Hannah Wallace

I'll Be There

For Bon Appetit's May issue, I wrote about a new continuing education program for Latinx vineyard workers in Oregon's Willamette Valley.  Currently, the article isn't up on the Bon Appetit website, but here's a PDF: Download Ahivoypiece

 

Household Recycling Made Easier — For a Price

I wrote about Ridwell, the Seattle startup that's building a business around collecting all the old batteries, clamshell containers and lightbulbs that most recycling programs leave behind, for Bloomberg Businessweek.   

 

Jill Fransen considers herself a serious recycler, the kind of person who knows the difference between various plastics, takes care to sort them, and drives five miles from her home in Portland, Oregon’s, North Tabor neighborhood to drop off refuse at a recycling center.

Over nearly a dozen years, Fransen’s routine was pretty well established. Then in late 2020, she heard about Ridwell, a subscription-based recycling service that had just been introduced in Portland. For about $12 per month, Ridwell would pick up items — stuff that many recycling programs won’t accept, like certain plastics and spent lightbulbs — right from one’s front porch, and take everything to its local plant to sort and redistribute for recycling or re-use.

“I was skeptical at first because of the monthly charge,” says Fransen. But seeing Styrofoam and #1 PET plastics — for polyethylene terephthalate, most known as the plastic used to make clamshell and other food containers — on Ridwell’s collection list persuaded Fransen to give it a try. “You have no idea how much #1 PET plastic you use,” she says. (According to the Michigan-based consulting firm Resource Recycling Systems, just 9% of the 1.5 billion pounds of PET-made items circulating in the U.S. are recycled.) “And driving out to East Portland got to be a pain in the neck.”

Taylor Loewen, general manager of Ridwell’s Portland operations, sits atop plastic bales at the warehouse.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Fransen is among the nearly 300 early adopters of the service in Portland, where operations started in November 2020. Since then, the number of subscribers there has grown to 22,400. Ridwell launched and established itself first in Seattle before expanding to Portland, Bellingham, Washington, Denver, Minneapolis and Austin. The total subscribers collectively is about 60,000. The company is among a small group of environmental startups that are working to eliminate plastic packaging and create compostable plastics from mycelium, a mushroom root.

Ridwell’s growth has coincided with Americans’ redirecting much of their anxiety and restlessness over the pandemic into online shopping. That in turn has generated huge amounts of garbage. “So many people were getting stuff delivered from Amazon, Instacart, and takeout,” says Taylor Loewen, Ridwell’s Portland general manager. “People were stuck at home realizing: ‘There’s just so much packaging in my house!’”

The effort started well before the Covid pandemic. Generally, consumers don’t have many easy options for properly disposing of things like plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and clamshell containers. In January 2018, China banned the import of most plastic recyclables, leaving many U.S. cities without a place to send what they’d collected. Before then, processors in China had handled about half of the world’s recyclable waste. Greenpeace has estimated that more than 90% of the plastic ever produced has not been recycled. 

Ridwell founder and CEO Ryan Metzger at the company’s Seattle warehouse.

Photographer: Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg

Those types of items had accumulated in Ridwell founder Ryan Metzger’s basement in his Seattle home. One weekend in the fall of 2017, he and his then 6-year-old son Owen started to clear the house of the refuse. “Every weekend, Owen and I would pick a category — Styrofoam, batteries, lightbulbs — and we would find a local partner,” he explained — someplace willing to take the haul. Before long, Metzger, then a marketing consultant for startups, was also hauling neighbors’ expired batteries and lightbulbs to various drop-off centers and recycling facilities around Seattle, along with his own trash. He’d post messages to the  neighborhood message board Buy Nothing, sharing tips about how to get rid of stuff — “I found a place that takes Styrofoam!”

The project, initially dubbed “Owen’s List,” caught on quickly. By October 2018, with 99 customers, it was officially named Ridwell. Within a year, the subscriber list had grown to 2,400 in the greater Seattle area.

For a monthly fee of $12 to $16, depending on the length of commitment, a square white Ridwell box is collected every two weeks. The box comes with reusable cloth bags, one for each item category — batteries, lightbulbs, threads, plastic, and a rotating “featured category” which ranges from old printer cartridges to holiday lights. Metzger estimates that, as of February, over 4.6 million pounds of waste from just Seattle, Portland, and Denver have been diverted from landfills.

Finding local partners, a key piece in the project from the beginning, has helped the expansion. Metzger worked to connect with businesses and other organizations that might re-use or recycle some of the collected items. Today, Loewen, the Portland general manager, and other employees with similar roles in Ridwell’s various locations spend a good chunk of time connecting with nonprofits and organizations like Free Geek, a Portland area technology nonprofit that facilitates the reuse of small electronics. The partners and categories vary from city to city.

Ridwell offers Portlanders a way to recycle plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and plastic clamshell containers.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Four years in, the venture also has become a fuller recycling business in its own right. At Ridwell’s 10,000 square foot warehouse in northeast Portland, employees sort plastic bags and blue Amazon wrappers (recyclable) from manila padded envelopes (not recyclable). A baler is used to compress plastic film into compact bundles. Industrial-sized bins spill over with second-hand clothes which ultimately will be donated to the city’s Pioneer Wiping Cloth, one of several organizations Ridwell works with.

Ridwell’s work has drawn investor interest. Metzger says the company has received three rounds of funding, though he won’t disclose the amounts. The business, he adds, is largely customer-supported.

Dylan de Thomas is vice president for external affairs at The Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to improving recycling systems across the country. De Thomas, who is based in Portland, is a fan of Ridwell — with one caveat. “I think it’s a neat concept. For all the materials — minus one — it’s a convenience service,” he says, referring to PET thermoforms, which are not only not accepted by the city’s recycling program but aren’t taken by any of the free recycling centers in town, either.

An unanticipated development has been a clash with Portland trash haulers, particularly in Clackamas and Washington counties. There, the sanitation workers have protested that Ridwell is stepping on their toes, even though those municipalities don’t currently accept the items that Ridwell collects. (Portland doesn’t have a municipal sanitation department, so private companies are contracted to collect garbage.) Another big challenge has been logistics. “It’s a logistics business that is growing quickly,” Metzger says.

Employees collect and sort items from Ridwell members at the Ridwell warehouse in Portland, Oregon

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

The Recycling Partnership’s de Thomas says ideally, what Ridwell collects and helps to redistribute or recycle should be part of any municipal service. “I prefer recycling programs that serve all of the residents equally and equitably,” he says.

Metzger is working to address the imbalance, he says, and is aware that the service Ridwell offers is not something everybody can afford. To that end, the company launched a pilot project over the December holiday season: for every gift card sold, Ridwell contributed $10 towards a six-month community-supported membership, of which there are now 100. “We hope to make it a more regular and larger part of Ridwell,” Metzger says.

Education also is part of Metzger’s game plan. The company sends out regular emails explaining what items are and are not included in each category. For example, a link might take you to the Clamshells page , which specifies that #1 PET plastic includes everything from plastic egg cartons and deli containers to plastic cookie trays. Not included in the category? Plastic bottles, blister packaging for batteries or electronics and colored plastics. Photos on each page make it easy to determine what is and isn’t included.

Last October, Metzger launched a transparency page. The company already had been sharing the names of their local partners, but on the transparency page, they also post each category’s contamination rates (how much collected material can’t be recycled or reused because it’s too dirty). On the website, you’ll learn that plastic film is the company’s most popular category in all six cities and goes to Trex in Nevada, where it’s transformed into composite decking.  Also that batteries, which go to EcoLights, have the highest recycling rate: 100%. 

“Transparency is something that consumers are very interested in,” Metzger says.  “It reinforces the behavior they’re making and shows the impact that we can all have by recycling and reusing properly.”

California’s Floodplains Are Coming Back, and So Are Their Salmon

Farmers and ecologists are partnering to restore the state’s natural flooding patterns, allowing native fish to thrive.

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Until just a couple of centuries ago, inland California was a lush tapestry of wetlands and floodplains that nourished a thriving ecosystem of fish. But as the state — and its vast agriculture industry — has grown, its waterways have been modified drastically. Rivers have been drained, fields dried out, levees and dams constructed. These engineering feats, coupled with extreme drought, have decimated natural habitats. Today, a shocking 83 percent of native fish species in the state are in decline.

Chinook salmon is one of these. “Winter runs used to have returns in the hundreds of thousands. Now a good year would be 10,000 fish,” says Andrew L. Rypel, a professor of fish ecology at UC Davis where he co-directs the Center for Watershed Sciences. Today, two of California’s three recognized Chinook salmon runs are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. “We have had years that have just been in the hundreds. It’s a species on the precipice of extinction.”

Now, Rypel and his colleagues are helping the Chinook rebound by working with California rice farmers to recreate the natural floodplains in which the fish used to thrive.

“One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival. Do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

The so-called “salmon-rice project” began a decade ago, when a motley group of scientists, rice farmers and conservationists joined together to answer a simple question: if they were to flood rice fields with water from the Sacramento River — effectively mimicking the region’s original ecological rhythms — would juvenile salmon take to the fields and grow? 

First, they conducted some basic experiments to see whether salmon even lived in floodplains. Turns out, they did. The Nigiri Project – which began in the early 2000s, is still ongoing and involves some of the same people working on Rypel’s project — set out to determine whether salmon can survive on rice fields. In Asian countries, freshwater fish are often raised on flooded rice paddies, but it wasn’t known if salmon in particular were suited to that environment.

