both respected figures in the Oregon wine industry—to join the panel.
[Image courtesy of Oregon Wine Board]
The trend of sub-AVAs and “nested AVAs” (or AVAs within AVAs) is going strong, said Mendelson. Napa Valley already has 16 nested AVAs, and the Willamette Valley (so far) has six. “It harkens back to the old-world appellation hierarchy,” Mendelson said. But it creates some marketing challenges. “What I had seen in France was that ‘Bordeaux’ became nonexistent on labels of Médoc and even finer, distinguished wines,” he said. “You will not see the word ‘Bordeaux’ on the label.” The more consumers become familiar with a sub-AVA—Yamhill-Carlton, for instance, or Russian River in California—the less they associate that wine with its larger AVA.
But there is a way around the problem: conjunctive labeling—that is, including the names of both the sub-AVA and the larger AVA on the label. Thach used the example of Sonoma Valley. In 2005, there were 13 AVAs in Sonoma Valley, and many had separate marketing associations that were really good at their job. “Sonoma County was not being marketed at all,” Thach said. “No one was putting ‘Sonoma County’ on their labels.” As a result, sub-AVAs such as Russian River were better known to consumers (who may not even have known Russian River was in Sonoma County).
That changed when grape growers came to the vintners and suggested conjunctive labeling. After consumer surveys and many conversations, the various players created a Sonoma County logo and a joint marketing program with a digital strategy, events, media tours, and the like. In 2010 the California legislature passed the idea into law, requiring all wineries in Sonoma County who claimed a sub-AVA on their label to also have the words “Sonoma County” on their label. Thach says the logo—a stamp that reads Sonoma County—has been highly effective, especially because it means wineries don’t have to entirely redesign their labels. (The stamp is placed to the right.)
Oregon winemakers may wish to pay attention to this success story.
At a recent meeting of the Willamette Valley Winery Association’s marketing committee, winemakers brought 40 bottles of their wine to share. Of those bottles, 36 didn’t have the words “Willamette Valley” on them. “Which is amazing, just amazing,” Wright said at the symposium. He worried that something valuable might be lost in the single-minded focus on the marketing of sub-AVAs: “We have forsaken the Willamette Valley.”
The experience got Wright thinking. Last summer, he called together a group of Oregon winemakers to discuss his concerns. Eight concepts came out of their lively discussion, but the two he mentioned at the Oregon Wine Symposium were conjunctive labeling and a requirement for 100 percent varietal content for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. (At the moment, Oregon state law allows winemakers to use up to 5 percent of other grapes in a varietal without declaring them on the label. Federal law allows even more leeway—it allows producers to add up to 25 percent of other varietals without declaring them.)
Though at first it may seem unrelated, the idea of having 100 percent varietal content shares the same goal as conjunctive labeling: to protect the name of Willamette Valley and the high quality of its Pinot Noir. Wright’s concern stems from the fact that most choice areas in the Willamette Valley are already planted. New growers and winemakers are planting on the valley floor and may be making “thin, diluted wine,” mixing it with other grapes, and marketing it as Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. “And that,” said Wright, “would be a problem.”
According to Wright, only two places in the world require 100 percent varietal content by law: Spain for its Albariño and Brunello for its Montalcino, which must be made of 100% Sangiovese. “We should join them,” Wright said. “It’s religious. It’s like tomatoes from San Marzano, bamboo shoots from Kyoto. . . We have Pinot Noir here that inherently wants to be spectacular.”
Thach challenged Oregon winemakers to try to bring more entry-priced bottles to market. Oregon wineries produce plenty of luxury and ultra-premium wine, as Thach demonstrated with a graph that showed Domaine Serene on the high end (with a $320 bottle) but very few bottles in the $15-to-$20 range. Entry-level wines, she said, will help reel in consumers who have not yet tried Oregon wines because of their high price tag. “It still needs to be good, clean, fruit-forward wine that’s accessible,” Thach said. “Just not as expensive.” She emphasized that it doesn’t even have to be Pinot Noir.
Tanghe, who teaches a master class on the Willamette Valley AVA for GuildSomm, spoke about the four Oregon sub-AVAs that are currently under consideration with the TTB: Laurelwood (nestled into the Chehalem Mountain AVA), Mount Pisgah in Polk County, Tualatin Hills (abutting the Chehalem Mountain AVA and the proposed Laurelwood AVA), and Van Duzer Corridor. He said applicants are frustrated that they have been waiting three years for approval from the TTB. Mendelson advised patience, in his experience with Paso Robles, California, it can take as long as seven years for approval to be granted.
Earlier in the symposium, Mendelson had reminded attendees that to be approved as a distinct AVA you must prove that you have “distinguishing viticultural features”—such as climate, geology, soils, elevation, or physical features. But once an AVA is approved by the TTB, it needs something more ephemeral if it doesn’t want to “die on the vine”: strong leadership. “And then that leadership has to justify the value-add [higher prices] and you must protect the name,” Mendelson said. It will be interesting to see whether the TTB will approve the proposed new AVAs—and whether conjunctive labeling will soon be coming to the Willamette Valley.
{This story appeared on Civil Eats in February, 2018.}
As part of a Jane Goodall-inspired community action group, "Saving Pan" includes recipes from Michelle Obama, Michael Pollan, and world-famous chefs.
When Brooke Abbruzzese was in sixth grade, she had no idea what to expect when she wrote First Lady Michelle Obama to ask for her favorite vegetarian recipe—or if she’d even get a response. But a month later, she found in her mailbox a formal-looking envelope fastened with the official White House seal.
“I was like, ‘What the heck! Why is there something from the White House in our mailbox?’” recalled Abbruzzese, who is now 14 and a freshman at Grant Park High School in Portland.
Obama’s recipe—for White House Kitchen Garden Cucumber Soup—joins recipes from Michael Pollan, and chefs Thomas Keller and Ina Garten, and many other luminaries in Saving Pan, a new cookbook created by Abbruzzese and 13 other Portland teens. The cookbook benefits the work of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga Sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo.
“In sixth grade, I was really into the environment, and I wanted to help give back,” said Abbruzzese, who admits to an obsession with Goodall. She met a primatologist friend of her father’s who told her about Roots & Shoots, the Goodall Institute’s youth-led community action program. Abbruzzese was inspired to form a chapter in her own community, drawing mostly from her classmates at Portland’s Beverly Cleary School. After researching why chimpanzees are endangered, the girls decided to focus on raising awareness of the illegal bushmeat trade, which is one of the biggest threats to chimp populations in Africa.
“I got a group of people together and we brainstormed, and that’s kind of how the cookbook came about,” said Abbruzzese. Saving Pan is a collection of vegetarian recipes that Abbruzzese and her classmates created over the course of three years. The title refers to the genus name for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), but also to that most important cooking tool (the cover photo is a blackberry cobbler cooked in a cast-iron pan).
And then there’s Peter Pan, the classic children’s book. As the group explains in their introduction, “Think of it this way: Peter Pan was an orphaned child, similar to the orphaned chimps in Africa. It’s our biggest hope that they can go on to thrive as well as he did.”
McKenzie, Charlotte, and Willa cook up Mark Bittman's frittata
The cookbook was published in December and has already sold 800 copies—not bad for a self-published cookbook that so far has only been sold in Portland. The students have been featured in local news reports, and their U.S. Representative, Earl Blumenauer, recognized their achievement during a congressional session in December. And Saving Pan has already raised $8,000 to protect chimpanzees in Africa.
And the great apes need as much help as they can get. At the end of the 19th century, chimpanzees numbered as many as 1 million. Today, because of deforestation and illegal hunting, they are endangered. They have already disappeared from four African countries and are nearing extinction in many others. In fact, according to the World Wildlife Federation there are fewer than 250,000 chimps left in the wild.
Each Roots & Shoots project is supposed to be rooted in the chapter’s community, so the students—knowing Portland is recognized for its culinary scene—decided to engage local chefs. (The cookbook eventually grew to include chefs from all over the country—and even Canada, France, and Spain.) They thought a vegetarian cookbook would be a great way to educate others about the bushmeat trade in Africa and its effects on remaining chimpanzee populations.
“Because we’re trying to stop the hunting of animals, we thought that promoting vegetarianism would be a really good way to do that,” Abbruzzese said. Putting a vegetarian cookbook together involved writing to food-world leaders like Michelle Obama as well as the chefs at nationally known veg-centric restaurants like Angelica’s Kitchen in New York City (which has since closed), Greens in San Francisco, and the Green Door in Ottawa. The students went door-to-door in Portland, asking celebrated local chefs including Jenn Louis, Kelly Myers, Sarah Pliner, and Jaco Smith for recipes. And the book also contains favorite recipes from the girls’ families: Aunt Debbie’s Artichoke Lasagna, Grandma Eastman’s Macaroni & Cheese, and the blackberry-blueberry cobbler shown on the cover.
A Jane Goodall collage, from Saving Pan.
Over the course of three years, the students gathered to test recipes on Friday nights. “The Friday I joined, they were doing the Michelle Obama recipe. So, I was like, ‘This is even cooler than I thought,’” said Emma Francioch, 14.
To avoid the chaos of too many cooks in the kitchen, half of them cooked, while the other half worked on the collages of the chefs that illustrate each recipe. They learned basic cooking skills from each other, through trial and error, and from the hosting parents. “They even had to clean up their own mess!” said Shanta Abbruzzese, Brooke’s mom.
“I was a little bit interested in cooking prior to doing this cookbook, but I didn’t have a lot of skills,” said Willa Gagnon, 15. “And now I feel like I can go into the kitchen and look at a recipe—or not—and I can make food that my whole family wants to eat.”
The girls had some surprise favorites, including lime-tofu wraps, Moroccan chickpea soup, “Soba Sensation,” and Michael Pollan’s “Any-Veggie Frittata.” Stokes, who usually doesn’t like coconut, was surprised by how yummy the roasted cauliflower in a creamy coconut fennel sauce was. (Chef Roy Farmer at the Green Door in Ottawa contributed the recipe.) “I need to make that again. I just love this recipe!” she said.
The cauliflower recipe was a touchstone for the students, teaching them that even when they think they don’t like an ingredient they should try it in a new iteration. “A lot of people in the group were like, ‘Noooo! I don’t want to eat it—I don’t like cauliflower!’” said Abbruzzese. “But then, everybody’s like: ‘You have to try it!’ And I don’t think there was a single person who wouldn’t eat it.”
Many of the girls became vegetarians on and off throughout the project; Abbruzzese became a vegetarian because of the cookbook—and remains one today. “I fly fish and she’s prohibited me from keeping what I catch. I have to throw it back,” says Brooke’s father, Chris Abbruzzese.
Working on a project that took three years to see through was tough. “There were definitely times where I was like, ‘Is this really gonna happen?’” said Stokes.
Ultimately the project taught them not only how to cook and work effectively in a large group but the value of persistence and dedication.
That said, they think their next project for the Grant Park Chapter of Roots & Shoots won’t be quite as ambitious. “We’re starting to get busier, and we’re starting to get, like, more homework,” said Stokes. “Before the book came out, we didn’t even know what finals week was!”
Maggie Harrison on her unconventional path to becoming a winemaker and her dedication to a difficult grape. (This story was originally published on SevenFifty Daily on Jan. 19, 2018.)
As soon as you taste one of Maggie Harrison’s wines—whether it’s an earthy Pinot Noir, a marvelously complex Chardonnay, or her lush, floral Roussanne—you understand why she has such a loyal following. What you taste in the glass comes from the unconventional ways in which this winemaker picks and ferments her fruit, particularly the Roussanne, a Rhône variety that’s notorious for ripening unevenly. For more than a decade, Harrison has been pulling the very best expressions out of a handful of varieties and making exquisite, nuanced wines at Antica Terra in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
Maggie Harrison with Sean O’Connor (left) and chef Timothy Wastell (right)
The Epiphany
Harrison’s unlikely journey to becoming a winemaker started on an island off the coast of Kenya. With a degree in international relations and conflict resolution from Syracuse University in New York State, Harrison landed a job at the Carter Center in Atlanta but deferred acceptance so she could travel. After a year spent backpacking around Europe, another year in South America, and yet another year in Africa, she was less and less sure about pursuing a career in conflict resolution.
“One evening, on an island off the coast of Kenya, I was having a beer and a complete nervous breakdown,” Harrison says. “A fellow traveler from Mozambique was unlucky enough to have pulled up a seat next to me. I spent most of the evening explaining to him that I was feeling adrift. Finally, this guy put down his beer, exasperatedly, and looked me in the eye. ‘You’ve just spent half an hour telling me everything that’s impossible,’ he said, ‘everything you don’t want to do.’”
“Then he asked, ‘What is it that you want to do?’” Harrison considered the question for a moment and said she thought she’d like to learn how to make wine. The traveler asked if there were any grapes in her country and she said there were.
After leaving Africa, Harrison headed for a winery in California. It wasn’t just any winery but Sine Qua Non in Ventura County—the cult winery owned by Manfred and Elaine Krankl.
The Oregon Trail
After working eight vintages with the Krankls—a period she calls the most formative of her life—Harrison was asked by one of their dear friends to be the winemaker at a new venture in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills. She demurred.