“The answer was that they not only survive, they grow extremely well,” Rypel says. “The fish were feeding on lush zooplankton that develop off the decomposed rice straws.” Rice straw is a rich source of carbon, and Rypel says that the density of zooplankton (normally microscopic) that develops in these winter-flooded rice plains is so high that you can actually see them with the naked eye, swimming around. 

“It turns out that this kind of food is like an awesome steak for the growing salmon,” he says. UC Davis scientists found that these juvenile salmon survived at high rates in the flooded rice fields — 50 to 80 percent over the course of a month. “That’s excellent for baby fish,” Rypel says. They also grew two to five times faster than they grow in the Sacramento River.

With these data points in hand, Rypel and his colleagues teamed up with the California Rice Commission and California Trout in 2018 and began studying the viability of raising juvenile salmon in small experimental fields. The work was funded, in part, by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a wing of the United States Department of Agriculture that pays farmers and ranchers to do conservation work. 

The researchers found that juvenile salmon grew two to five times faster on the rice fields than they grow in the Sacramento River. Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

In 2021 the California Rice Commission and the UC Davis scientists got an additional $550,000 grant from NRCS to continue and expand upon their work. (The California Rice Commission and its partners are matching this grant.) Though this is the first year scientists are trying this out on production-scale rice farms, preliminary data is encouraging. For instance, in years like the past one, when the rice fields around the Sacramento River don’t flood naturally, farmers flood their fields with water from the adjacent canals and then scientists stock them with hatchery fish. They then track the fishes’ growth, survival and movements. Data so far indicates that these fish survive at a rate four to five times higher than lab-raised fish. 

In the coming months, they’ll continue to track these hatchery salmon with tiny acoustic transmitters as they make their way out to sea. “One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival,” Rypel says. “That is: do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” The plan is to track 600 of the salmon to see if they make it to the Golden Gate Bridge and conduct a side-by-side comparison with lab-reared fish of out-migration survival.

 

Rypel says it boils down to two words: Big and early. “Being a baby salmon kind of sucks!” he laughs. “It’s really hard. Most of the fish die. You are dodging predators, you have to migrate a super-long distance. You need fat reserves.” Giving the salmon a head start while they’re still very young can have huge knock-on effects. “We think that by rearing them on these rice fields, we can get fish very big, very quick. If the fish can become smolts [juvenile salmon] earlier in the winter, they can ride the flows better and have better survivorship.”

Raising fish in rice paddies is nothing new. Rice farmers from China, Thailand, India and Northern Vietnam have been doing it for centuries – according to some evidence, for as long as 2,000 years. 

According to Rypel, the unusual collaboration between farmers and ecologists is “a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.” Credit: Center for Watershed Science

But the project in California is actually more directly inspired by a series of bird conservation efforts dating back to the late 1980s and early ’90s. At the time, Pacific flyway birds — ducks, snow geese, egrets and all the other migratory birds that over-summer up in Alaska or Canada, and over-winter in the Central Valley — were in decline. For decades, rice farmers in the area regularly burned their leftover rice straw after the fall harvest. “People who lived in the area at that time will remember when the skies were black with smoke,” Rypel says. The air quality was poor, and carbon was being released into the atmosphere, as well.

Residents frustrated by poor air quality campaigned to stop this practice, and in 1991 a state law banned it. “Some smart people got together at that time and figured out that if you re-flooded the rice fields, you could naturally decompose the rice straw,” Rypel says. “At the same time, you could potentially provide habitat for the migratory birds that were on the Pacific flyway.” The NRCS began a program where they paid rice farmers to flood their fields instead of burn them, which was a win for the locals, a win for the birds and a win for the farmers, as it gave them a new revenue stream.

“I’m not a bird ecologist, but I work with a lot of bird scientists who have worked on this, and it’s probably one of the big conservation success stories in our country’s history,” Rypel says.

It was that program’s success that got fish ecologists scratching their heads. “Hey, if you can do this for birds, why can’t you do that for fish?” Rypel recounts. “We’ve got 83 percent of species declining in California. We know salmon use the floodplains. Is there a way to do this with fish?” 

The answer appears to be a resounding yes. There are roughly 500,000 acres of rice under cultivation in the Sacramento Valley. “That’s a lot of habitat that’s potentially on the table there,” notes Rypel. He and his colleagues at UC Davis hope to replicate the model on more farms in years to come. “It’s a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.”

Why we need biodiversity on our dinner plates — and why it’s disappearing

This book review ran in the Washington Post on Feb. 11th, 2022. 

In the early 1970s, American botanist Jack Harlan proclaimed that mass extinction was underway in America’s fields. “These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine,” Harlan wrote. He was referring specifically to the genetic resources within three crops that we most depend on: wheat, rice and corn. Forty years later, his words inspired another botanist, Cary Fowler, to launch an underground seed vault in Svalbard, Norway.

Journalist Dan Saladino unveils the work of Harlan and other visionaries in “Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them,” his impressively researched book about the variety of crops, animals and foods that have been tossed aside in favor of the monocultures that have come to dominate our food supply. Though they were meant to improve efficiency and yield by “feeding the world,” these crops and breeds are having unintended consequences. Many of today’s “improved” crops, which lack diversity because they come from patented seeds, have no defenses against fungi, viruses and insects — all of which are becoming more of a threat with climate change. The breeds of animals we rely on for food have also been narrowed on a global scale, making them more susceptible to diseases that could wipe them out.

One by one, Saladino, a food journalist for the BBC, shows how unique foods and crops have been neglected in favor of modern, supposedly “revolutionary” varieties. In India, the wild citrus fruit memang narang (“the fruit of ghosts”) was overlooked after 19th-century plant breeders bred out the bitter-tasting phenols, which are what give this fruit its potent health-bestowing properties and also serve as a defense against pests and disease. In Anatolia, Turkey, kavilca wheat, a type of emmer that’s been grown since Neolithic times, is not only more nutritious than today’s bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) but, thanks to its tightfitting husks, is also resistant to Fusarium head blight, a devious fungus that is threatening wheat crops. Kavilca and other ancient varieties of emmer may also have genetic resistance to wheat blast, a new disease that is decimating crops from Brazil to Bangladesh. (Because of the Green Revolution, which developed more productive crops, 95 percent of all wheat grown today is Triticum aestivum.) In China, red mouth glutinous rice was spurned in favor of high-yielding white rices known as IR8 and IR64.

And on and on. Saladino even has a chapter on alcoholic beverages, where he shows how industrially made wine has become popular in Georgia, the birthplace of natural winemaking, and how Belgium’s lambic beermaking tradition is at risk of dying out thanks to the global beer industry. (Saladino delivers this depressing fact: Today, 1 in 4 beers consumed around the world are brewed by just one company, A-B InBev.)

Another culprit is more personal: the gradual but decisive change in our palates. In part because of the ubiquity and popularity of Coca-Cola and other sugary beverages around the world, people — even Belgians — don’t crave the sour, complex flavors of lambic beers as much as they used to. In Russia, where a fermented sour beverage called kvass has been made for centuries, a government ad campaign squarely aimed at Coca-Cola, which had opened a bottling plant in St. Petersburg in 1995. “Say no to Cola-nisation. Drink kvass to the health of the nation!” read one ad, according to Saladino. The effort kept Coke from capsizing kvass for a bit but ultimately failed.

In some cases, as with the Faroe Islands’ skerpikjot — sheep’s meat that is fermented in sea wind for nine months until it’s covered in mold — the reader may wonder if the extinction of a particular food may be such a bad thing. (After all, now that the fishing industry has taken off in the Faroe Islands, its inhabitants won’t face starvation anymore.) But whether you hunger to try the delicacies Saladino describes or not, he makes one thing abundantly clear: These ancient culinary traditions kept people alive during hard times, and they’ve become an integral part of a region’s history and culture.

There is hope. In each country Saladino visits, he finds an underground of passionate citizens who are valiantly working to preserve their crops and food cultures. Sometimes it’s a botanist who has saved seeds and cultivates rare plants. Other times it’s a small-scale farmer, a cheesemaker or a cultivator of wild yeasts who is proselytizing, sharing knowledge and know-how with a younger generation. One example is miller Rae Phillips of Barony Mill, in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, whose father and grandfather also milled bere, an ancient form of barley that’s adapted to the harsh weather of the islands. Phillips came out of retirement in his 70s when he saw a new generation of Orcadian farmers, bakers and brewers who were excited about bere, which requires an intricate milling process. Before he died in 2018, Phillips passed his knowledge to a younger miller who keeps the tradition alive.

Saladino brings his subjects to life, even breaking bread with them as he seeks out these rare and important foods. His evocative descriptions make a culinary case for preserving them. In a rural village in Turkey, he is invited to join farmer Erdal Göksu and his wife, Filiz, for a feast where he tastes kavilca for the first time. “Filiz … added bowl after bowl to the table: cream and soft cheeses, pickled cabbage, peppers stuffed with spiced lamb and, at the centre of it all, a large dish piled with Kavilca shaped into a ring, its brown grains glistening with the fat and juices from the goose, with flakes of tender, buttery meat in the centre.” The sensual enjoyment of delicious, nutrient-rich foods may be as good an argument as any for saving them.

Hannah Wallace is a journalist who covers regenerative agriculture, food justice and start-ups. She lives in Portland, Ore.

Eating to Extinction

The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

By Dan Saladino

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 464 pp. $30

The Nike Designers who Started an Online Cremation Service

I wrote about Solace, a Portland-based startup, for Bloomberg Businessweek. 

David Odusanya (L) and Keith Crawford (R) at the Solace offices in Portland, Oregon 

When Keith Crawford and David Odusanya started their cremation company in April 2019, there was no way they could anticipate that a worldwide pandemic would soon prove the urgency of their model.

As Covid-19 approaches the two-year mark, Solace Cremation has turned out to be a service for the modern age—a web-based business that offers a safe and remote experience while allowing customers to smoothly organize a loved one’s cremation. Based in Portland, Ore., with operations in Seattle and Southern California, Solace handles the entire process almost completely online.

Crawford and Odusanya, formerly brand designers at Nike, left the apparel giant in 2017 to form their own creative agency, Co-Lab.  A couple years later, after reflecting on the difficulties they both experienced upon losing a parent, they started to research the funeral business. 

Crawford’s father died in 2013 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, but he’d planned everything about his own funeral and paid for all of it in advance. Even so, the funeral director overseeing the arrangements tried to up-sell Crawford and his siblings on various products and services once their father was gone. “Why would we want to do anything different from what my dad had chosen?” Crawford asks. And why, he kept wondering, hadn’t anyone come up with a better experience, given how many Americans are dissatisfied with end-of-life rituals.

Odusanya’s mother passed away later that same year, in his hometown of Sheffield, England. Her wish was to be cremated.  “I couldn’t understand why we were paying $2,000 for a wooden casket,” he says.

They each came away from those experiences wondering how they might fully redesign the funeral home experience — “so creepy and gloomy,” says Crawford. Part of their research involved interviewing families who’d had reactions similar to Crawford’s. The process, they heard again and again, was antiquated and cold, leaving most people feeling it was all about money. The pair was also surprised to learn that the cremation rate surpasses the burial rate in this country and no one’s building new funeral homes. So they ditched their initial idea and focused on modernizing the experience of saying goodbye to a loved one.

The death-care industry is dominated by Service Corporation International, a conglomerate that owns mortuary chains such as Dignity Memorial, Neptune Society, and Funeraria Del Angel. The industry is notoriously opaque about pricing. Even in California, where funeral homes must list prices online, a loophole allows many to get out of that basic requirement. Most funeral homes won’t disclose rates until you’re sitting at a table with them with a big binder plopped down in front of you.

“If you’ve chosen direct cremation there is no need for all the funeral home visits, paperwork by hand, and in-person meetings,” Crawford says. “We removed that from the equation and—COVID aside—people are very happy about that. It gives them time to do other things—plan a memorial, grieve with their families.”

Funeral rates rise with various purchases: caskets, floral arrangements, even prayer cards. And the cost of cremation increases significantly when handled by a traditional funeral home—to an average of $2,550 in the U.S., according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Even when choosing cremation at a typical funeral home, the fees can pile up, says Malisa Riceci, Solace’s funeral director. “If you want ‘priority’ cremation, if you want a lock of hair, if your loved one is over a certain weight, even if you want a pacemaker removed—these all add up very quickly,” she says. Most people, still overcome by grief, wind up agreeing to extra costs because they don’t have the time or emotional energy to shop around or negotiate.

Solace adds no extra fees. Its $895 flat fee includes: picking up the body (of any size), removing a pacemaker, cremating within 48 hours, completing paperwork, and returning a loved one’s ashes in a simple cardboard box. The only extra cost is for the death certificate, as that varies depending on the state and the number of copies a family needs.

The Solace office in Portland, Oregon.   [Courtesy of Solace Cremation] 

 

“What they have done is brilliant and necessary,” says Michael Hebb, founder of Death Over Dinner, a nonprofit that organizes events where people talk about death. He met Crawford and Odusanya about five years ago at Endwell, an annual industry symposium. “For one, the clarity of the offer and the pricing.” he says. “It’s not hidden away in some part of a funeral home’s website.”

Liz Eddy is the 31-year-old founder of Lantern, a resource guide for end-of-life planning that also serves as a digital vault for documents. Eddy singles out the one-on-one care the Solace team takes with each customer—even as it’s done remotely. “You have to deeply connect and earn trust with the individual,” she says. “They allow for ease, but also the experience is warm and connected and run by people who really understand” customers’ needs.

Solace says its growth has been swift. Although it doesn’t disclose figures, it says revenue tripled from 2019 to 2020. The startup recently collaborated with the Good Mod, a Portland design company, and industrial designer Rob Bruce, also a former Nike employee, to create more permanent urns—a frequent customer request—from 3D printed clay. These are available for sale on a separate website for $195 and up.

“We want to provide services that families want,” Odusanya says, “vs. just trying to sell them anything.”

The Anti-Displacement Repair Team of Portland

By fixing up homes in Black neighborhoods, one group is slowing down harmful gentrification and keeping communities intact.

 

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful. My friend Cheryl Juetten took the photos.  

A former professional boxer who has spent 30-plus years training young men how to fight, J.C. Wade wasn’t exactly used to asking for help.

“I’m the proud man guy, you know?” says the resident of Woodlawn in Northeast Portland. “Don’t want to let nobody know I need help.” But now he freely admits that he needed it. 

J.C. Wade in front of his house in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Portland 

Wade, 68, has four types of arthritis and recently went through prostate cancer treatment. The chemotherapy exhausted him and he had to quit his job as a city bus driver. Stuff piled up around his house. But his biggest issue was the kitchen sink. The pipe had clogged, and because the sink was built into the cabinets they’d have to replace the whole thing, which he couldn’t afford. “So for about four years, I had a big pot up under the sink that the water would run in,” he chuckles, “and I would filter the garbage out and pour the water down the toilet.”

Then, in August 2020, Wade got a call from a friend who told him about Taking Ownership PDX, an organization that helps Black homeowners age in place. Taking Ownership PDX is oriented toward longtime residents like Wade, who bought his ranch-style house in Woodlawn in the mid 1980s. Six of his ten kids grew up there. 

The group focuses on maintenance to keep houses livable, making long-needed repairs and renovations to decaying decks, sagging roofs and failing plumbing. In so doing, the organization aims to generate wealth for Black homeowners, deter predatory investors and realtors, and prevent communities from being splintered by gentrification. 

Woodlawn is just one of Northeast Portland’s historically Black neighborhoods that, over the past decade, has seen an influx of younger, wealthier and mostly white homeowners. Residents who grew up in Woodlawn now can’t afford to live there; median home prices are $551,000, according to Zillow. Longtime homeowners like Wade are more than just property owners, then. They’re an essential part of the city’s fabric whose presence gives the neighborhood a sense of continuity. 

When he applied for help with Taking Ownership PDX, Wade had no idea what to expect. “I wasn’t used to people helping me,” he says. Then a team of eight showed up at his house. They dismantled a rotting shed, fixed up the yard, cleaned the basement and repaired that sink — without even needing to replace the whole thing.   

“They helped for days!” Wade says, astonished. “My yard was overgrown — I had dumpsters worth of overgrowth. But they cut it, cleaned it. I haven’t really seen my yard in years. It looked like a jungle. And they kept coming back, you know? It relieved a lot of pressure off of me. I get a little teary-eyed thinking about it. Let me get my man-up stuff!”

 

Wade’s house was one of Taking Ownership’s first projects. Since then, the group, founded by 36-year-old Randal Wyatt in July 2020, has helped over 50 Black homeowners across Portland. The organization has raised over half a million dollars and maintains a database of 250 local volunteers who are eager to pitch in on the projects whenever they arise. 

Wyatt, a native Portlander, has always been a helper. Before Taking Ownership, he was a student advocate at Portland YouthBuilders, worked with teenagers at the Latino Network, and served as a residential treatment counselor at the Salvation Army. When he had twin boys at 19, he learned the importance of strong communities.

“Becoming a father so young, I realized real quickly that life is much bigger than me,” Wyatt says. “We live in a capitalist society where we think very individualistically. I thought, ‘I have to contribute to the community.’ I care about other people.” For the past 16 years, he has used hip-hop to address social issues, reaching teens with rhythm and poetry workshops, and holds benefit concerts for various causes. After the murder of George Floyd, friends and neighbors reached out to see how they could be stronger allies to Portland’s Black community.

Since he was 11, Wyatt has lived in Northeast Portland and watched it gentrify. “I know that white supremacy is based on land ownership. So I just thought, if we pool our money together and come together as a community and fix up Black-owned homes, we might be able to alleviate the financial burden, bridge the wealth gap, raise property values and help people stay in their homes.”

When he launched Taking Ownership he posted about it on Instagram. Donations started pouring in. After the first two projects, word spread quickly. “It blew up almost overnight,” he says. After that, Black homeowners interested in getting help filled out referral forms on the Taking Ownership website. Then they’d go onto the waitlist. Wyatt says senior citizens, people on a fixed income and single parents get priority.

“We prioritize people who make $20,000 or less a year. We’re very clear about that,” he says. There are currently 120 people on the waitlist.