“I had just begun Lillian—my own tiny Syrah project in California,” Harrison recalls, “and my first vintage was still resting in the barrel. I was afraid that if I took on another project, I would be stretching myself too thin.”
The owners of the new vineyard—Scott Adelson, John Mavredakis, and Michael Kramer—none of whom had winemaking or vineyard experience, were persistent. Ultimately, though, they accepted Harrison’s firm “No, thank you.” But they did ask her for a favor: Would she mind taking a look at the vineyard and giving them some pointers on how to farm it? Harrison flew up to Oregon on a rainy spring day.
Her arrival was not auspicious. One of the partners picked her up at the airport and drove her southwest to the Eola-Amity Hills. The weather was gray and bleak, and the endless suburban strip malls along 99W only made things seem bleaker. When she finally arrived at the vineyard, in the countryside northwest of Salem, a sign in barely legible script read “No Trespassing.” “The r was backwards,” Harrison recalls, “as if it had been written by an ax murderer.”
But once she set foot in the vineyard, Harrison fell in love with the property.
“To our left were wetlands and views of the ryegrass growing beyond. To our right, on a steep hillside, was a forest of gnarled, moss-covered oaks. When we reached the top of the hill, the first thing I noticed was the light,” Harrison says. “The clouds fractured over the vineyard and allowed the sun to ray through… I could see the vineyard—a sea of yellow leaves and stunted shoots. The vines were at the beginning of their growth cycle, but they were already beginning to defoliate. The site was so beautiful, the potential so clear—but the suffering was equally clear.” Harrison had only been there a minute before she ducked behind one of the oaks, called her then-boyfriend (now husband), and said, simply, “We’re moving to Oregon.”
Luckily, he agreed.
Harrison finished her last vintage of Sine Qua Non in 2005, and in 2006 she became an owner—with Adelson, Mavredakis, and Kramer—of the 40-acre property in the Eola-Amity Hills. At the time, only six acres were under vine. But since then, she’s planted another 13, bringing the vineyard to just under 20 acres. It’s here that Harrison grows Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes and bottles them under the Antica Terra label.
Reckoning with Roussanne
But Lillian, Harrison’s California project, lives on. Each fall, she flies south to California and picks Syrah, Roussanne (which she started sourcing in 2011), and (in the past) Cabernet Sauvignon. The clusters, carefully stacked in vented plastic totes, are sent to Oregon by refrigerated truck to be sorted and fermented at the Antica Terra facility in Dundee. The resulting wines are bottled under the Lillian label, named after Harrison’s maternal grandmother.
Harrison has a particular passion for Roussanne, the only white wine she makes under the Lillian label. If you ask her how she produces it, she grows animated, eager to share the unique methods she’s devised to get the most out of this tricky variety.
Lillian and Antica Terra bottles at Harrison's Eola-Amity Hill Vineyard (the Roussanne is at left)
“There is not a tremendous amount of Roussanne grown in this country, because of its somewhat annoying habits,” Harrison says. “The growers struggle with it because it ripens incredibly late, and the winemakers struggle because it ripens incredibly unevenly.” (Jon Bonné, in his book The New California Wine, reports that fewer than 400 acres of Roussanne are planted statewide.)
“Roussanne is the least uniform grape variety I’ve ever seen,” says Harrison. “A single vine will have clusters that are green, yellow, gold, amber, rusted, and botrytis. Nothing is ripe at the same time.” That’s a major frustration for most vineyardists, but it became a creative challenge for Harrison. Her work-around is to pick when 80 to 85 percent of the fruit is perfectly ripe and then collate by color.
“Roussanne becomes really russet when it’s ripe—deeply amber and a little bit scaly,” says Harrison. She and her vineyard team bring the whole block in at once and then separate it by color at the sorting table. First they sort by clusters—one box for the greenest, then gold, then amber—as well as a box for the fruit with the highest percentage of botrytis. The grapes on the richest end of the spectrum are sorted one by one. Harrison handles each of these boxes differently.
The grapes on the lightest end—the greenest ones with the highest acid—she handles like Chardonnay. “I’ll give them 10 to 18 hours in the press,” she says, “and then [send them] directly into barrel.” The yellowish grapes, she’ll macerate on the skins for six hours and then take them to the press. Deeply golden grapes she might let macerate on the skins for as many as 20 hours to extract maximum aromatics, flavor compounds, and textures. Says Harrison, “We’re trying to eke out what’s there.”
Finally come the richest grapes. “The challenge here,” says Harrison, “is really how you’re going to access the aromas you know are there—in the gentlest way possible.” Instead of walking on the fruit with rubber boots (the way winemakers may do when making a dessert wine like Sauternes), she macerates and ferments the fruit on the skins for three to five days, gently washing the skins with the juice twice a day until the aromatics crack open and the flavors become really clear. Each of these Roussanne wine groups is fermented in barrel, separately, for a year. “Then we take samples and take them to the blending table,” says Harrison. “That’s where we find the ratio that comes together to form the most compelling whole.” The result is a highly aromatic, floral wine with a lush texture and an almost oily quality.
A few years ago, Harrison was at a dinner party at a winemaker’s house in California. She says the winemaker exclaimed, “We hate Roussanne!”
The reason it’s a turnoff for some, she surmises, is that it’s a low-acid grape. “If you try to retain the acid that exists, you lose out on the dripping honey beeswax characteristic,” she says. “But if you forgo that, you lose all the acid.”
In her inimitable way, Harrison has figured out a method for working with the fruit and pulling the best aromas, flavors, and textures from it to create the finest expression of a Roussanne.
Over a decade ago, while filmmaker Laura Dunn was making her first feature documentary, “The Unforeseen,” farmer and poet Wendell Berry graciously invited her into his Henry County, Kentucky home so she could record him reading the poem from which the movie’s title originates. Like many, Dunn was moved by Berry’s presence, and she’s been working to bring his worldview to a wider audience ever since.
Earlier this year, she released “Look and See,” an unconventional documentary about Berry’s life. In the film, Berry himself is elusive, never actually appearing on camera in the present day. Instead, the film is filled with still images of Berry on his farm in the early years, television footage from the 1970s of him opining about changes to agriculture, and his resonant voice floating over gorgeously shot images of Kentucky farmland.
Wendell Berry at his multipaned window, which he wrote about in the Window Poems.
Dunn knew early on that Berry would not agree to be filmed. But rather than abandon the project entirely, she took this as a creative challenge. As a result, “Look and See” offers a view of the world from Berry’s eyes instead. Over the course of the film, you meet Berry’s daughter, Mary; his wife, Tanya; and numerous Kentucky farmers whose struggle to stay on the land in the face of consolidation is the subject of much of Berry’s work.
The film also captures Berry’s debate with Earl Butz, the now famous U.S. secretary of agriculture under Nixon and Ford, and a major proponent of industrialization of agriculture. In his rebuttal, Berry pays homage to the “traditional farmer” who “first fed himself off his farm and then fed other people; who farmed with his family, and passed the land on to people who knew it and had the best reason to take care of it. That farmer stood at the convergence of traditional values. Our values. Independence, thrift, stewardship, private property, political liberty, family, marriage, parenthood, neighborhood. Values that declined as that farmer is replaced by technologies whose only standard is profit.”
“Look and See,” which has been screened in communities across the country through TUGG (a theatrical booking site for indie films), debuted on Netflix in October. Civil Eats spoke to Dunn about telling the story of Berry’s life, her unconventional filmmaking methods, and why she sees Berry’s novels as the heart of his oeuvre.
When did you first read Wendell Berry’s writing and what imprinted itself upon you?
I read The Unsettling of America in high school. My mom is a [corn] geneticist—and very much an environmentalist, an agricultural person. Because of that, I was interested in these ideas. And then I read more of his stuff in college; he was a writer I really loved. But when I was working on my first feature, “The Unforeseen,” [executive producer] Terrence Malik wanted me to find some voices to include in the film … So I delved deeply into his work—mostly his poetry. And then I reread The Unsettling. And I really fell in love with his poetry and his work again.
And why did you decide to make this film, so many years later?
When we toured “The Unforeseen,” I was really surprised by how few people knew who Wendell Berry was. I feel like more people should be familiar with Berry’s work.
Can you talk about what it was like to make a film about Berry without including him in it? And I take it that wasn’t your choice?
It was the constraint he put on me. He is really anti-screen: no computers, T.V., or movies. He thinks it contributes to the decline of literacy and the deterioration of imagination. And I knew that, so I knew this would be a challenge.
He didn’t want to be filmed—it makes him feel so inauthentic. So, in those early conversations, I said to him, “I understand. I actually think that’s very insightful information about you. If we could just do audio interviews, that would be interesting. I want you to point me to what we should see.” So I accepted that constraint. And it was his wife Tanya who would say, “This is who you should talk to.”
Can you say anything about the black-and-white still photos at the heart of the film?
James Baker Hall, one of Wendell’s dearest friends, passed away in 2009. He was a writer and professor at the University of Kentucky, and he took all these gorgeous black-and-white photos. His widow had boxes and boxes of never-before-seen negatives and when we found them, I thought, “There’s a film here that we could piece together.” It’s sort of impressionist-style.
Who are the farmers you interview throughout, and why do you choose not to name them in the course of the film?
Everyone in the film is a friend or a neighbor of Berry’s. Sometimes I watch the film and think, “Maybe I should have named them.” Form is something I’m constantly experimenting with. There are standard things you’re supposed to do in a documentary. I had it with their names for a long time. Then I thought, “It becomes so literal-minded.” I want people to feel something. We live in such an information age. I don’t want more data. I want something that’s going to transport me to a place. I’m making the film I want to see.
Can you speak about the beautiful wood engravings that start each chapter of the film?
Wesley Bates has illustrated a lot of Wendell’s books. [Co-director/producer] Jef Sewell, my husband, did the visual design. I wanted it to be chapters like in a book. So he said, “We have to find Wesley Bates.” He’s an amazing, vibrant artist in his 60s, who lives in Toronto. They’d have conversations over the phone and then he’d sketch something and then we’d give him feedback.
Throughout the film, we hear Berry reading his poems. How did you choose which poems to include?
It was really tough. “The Window Poem” was something I had read many years ago and that was really in mind when we started the film. It’s about the tension between the grit of our world and the patterns. My approach was to go to Henry County and do a portrait of this place. We’d go and I’d spend a few weeks, find what stories were compelling. We’d shoot all the footage and then you edit it and you find narratives—poems to frame things. This illustrates this idea, or that idea.
I was familiar with his essays and poetry, but I didn’t know that he also wrote novels. Can you say a little about them?
I honestly think his novels are the heart of his work. Basically, every single novel is told through the eyes of a different character in a small town in Kentucky. The more you read, the more complete a picture you get.
Berry is hard to categorize, and you get at that in the film where his wife Tanya says, “Some people would think he’s a novelist and some think he’s an essayist and some think he’s a poet…” How do you see him?
I see him as an artist. I think his nonfiction writing is infused with poetics all over the place. He sees segmentation or categorization as a function of the industrial mind. He very much believes in interdisciplinary thought. So I think he’s deliberately defying … category. He doesn’t want to be limited.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “Look and See” is available on Netflix; the trailer is below.
{Note: this story was written before both Mario Batali and Andrew Friedman were accused of chronic sexual harassment and assault by dozens of women who have worked for them over the years. I expect many more women will come forward over the coming weeks and months to reveal other powerful men in the restaurant industry have been guilty of the same thing.}
Over the last few months, numerous women have come forward to accuse movie producer Harvey Weinstein and dozens of other men in various industries of sexual assault and harassment. The restaurant world has begun its own reckoning: Celebrity chef John Besh was the first to fall, as documented in a lengthy exposé in October in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Twenty-five women came forward to share their stories of sexual harassment while working for the chef’s restaurant empire. Besh, who has stepped down from his role at the company to “focus on his family,” has inspired both fear and soul-searching in the restaurant industry. Could your company, too, be fostering a culture where sexual harassment thrives?
For those working in the restaurant and alcohol industries, it’s not exactly breaking news that sexual harassment is widespread. In 2014, a report by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United found that 90 percent of female restaurant workers had experienced sexual harassment. Two-thirds had been harassed by a restaurant owner, manager, or supervisor.
The women SevenFifty Daily interviewed for this story—sommeliers, PR execs for alcohol companies, event planners, bar managers—mentioned not only persistent sexual harassment throughout their careers but also “look the other way” human resources policies, especially at male-run restaurant groups. “It’s just endemic across the whole industry,” says one wine PR executive who asked not to be named. Melissa Lang, a veteran of several restaurant groups who now is the events manager for the Dallas-based restaurant chain Dave & Busters (more on that later), says, “Sexism is so rampant—you become jaded to even noticing.”
The alcohol industry may be even worse than the restaurant world. Though no sexual harassment statistics are available for the booze industry overall, the culture of free-flowing wine and liquor is certainly known anecdotally to spur bad judgment. “A lot of my sexual harassment complaints are alcohol-fueled—there’s no question about it,” says Richard Curiale, a Bay Area lawyer who litigates sexual harassment cases and leads sexual harassment training for the tech and wine industries. “I would say 60 percent of the complaints I get wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been drinking.”