Wyatt has partnered with other organizations and companies that donate appliances and services so that people waiting can get things they desperately need like new water heaters or air conditioners. After June’s record-breaking heat waves, Taking Ownership sponsored an AC and fan drive and collected nearly 200 fans and air conditioning units in a single day. For some Black Portlanders, like J.C. Wade, it was the first time they had ever had AC. “It was just a small air conditioner and it’s in one room, but it was enough for me and my dogs to make it,” he says.

The new stove installed by Taking Ownership PDX volunteers in J.C. Wade’s kitchen. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

In addition to the hundreds of volunteers who do yard work, sorting, cleaning and other tough, non-skilled labor, Wyatt works with four licensed contractors who handle structural projects like decks, windows and roofs. He also works with two Black-owned landscaping companies, an electrician and a plumbing company, and has, on several occasions, partnered with a Latino-owned roofing company and a green design/build firm called Birdsmouth. All the contractors are paid, unless, like Birdsmouth, they donate some of their labor.

One of his contractors is James Mwas Njoroge of Jenga Construction LLC. Njoroge, who moved to Portland from Kenya in 2005, has been a contractor for 10 years and recently launched his own company. He’d been following Wyatt on social media when he read about Taking Ownership. “What he is doing is very very important, and not just for the homeowners,” Njoroge says. “He’s trying to get Black people more opportunities to work.” There aren’t many licensed Black contractors in the Portland area, but Njoroge is hoping that will change. Over the next year, he aims to help Wyatt reach out to Black youth and encourage them to enter the trades.

 Jed Overly was Taking Ownership’s first volunteer before becoming the organization’s volunteer coordinator. A Black man who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, he’d experienced racism up close. “Everything that was going on at that time [after George Floyd’s murder] triggered my internal convictions,” he says. “Taking Ownership gave me an outlet to make things better. I attended a lot of protests. But I’d ask myself, ‘But what are we doing, though?’” Instead of tearing something down, he wanted to build something up. “And that’s literally what Randal was doing.”

Overly says that even now, 16 months after Taking Ownership launched, he still gets 10 to 15 new volunteers a week. About 25 percent are Black, compared to just six percent of the city at large. Volunteers often work alongside homeowners, or homeowners’ children or grandchildren. One of the things Overly loves about the work events is that people make long-lasting connections. “Volunteers are swapping numbers. People are becoming friends,” he says. Some people even become friends with the homeowners. “So you have little old ladies who need help rearranging their house. They get the volunteer’s number. It really is community-building.” 

J.C. Wade in his restored backyard. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

Samantha Guss, who has worked on four projects, says she’s ripped out a lot of blackberry bushes. “I’m pretty sure every project has a blackberry bush,” she says. She’s also dismantled fences, scrubbed floors and helped sort through personal belongings. But all the hard work is worth it, she says, when you see how happy the homeowner is. This volunteer opportunity also came at a time when she really needed community.  “I was deep into depression with the pandemic, very isolated. So it was really great for me to be able to feel useful. To help someone else that needed it. It really helped my mental health.”

One of the negative consequences of gentrification is that when wealthier people move into a neighborhood, they tend to report their less-well-off neighbors for minor code violations like peeling paint or overgrown grass. A recent analysis by the city’s Ombudsman’s Office showed that Portland neighborhoods with the fastest rising home prices and those with the most racially diverse residents tend to have the most property violation reports. This often results in residents facing escalating fines — and eventually liens — putting families at risk of foreclosure. In Portland, this complaint-driven system disproportionately impacts homeowners of color. 

“Becoming a father so young, I realized real quickly that life is much bigger than me. I thought, ‘I have to contribute to the community.’” Credit: Cheryl Juetten

Wyatt hopes to inspire Portlanders to be more compassionate, more community-minded. “As neighborhoods get more affluent, the standard of upkeep changes and maybe some of the homeowners who have owned their homes for 30 years don’t have the same financial abilities as some of their neighbors to maintain their homes,” he says. “I want people to understand: instead of calling the city, why not go over there and meet your neighbor? Why aren’t they able to keep up on their house?  Why not lend a hand?”

Politics Not As Usual

I wrote a profile of two powerhouse Mount Holyoke alumnae: Tami Gouveia ('96) and Kristen Elechko ('97) for the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly.  

Kristen Elechko, left, and Tami Gouveia, right. 

In early 2021, Kristen Elechko ‘97, who had recently wrapped working for U.S. Senator Ed Markey’s reelection campaign in Massachusetts, finally had time to read her Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly. She was skimming through the Class Notes when one name jumped out at her: Tami Gouveia ‘96.

Though she had not known Gouveia at Mount Holyoke, she had recently read the statement that Gouveia, a Massachusetts state representative from the 14th Middlesex District, had released on why she hadn’t voted for Ron Mariano for speaker of the Massachusetts House. "I believe that the residents of my district and across the state deserve, and are demanding, an open process and new leadership that represents the values, identities and priorities of voters across our state," Gouveia’s statement read in part. She felt that Mariano stood for politics as usual — he was so sure he’d win that he didn’t even give a speech until after he was elected — and that the climate crisis, the housing emergency and staggering economic inequality in Massachusetts demanded bolder leadership than he would offer. None of her House colleagues could give her a compelling reason to vote for Mariano, a Democrat, she wrote, except that she could be punished for not endorsing the status quo. "None could describe the great things that Speaker Mariano might do to help ensure a just recovery through the coronavirus pandemic," she wrote.

Elechko was impressed that Gouveia had the guts to not vote for Mariano. "I’d had conversations within my channels around how much I appreciated her standing in her leadership and in her values, and doing something that’s very hard publicly," Elechko says. She was also inspired by how Gouveia regularly spoke up about the need for climate justice and simultaneously raised up young leaders of the Sunrise Movement. When she discovered that Gouveia was an MHC alum, she says, "I lost my mind! I reached out to her on every channel possible and thanked her, and also noted that we were at Mount Holyoke at the same time. We had a wonderful exchange," Elechko says. And then that was that.

A few months later, in March, when Lowell, Massachusetts, native Gouveia decided to run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, she started asking people in her networks for suggestions for a whip-smart campaign manager. Elechko’s name came up several times. Gouveia soon arranged to talk with Elechko over Zoom.

"It wasn’t like a traditional interview. It was more like, ‘Here are my values and here’s how I approach the world, and here’s how I think about campaigns, and here’s how I think about leadership,’" Gouveia says. "And then there was a lot of laughing, head nods and ‘Yes. Yes! Yes!’"

They had two or three multi-hour-long conversations.

Elechko, who had been the deputy relational organizing director for Ed Markey’s campaign, had instant chemistry with Gouveia. Gouveia felt the same and hired Elechko, who began her new job as campaign manager in mid-June.

GOUVEIA: POLITICS NOT AS USUAL

When I interviewed Gouveia in 2018 for my “She’s Running” feature for the Quarterly it was the first time she had run for office, after a 25-year career as a social worker protecting children from environmental toxins and preventing substance abuse. She ran against two men in the primary—winning with 64.3% of the vote, the widest margin of a first time candidate in the state’s history—and then went on to win against a Green-Rainbow Party candidate in the general, garnering 90% of the vote.

"Representing the people of the 14th District has been the joy of a lifetime," Gouveia says. "They are just very civically engaged. They show up for meetings, they reach out to me all the time about different policy issues they care about." But despite getting some progressive legislation passed, her time in the state legislature has shown her that her skills as a public health social worker might be better suited to the role of lieutenant governor. "What I’ve been observing is that the corner office has been occupied by people who prefer to maintain the status quo. They don’t have the express commitment to addressing the structural issues that drive inequities in our state — whether you’re talking about inequities around race or ethnicity or immigration status or class or gender and gender identity. We’re standing still," Gouveia says. "So there’s so much opportunity — especially with the infusion of federal dollars as a result of COVID-19 — to really chart a different path forward. And I’m not seeing that from Charlie Baker."

Continue reading here.     Or download the PDF here. Download MHQ_Sum21_Tami-Kristen FEAT_Spreads

How These Founders Are Detoxifying the Denim Industry—and Saving the Planet

This story appeared in Inc.'s October, 2021 issue, as part of the Female Founders 100.

Most jeans manufacturers rely on petroleum-based dyes and pollutants. Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu are on a mission to revolutionize the industry with planet-friendly, microbe-based dyes.

Michelle Zhu (left) and Tammy Hsu run Huue, a startup developing sustainable textile dyes to replace the ecologically destructive colorants the fashion industry uses.

About 20 percent of the world's industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing. And the denim industry is the worst offender: Most mass-market denim brands rely on petroleum-based dyes and chemicals like formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. In 2019, that reality inspired Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu to start Huue, which they spun out of Hsu's grad school work at the University of California at Berkeley, where she developed dyes made from microbial secretions. Huue is working on the launch of its first dye, a natural-but-synthetic indigo. The company's eight scientists are also developing sustainable dyes and colorants to disrupt other parts of the fashion industry. --As told to Hannah Wallace

 

ZHU: My parents were entrepreneurs in the apparel industry. Their brand focused on urban streetwear in the late '90s and early 2000s, which was why denim was such a large focus. As a child, I would visit garment manufacturing facilities on summer trips to China and witness the pollution firsthand: particles in the air that workers had to guard against with facemasks, and foul-looking waterways around the factories. It made a lasting impression on me.

HSU: I came at it from studying science and biology. The lab I was in was very entrepreneurial—we were all thinking about how we could apply these solutions to real-world problems. I'm interested in fashion, clothes, and textiles. The more I read about it, the more I realized that this is a huge problem in the industry.

ZHU: Until the turn of the 20th century, indigo was made from plants. Natural indigo is not very cost effective or scalable, and its performance and color consistency doesn't fit industrial needs. Today, it is generally created via petrochemicals. Fossil fuels are used at the source of creation, but the industry also relies on toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and benzene— which not only pollute the planet but are carcinogenic as well. That's the main challenge we're tackling.

HSU: We look at how the indigo plant makes the indigo dye molecule. Then we take that genetic information and instruct our microbes to make indigo the same way. We're growing these microbes, and they're programmed to secrete the indigo.

ZHU: Microbes are truly amazing—they multiply rapidly. We call them nature's most powerful manufacturers.

 

HSU: Six years ago, my professor at Berkeley had a grant, and a story was written about our project. When people learned we were working on sustainable indigo, brands started inquiring.

ZHU: We'd just hired our team of scientists and everyone was so excited to get to work last year. And then it was all shut down. Our milestones are lab-based, so not being able to go into the facility for three months created all sorts of uncertainty. Then there was the issue of when we could run productions and supply products. We were fortunate to win a female founders competition hosted by Microsoft's M12 fund, Mayfield, and Melinda Gates's Pivotal Ventures. That gave us an extra million dollars, which was a big help in the midst of Covid. Finally in July 2021, we brought the whole (vaccinated) team back into the lab full time.

HSU: We've made a lot of progress to scale up our production with a couple of facilities around the U.S. and to make our microbes more efficient. In August, we were producing 80 times more dye than at the end of last year. Our partners want huge amounts of dye.

ZHU: The fashion industry is aware of its challenges—its troubled supply chain and the toxic nature of the dyeing process. It hasn't been difficult to get people really excited about the technology and potential.

Great Escape: Oregon's Wallowa Mountains

I recently got to write about one of my favorite regions of Oregon: the Wallowa Mountains.  It may be a five-hour drive from Portland, but boy, this part of the state is utterly gorgeous.  I long to go back every summer to hike, camp, swim, and have a beer along the creek at Terminal Gravity. 

At the end of our long hike from the trailhead, we found the Minam River Lodge 

Here's my story, for Conde Nast Traveler. I'll give a tease here.  

Two hours into our hike through the Eagle Cap Wilderness, I looked up from the wooded path to see that the thick stand of Douglas fir was draped in a gauzy yellow-green lichen. “Usnea!” I called out to my husband, Don, who is used to me blurting out the scientific names of Pacific Northwest flora and fauna. The usnea—also called old-man's beard—looked ethereal in the dappled afternoon sunlight. I half expected to see a wood sprite spring out from behind one of the towering firs in this patch of old-growth forest.

I suppose you could say that Don and I had come to this far-­northeastern corner of Oregon to escape reality for a bit. After the year we'd had—cooped up indoors, our attention wandering from the pandemic to the protests, the wildfires to the election—we felt we'd earned it. The place's remoteness, a five-and-a-half-hour drive from our home in Portland, helps explain why, even though I've lived in Oregon on and off since the late '80s, I didn't visit Wallowa County until a decade ago. But when I first saw the wide-open Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, snowcapped mountains, and glacial lakes, I fell in love. I've been back a handful of times since to hike and ride horses.

Some refer to the Wallowa Mountains, a 40-mile-long range that extends into neighboring Union County, as Oregon's Alps, and the whole region does bear some resemblance to Switzerland. But it's also distinctly the American West. The Nez Percé were the first people to settle the area. They lived here for at least 11,000 years before being driven out by the U.S. Army in the late 1870s, in direct violation of the U.S. government's own treaty. Though the tribe is now officially based in Idaho, it still holds culture camps for Nez Percé kids each summer near Wallowa Lake.

An aerial view of Joseph, Oregon with Wallowa Lake in the background. PHOTO: LEON WERDINGER

There's something romantic about hiking into a place with everything you need on your back. Even better when the destination is a backcountry luxury retreat with no Wi-Fi or cell service where we could be blissfully ignorant of the news cycle. We were on our way to the Minam River Lodge, hidden in the middle of the 360,000-acre Eagle Cap Wilderness and accessible only by private plane, horseback, or foot.

Owner Barnes Ellis came here in his 20s for a family reunion. It was 1990 and the property—an old hunting lodge—had seen better days. The beauty of the wild landscape made an impression on him, though, and 20 years later he bought the roughly 126-acre spread. By then the lodge was a dilapidated wreck, but Barnes hired an architect and embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar renovation. Since the Minam opened in 2017, I'd had it in my mind to visit and, specifically, to arrive on foot, even if that meant possible, if unlikely, encounters with elk, cougars, and bears.

The eight-and-a-half-mile journey in, mostly downhill, started at the Moss Springs Trailhead, high above the tiny town of Cove. We didn't have to trek far after leaving the relative civilization of the Moss Springs campground to feel totally enveloped by wilderness. We traversed steep scree-covered paths, passed hillside meadows, and scrambled across pristine creeks, all against the backdrop of evergreen-covered mountains.

By the time we arrived at the Minam, our feet ached and it was a challenge to stand upright under our packs. Our tent was more of the glamping than camping variety, with luxe linens and wide-plank floors. (The resort also has cabins and conventional guest rooms in the lodge.) After a quick rest, we ambled slowly to the main lodge, where chef Sean Temple, a veteran of New York's Jean-Georges and Portland's beloved Paley's Place, holds court at the restaurant. Most of the herbs and vegetables he uses are grown on the property, while nearly everything else is sourced from nearby farms, ranches, and wineries. It was a memorable dinner—and not just because it was one of the first, in a very long while, that we didn't have to cook ourselves. After a chicory salad studded with Jonagold apples and showered with Parmesan, Temple presented a perfectly seared grass-fed strip steak over a purée of grilled chanterelles. We heard laughter from a boisterous group on the outdoor patio, a balm after months of isolation.

To continue reading, see the full story here.  

 

FACTS

Hotels

The Jennings: This 12-room boutique hotel is self check in, so be sure to have your key code before arriving. A communal kitchen/library means you can brew your own coffee or tea and store snacks in the fridge. From the shared balcony, you can view the mountains. Doubles from $95 (with shared bathroom)

The Indian Lodge Motel: If you can’t get into the Jennings, the Indian Lodge Motel down the street is a spotless, quiet spot with good beds and free Wifi. Doubles from $125.

Restaurants

The Range Rider One of the only restaurants along OR-82 open on a Tuesday night, Range Rider is a western bar complete with old cowboy boots, fiddles, and a 100-strong collection of vintage ceramic Jim Beam decanters. The grass-fed Corriente beef burger from 6 Ranch (just a few miles down the road), is a delicious juicy mess. 

Blythe Cricket This whimsical café serves up six delicious english muffin sandwiches, a daily fritatta, waffles, and strong Nossa Familia coffee. Get the Deep Dark Woods—sautéed mushroom, onion, spinach, egg, and havarti, all slathered with red pepper aioli on a homemade english muffin.  700 N. Main St., Joseph; Serves breakfast until 11:00 a.m.

The Gold Room—JoMarie Pitino and Ross Effinger make naturally-leavened crusts with Oregon-grown wheat at this pizzeria, which also has excellent sides like wood-fired beets with coriander buttermilk dip and radicchio salad with sourdough breadcrumbs, pecorino, and a roasted garlic dressing. Don’t skip the habanada margarita. 100 N. Main St., Joseph; Opened Thurs.-Sun., 3-8:00 p.m.

Activities /Shops

Joseph Branch Railriders— If you want to see off-the-road scenery without the exertion of hiking, take a ride on these recumbent bikes, orchestrated to fit on the region’s decommissioned railroad tracks. Just be sure to empty your pockets of all valuables. As your guide will warn you, people who don’t have had their wallets, sunglasses, and phones crushed on the tracks.

From May-early October; jbrailriders.com

Sports Corral—This store has everything you need for your Wallowa hiking/camping/hunting expedition. City folk will pine after the $280 Stetson hats and gorgeous cowboy boots and might even snap up an insulated Hydroflask beer flask, a fishing rod, or…a bear horn. 401 N Main Street, Joseph

Wild Carrot—Who knew that the headquarters for this botanical beauty brand, which has a cult following, is in sleepy Enterprise? In addition to rosewood body lotion, Doug Fir lip balm, and neroli night cream, the store sells organic tea, greeting cards, and hand-stitched wallets. 112 W. Main St., Enterprise 

 

 

The Next Chapter for Farm to School: Milling Whole Grains in the Cafeteria

A new pilot project in California is purchasing a mill for a school cafeteria, marking the next step in years-long effort to bring local, whole grains to schools around the country.   This was published on Sept. 10, 2021 in Civil Eats.  

 

Nan Kohler founded the milling company Grist & Toll in Pasadena, California in 2013 and her freshly milled flours have been a hit with bakers, chefs, and locavores ever since. But her abiding wish is to sell California-grown, freshly milled whole grain flour, which is nutritionally superior to refined flour, to the public schools in the area.

“If I could sell to anybody, I would sell to the school lunch programs,” Kohler says. “Then we start those little healthy bodies young, and we change those palates to look forward to delicious whole grain foods. And set them up for healthier lifestyle and eating habits going forward.”