As stories of sexual harassment and even assault continue to emerge, it may be instructive to look at companies that have structures in place to deal with sexual harassment. The resources and tips cited here have proven effective in reducing harassment by employees, employers, and customers.
This story was published on NBC's Better on Nov. 17th.
Bartending might seem like a fun, carefree job — how stressful could it be to make cocktails and pour wine and microbrews to thirsty guests? Very, according to U.S. News & World Reports. Using their own data and data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook, the company recently released a list of most stressful jobs of 2017. Bartending is one of the twenty-two professions that made the list, right alongside anesthesiologist, paramedic and patrol officer.
Constantly interfacing with public—especially an inebriated public—can be trying, especially when you have to do it cheerfully and for prolonged periods on your feet, without a break. That said, the kind of stress a bartender faces depends very much on the type of bar. If you’re at a dive bar, you have to be security in addition to a charming host.
“Do you have to cut someone off and have them scream in your face?” asks Colin Carroll, the bar manager at Trifecta, a popular restaurant in Portland, Oregon. In a sophisticated spot like Trifecta, that doesn’t occur. But Carroll has stress of a different sort.
“There are ten tickets with 13 different cocktails and 'where the hell is my flat bread?' There’s always a running checklist of five to 10 things to do,” says Carroll, who is always prioritizing things in his head from most to least important. For Carroll, who has bartended for 11 years, this creates a low but ever-present level of anxiety.
Bartending is also physically draining. Carroll works 50 hours a week, the majority of it on his feet.
“Especially as you get older, it takes its toll on your body,” says Carroll, 36.
The food system, like every other sphere of life in America, has been shaped by structural racism and racial injustice. Civil Eats has chronicled some of the many efforts to expose and address the ways that structures in the food system actively work to silence, marginalize and take advantage of people of color.
Ricardo Salvador, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and director of its Food and Environment Program, has spent a lifetime writing and talking about what an equitable food system might look like. On a recent, unseasonably sunny October evening at The Redd on Salmon in Portland, Oregon, he offered 800 food system innovators a reminder about the size and scope of institutional racism in our current food system, underlined the urgency of food justice work, and offered concrete actions we can all take to create positive change.
“We live in a very unjust, inequitable society,” began Salvador. “And the brunt of the inequity is felt through the food system.” Salvador detailed how we got here through the dark history of colonization—from the genocide of the myriad Native American tribes, whose land we stole, to the African citizens who were abducted and enslaved by the English and then the Americans.
“From the standpoint of an economist, the way you generate wealth is that you have access to at least one of the factors of production: land, labor, rent,” Salvador said. From the 1830s until the 1880s, he noted, we drove the original inhabitants of this continent off their land, quite literally depriving them of their food as well as their food culture.
“If you want to find some of the most immiserated human beings on the planet—not just in the United States—you would go to the concentration camps that we call the reservations,” Salvador said. “Here is where you will find people whose land was taken from them, and therefore their foodways, their ways of accessing the natural resources upon which they based their entire cultures and they way that they nourished themselves.”
Similarly, the Africans who were taken from their homeland and brought to the U.S. by the slave trade were driven against their will from their land and were forced to be the unpaid labor to allow white Americans to profit. “What those people were enslaved to do was actually to drive the beginning of what today we call Big Ag,” Salvador said.
Tragically, slavery has not disappeared. To this day, exploited farm labor is what keeps the cost of food so cheap in this country. “Farm labor is the most essential, the most important part of our food system, and the most undervalued,” Salvador said.
“We spend as little as 6 to 12 percent of our disposable income on food. That is usually quoted as something that we should be very proud of. But it should be a national shame,” he said. “It’s as if the workers involved in the food industry and nature that is required to produce the food were costs to be minimized…We need to find a way in which we actually value all of those resources—the land and the people that are involved.”
One of the long-simmering questions facing those striving for better food for all is how to go beyond voting with your fork? Is it possible to create a new food system that does not rely on exploitation?
Salvador made a case for profound system shifts like reparations, loan forgiveness programs, and immigration reform. He urged people to work independently and collectively to support these goals and the great food-system reform work that’s already afoot in our communities around this country. Among his suggestions:
• Support Reparations to the descendants of enslaved peoples. One place to start is to urge your members of Congress to support Rep. John Conyers’ (D–MI) bill, HR 40: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.
• Support immigration and labor reforms that value labor and provide for dignified livelihood. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, and realistic transition initiatives such as the proposed “Blue Card” program.
• Get your elected officials to support U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree’s Local Food and Regional Market Supply FARMS bill, which will create local jobs, boost midsize farms’ sales, and increase access to healthy food.
• Get your elected officials to read and support Oregon senator Earl Blumenauer’s roadmap for an alternative Farm Bill “Growing Opportunities.”
• Get your local school district to sign onto the Good Food Purchasing program, a metric-based framework that encourages institutions to direct their buying power toward local economies, environmental sustainability, a valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. (L.A. Unified School District, San Francisco Unified, Oakland Unified, and Chicago Public Schools have all already signed on.)
In closing his presentation at the Redd, Salvador came back to his original question.
“Do we know enough to create a food system that does not rely on exploitation?” he asked. “Yes, we know enough to produce our food without exploiting nature, and we definitely know enough to produce our food without exploiting people…. Let me just put a very sharp point on it for you: The question is not really: ‘Do we know enough to be better?’ The question is: ‘Will we?’”
Three years ago, when Chelsey Smith took a job at the Jack Daniel’s bottling plant in Lynchburg, Kentucky, she had no idea what the policy on maternity leave was. “I didn’t have a clue about it until I was pregnant,” says Smith, now 26. So when she and her husband, Drew, a truck driver for the company, learned they were pregnant with their first child last year, they were happily surprised to discover that Brown-Forman (the owner of Jack Daniels’s) had a progressive parental leave policy: Chelsey was entitled to 12 weeks of paid leave, and Drew, as the non-birth parent, was due six weeks, paid.
Brown-Forman’s parental leave policy proved crucial for the new parents. Chelsey had complications during labor—the epidural caused part of her left leg to remain numb—and she came home from the hospital on crutches. In addition to pediatrician visits, Chelsey had to see a neurologist several times and have an MRI. (The cause of the numbness is still a mystery.) The extra appointments would have been impossible if Drew wasn’t also home and able to drive the family.
“When I came home from the hospital, I was on crutches and couldn’t put my foot on the ground. Drew did everything: bathed me, cooked supper, went grocery shopping, did dishes and laundry—the list goes on,” she says. And because Brown-Forman’s policy allows the non-birth parent to take his (or her) six weeks any time over the first six months of the baby’s life, Drew can reserve a week or two for when Chelsey returns to work.
Drew, 32, realizes how rare paid paternity leave is in the United States and says he can’t imagine not having this benefit. “Those nights of hardly any sleep are much easier to deal with,” he says, “when you don’t have to worry about getting up on time in the morning.” And the time he’s been home with Chelsey and their daughter, Megan, has brought them closer as a family. “I sure am glad I was there the first time that little girl smiled,” Drew says. “I would’ve missed that and many other memories without these benefits.”
Chelsey, Drew, and Megan Lee Smith. Photo courtesy of Drew Smith.
Brown-Forman—which also makes brands such as Woodford Reserve, Sonoma-Cutrer wines, and Finlandia vodka—has one of the best parental leave policies in the alcohol industry.
“Their parental leave policy is fantastic. And their paternity leave is the highest I’ve seen,” says Deborah Brenner, the founder and president of Women of the Vine & Spirits, a membership organization dedicated to the support of women in the alcoholic beverage industry.
“It was a topic that mattered a lot to me,” says Kirsten Hawley, Brown-Forman’s chief human resources officer. “It came from conversations with women who were trying to make hard choices between staying at home to bond with a newborn baby or coming back to work so they could earn an income. And also talking to dads about their desire to stay home with their newborn child longer than they had the opportunity to.” At the time, the company already offered decent parental leave—two weeks, paid, for dads, and six weeks, paid, for moms—but it was covered by a short-term disability insurance policy. Hawley thought the company could do better. She says, “We decided to not treat childbirth as a disability.”
The revised policy, which kicks in after a year of employment, also makes no distinction between fathers and same-sex partners—the “non-birth parent” can be male or female. “We wanted to be sure that our leave addressed today’s modern families,” Hawley says. It also covers adoptive parents and foster parents, giving them six weeks of paid leave. It covers all Brown-Forman’s salaried workforce and hourly nonunion employees.
Needless to say, this is not the norm in the alcohol industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2016 National Compensation Survey, the leisure/hospitality sector has among the lowest rates—6 percent—of access to paid family leave. (That category includes restaurants and hotels, though not bars.) The only category to fare worse was the construction industry. Manufacturing, which includes companies that make alcoholic beverages, was slightly higher, at 10 percent.
“The restaurant industry is not flexible, and it doesn’t put any value on families or mothers,” says Jessica Brown, 34, who oversees the food and beverage program at JetBlue. Brown should know. She had worked for two years as the wine director for a notable New York restaurant group when, soon after she’d told her direct supervisor she was pregnant, her position was eliminated. “It’s unclear whether the owners knew about my pregnancy when my position was eliminated,” she says, “but it was definitely a shock.” Not that the company offered any paid parental leave anyway.
Brown spent months applying for jobs in the industry and had some positive interviews, but once she disclosed that she was pregnant, in each case she was told (later, by the various HR staffs at the places she applied) that the employer had decided not to fill the position. Ultimately, she was able to parlay her food and beverage experience into a “day job” at JetBlue.
Five states—California, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Rhode Island—and the District of Columbia have passed paid family leave laws, but many other states offer just six weeks of paid leave at partial salary, which any woman who has given birth says is barely enough time (or money). Still, it is better than the unpaid leave mandated by federal law. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires all businesses with more than 50 employees to offer new moms and dads 12 weeks of unpaid leave. (To get this “benefit,” though, you have to be full-time and have been with your company for a year.) Crucially, the FMLA also offers job protection: Your employer must offer you the same job when you return to work, or one that is nearly identical, with identical pay and benefits.
But what if you’re pregnant and you work for a small employer, like a restaurant, cocktail bar, or small wine importer? “You hope to win the lottery,” says Kate Newhall, the policy director at Family Forward Oregon, a politically savvy nonprofit that advocates for family-friendly policies in the state.
Family Forward Oregon spearheaded the campaign for a statewide paid sick leave bill, which was signed by Governor Kate Brown in 2015, and it is one of the leading organizations behind Time for Oregon, a coalition fighting for paid family and medical leave in the state. A bill to provide such leave was introduced in the 2017 legislative session, but it didn’t pass. Newhall is confident, however, that it will be on the agenda again in 2018, saying, “We’re in it to win it!”
Until Oregon passes a paid family leave bill, it is one of the 45 states where new mothers have to fend for themselves—or rely on family. When Sonia Kehler, 44, a bartender in Portland, was pregnant with her daughter Vela, her boss at Captain Ankeny’s bar gave her six weeks off, unpaid. Kehler survived financially because her partner, also a bartender, was able to find a better-paying day job and because her father babysat Vela when she went back to work. She was able to pump breast milk in an employee bathroom. Having been a bartender for years, Kehler wasn’t surprised by the lack of any kind of paid maternity leave. She says, “I never even asked.”
Rare is the independently owned bar or restaurant that can afford to offer paid maternity leave. Liz Davis, the owner and manager of Xico, a Mexican restaurant in Portland with 25 employees, has offered health insurance to all employees—even those who work only part-time—since the day the restaurant opened five years ago. But paid maternity leave is another matter. “Our profit margin is so small, and we actually can’t operate with one less server,” says Davis. “We’d have to replace her. So it becomes a situation where we’re paying two people.” But after reading Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened (Simon & Schuster) and thinking about the issue at length, Davis decided to offer one week of paid maternity leave. “I know that’s nothing,” she says, “but for [my employees], it’s the difference between being able to pay rent that month and not.”
In states like California, which was the first in the nation to pass a paid family leave law, in 2002, restaurant owners aren’t faced with this tough decision, because thestate pays for the leave through a worker-funded insurance program. Jacquelyn Dowell, 33, is a bartender at Oakland’s Ramen Shop. When she told her boss she was pregnant, he was very supportive.
“He sat me down and said, ‘What shifts are gonna be good for you? I just want you to be comfortable,’” Dowell says. “So that was amazing.”
Six weeks before her due date, Dowell was racked with false labor pains, and her doctor told her not to return to work. California’s short-term disability program covered her at 55 percent of her salary for six weeks, and the state’s then Paid Family Leave covered another six weeks off, also at 55 percent of her salary.
Was that enough to live on in the high-rent Bay Area? “Not at all—not even close,” Dowell says. But fortunately, Dowell’s husband, Kevin, works for a small spirits company, The 86 Co., and he was allowed a month and a half of paternity leave at his full salary. Knowing that most bartenders in the U.S. don’t receive any pay during maternity leave makes Dowell feel lucky. “Yet I feel that what I received wasn’t enough,” she says. “It’s super unfair. It’s just crazy to me that pregnancy isn’t covered.” Last year, California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that will increase the Paid Family Leave payment to 70 percent of a minimum wage worker’s salary. (Workers with higher pay will get 60 percent of their salary.) The new coverage will take effect in 2018.
Companies in the alcoholic beverage industry that are truly family-friendly, like Brown-Forman and The 86 Co., are few and far between. Some leading wine and spirits distributors offer paid leave, but only to members of the sales team. (This recalls Starbuck’s recent fiasco: Earlier this month shareholders objected that a new, 18-week parental leave policy was only for salaried workers, whereas hourly workers receive only six weeks.)
Diageo, the British multinational spirits and beer company (Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, Guinness) whose U.S. offices are based in Norwalk, Connecticut, has made Working Mother’s list of 100 Best Companies for the past nine years. In addition to subsidizing day care, the company offers job-sharing, flextime, and a decent parental leave policy. All full-time employees who have worked a year for the company—even fathers and adoptive parents—are eligible for four weeks of paid leave.
One restaurateur who is helping set the bar for paid family leave is Danny Meyer at Union Square Hospitality Group. Last fall he announced an eight-week parental leave program at all 16 of his restaurants and bars that applies equally to birth parents and non-birth parents. The program covers full-time employees who have been with the company for at least one year, and gives four weeks at 100 percent of the base wage, and another four weeks at 60 percent. Of course, this means that workers at restaurants that still accept tipping will not get tips while they’re out, but the base wage at USHG restaurants is still higher than the tipped minimum wage in New York City. (Similarly, workers who take advantage of this leave at the group’s nine Hospitality Included restaurants—that is, restaurants that have abolished tipping—would not get revenue share, but their base wage is higher than the current New York City minimum wage of $11 an hour.)
But the majority of companies in the alcohol industry don’t offer paid parental leave for the simple reason that they don’t have to. Kat Kelly, now 38, was pregnant when she took a job as import manager at Baron Francois, a French wine importer. (She did not disclose she was pregnant in her interview because she feared she would not be hired if they knew.) She says her boss presented the company as family friendly in her interview, but he offered her only six weeks off, unpaid, when she gave birth. (Because she hadn’t been at the company for a full year, and because Baron Francois had 20 employees at the time, Kelly was not entitled to any time off under the FMLA.) Luckily, she had applied for short-term disability and so got a tiny portion of her salary. But just a month into her six-week leave, Kelly says she felt pressured by the company to work from home.
“Psychologically, I wasn’t ready. And I don’t think I’d physically healed from the C-section,” says Kelly, who returned to work exhausted. “I was forgetting things, feeling overwhelmed.” The only place she could pump her breast milk was in one of two single staff bathrooms, and coworkers were always knocking on the door. To top it off, she also felt pressured to go to evening wine events and drink a lot. “I wanted to be like, ‘Oh, I’m still cool,’” Kelly says. “But I wasn’t able to do that anymore.” She eventually left Baron Francois—and the wine industry—to work at NARS Cosmetics, which she says is a truly family-friendly company. “They have a nice, big pumping room,” she says. “Women have babies, and that’s a natural part of life.”
Kylie Henshaw, human resources coordinator at Baron Francois says the company still doesn’t have a formal maternity leave policy, but in January it will be subject to New York state’s new Paid Family Leave Program, which requires that all companies offer eight weeks of leave to new mothers and fathers, paid at 50 percent of her or his salary. (The Program covers full-time and part-time employees; full-time employees must work at least 26 weeks, or six-and-a-half months, at a company to be covered; part-time employees must work at least 175 days to be covered. The Program also covers employees who need to care for a sick relative.) Henshaw says the company has since moved to a new office space and now has a private room in which new mothers can pump.
But until all states start passing paid family leave policies like California and New York’s—or bars, restaurants, and alcoholic beverage companies start issuing more progressive maternity leave policies on their own—the drinks industry will continue to lose some of its best employees.
“One of the main problems that the restaurant industry has right now is maintaining qualified employees,” Jessica Brown at JetBlue says. To her, it is no surprise why.
“They’re losing a tremendous number of seasoned professionals because they don’t support families or any type of maternity leave.” Employees who have been with a company for a long time are, she says, “put out to pasture” just because they decide to start a family. “The industry has to take a hard look at this issue in general. They need to look at the Big Picture.”
When she was 13, Claire Wineland started a foundation to help people with cystic fibrosis (CF), a progressive and terminal genetic disease. That would be remarkable for any tween, but for Claire—who was born with the disease and had just nearly died of complications from it—it was especially plucky. Though she’s spent nearly a quarter of her 20 years in the hospital and has had 35 surgeries (so far), Wineland’s outlook on life is uniquely upbeat. Wineland shares her secrets on staying resilient, embracing challenges, and becoming a professional schmoozer.
Q: How do you stay resilient in the face of your disease? A: I don’t think of my disease as a burden. Just being alive, regardless of one’s circumstance, is incredibly challenging. Every single human being is dealing with a huge level of suffering. It’s an innate human condition. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the hospital. I’d have the hospital room all decked out, doing arts & crafts, just being a kid. Adults would come visit me. They’d squat low and say, “I’m so sorry you have to deal with this.” And I’d be like, “No, I’m having a grand old time!” Finally, I started to hear about their lives. The more I started to talk to them, the more I realized that they were miserable. We’re looking at the wrong measurements. It’s not getting over your problems—it’s finding a way to use them.
Q: When you were 13, you started Claire’s Place Foundation to help people with cystic fibrosis. Tell me about it. A: CF is a hugely taxing illness. After I recovered from lung failure and being in a coma [at age 13], it dawned on me how much support my parents—especially my mother—needed. She was a single mom with another kid. She was with me every single day in the hospital. She had to quit her job. On top of that, she had to find a way to pay her bills. I started the foundation to help her.
Once my mom was secure, I realized, “Wow, I’m actually pretty good at this!” The Foundation has grown every year. We provide grants for families who are dealing with extended hospital stays. We help them pay their rent, their car payments, bills—whatever they need covered financially, so that they don’t have to lose their home on top of losing their child.
Q: What keeps you upbeat and enjoying life, when it would be so easy for you to dwell on the negative? A: When you feel something, you have to let yourself feel it. People mistake positivity with ignoring what’s there and what’s real. The truth is, anger, aggression, fear, pain, sadness—they are way older than we are. There is a way to feel something and not get stuck: by acknowledging what’s there and realizing that, fundamentally, it doesn’t matter. I genuinely don’t care that I have CF, because I get to travel the world as a public speaker. I have a dog I love (her pit mix, Daisy). I get to design hospital rooms. I get to be the person I want to be! Not in spite of my illness, but because of it.
Q: You’re partnering with Zappos to make hospitals more beautiful. Tell me a bit about this project and why you’re passionate about it. A: There’s no reason why hospitals have to be terrifying, cold, and sterile environments. I’m focusing on redesigning hospitals to benefit patients, so that they’re a space for them to heal. We’re re-doing the Children’s Hospital in Vegas. The playroom is my baby: I’m going to bring the outside in by changing the lighting so it’s not fluorescent, but warm. It should be done by the end of this year.
Q: How do you balance your full life with the limitations that your disease brings? A: I’m really bad at balancing taking care of myself and working. I tend to overdo the working and underdo the treatment. With CF, you have to do four hours of breathing treatments per day. They’re intensive and exhaustive. Then you have shots, pills, blood tests.
No matter how well I take care of myself, I have a terminal illness. But at the end of the day, what will I have done with my time? Just breathing treatments? Or will I have actually given something with my life? As much I screw up and am by no means a perfect patient, I’m really proud of myself. It’s up to everyone to find their own version of that.
This interview was done for MeQuilibrium's Cup of Calm series, where writers interview interesting people and experts, their journey to resilience, and their wisdom on wellbeing
A new documentary chronicles the efforts of wheat farmers and urban gardeners as they shift to sustainable farming. {This story ran on Civil Eats on Sept. 29th, 2017.)
“I’ve never been comfortable growing lawns and golf courses when there’s a worldwide food shortage,” says Willow Coberly at the beginning of the new documentary “Gaining Ground.” Willow is married to Harry Stalford, a grass-seed farmer from Oregon’s Willamette Valley who, at the start of the film, is as conventional as they come. His transformation into a champion of organic wheat, thanks to his wife’s prodding and persistence, is the moral heart of this stirring film.
Farming in and of itself is a risky profession. “Gaining Ground” tells the stories of three farmers—two from rural Oregon and one from Richmond, California—who take additional risks to transition away from conventional, commodity farming to grow organic food. In the case of Doria Robinson, who returned to her hometown of Richmond to work at Urban Tilth, the mere act of growing sustainably farmed food in a food desert is a deeply courageous act. As she says in the film, “This is the front line, and somebody has to hold it.”
Filmmaker Elaine Velazquez and her wife, the producer and radio documentarian Barbara Bernstein, took five years to shoot and edit the film, which turned out to be a good thing. Just as they were about to wrap the shoot, two issues that had been looming in the background of their farmers’ lives—and their documentary—came front and center: The Chevron refinery in Richmond exploded and genetically modified wheat was found in an Oregon field.
The couple has been showing the film at events around Oregon and at film festivals across the country; it will have its Bay Area theatrical debut this weekend at the Food & Farm Film Festival in San Francisco. (The film will be shown on October 1 at 4 p.m.) Civil Eats spoke to Velazquez and Bernstein about the importance of forging rural-urban connections in the age of Trump, Richmond’s long tradition of farming, and why the next generation sees a future in organic farming.
When Cattail Creek Lamb owner John Neumeister was younger, he would devote one day per week to making the 110-mile drive from his ranch near Junction City, Oregon to Portland, where the bulk of his customers were located.
“I’d leave the farm, drive 100 miles to the processor, pack the order myself, do the invoices by hand in the truck, and then go make 20-25 deliveries at restaurants around Portland,” said Neumeister, who will turn 70 next month. He would crash at a friend’s house in Portland, then do more deliveries the next day, on the way back home.
These 15-hour-days took their toll, but they also didn’t allow Neumeister, who has been raising pastured lamb since he took over his family’s flock in high school, any time to drum up new business or work on long-term sales strategy. And if he got a last-minute order from a Portland restaurant who suddenly ran out of lamb mid-week there was little he could do about it.
“If a chef called me on Thursday, I might say ‘You know, I can see if UPS can deliver it,’” Neumeister said. Which meant trying—sometimes in vain—to stalk his local UPS driver, whose delivery route he knew by heart. If he couldn’t locate the UPS truck, Neumeister was out of luck.
“And then the restaurant would end up buying from one of my competitors.”
A B-Line trike rider leaves the Redd with a refrigerated box full of food for Portland area restaurants
Now, thanks to the Redd on Salmon, a Portland food hub created by the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust, Neumeister not only has freezer storage space for up to 3,600 pounds of lamb in Central Eastside Portland, he’s got a stall for staging orders, an office space, and built-in distribution via B-Line trikes to Portland area restaurants.
Best of all, there’s no need to chase down UPS drivers. When a restaurant needs a special order of pastured lamb, as happened earlier this month with chef Joshua McFadden’s Tusk, all Neumeister needs to do is call B-line, who also does fulfillment for Cattail Creek.
When consumers hear the term private-label wines, they may envision Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck or Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand, which includes Chiantis and Malbecs that retail for $6. But what they may not realize is that the private-label market has grown beyond the bottom shelf. Premium private-label wines are popping up at Costco and even Whole Foods for as much as $24.
Private-label wines—traditionally, brands created for a company (often a retailer or restaurant), which sell exclusively via one sales channel—are no longer, by definition, plonk. (Though plenty of volume-driven, inexpensive wine still exists.) These days, restaurants from Shake Shack to The French Laundry, as well as brands like Whole Foods and Grand Hyatt hotels, are getting into the private-label game, partnering with respected wineries like Frog’s Leap (in the case of Shake Shack) and Michael Mondavi’s Folio Fine Wine Partners (for Grand Hyatt’s Canvas line) to make wines that are exclusively available to their customers. Some of these wines are easily identifiable “linked” brands, such as Costco’s Kirkland, Sam’s Club’s Member’s Mark, and Trader Joe’s eponymous label. Others are less obviously aligned with their owners, including Whole Foods’ Wine Farmer or Kroger’s Acronym, which many consumers may not realize are private-label brands. What all private-label wines chiefly have in common is that the retailer, hotel chain, or restaurant often has a hand in forming the flavor profile and style of the wine and that the resulting wines are priced lower than similar wines from recognized wineries.
The profile of these wines has risen to such a degree that the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnist, Lettie Teague, recently devoted a column to the category. She singled out three Costco wines, including the 2015 Rutherford Napa Valley Meritage ($14), which she called a remarkable value. She also liked the 2016 Member’s Mark Mosel Riesling ($10.50) at Sam’s Club.
“Everybody has the same goal: to buy good wine for cheap,” says Andrew Cullen, founder of the CostcoWineBlog.com, which publishes independent reviews of the retailer’s private-label wines.