The problem is that schools typically can’t afford Kohler’s flour. This fall, however, she is midwifing a project that will get whole grains into two California school districts. Along with the California Wheat Commission, she was recently awarded a $144,000 California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) grant that will enable Shandon Elementary in San Luis Obispo County to be the first public school in the U.S. to make its own flour using a stone mill on site. The grant, which is funded through March 2023, will cover the cost of the mill and two pasta extruders as well as the training for cafeteria staff to use both.

Elementary students processing whole wheat pasta with the wheat they harvested that season from their school’s wheat garden.

Two additional grants for $20,000—one awarded to Shandon Joint Unified School District and the other to nearby San Miguel Joint Union School District, both along California’s central coast—will buy enough whole grains from local farmers to provide both districts with freshly milled flour for nearly two years. Claudia Carter, executive director at the California Wheat Commission, says the Wheat2School project will provide students in these two districts with nutrient-dense, whole grain foods.

Over the past 20 years, the farm-to-school movement has prioritized getting locally grown fruits and vegetables onto cafeteria trays. The “grain-to-school” movement, though, is just starting to gain steam. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), passed in 2010, improved nutrition standards nationally, requiring grain-based foods served in public schools to be made with at least 50 percent whole grains. It also provided $5 million annually in funding for farm-to-school projects across the country.

“Over the past 5 to 7 years, we’ve seen a real increase in folks doing farm-to-school that haven’t been just fruits and vegetables,” says Anna Mullen, the communications director at the National Farm to School Network. “We’ve seen an expansion of the idea—to wheat, grains, fish, protein, bison.” Mullen credits the HHFKA for codifying support for farm-to-school projects, and spurring innovation—including projects like the one at Shandon.

Ahead-of-the-curve school districts have been sourcing local wheat for years. Two in Oregon—Portland Public Schools and Bend-La Pine Schools—have been baking with flour from Camas Country Mill in the Willamette Valley for instance. In Georgia, Burke County Public Schools has been sourcing whole wheat flour, whole grain grits, and corn meal from Freeman’s Mill in Statesboro for 7 years.

And other districts are beginning to embrace the idea as well: Two years ago, the Chicago-based company Gourmet Gorilla began sourcing wheat from Midwestern farmers to make oat bars, muffins, and pizza with 51 percent whole grain for schools in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. And in upstate New York, a dozen public schools began working with pasta manufacturer Sfoglini and Birkett Mills to serve students a 51 percent whole wheat fusilli and macaroni.

However, the Shandon project is one of the first that will exceed the National School Lunch Program’s requirement. For at least the next two years, all the bread, pizza, tortillas, and even pasta will be made with 100 percent whole wheat.

‘The Best Tortilla I’ve Have Ever Had’

Claudia Carter, who is working on a Ph.D. in nutrition at North Dakota State University, is passionate about the Wheat2School project for several reasons.

 

Chuck Buckingham, lead volunteer, using his wheat thresher to harvest at Whitehead Elementary in Woodland.

The majority of the students at Shandon and San Miguel are farmworkers’ kids, and most are Latinx. “My food service manager [at Shandon] told me, ‘For some of these kids, [school breakfast and lunch] are the only two meals they eat throughout the day,’” Carter says. “So I have to feed them the best I can. How can I be serving them a Pop-Tart, canned fruit, and fruit juice? If you add that together it’s 65 grams of sugar—and that’s just their breakfast!”

That list describes the actual menu at the Woodland Unified School District just outside Sacramento, where Carter launched a previous wheat-to-school project. And it’s a far cry from that kids have less than 25 grams (six teaspoons) of sugar a day.

“For some of these kids, [school breakfast and lunch] are the only two meals they eat throughout the day—so I have to feed them the best I can.”

Breakfasts like this, Carter says, can not only lead to childhood diabetes, they also lead to sugar spikes (and crashes) that undermine sustained learning. She points out that whole grains, on the other hand, contain not only more fiber than white flour, they contain Vitamin E, an antioxidant that is important for vision and a properly developing nervous system. (The Dietary Guidelines for Americans has called these both “shortfall nutrients” since they are so under-consumed by the U.S. population.) Whole grains also are rich in B vitamins and protein, both of which are important for brain health. And though some whole grain recipes—like whole-wheat muffins—contain added sugar, the levels tend to be lower than the processed food included in most school breakfasts.

Some nutrition professionals pointed to the high percentage of whole grain foods that went to waste in the first few years after the HHKA, but Carter believes that you can influence kids’ palates by feeding them high-quality whole grains early on.

The 100 percent whole wheat cinnamon rolls prepared for Shandon and San Miguel schools.

In Ecuador, where she grew up, bread and tortillas made with whole grain are a rarity. It was her husband, who hails from South Dakota, who converted her to eating them. “As a result, our kids have been eating whole wheat stuff since they were little,” Carter says. “I buy all the stuff Nan produces at Grist & Toll, and I make pancakes, bread, and cakes.”

Carter is also on the board of a nonprofit called Yolo Farm-to-Fork, which funds edible school garden programs throughout Yolo County in California. A few years ago, in an effort to introduce other kids to these delicious, nutritious baked goods, she helped launch Yolo’s wheat-to-school project at another elementary school in the county. The students grew wheat—and, in a single day, harvested it and milled it themselves.

“That same day we had stations for pasta-making, tortilla-making, and bread-baking,” Carter says. “Keep in mind that 80 percent of these kids are Mexican-American. They grew up eating white tortillas, like me. And every single kid had a huge smile on their face when eating their tortilla warm. I heard, unanimously, ‘This is the best tortilla I have ever had.’”

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This experience was the inspiration for the Wheat2School project at Shandon. Carter will be collecting data for her doctoral research, proving, she hopes, that kids actually do want to eat 100 percent whole grain products. She also plans to compare the nutritional content of the fresh bread with what Shandon has served in the past.

Baking Demos and Milling Lessons

This month, Grist & Toll’s Kohler will visit Shandon to train cafeteria staff and the California Wheat Commission’s intern Isaac Lopez on the mill. The staff—including Shandon’s food service manager Gelene Coehlo, a home baker herself—has expressed excitement about the project.

Lopez, a student at Cal Poly, will be on site once a week to help with trouble-shooting. Eventually, Carter hopes to train high school students to use the mill as well.

Over the summer, the California Wheat Commission hosted baking demos and tested recipes to find the tastiest and healthiest recipes for kids. Kohler is sharing some new recipes for muffins and no-knead pizza; they’re also making some surprising discoveries, including a way to decrease the sugar content in their roll recipe from 20 percent to 15 percent.

From left: Claudia Carter and Nan Kohler at Shandon Elementary school.

“The beauty of working with 100 percent whole Sonora wheat is that it comes with an internal sweetness,” Carter notes. Though the National School Lunch Program has no limit on sugar, she and Coehlo are glad to reduce it where they can.

As part of the grant, Carter and her intern will also be developing lesson plans on the history of wheat grown in California, agricultural science, and the superior nutrition of whole grains. “Right now, we’re putting together a lesson plan on the Missions in San Miguel that grew Sonora wheat specifically,” she says. Students will also have the opportunity to grow and harvest wheat in a test garden.

Supporting local farmers is key to Carter and Kohler’s vision for the project, and to that end, they’ve arranged for three of the California farmers who supply grains for the pilot project to speak in classrooms this fall.

“We want to show children their faces and say, ‘OK, you are eating their bread,’” says Carter. “A lot of pointing back to how your food is made, why this is so important.”

The Cost of Local Wheat

Since infrastructure is one of the tricky issues with wheat-to-school projects—schools need to find a local miller to work with, or have a mill on site—some people are studying how to make the process smoother and less costly. Last year, researchers at the Center for Integrated Agriculture Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture & Life Sciences and the Artisan Grain Collaborative in Madison received a $516,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers’ Market Promotion Program to expand the value chain for Midwest grain growers in institutions over the next three years.

“I think that creating those local businesses that make products from a local grains is probably gonna be the sweet spot,” says Vanessa Herald, a senior farm to institution outreach specialist at UW-Madison.

Umi Organic in Portland is one such company. In 2019, Portland Public Schools began purchasing the company’s 50 percent whole-grain, organic yakisoba noodles. Umi’s owner Lola Milholland says that providing additional funding for grain-to-school projects like hers is critical to their success.

“Our product does cost more money,” she says. “It’s Oregon-milled grain, Oregon-produced noodles.” (Milholland sources Durum and Edison wheat flour from Camas Country Mill in Eugene.)

Oregon’s legislature has been funding farm-to-school projects since 2007, when it budgeted for a permanent, full-time farm-to-school manager position. In July, the legislature re-upped the Oregon Farm-to-School Grant Program, setting aside $10.2 million in funding for schools to purchase and serve Oregon-grown foods. These funds, in part, will go to buy more Umi Organic noodles; the Portland Public School district just increased its noodle order from 2,000 pounds every six weeks to 3,600 per month.

In Chicago, Gourmet Gorilla maintains a cost-conscious focus, since their customers are school districts that don’t necessarily have grants. Co-founder and CEO Danielle Hrzic says they lower costs by including some conventional ingredients alongside organic ones.

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“There are some concessions you have to make,” says Hrzic. “Breads were really tough. We want clean and whole grain, and it gets expensive in a lot of cases. So that’s where we started making our own grain products that met all the nutritional requirements.”

Their internal brand, Grow Good Foods, includes GROWnola, muffins, pizza, and oat bars—all made from local grains including sorghum. The company works with Janie’s Mill in Illinois and Meadowlark Organics in Wisconsin.

The Future of Wheat2School

Back at Shandon Unified, Kohler sees a future for the Wheat2School project even when the CDFA grants expire in 2023. “We need to set it up so it can thrive on its own and be sustainable,” Kohler says. “We’ll be facilitating the connections with the farmers who are committed to a certain price point for the grain.”

Although the California Wheat Commission’s grant covers all the start-up costs—the stone mill and two pasta extruder machines, as well as staff training—the main challenge once the other two grants run out will be getting quantities of wheat at a price that can work for both the district and the farmers. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble doing that,” Kohler says, optimistically.

“We know all about school budget deficits and challenges—but we also know what’s possible with a lot of creative thinking and community-building.”

Organic whole wheat flour costs three times as much as processed white flour, which can go for as little as 27¢ a pound. Shandon and San Miguel are paying an average of 55¢ a pound to buy unmilled wheat directly from the farmers, according to Carter.

“We know all about school budget deficits and challenges,” Kohler says. “But we also know what’s possible with a lot of creative thinking and community-building.”

When she and Carter first met with the Shandon kitchen staff this summer, they were already brainstorming about how the mill might open up fundraising opportunities like pizza parties and bake sales. Furthermore, Kohler expects more organic growers to join the Wheat2School project—she was inundated with wildly supportive messages from farmers after announcing the project on Instagram this summer. Some of these farmers grow at higher volume and may be able to achieve a lower price—one that schools can afford on their own in the future.

As Kohler said in her Instagram post, “You think it can’t be done? Too complicated? No one is interested? Kids won’t eat whole grains? Watch us, we’re about to blow the lid off all that.”

The 'Top Chef' Guide to Portland

I wrote this Top Chef guide to Portland for Food & Wine back in June.

In Season 18 of Top Chef, the culinary reality competition traveled to Oregon for the first time. While we watched the cheftestants eat, cook, and compete for the title in the City of Roses, we also caught glimpses of the natural beauty of the entire state along the way-including the Columbia Gorge, the Oregon Coast, and Willamette Valley wine country. Here are all the locations visited by Top Chef in the city of Portland and beyond.

Portland Restaurants

Homebase for this season, the city known for its food carts and farm-to-table cuisine also boasts a wide range of African diaspora restaurants, Latino spots, and elevated Japanese fare, some of which were featured on-screen.

Akadi, which the contestants visited in Episode 3 with judge Kwame Onwuachi, is justly famous for its attieke poisson (grilled whole fish with grated, fermented cassava), peanut butter mafe and shosho (black eyed pea stew). Though it's been closed since January so chef-owner Fatou Ouattara could take an extended visit to her native Ivory Coast, it will re-open in September in a larger location with an expanded menu that will include dishes from Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, and South Africa.

 

Judge Gregory Gourdet took another group of contestants to Yaad Style Jamaican on busy MLK Jr., Boulevard for some curried goat and brown stewed chicken. Try these and other Jamaican specialties like oxtail stew or jerk chicken (with a medley of peppers and onions). Owner Curtis Mazelin hails from Montego Bay (he's lived in Portland since '97) and has plans to start some Reggae music nights this summer.

The South American country of Guyana is a melting pot of people and that's reflected in its diverse cuisines. Try the same delicious puff breads-stuffed with either a bacalhau (Portuguese-style salt cod) omelet or chana aloo (chickpea and potato curry)-that the contestants sampled at Bake on the Run, a food cart located at the Hawthorne Asylum pod.

The contestants also swung by the Portland Mercado, home to nine rotating food carts, to try Mathilde Aurelien Wilson's Haitian food. Though Wilson has since closed her food cart to run a catering company, you can sample the cuisines of Argentina, Colombia, Coast Rica, Cuba, Oaxaca, Peru, Venezuela, and more at the Mercado, which is also a business incubator for Latino food entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, you can try Wilson's tasty Mathilde's Kitchen hibiscus flower drinks all over town at New Seasons, Green Zebra, and Market of Choice.

Departure, where previous Top Chef contestant Gregory Gourdet presided until 2019, still shines atop the Nines Hotel. Executive Chef Matt Christianson oversees the new menu which still has a lot of inventive vegan options (mahogany noodles sport a chili glaze, truffle marinated crispy tofu, sweet pepper, shiitake, and spring rabe; baby gold potatoes with fermented cashew cream) as well as pork belly, steamed buns with wagyu meatball, and bison rendang curry.

Don't forget to hit up Season 18 contestant Gabriel Pascuzzi's restaurants, Mama Bird, Stacked Sandwich Shop, and Feel Good.

Portland Hotels

Left: CREDIT: THE HOXTON

Right: CREDIT: THE HOXTON

At the end of Episode 3, the judges dine in the lobby of the Hoxton, the edgy British hotel chain, to taste the contestants' own take on Pan-African cuisine.Post-pandemic, the lobby coffee bar has re-opened (though at limited capacity) with its work stations and Proud Mary coffee. Rooms have a Northwest-chic vibe with wood paneling, vintage furniture from local shops, and art from Portland's Upfor Gallery. Tope, the rooftop Mexican restaurant, has re-opened under chef Joel Lui-Kwan and still has its trademark spicy Margaritas and mouth-watering tacos.

Bed down where the Top Chef contestants stayed for three months during filming-at the Royal Sonesta (formerly Kimpton's Hotel Monaco). This 221-room property has a regal high-ceilinged lobby, Frette linens, and whimsical guest rooms with bird-patterned wallpaper.

Other 'Top Chef: Portland' Locations

Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, otherwise known as OMSI, is one of the top science museums in the U.S. In addition to fun interactive exhibits for kids of all ages, the museum offers tours of the USS Blueback, the U.S. Navy's last non-nuclear powered submarine-now docked in the Willamette River.

Spend a few hours enjoying the tranquility of the Portland Japenese Garden, a lush series of gardens full of ponds, streams, and water fountains. Stop for tea from Tokyo-based Jugetsudo and a piece of castella cake at Umami Café.

One of the biggest urban green spaces in the country, Forest Park has over 80 miles of hiking trails, 112 species of birds, and serious wildlife. (Joggers have spotted elk and coyote.) Try one of the shorter loops of the Wildwood Trail and you'll soon be surrounded by towering Douglas fir and bigleaf maples.

Columbia Gorge

CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES

Located along the "Fruit Loop" above Hood River, the 40-acre Mt. View Orchards is where the contestants picked their fruit for Episode 4's savory fruit challenge. Here you'll find everything from Pink Pearl apples and Akane to apricots, cherries, peaches, and plums-all with a backdrop of snow-covered Mount Hood.

Oregon Coast

An easy day trip from Portland, the Oregon Coast where to go to walk on the beach, explore tidal pools, and sample some ice cream.

CREDIT: CARLY DIAZ

Getting a cone (or a bag of cheese curds) at Tillamook Creamery is a time-honored summer tradition in Oregon. A few years ago, the facility got a splashy new redesign. It's currently open to visitors for self-guided tours of the creamery exhibit and purchases of to-go food and ice cream.

Gearheart is the tiny town where Portland native and pioneering American chef James Beard spent his summers as a child. Though his family cottage is privately owned (and therefore not open to the public) you can recreate his outings and pack a picnic of charcuterie, cheese, smoked fish, and bread and head to the beach or to stunning Ecola State Park, 18 minutes south.

CREDIT: LIDIJA KAMANSKY / GETTY IMAGES

Two miles south of Ecola is the popular coastal town of Cannon Beach, known for its iconic Haystack Rock. Book an oceanfront studio at the very place Top Chef contestants stayed, the 95-room Surfsand Resort.

About half an hour further south is picturesque Nehalem Bay, a state park that has year-round camping, a two-mile bike trail, and great crabbing and clamming. In fact, this is where the chefs go crabbing for their Dungeness at Kelly's Brighton Marina. Rent baited rings and a bucket from Kelly's and you can crab right from the dock. (Kelly's provides the shellfish permit, which is $19 for three days for non-Oregonians; $10 for Oregon residents.) 

Willamette Valley

Willamette Valley Vineyards, located just south of Salem in Oregon's celebrated wine country, is where the final challenge takes place in the Season 18 finale. Try a daily flight ($15-$20) or a "pairings exploration" which pairs small-lot wines with four small plates prepared by winery chef DJ MacIntyre.

Left: CREDIT: ANDREA JOHNSON

Right: CREDIT: CHERYL JUETTEN

One of the most beautiful vineyards in the state, Soter Vineyards is perched atop a hill in Carlton. Justly famous for their biodynamic pinots and rosés, the winery is also illustrious for having hired Top Chef contestant Sara Hauman to be their head chef in 2019.

More Food to Explore in Portland

Of course, Top Chef could only cover so much in 14 episodes shot during lockdown. If you're planning a trip to Portland, here are a few not-to-be-missed places that opened during or just before the pandemic.