And every retailer has the same goal: to make more money.
I wrote this piece about alcoholism in the wine, beer, and spirits industry for a new wine industry publication called SevenFifty Daily.
Drinks professionals weigh in on their recovery from alcoholism and how they’re charting a new course
It’s July 2014 and Giuseppe González, celebrated bartender and owner of Manhattan’s swank Suffolk Arms, is in New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail. It’s his birthday weekend. A rock-star partier, González also has type 1 diabetes, and his doctor has just told him he needs to quit drinking—or else. But at this weeklong bacchanalia, his doctor’s advice is far from his mind. Instead, he heads to a party and ends up in the bathroom with a bag of blow. His cell phone rings.
“It’s my mom, calling to wish me happy birthday,” González says. “She hears me and she’s like, ‘Joey, are you all right?’ and I say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’” González got off the phone with his mom and called a friend to ask for help. His friend replied, “I’ve been waiting for this call for a while, bro.”
The next day, González went to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He’s been sober ever since. That’s not to say it has been easy. “Alcoholism is chronic—it never goes away. There’s never gonna be a day that goes by that I think I have control over it,” says Gonzalez, who, three years later, attends an AA meeting every morning.
González has plenty of company. People who work in the food and beverage industry are around alcohol daily and are often expected to drink it. Temptation is everywhere. As González puts it, “I had easy access to some of the best spirits—and some of the best bartenders in the country were my best friends.” In such circumstances, it’s easy to overindulge. Statistics bear this out: The hospitality industry is the profession with the highest rate of substance abuse, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Recently, though, a handful of high-profile bartenders, chefs, general managers, and others in the industry have been speaking out about their struggles with alcohol abuse—and their newfound sobriety. Sean Brock, chef at Husk, McCrady’s, and Minero in Charleston, South Carolina, went to rehab last January and spoke about the pleasures of not drinking in a recent article for the New York Times. A year ago, Jack McGarry, co-owner of New York City hotspots Dead Rabbit and BlackTail, stopped drinking after a close call that landed him in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And Mickey Bakst, general manager of the Charleston Grill in South Carolina, who’s been sober for 35 years, is outspoken about his alcoholism. “I have an extraordinarily blessed career, all due to the fact that I got sober,” he says. Though not all recovering alcoholics have stayed in the industry, many have—and they say their careers are more successful than ever. The stigma of being a drinks professional with alcoholism is seemingly starting to disappear.
In the late spring of 2014, Janaki Jagannath and her colleagues had left a community meeting and were standing in the dusty basketball court inside Cantua Elementary School in Cantua Creek, California. Nestled deep in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, Cantua Creek is one of the poorest communities in the state—located in one of its most lucrative agricultural regions.
The residents of Cantua Creek had just been hit with three-fold water rate hikes, which would mean paying close to $300 a month for water the local health department had found to be contaminated with high levels of disinfection byproducts, leaving it undrinkable. And residents had just been told that their water would be shut off if they couldn’t pay the new rates. Jagannath, who was then working for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), was outraged.
“In California, water is the epitome of privilege,” Jagannath explained by e-mail. “At no point in this state’s history have rural residents—the people who do the work of growing, picking, and packing our agricultural commodities—had a say in where clean water should be directed. The odds have been stacked against small, local vegetable producers—and moreover against the health and safety of farmworkers—for the majority of California history.”
Standing around the local basketball court with colleagues from other farmworker advocacy organizations and environmental justice nonprofits, Jagannath realized an urgent need for these groups to come together strategically if they were to succeed in fighting the myriad injustices facing low-income farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley.
She got her wish. A year later, at just 26, Jagannath was hired to be the first coordinator of the San Joaquin Valley Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which she soon renamed the Community Alliance for Agroecology (CAFA). Now 28, Jagannath is known as a powerful advocate for farmworker rights, environmental justice, and political organizing in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
“Jagannath took the Alliance to a different level,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and one of the Alliance’s founders. “Her focus became ‘How do we work with small farmers of color in the valley? How do we build a good agricultural system from the ground up?’”
For two years at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), Jagannath had worked one-on-one with farmworkers who had experienced pesticide exposure, harassment in the fields, and wage theft. She also worked on some larger environmental justice cases—like the episode in Cantua Creek—that were focused on communities’ access to fresh water.
In Cantua Creek, Jagannath worked alongside residents to secure subsidy funding from the state to defray their water bills, and arranged for state-funded bottled water to be delivered to each home (which is still happening to this day). Situations like the ones at Cantua Creek are symptoms of a larger illness, of course. Members of CAFA get farmworkers involved in building environmental justice solutions. For example, CAFA is currently advocating for legislation known as the Farmer Equity Act (AB 1348), which would give socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers increased access to environmental stewardship funds.
Formative Experiences in Farming
Jagannath’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from South India, settling in Mobile, Alabama, where Jagannath was born. Her dad worked at paper mills in the South, and Jagannath’s childhood was punctuated by moves from one rural mill town to another. Her parents divorced when she was five, and eventually her mom moved to Southern California, where she raised Jagannath and her brother.
I fell in love with agriculture there,” Jagannath said. “I grew up wanting to farm.”
Jagannath may have been destined for a career in farming—after all, Janaki is the Hindu goddess of agriculture. “Overall, she is a central character in Hindu faith representing the ecological cycles of the planet upon which agriculture, and all of life on earth, depend,” said Jagannath. But during college at the University of California, Davis, Jagannath spent her summers working at Chino Nojo, a diversified fruit and vegetable farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California. She harvested crops—from carrots to strawberries—alongside the field crew and also worked at the farm’s vegetable shop.
She remembers picking the season’s finest heirloom tomatoes and then slicing them for Alice Waters at the back of the shed so she could taste them before loading up crates for Chez Panisse. She also recalls picking golden raspberries in late summer for Wolfgang Puck, who would drive all the way to the farm from Spago in Los Angeles.“
Working at Chino Nojo opened her eyes to the need for more farms like it—those that provide long-term, stable work for farmworkers, and employers who see farming as a dignified occupation.
“I learned a lot of what I know about farming from one farmworker there, Rene Herrera, who has worked there for most of his life, and his father before him,” Jagannath said. “Those kinds of jobs are rare as a farmworker—because farms like the Chino family’s are equally rare and precious places.”
At UC Davis, Jagannath “got politicized,” she said. She discovered the vocabulary with which to explain the environmental downside of her dad’s jobs working at paper mills throughout the South—and learned about the concept of environmental justice.
By the time she graduated in 2011—with a B.S. in International Agricultural Development—Jagannath had worked with faculty to build the University’s Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems degree, which is considered a paradigm-shifting step for agricultural education in California. She went on to get a certificate in ecological horticulture from UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.
Fighting for Policy and System Change
At the Community Alliance for Agroecology, there are three main areas of work: policy advocacy (as with the Farmer Equity Act, or trying to establish a drinking water fund for rural residents paid for by Big Ag polluters), local agroecology organizing (such as holding farmer-to-farmer exchanges on agroecology and market enhancement), and building political power for systems change (they host trainings in the areas of food systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy and organizing). Right now, the organization’s biggest policy push is on the Farmer Equity Act, though the group has also been actively trying to get the state to channel some of the subsidies it grants to large dairies with methane digesters to “alternative manure-management strategies” like pasture-based dairies.
Promoting soil health is another major area of the Alliance’s focus. “Janaki knows all this information about soil health,” said Genoveva Islas, Program Director at Cultiva La Salud. “It really does help to highlight our connection back to the earth, and why it’s so important to preserve it.”
In addition to composting and manure management, CAFA is championing a practice known as orchard recycling. “Rather than growing an almond tree for 25 years and pulling it out and burning it in field, you take that material and blend it back into the soil,” explained Janaki. “We’re essentially trying to close the loop.”
But probably the most exciting part of CAFA’s work right now—especially in the Trump era—lies in developing a so-called “organizer academy” led by two United Farm Workers-trained organizers that will teach community members and farmworkers about food-systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy, and organizing. “The curriculum is taught in a way that’s evocative of the 1960s and 70s organizing strategies that were successful in winning some of the major battles for equity for farmworkers,” said Jagannath. So far, the pilot project has been for CAFA staff only, but Janaki envisions trainings for farmworkers in the near future.
“We can’t just advocate for reform and regulation,” Jagannath said. “Instead, we’re working on how to build political power amongst farmworker communities, to ensure our local and state elections have representation for communities of color who have been paying taxes but not receiving any of the benefits.”
Update: Jagannath will be attending UC Davis law school in the fall to study Environmental Law with a focus on agriculture and land use. CAFA is currently seeking a new coordinator.
When Agnes Nyinawumuntu began her career as a coffee farmer two decades ago, she picked coffee “cherries" indiscriminately and with little care for quality. Back then, because she was selling her cherries to a middleman for a pittance — 250 Rwandan francs (about 30 U.S. cents) for 2 pounds of unwashed cherries — she had no incentive to select only the ripe, scarlet-colored cherries that create the best coffee.
Agnes Nyinawumuntu at a Let's Talk Coffee event (photo: Relationship Coffee Institute)
Today, after three years of training in agronomy, cupping and roasting by the nonprofit Relationship Coffee Institute, Nyinawumuntu is paid nearly $2 a pound for her beans, and she is also the past president of the Twongere Umusaruro Cooperative in eastern Rwanda. She has become a respected figure in Rwanda’s coffee industry who is regularly asked to train other Rwandan coffee-growers in best agricultural practices. The money she has earned has lifted her family out of poverty — she was able to upgrade their earthen dwelling to a stucco house and purchase mattresses for herself and her husband and for each of their five children, as well as purchasing livestock and an additional plot of land for farming.
Over the last four years, the Relationship Coffee Institute has enrolled more than 14,000 female coffee farmers in Rwanda in its training, teaching them how to improve coffee quality throughout the growing and processing of the beans. The Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI) is a unique collaboration between a B Corp-certified coffee importer, Sustainable Harvest, and the nonprofit Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Improving economic opportunities for farmers like Nyinawumuntu is RCI’s reason for existing.
Continue reading my feature for B Magazine, the publication of B Lab, on the nonprofit's web site.
In late February, I read an Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof called "Trump Voters are Not the Enemy" that really resonated for me. Like everyone I know, I'd been struggling to understand how 62 million Americans could vote for someone who treats women so abysmally, stoops to racial slurs, and ridicules everyone from disabled people to Miss Universe. I realized there were other reasons Trump appealed to folks, of course, but I assumed that voting for him meant you also endorsed his worse traits.
Todd Nash, in a photo taken by Brown Cannon III for 1859 Magazine
Since agriculture is one of my beats, I went in search of farmers from my (and Kristof's) home state of Oregon. What I discovered is that Trump supporters have complicated feelings about him—even more so now that the new budget proposal makes such drastic cuts to the agriculture programs that really help farmers (some of the very people who helped elect him). But these farmers still hope he will deliver when it comes to getting rid of regulations. I think my favorite quote came from rancher Todd Nash, the Commissioner of Wallowa County out in Eastern Oregon, when I asked him if he had any reservations about Trump.
“His personality! His flippant comments! It was really tough for me to vote for somebody that was not respectful in a lot of ways,” said Nash. “During the campaign, every time he would say something that was so offensive, I kept saying, ‘Doggone it! Don’t make it so hard for me to vote for you!’” he recalled.
Read the whole four-part series, which was published in Oregon Business Magazine earlier this week.
A few weeks ago, wine writer Katherine Cole invited me to be a panelist on her new podcast, the Four Top. On the podcast, which just won a James Beard media award, Katherine and three other food-world insiders (usually members of the media) talk about hot-button topics in the food and beverage culture. For this episode, Peter Platt of Andina restaurant, OPB reporter Roxy de La Torre, and I discussed Sanctuary Restaurants, undocumented immigrants in the restaurant industry, and Peruvian cuisine. Have a listen here, and subscribe to the Four Top on iTunes!
A glass of Frappato and the menu at Osteria Savio Volpe
A decade ago, the east Vancouver neighborhood now known as Fraserhood was mostly known for its Pho restaurants and cheap rents. But in 2007, Andreas Seppelt opened the French bistroLes Faux Bourgeois, and it became an instant hit. Chic coffee shops, co-working spaces, bars, and more restaurants (including the fabulous Osteria Savio Volpe, with its sexy vibe and handmade pastas) soon followed. In fact, this once-gritty area now has reputation as an emerging foodie enclave, anchored on one end by Bow & Arrow’s only Vancouver café, and on the other by one of the best restaurants in the city. Here, our shortlist of the best spots.
One of the best farro dishes I've ever eaten, at Savio Volpe
I've been traveling to Cabo for years with my mom and step-dad and every time we go, it seems, there are more restaurants touting their locally-grown, organic produce. Not only that, there are now at least three organic farms in the arroyo outside of San Jose that have restaurants. I write about these on-farm restaurants for the May issue of Food & Wine. (Available with a digital or print subscription here.)
Here's a tease:
It’s dusk and I’m sitting with my husband on a lush 16-acre organic farm, sipping a glass of cabernet when I notice that the tree brushing up against my arm is festooned with pomegranates. It’s only 5:30PM but already the open-air bar to my right is spilling over with glamorously-dressed Californians and Canadians nursing carrot margaritas and watermelon-mint-basil juleps served in Mason jars and a band on a stage made of hay bales is belting out Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Rows of arugula, beets, carrots, collards, and mizuna line the field behind us, foreshadowing the unforgettable meal we’re about to consume.
I’m not in my agriculturally-rich home state of Oregon. I’m at Flora Farms in San José del Cabo, Mexico. When I first started coming to Los Cabos 18 years ago, it was impossible to find organic produce anywhere, let alone on restaurant menus. The Cape of Baja, home to both Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo, is arid and desert-like—I’d assumed it was inhospitable for farming.
Little did I know that in 1996, Gloria and Patrick Greene, expats from California, had quietly started growing organic vegetables on an estuary hidden behind the colonial town of San José. Back then, there was no marina and few people lived in the rural villages of Animas Bajas and La Choya; certainly no tourists drove out there. In fact, when it rained, the arroyo would flood, making these two villages—and the Greene’s yurt and farm—inaccessible. “When the arroyo used to run every summer, we’d be cut off for two to three days,” says Greene, laughing. (This was before the San José Marina—or the bridge to it—was built.)
Today, as we tour the farm with chef Guillermo Tellez, I marvel at how the whole Flora Farm enterprise has expanded since I first visited in 2012. The old growth mango grove, a magical spot for weddings and other events, now has its very own kitchen and a brand-new open-air rotisserie for grilling chickens. (Beets, wrapped in tinfoil, are roasted in the embers and served in a fabulous salad at dinner.) Owners of one of 10 culinary cottages— luxury straw bale homes—have access to a beautiful lap pool and hot tub, as well as unlimited organic vegetables and herbs. There’s even an on-site microbrewery, two clothing boutiques, and a brand-new spa and yoga center, complete with a barber shop and juice bar. “We are like our own little village,” says Tellez, whose hoop earrings and pointy salt-and-pepper goatee lend him a pirate-like vibe.
Wine glass in hand, I follow Tellez as he leads us past a wedding—the guests are mingling over cocktails in the mango grove—into his tiny meat cellar, where various cuts of heritage pigs dangle from strings. He’s justifiably proud of the kitchen’s ambitious charcuterie program, which yields dry-cured coppa, sopressata, and culatello (leg cut cured in a pig’s bladder). The cellar will soon double in size, he tells us, and a cheese cave is in the works. Right now, the staff milks six cows and makes their own butter, ricotta, and burrata. (The cave will allow Tellez to make cotija and other aged cheeses.)
Gloria’s motivation to start farming twenty years ago was simple: she had opened an organic restaurant in San José, and needed a ready supply of pesticide-free produce. The 10-acre plot of land that she and Patrick owned came with a mango orchard and a well. Though the soil wasn’t ideal for farming, the Greenes built it up with compost and cover-cropping. Within a few years, their flavor-packed vegetables were turning heads. Chef Charlie Trotter requested tomatoes and herbs for his restaurant at the One & Only Palmilla. Eventually, Trotter gave Gloria a wish list of heirloom varieties to grow: Black Krim and German pink tomatoes, Broad Windsor favas, nero di Toscana kale. Soon other area chefs were placing their orders.
Gloria had been hosting a farmers market and cooking classes on her property for years. In 2009, she began working with a local rancher to raise Spanish hogs, chickens, goats, and rabbits on a nearby ranch. She and Patrick opened Flora’s Field Kitchen the following year. The marina bridge, built that same year, made the journey to the farm easier, but it was still circuitous, via a steep, pothole-pocked dirt road. Nonetheless, guests arrived in droves. Even the likes of Thomas Keller and George Clooney were showing up for dinner. Today, the restaurant is so busy—they do breakfast, lunch, and dinner—that chef Tellez reserves all the farm’s produce, herbs, eggs, and meat for its own meal service, farm store, private events, and two markets.
Just-picked winter root vegetables for sale at Flora Farms
Flora’s Field Kitchen seems to have started a trend. A few miles to the west, chef-farmer Enrique Silva has been farming organically at Los Tamarindos since 2002, and opened an on-farm restaurant in 2011. And last year, Cameron Watt and Stuart McPherson, expats from Vancouver, B.C. snapped up a 25-acre site between Los Tamarindos and Flora Farms. But the farm-to-table ethos has also caught on throughout Los Cabos. All the best resort restaurants along the corridor—from brand-new Comal at Chileno Bay Resort to the restaurants at the One & Only Palmilla—source their produce from local farms and ranches. And every Saturday morning, San José’s boisterous Mercado Orgánico attracts locals and travelers who come for its farm-fresh eggs and produce, live music, yoga classes, and tasty Mexican fare like Tlacoyos and tamales.
When my editor at Organic Life asked me to write a piece about childhood vaccines, I had no idea how controversial the subject still was. As a health journalist, I pay attention to the latest studies and knew the scientific consensus is that vaccines are entirely safe and medically necessary if we want to keep our children protected from a variety of painful (sometimes deadly) childhood diseases. I interviewed infectious disease experts, doctors, and even a naturopath to find out how we know there's no link between vaccines and autism and whether it's OK to choose an "alternative vaccine schedule."
Since my piece came out on April 26th, there's been another measles outbreak—this time in Minneapolis, among the Somali community. My heart breaks for the mom whose 18-month-old daughter had to get IV fluids and oxygen for 4 nights in the ICU. She now regrets that she listened to the anti-vaxxers who sowed fear about autism, which is why she rejected the MMR vaccine for both her children. She and her husband are now spending their days trying to persuade other Somali parents to vaccinate their children rather than risk exposure to measles.
Since Organic Life is no longer around, I'm reproducing the story in full, below:
Every Parent Needs To Know These Medical Facts About Vaccines And Autism The anti-vaccine movement isn't just spreading fake news—it's a public health risk
By Hannah Wallace
The BBC drama Call the Midwife follows a group of progressive nuns and nurses in 1957 London who cycle from house to house delivering babies and dispensing free medical care. If you’ve ever watched it, you already know how deadly diseases such as measles, polio, and whooping cough (pertussis) can be.
Today, in 2017, we have vaccines against all three of these diseases—and more. So our children should be protected, these preventable illnesses confined to the past and to binge-watchable historical dramas.
Right?
Alarmingly, misinformation about vaccine safety has been spreading via anti-vaccination support groups on social media, films—and even the White House—that suggest a link between vaccination and autism.
Vaccines have been doubted since their invention. (Vaccine hysteria is much older than you think—it goes all the way to 1796.) But much of the thinking in today’s anti-vaccine movement can be traced to a 1998 paper by gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield published in the British medical journal The Lancet which linked the rise of autism to the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine. The paper was later shown to be based on fake data and has since been disavowed by 10 of its 13 original authors. The Lancet retracted the paper, but it was too late—the idea of the autism link had already taken hold.
Today, suspicion of childhood vaccination persists, despite the fact that the link to autism has been roundly disproven (see Cochrane’s systematic review of worldwide studies of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, which involved over 14 million children, and also the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 18-page document listing all the studies showing that getting vaccinated is not linked to autism or other neurological disorders.)
Here are the facts that every parent needs to know:
To Not Vaccinate Can Have Deadly Consequences
As a result of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, outbreaks have been popping up all over the country. “In areas where vaccine-hesitant families cluster, we’re seeing outbreaks of chicken pox, pertussis, and other transmissible diseases that could’ve been prevented,” says Dawn Nolt, M.D., M.P.H., a professor at the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon.
Over the past four years, there have been at least three measles outbreaks—one in Texas and two in California, both home to robust anti-vaccine movements—and public health officials worry that bigger ones are in our future. In some private schools in Austin, Texas, 30 to 40% of the children are unvaccinated, according to Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Hotez and others worry that we may be on the verge of a potentially large measles outbreak. Measles is a highly contagious and lethal disease. Just to give you an idea: the virus remains active in the air or on infected surfaces for up to 2 hours—you can catch it by walking into a room where a person with measles has been hours earlier. You can also catch it from someone who doesn’t yet know he has measles: it can be transmitted four days prior to the onset of the rash. Worldwide, it still kills around 90,000 children a year, as reported by the World Health Organization.
One reason people are hesitant to vaccinate their children is because they haven’t witnessed up-close the kind of suffering that these diseases can cause.
“If you don’t see it, you don’t believe it,” says Dr. Nolt. “People don’t see how devastating chicken pox, pertussis, and measles are, so it gives them a sense of security that these diseases aren’t in the world.”
Before the pertussis vaccine became widely available in the 1940s, about 200,000 children got sick with it each year in the U.S.; about 9,000 of these children died. Similarly, before the measles vaccination program started in 1963, an estimated 48,000 people in the U.S. were hospitalized with measles each year and around 400 people died of the disease.
Your Kid’s Immune System Won’t Be Overwhelmed By A Vaccine
Nolt says that contrary to popular belief, a baby’s immune system is not “overwhelmed” by a vaccine. “Children encounter thousands of millions of germs every day. Getting a vaccine is just drop in the bucket,” says Nolt. “Even multiple doses given at one time is not going to overwhelm their immune system.”
It helps to have a basic understanding of how vaccination works. When germs, such as bacteria or viruses, invade the body, they attack and multiply: an infection takes hold, causing illness. The immune system fights off disease-causing microbes, in the process learning to recognize the illness-causing germs. In the future, the immune system will produce the specific antibodies needed to defeat them, so the next time you’re exposed to those microbes it can take them down quickly, before infection sets in. On average, it takes your immune system over a week to learn how to fight off a disease-causing microbe. (In the meantime, you’re sick).
A vaccine exposes your immune system to disease-causing microbes that have been killed or weakened so that they can’t cause illness, teaching your system how to fight that particular disease without actually contracting, say, diphtheria, which could otherwise overwhelm the immune system before your body can fight it off, causing severe health complications or death.
Because vaccine formulas have gotten more precise over the years, children today are actually exposed to fewer bacterial and viral components than they used to be. Thirty years ago, children received shots that protected against eight diseases and were exposed to more than 3,000 bacterial and viral proteins, the Washington Post reported recently. Today, even though children receive more vaccines, the total number of bacterial and viral components administered is only about 150.
Vaccination Does Not Cause Autism
Thimerosal, which was once widely used as a vaccine preservative in the U.S. and elsewhere, is the mercury-containing compound that anti-vaccine activists say causes autism. However, studies that the American Academy of Pediatrics cites show no link between thimerosal and autism.
Nonetheless, in 1999, the U.S. Public Health Service recommended removing thimerosal from vaccines as a precautionary measure. Since 2001, thimerosal has not been used in any childhood shots except for themulti-dose flu vaccine, according to Ian Branam, a press officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC). Thimerosal was never used in the MMR vaccine. And childhood autism rates in the U.S. continue to increase since thimerosal was removed, which suggests that something else is to blame for our autism epidemic.
What To Know About Spacing Out Shots
Most pediatricians recommend following the CDC’s latest schedule. “The schedule is updated every year,” explains Nolt. There are currently 10 vaccines recommended for children under 18 months (though some are multi-dose) but the most important are Pneumococcal (which protects against Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria, which can cause pneumonia, ear and sinus infections, meningitis, and a blood stream infection), and Hib (which protects against Haemophilus influenzae type b, which causes serious infections including bacterial meningitis).
If you’re wary about your baby getting several shots at once, you can talk to your pediatrician about spacing them out. Dr. Nolt does not recommend this, because the goal is to induce protection before 12 months, when your child is most vulnerable. Some shots, like Hib, require 2-3 booster shots over time, and spacing out shots prolongs the interval when your child is susceptible to serious infectious diseases. However, she would prefer a parent delay some shots than not vaccinate at all.
Hilary Andrews, a naturopathic physician with a private practice in Portland, Oregon, customizes immunization schedules for her patients. (In Oregon, naturopaths can administer vaccines.) “Every child comes with its unique risk factors towards infectious diseases, and its own protection,” says Andrews. If you cannot find an M.D. or N.D. in your area who is open to an alternative vaccine schedule, Andrews recommends Paul Thomas, M.D.’s The Vaccine-Friendly Plan,which walks you through how to talk to your pediatrician.
“A lot of books are either completely against vaccination or all-in with the CDC schedule. This is a resource for those who are what I consider the middle group,” Andrews says. Even then, parents should fully understand the risks involved in delaying each vaccine—again, talk to your child's doctor, don't blindly follow the book. Thomas suggests skipping the hepatitis B vaccine, for example, unless you, the mother, have hepatitis B—but babies can still get hepatitis B by being bitten by an infected person, by touching open cuts or sores of an infected person, or from food that was chewed (for a baby) by an infected person. Thomas also recommends taking a pass on the rotavirus series, as long as your family practices good hygiene, drinks clean water, and has access to health care. (Most babies with rotavirus infections can effectively be treated with antinausea drugs.)
However, even Thomas believes it’s very important that you vaccinate your child against both Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) and pertussis (DTaP), following the CDC schedule. He allows that some parents may prefer starting these shots at 3 months, as they do in certain European countries, or may want to give just one vaccine at a time—just know this will require a few extra visits to the pediatrician’s office.
Know Where To Find Reliable Information
For more facts about vaccination, refer to the following organizations:
The American Academy of Pediatrics’s Immunization Page, which contains information for providers and parents
The Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offers information for parents including “A Look at Each Vaccine,” which tells you why each vaccine is important for your child to get.
Institute for Vaccine Safety, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health offers an independent assessment of vaccine safety.
I'm pretty excited about my first story in Food & Wine, about Dana Frank's beguiling new natural-wine-focused restaurant, Dame.
Reporting this meant I got to know the Oregon winemakers who are on the menu at Dame, as well as their wines. Five of the winemakers were at the dinner: Kelley Fox (of Kelley Fox Wines), Dan Rinke (Johan), Chad Stocks (Minimus and Omero), Steven Thompson (Analemma), and Scott Frank (Bow & Arrow), Dana's husband.
Frank pouring wine from a banquette at Dame
My story is not available online yet, but here's a tease:
Things can get geeky when you hang out with natural-wine makers. Conversation flits from how much VA, or volatile acidity, a wine should have, to why Pinot Gris ought to be turned into a red rather than a white. Opinions fly. Cursing is compulsory. And, if you've opened a half dozen of their bottles, you're in for a rollicking good time.
On a recent night at Dame, sommelier Dana Frank's new natural-wine-focused restaurant in Portland's Concordia neighborhood, she'd gathered her winemaker friends for a spring feast paired with their best vintages. "Yes, these are really unique, interesting wines," said Frank as she popped open a bottle of Bow & Arrow's Melon, a supercrisp, golden Loire Valley varietal made by her husband, Scott Frank, who was at the other end of the table. "But they're also really delicious."
Keep reading in the April issue of Food & Wine, pg. 83.
This explainer-style piece on grass-fed dairy was published in Organic Life last month but with all my travels this winter, I forgot to post it. ;-)
Petting a cow at Jon Bansen's pasture-based dairy in Monmouth
Most milk and beef sold in America today comes from cows that have been fed corn. It cheaply fattens the animals up, but because cows’ multi-compartmented stomachs can’t properly digest corn, it also makes them more susceptible to E. coli, a pathogenic bacteria that can spread to humans. The solution? The food cows were meant to survive on: grass.
Not only are grass-fed cows healthier, but their meat and milk are more nutritious than their cornfed counterparts. Grass-fed meat and dairy contain gobs more beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids, which may prevent dementia as well as heart disease. They’re also high in conjugated lineoleic acid (CLA), a healthy omega-6 that’s been shown to lessen symptoms of inflammatory disorders such as allergies and asthma. In well-managed grass-fed operations—where cows are regularly moved to fresh pasture—there’s an environmental boon, too. Their manure replenishes the soil, improving the quality of the forage growth, which in turn reduces erosion and water pollution.
As word of these benefits has gotten out, demand for grass-fed products has skyrocketed. That’s led to some shady advertising. All cattle are grass-fed until they get to the feedlot, and any producer can put the words “grass-fed” on their product. (The USDA’s woefully understaffed Food Safety and Inspection Service theoretically regulates grass-fed beef claims, but doesn’t have the resources to audit ranches, so it’s all on the honor system.) Luckily, there are a few reliable and strict grass-fed certifications out there.
Owners: Vitaly and Kimberly Paley, Marcel Lahsene, and Garret Peck
Atmosphere: Last February, when the Heathman Restaurant shuttered, the dining room was completely gutted and revamped. It now has a modern, open feel with oak floors, lime-green banquettes, pressed tin ceilings and an open kitchen that runs the length of the dining room. Striking slate waves by Oregon artist Michael Schlicting hang on the wall, lending the space a sea-focused vibe.
Clientele: Lawyers, politicians, tech workers, journalists, Heathman hotel guests, theater-goers and ladies-who-lunch-after-shopping.
Most popular: The entire smoked, kippered, and cured section of the “Sea Bar,” which includes smoked sablefish, sturgeon pastrami, beet-cured steelhead, and mustard-kippered salmon — all with house-made matzo crackers and smoked-herring schmear. Kale Caesar salad with chicken, the Dungeness crab Luigi, the open-faced Reuben and “Le Grec,” a pita stuffed with rotisserie chicken salad, pesto, and a cucumber yogurt dressing served with crispy fries.
Best seat in the house: All the window seats. If you’re craving privacy, the seats behind the mesh screen in the back of the dining room are best
Danger zone: Impress your clients with a seafood tower. The petite tower ($45) serves 2-4 and will give you a sampling of what’s fresh from the sea: oysters, prawns, cherrystone clams, sea urchin shots, smoked mussel shots, Dungeness crab, and assorted sauces. The grand version ($86) is twice as big and feeds 4 to 6.
Bragging rights: Over the decades they’ve been in Portland, the Paleys have built strong relationships with local winemakers. As a result, the wine list emphasizes wines from small Oregon and Washington producers.
Overheard: Two middle-aged men in suits converse: “One real mistake in our political system is we’ve created an elite class“; “It’s weird to think about being passionate about data”; “I was going to put it into stocks, but I think there’s a bubble right now. Real estate makes sense.”
Is natural wine a fad or the next big thing in sustainable viticulture? I wrote about Oregon's place in the natural wine movement for the January issue of Oregon Business Magazine.
Three natural winemakers at a recent dinner at Dame, Dana Frank's wine bar
It wasn’t long ago that you’d find me perusing the wine aisles at Trader Joe’s, searching for a bottle of affordable Pinot Noir for book club. A conscientious consumer, I’d choose a bottle from Oregon or Washington even if I couldn’t find organic or biodynamic. Little did I realize that even these wines—usually hovering at $12 a bottle—contain all sorts of chemicals and additives that, while not imminently dangerous, I’d certainly refuse to ingest if they were listed on a loaf of bread or a box of Grape Nuts. But because the FDA doesn’t regulate wines (that job falls to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau), there are no labeling requirements for what goes into each bottle.
If there were, you would be shocked. In addition to the pesticides and herbicides that many conventional wineries use in the fields, winemakers routinely use chemicals and additives in the cellar.
Some of the more egregious include Velcorin (dimethyl dicarbonate, which essentially sterilizes the wine and requires wearing a hazmat suit to dispense it); a plastic polymer known as PVPP (used as a fining agent to remove astringency); and something called Mega Purple, a grape concentrate that is used to “plump up” the color of a pale red wine and add a jammy flavor.
Though USDA organic standards forbid the use of most of these additives, they allow less benign substances like enzymes, powdered tannins, oak chips, dry powdered fish bladder (Isinglass) and egg whites.
As the market for organic food has soared over the past decade, a parallel movement has been quietly humming along in the wine world. It turns out that many mass-produced wines have been tinkered with endlessly in the cellar; they might contain anything from designer yeast strains and bentonite clay to the chemicals listed above.
So, mirroring the organic-food movement, a scrappy and somewhat rebellious movement has sprung up that champions so-called natural wines. The phrase, and the practice, is controversial, because there’s no agreed-upon definition of natural wine, and neither is there a third-party certifier.
This story appeared on Civil Eats on January 20th. (And was later published on Grub Street as well.)
When a group of restaurant owners from the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United) held their most recent virtual meeting, members shared their employees’ fear of a Trump administration. “They expressed concern over the well-being of their employees, who are traumatized. And their concern over the feasibility of their businesses if Trump does enact all of these policies,” said Sheila Maddali, co-director of the Tipped Worker Resource Center at ROC United.
So in early January, members of ROC United’s national restaurant employer association, RAISE, wrote a letter to President-elect Trump asking for a pathway to citizenship. Inspired by their members’ courage, and their willingness to use their collective voice, ROC’s leadership banded together with Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino online organizing group, and launched the Sanctuary Restaurant campaign.
In just two weeks—and without publicizing the campaign—65 restaurants across the country signed on to become Sanctuary Restaurants, prominently displaying window signs that they are a safe place for undocumented immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community. Restaurants span the country and include Coi in San Francisco, Lil’s in Kittery, Maine, Honey Butter Fried Chicken in Chicago, and ROC United’s own restaurant, Colors, in Detroit and New York City.
In addition to publicly committing to a zero-tolerance policy for racism, sexism, and xenophobia, these restaurants are part of a rapid response network that will offer strategies for protecting targeted workers and informational trainings on legal rights. They have also created a number employees can text if they’re experiencing harassment or injustice: text TABLE to 225568.
ROC United’s effort is just one of many like it. As Trump is sworn is as the 45th president of the United States, the restaurant industry is understandably on the front lines: Trump made it crystal clear during the campaign that he wants to deport all undocumented immigrants and build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. This is serious news for restaurant workers, as the Pew Research Center estimates that at least 1.2 million in the U.S. are undocumented.
Chefs Take Action
In addition to longer-term planning to protect vulnerable communities from the Trump agenda, chefs across the country have taken the inauguration as an opportunity to do good in their own communities, by either welcoming them into their restaurants or hosting pop-up fundraisers for progressive causes.
Renee Erickson, the James Beard Award-winning chef from Seattle’s Walrus and the Carpenter and Whale Wins, is hosting a fundraiser at her Capitol Hill hotspot, Bar Melusine, on January 20. Funds will go to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry.
In Portland, Oregon, Le Pigeon and Little Bird will donate 5 percent of sales on Inauguration Day to three organizations that provide legal services for new immigrants. The same day, Chez Panisse, Mission Chinese, Zuni Café, and 21 other celebrated Bay Area restaurants will each serve a dish using manoomin, the wild rice cultivated by the Ojibwe people. Proceeds from that dish will go to Honor the Earth, a nonprofit that works to revive indigenous food traditions and has been deeply involved in the resistance at Standing Rock. The fundraiser, called #FoodStand, will extend to the Good Food Awards, which take place in San Francisco over inauguration weekend.
Cookie Grab & Other Fundraising Efforts
Other actions are already underway. In Portland, Oregon, 21 female bakers and chefs participated in a “Cookie Grab” that raised $27,500 for Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette. The pink boxes, costing $50 and containing 21 cookies, sold out within 24 hours.
“It was a truly amazing response that we did not expect,” said Sarah Minnick, owner of Portland’s Lovely’s Fifty-Fifty and co-organizer of the Cookie Grab. “When the donation coordinator for Planned Parenthood called to see how she could help us promote the fundraiser, I told her we were already sold out and she cried.”
Now, Minnick and co-organizer Kristen Murray, the chef and owner of Portland luncheonette Maurice, plan to do the Cookie Grab two times a year to generate money and excitement for Planned Parenthood. In Bellingham, Washington a group of bakers and chefs organized their own Cookie Grab in early January, selling all 75 boxes of cookies for $40 each in 24 hours, earning $3,000 for Mt. Baker Planned Parenthood Healthcare Center.
Organizer Cara Piscitello of Acme Farms + Kitchen says they already have plans in the works for a second fundraiser to mark Trump’s 100th day in office. “Should any other crisis or extreme injustice arise before then, we are ready to take action and pitch in where we can,” said Piscitello.
“A lot of people we love and support—our family and friends—are in groups that are potentially going to be ignored or treated poorly, based on the new administration,” said Erickson. She chose the ADL as her charity for its longstanding commitment to protecting civil rights for all. The group’s efforts cover a broad range, including cyberbullying prevention workshops in schools across the country.
“There are so many issues and this one covered the most bases,” said Erickson. The ADL looks out for all people who might experience discrimination or hate.” She added that the fundraiser at Bar Melusine is an open house party—there is no exclusive invite list or $200 per plate fee. “This way we can invite people from all parts of our lives—some that will give lots of money and some who will give nothing at all, but who will be supportive.”
In addition to asking guests for donations, Erickson and her staff will auction off works by prominent Seattle artists Curtis Steiner and Jeffry Mitchell. Erickson’s main suppliers—Hama Hama Oyster Co., Willowood Farms, and Sea Wolf Bakers—are all donating food to the event; cases of wine and liquor will also be donated.
In Washington, D.C., an all-volunteer initiative called All in Service has recruited 124 restaurants and retailers to donate a percentage of their profits from inauguration weekend to local charities. Establishments include places like Tryst, Momofuku CCDC, and Glen’s Garden Market; charities will range from those that support the local migrant community to LGBTQ issues and homelessness.
Also in D.C., on January 19 and 20, Italian café and food emporium Via Umbria in Georgetown will host a $25 cocktail class, “Cheers to Powerful Women,” that will feature classic American cocktails inspired by powerful American women. All profits from the classes will go to Planned Parenthood. Pizzeria Paradiso’s Dupont Circle location will be serving pints from women-owned Denizens Brewing Company; 100 percent of all proceeds will go to the League of Women Voters.
Instead of fundraising, Seattle chef Josh Henderson is opening up two of his restaurants on inauguration day to feed the houseless or any Seattleite who needs a free hearty meal. “Trump represents disunity. I just want to show that there are people who represent the opposite of that. That there’s love and hope,” said Henderson. The restaurants, Quality Athletics in Pioneer Square and Canteen in South Lake Union, will serve spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad, garlic bread, and apple pie on Friday afternoon.
Most chefs are quick to say that doing good is not a partisan issue—or shouldn’t be. “No matter what our guests’ political beliefs are, they are welcome in our restaurants,” said Le Pigeon co-owners Gabriel Rucker and Andy Fortgang in a statement explaining their choice to donate to local immigrant rights groups. Yet, the statement continues, the climate for immigrants could be more hostile with the incoming administration. “The restaurant business has always been a major employer of immigrants and it is a group we care deeply about. Helping others is not a protest—it’s what we feel is the right thing to do.”
Even so, there’s bound to be pushback—customers who will insist they don’t go to restaurants for political reasons. But Katherine Miller, executive director of the Chef Action Network and senior director of food policy advocacy at the James Beard Foundation, thinks it’s wonderful that so many restaurants are finding creative ways to be there for their employees and all customers during a time of fear and tension.
“Restaurants are your communities these days. These chefs are leaders in their communities,” said Miller. “They’re really showing their support for American values—the things that make us great as a country.”
Now that cannabis is legal recreationally in Oregon, I thought I'd give it a try for my occasional insomnia. Here's what happened, in the December issue of Vogue. Along the way, I dig into the science and find out how terpenes influence your high (more than indica vs. sativa), which conditions cannabis actually helps, and why it can cause anxiety, paranoia, and even hallucinations in some people but not others. Download PotHoles
Here's the uncut version, which includes more stories from women.
Last fall, Oregon became the fourth state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. In my hometown of Portland, people began lighting up on street corners, friends threw pot-themed dinner parties, and I heard whispers about a chef who hand-delivers salted caramel “medibles.” Farma, a dispensary a mile from my house, is so spare, modernist, and color-coded that it looks more like a Damien Hirst installation than a head shop. Buds with names like Island Sweet Skunk and Dogwalker are displayed beneath the glass like so many exquisite chocolates.
Whenever my husband, an unrepentant marijuana enthusiast, invites me to join him, I decline. On the few occasions I have experimented, a creeping agitation has tempered any sense of euphoria, and I’m terrified of becoming like the dopey-eyed, shiftless stoner boys I remember from high school. I struggle with insomnia, however, and my cocktail of remedies—valerian, wine, and Ambien—has become less and less reliable. Which is how I find myself at Farma one afternoon, consulting with the slender young salesperson behind the counter.
Two women my mother’s age are sniffing a canister of buds, a tall man with a baseball cap is nonchalantly buying a pre-rolled joint, and a 20-something blond in skinny jeans and a Pendleton jacket is examining the $280 Pax vaporizer.
“I’m looking for something that will help me sleep—an indica?” I stammer, naming the strain I’ve read delivers a calming high (another, sativa, has a reputation for working as a stimulant).
“We don’t classify cannabis that way here,” my budtender tells me knowingly. “It’s the terpenes that are important.”
Terpenes are the aromatic oils that confer character on each strain of marijuana and are believed to be responsible for particular effects. So while every label at Farma lists the percentages of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), pot’s main psychoactive compound (i.e. that promises a buzz), and cannabidiol (CBD), the medicinal elements that ease pain and anxiety but won’t get you high, terpenes are the star ingredient. As my attendant explains, strains with a red label give you an energetic high, whereas those with a blue one are calming.She selects a glass jar from the latter category and waves it under my nose.
“I’d try Blueberry Malawi combined with a CBD-rich strain like Harlequin,” she suggests cheerfully.
My head is whirling, and not because of the buds’ piney, aroma. I was too much of a square to try pot until the summer after college, when I traipsed around Amsterdam with my sister and best friend making obligatory stops at the city’s famous “coffee shops.” But in this brave new world of legalized weed, here I am, ready to reconsider and explore the drug’s much vaunted health benefits.
Research among my peers yields that Sarah, the owner of a Portland clothing store, uses cannabis as a sleeping aid several times a week. As does Amina, an engineer at a well-known Bay Area tech company. “I’ve literally tried everything: hypnotism, pills, you name it,” says Amina, who is 30 and has grappled with chronic insomnia throughout her adult life. Ambien makes her feel like a zombie the next day. “Smoking weed helps tremendously,” she tells me. “And I feel that it’s better for my body than the other drugs I’ve taken.”
It alarms me, however, that our acceptance of marijuana—and the thriving, out-in-the-open industry that is flourishing around it—has taken root faster than the scientific world can keep up with it. We know precious little about the specific ways marijuana does what it does, let alone which “route of administration”—smoking, vaping, eating, or using cream, patches, or tinctures—is optimal for which malady, and at which dosage. At the federal level, cannabis is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug with no accepted medical use, which means that funding for human studies has been scarce. (Last June, the Obama administration lifted a barrier to research, but those in the field say it’s still a bureaucratic maze.)
Before I embark and imbibe, I want to know more.I start with Mark Ware, M.D., head of the Quebec Cannabis Registry, the world’s first research database for medical cannabis. Dr. Ware confirms what my friends are telling me—that a handful of pain studies, including his own clinical trial, show that improved sleep is a proven secondary outcome of cannabis. Yet the causality is still a mystery. “It’s not clear if cannabis works on the pain primarily—if your pain is improved, you sleep better,” he says, pointing out that another possibility is that those who sleep soundly are more equipped to handle pain.
As I sift through the research on cannabinoids’ abilities, I learn that marijuana could be of use to me in another way: It reduces inflammation, and may even reduce the inflammatory proteins linked with some autoimmune diseases. “CBD in particular is a very potent anti-inflammatory,” says Raphael Mechoulam, a chemistry professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who is famous for having isolated marijuana’s key compounds in the 1960s. More recently, his lab has shown that CBD blocks the development of autoimmune Type 1 diabetes in mice. This stops me in my tracks. The FDA-approved drugs I’ve been on for 20 years to treat an autoimmune disease may cause osteoporosis and lymphoma. Could cannabis be more effective, not to mention safer?
Katie McCobb, a 34-year-old tech analyst in Portland, thinks so. The first thing I notice about McCobb when we meet is her strong physique. It’s hard to believe that this woman, who cycles 100 miles a week, has lupus, an autoimmune disease in which her immune system attacks her tissues and organs, causing debilitating joint pain and fatigue. After she was diagnosed in 2013, McCobb was prescribed Prednisone and Plaquenil. Frustrated by the immunosuppresants’ side effects, which include nausea and loss of appetite, she tapered off both medications against her doctor’s wishes—replacing them with a cannabis tincture (a liquid concentration that is administered under the tongue). Since then, she says, her pain has decreased by more than half.
I savor the notion that I could sleep better and treat my autoimmune disease in one fell swoop. However, my other concerns remain, chiefly the specter of short-term memory loss. My husband, for one, is constantly forgetting things. The other day, he suggested we go see a film we’d already been to a month earlier. Frank Lucido, M.D., a Berkeley-based family practitioner who has spent the last 20 years issuing medical cannabis “recommendations” (the word “prescription” cannot apply to substances that are not FDA-cleared), says that, along with sedation and intoxication, short-term memory loss is a classic side effect. “I’ll tell my patients, ‘You may find yourself having to ask people to repeat things a couple of times,’ ” he says.
I earn my living as a freelance writer, and can’t afford to be absent-minded. The good news, I discover, is that marijuana’s cognitive impairments are not permanent. When you stop using for a spell, your short-term memory returns. The exception is in the case of teenagers, whose developing brains are more vulnerable, says Madeline H. Meier, assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University. Meier’s 2012 study, which tracked 1,037 New Zealanders from birth to age 38, showed that heavy teenage marijuana users suffer lasting mental deficits. “Those who began using before 18, and continued to use, lost IQ points,” says Meier. Even when these subjects eventually quit as adults, their IQs did not completely bounce back.
When my friend Sophie was in her early 20s, she loved getting stoned. “Food was better, sex was better. Music, too,” she recalls. But then she started to suffer panic attacks. “Your heart thumps, you can't catch your breath, your ears catch every noise and amplify it,” says Sophie, who is 43 and hasn’t smoked for the past two decades.
Why some people find cannabis relaxing while others find it triggers anxiety may result from individual differences in the brain’s cannabinoid receptors. More likely, though, it comes down to dosage. Too much THC lowers blood pressure and increases heart rate. It can also bring on hallucinations, paranoia, and psychosis, according to Ethan Russo, M.D, a Vashon, Washington-based neurologist and cannabis researcher. “If you overdose, you could go wacko for a period of hours with paranoia and hallucinations,” says Dr. Russo, who blames high-potency concentrates such as tinctures, oils, and “dabs,” for the proliferation of these effects. Further complicating matters, we don’t even know how to measure potency; a recent study at Johns Hopkins University revealed that the cannabinoid content of the majority of edible products for sale at dispensaries are mislabeled. “Since the FDA cannot regulate cannabis, there are no standards or method of testing or manufacturing it,” says the study’s author, Ryan Vandrey, Ph.D,. Even Dr. Lucido, the sanguine Berkeley “recommender,” observes that some marijuana dispensaries interpret his instructions more innovatively than he’d like. “It throws off my dosing strategy,” he says.
The marijuana plant itself has become stronger over the past few decades: In the ‘90s, its THC levels hovered at 3%; now, strains such as “Animal Cookies” clock in at 29%. Edibles present their own problems. Because it can take up to three hours to feel their effects, novice users tend to overindulge. (Who can forget Maureen Dowd’s description in The New York Times of spending 8 hours “panting and paranoid” in a Denver hotel room after consuming too much of a cannabis chocolate bar?)
“Eating a regulated edible should be just as easy and predictable as drinking a glass of wine,” counters Andi Bickel, a willowy blonde and the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Drip Ice Cream, whose mouthwatering flavors include honey lavender and salted caramel. As we sit at the kitchen table in her mother’s spacious Southeast Portland bungalow (Bickel’s former production headquarters) she shows me the 4-ounce containers. They come with a “dosage spoon” and are printed with a cheeky safety guide explaining one spoonful (a mere 3.5 mg of THC) will bring “delightfully subtle internal twinkles.”
I’m warming to the idea of trying cannabis again when I hear about a “Tapas & Terps” dinner hosted by Laurie Wolf, author of Herb: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Cannabis. Vaporizers will be on hand, says the Evite, and each course will be served with a strain that showcases a dominant terpene.
It’s a rain-soaked evening when my husband and I arrive at Wolf’s swank floating home in Oregon City. Our hostess ushers us into an airy living room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Willamette River and striking artwork on the walls—including an original Mapplethorpe photograph. We chill on the couch with ten others—some of whom are already passing around a vape pen. (I demur.) There’s a cannabis-activist power couple, a young woman in a chic gauzy black dress, and Laurie’s fetching daughter-in-law, Mary, with whom she runs an edibles company. Conversation flits from which pot growers use organic methods to the benefits of vape pens. “You can just slip them in your purse!” says Leah, a mother of three, whose SUV is parked outside.
Our first course arrives—button mushrooms stuffed with a garlicky sautéed mushroom filling, crowned with lavender cheese—and our goateed budtender, Tyler Hurst, offers us a puff of Blackberry Moonshine from a glass “vape bong.” It contains myrcene, a terpene known for its sedative properties. The aroma is musky and floral. I take a hit. I’m starting to get the hang of this—it’s like a wine pairing where instead of an earthy pinot, the mushroom course is paired with a myrcene-rich cannabis. Except that at this pot pairing, the guests are getting slowly stoned rather than elegantly inebriated. I ask Laurie’s son Nick, a product manager at a charter school foundation, if it’s fun having a mom who works in the cannabis industry. He’s fine with it now but it rankled him in college when she’d send care packages full of pot cookies. “I rebelled by being strait-laced,” he says. “I sure was popular, though.”
Next up are Wolf’s wonderfully crispy potatoes with juicy nubs of smoked sausage and a lemony aioli, paired with a strain called Golden Pineapple—rich in the terpenes limonene and carene. But it’s the strain that’s served with the third course—a buttery thyme-flecked shrimp-and-mango dish—whose effects I like best: J1, high in myrcene and caryophyllene. (My notes—more accurate than my memory—say, “Mellow, peppery. Smells of lavender.”) By the dessert course—a “slightly medicated” trifle (terpenes unknown) that I can’t stop eating—I’m buzzed and floaty. Back at home, though, my brain is skipping from thought to thought, keeping me up even though I’m exhausted. At 1 a.m., I pop an Ambien.
What was in the mysterious trifle? Ambien has just one active ingredient but cannabis is a complex botanical medicine with 60 cannabinoids and hundreds of terpenes, all of which we’re just starting to learn about. All of them interact synergistically, too, in something scientists call the “entourage effect.”
Two months later, I’ve downscaled my research to herbs of a gentler sort—a soporific “dream tea” of chamomile, mugwort, rose petals, damiana, lemon balm, and lavender purchased at a local botanical store. Granted, it doesn’t give me any “subtle internal twinkles” but nor does it make my heart race and my mouth dry. And so far it has lulled me to sleep every night.
McKenzie, Charlotte, and Willa cook up Mark Bittman's frittata