Former food cart Malka became a brick and mortars restaurant in February 2020. Though their timing was rotten, chefs Jessie Aron and Colin McArthur pivoted to take-out and their inventive rice bowls, quirky salads, and outrageously yummy sandwiches have kept much of southeast Portland fed ever since. The Important Helmet for Outer Space is a must-slow-roasted pork shoulder in apricot curry BBQ sauce with pan-roasted mushrooms, stir-fried vegetables, crispy shallots, peanuts, and avocado on coconut jasmine rice. The veggie options are equally creative. A new salad, Hobbes is Wearing Jams! has sugar snap peas, quick pickled cherries, watermelon radish, mint and basil, tahini, spice-roasted carrots, golden raisins, fried shallots-and that's only half the ingredients. "I'm a maximalist, through and through," Aron says.

Chef Peter Cho of Han Oak fame opened Toki in January, in the old Tasty & Alder space. The restaurant, already known for its lip-smacking Korean fried chicken wings, also has chargrilled spicy pork short ribs, pork dumplings, and bi bim bap with Yuzu soy cured salmon belly served with snap peas, carrots, kohlrabi, and cabbage. 

Takibi, the hotly anticipated Japanese bonfire restaurant, is now open in Snow Peak's new flagship store. (The Japanese outdoor lifestyle brand has had a presence in Portland since 1999.) Start with a cocktail; the bar menu is a fun collaboration between bar legend Jim Meehan and buzzy new talent Lydia McLuen. Chef Alex Kim, a veteran of Michelin-starred restaurants in New York City and Tokyo, creates an aggressively seasonal menu of shareable dishes. Standouts include the sashimi platter (served with Oregon-grown wasabi), the charcoal-grilled black cod with white miso, and his handmade soba noodles. Just around the corner is the brand-new Smith Teamaker Cafe. Chef Karl Holl's small but stellar plant-based menu includes tea-infused dishes like golden turmeric noodles with tea kimchi and chocolate chia pudding with Lord Bergamont jam and chocolate hazelnut granola. It goes without saying that these dishes pair splendidly with Steven Smith teas and tea lattes.

From a Prison Garden Sprouts Real Growth

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful.

 

Amid rows of snap peas and summer squash, incarcerated gardeners cultivate job skills, inner peace and fresh produce for the cafeteria.

On her most recent stay at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, 45-year-old Adria White knew that she needed more than a drug treatment program. She was up for release soon, and while that program, which she’d participated in twice before, included useful tools like mindfulness training and behavioral therapy, it did little to prepare her for getting a job on the outside.  

“You learn coping skills,” says White, who became dependent on methamphetamines at around age 30. “But when you get out and you’re poor and struggling, that doesn’t solve your life problems.”

So when her cellmate told her about Lettuce Grow, a sustainable gardening program that takes place at 16 Oregon prisons and juvenile detention centers, she signed up, hoping the skills she’d gain would help her land a job at a nursery or start a community garden in her hometown. 

Though she had zero prior gardening experience, White, it turns out, has a green thumb. Soon she was digging her hands into the small garden plot on the medium security side of the prison, planting mainly flowers and herbs. “I spent a lot of hours out there — as many as I was allowed. I fell in love with my plants. There’s a bond,” she says. Dahlias became her favorite flower. “They are fast and they are so eye-catching!” She also loved the aroma of the herbs — particularly lavender and sage — and shared them with others. “Women started rubbing lavender on their Covid masks,” she laughs. 

One of the privileges of the gardening program is that participants are permitted to go outside when the yard isn’t officially open.

“I was like, ‘This is cool. I can go outside and no one is out there!’” she says. Over time, her gardening work became more than just a chance for some limited freedom from confinement. It grew into a full-fledged passion. 

White was scheduled to take the next sustainable gardening class in September, right after she’d moved to minimum security, but the entire prison was evacuated due to wildfires. When prisoners and staff returned to the facility, a Covid outbreak resulted in a lockdown that barred all visitors including the Lettuce Grow staff and volunteers. “As a precaution we had provided the class with the text books and class materials, just in case we got shut out,” says Lettuce Grow director Rima Green. White, undeterred, worked her way through the class materials on her own. “That’s no mean feat,” emphasizes Green. The curriculum, from Oregon State University’s Extension Service, is a college-level class.

Green and staff were finally allowed back into Coffee Creek in March, and got to know White as they gardened with her, side by side. Green was so impressed by White’s skills and determination that she hired White, who was released in May, to be a part-time employee at Lettuce Grow, which is a program of the Portland-based nonprofit Growing Gardens. In her new job, White is doing office work such as correspondence, surveys and coordination with volunteers. Other graduates of the Lettuce Grow program have gone on to find jobs at Portland Nursery, a family-run garden center with two locations, and other horticultural-related businesses in Oregon. 

Adria White in the garden she planted at her sister’s house after being released from prison. Photo courtesy Adria White

Lettuce Grow was founded by attorney and master gardener Sarah Van Roo in 2009 with 15 incarcerated people in two Oregon prisons. Van Roo’s original intent was to improve the nutritional quality of the meals served to residents, some of whom she’d befriended while teaching yoga at Coffee Creek. 

In 2015, Lettuce Grow merged with Growing Gardens, which promotes food security by building gardens at schools and in residents’ backyards. Today, 11 years later, Lettuce Grow serves 200 incarcerated people in Oregon each year, providing them with valuable job skills and a respite from the drudgery of prison life. Those enrolled in the program are able to take classes like the Oregon Food Bank’s Seed to Supper class, Oregon State University’s Sustainable Gardening class and an advanced Greenhouse Management class.

Because participants cultivate a vegetable garden on site, Lettuce Grow also gives prisoners access to healthy, delicious food, like fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes, spinach, snap peas, kale, lettuce, summer squash and broccoli. In 2020, even amid the pandemic, the State Corrections system grew 365,536 pounds of food. Some 97 percent of that went into the institutions’ kitchens. (The rest was delivered to food banks across the state.) This total does not include the produce grown in federal prisons in Oregon like the one in Sheridan, where residents harvested 100,000 pounds of food in 2020, all of which was consumed at the prison cafeteria. But the program’s most impressive data may be that which shows participants have just a four percent recidivism rate — the national average at state correctional systems, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is 68 percent within three years.

White was hired as a prison gardener when she moved to the minimum security facility within Coffee Creek. When she got there in September, the garden had seen better days due to staffing shortages and one uncooperative correction officer. “It had been neglected, with the quarantine and the fires,” she says. “And the voles!” Despite being a menace to the garden, the voles became popular with the gardeners, who gave them names and treated them like pets. Meanwhile, White spent so much time weeding that at night she dreamt she was pulling weeds. She was paid $50 per month for four 40-hour weeks — a very small sum, but one that is fairly typical for what incarcerated folks earn.

There’s a lot of creativity at Coffee Creek’s minimum security garden. One woman has designed a “Three Sisters” garden of corn, beans and squash. Another used flowers to recreate the album cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. White grew flowers and herbs, and with other gardeners harvested vegetables and fruits for Coffee Creek’s cafeteria. That was probably the most rewarding part of the job, White says.

Adria White’s grandson sampling the garden’s berries. Photo courtesy Adria White

“When we got the fruits and vegetables on the trays, every single woman was grateful. You could hear every woman talk about it. They would tell us thank you,” she says. “I also had people come up to me throughout the day while I was working and say how much the garden means to them — how seeing the flowers, having a place to sit down and see something natural instead of cement and barbed wire were good for the soul.”

Coffee Creek currently has about 800 residents, all of whom are women. At the cafeteria, the lines were always longer in summer, when the women knew that the garden’s abundance would show up on their trays. The tomatoes were the most popular item.

“In prison, they don’t ever serve tomatoes,” says White. “Some people — especially if they were lifers — when they got fresh organic tomatoes on their tray, it was an overwhelming sensory experience. There is a lot of emotion in eating a fresh tomato when you haven’t in ten years.” 

For White, the garden had the added bonus of soothing her anxiety.

“I’m kind of reclusive. Being social is challenging for me,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’ll never be able to get a job, I’m so weird in public.’”

But gardening, of course, is a solitary pursuit, and White says getting better at it gave her confidence and made her realize that she can do something to make money. The first thing she did after being released this May, she says, was plant a garden at her daughter’s house.

“Every time I get anxious, I go into the garden,” she says. “The transition from prison life can be really tough. For me, to have something positive — something new to keep my mind busy until I have my perspective back — that has been huge.”

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic had a big impact on the program. None of Lettuce Grow’s 32 volunteers statewide were able to visit the facilities for months, and a number of the sustainable gardening and greenhouse management classes were cancelled. At some sites, classes were conducted by members of the prison staff or even by incarcerated tutors themselves. At facilities like Coffee Creek — which had a number of lockdowns — there were no classes. Everything White learned while in minimum security was from getting her hands dirty and from gleaning tips from fellow gardeners, or from Green and Mirabai Collins from Lettuce Grow, who were finally allowed in in March

But with vaccination rates increasing in Oregon prisons — at press time the prison vaccination rate was 71 percent, higher than the statewide rate — some facilities are starting to pilot face-to-face visitations, and Green is hopeful that volunteers will soon be allowed back in. 

For White, learning how to garden has been nothing short of transformational. She’s already found another gardening project to sink her hands into — she recently stumbled upon a community garden near her daughter’s house that was overgrown and neglected. When she called the number for the volunteer organizer, the fellow who answered said he’d moved to California. Would she like to take it over? White accepted the task, and is now eager to get in there and start weeding. She envisions a zen garden with lots of flowers. “I want it to be a healing space,” she says. “It creates a healing energy instead of stress.” 

How helping my houseless neighbors helped me

This op-ed appeared in Street Roots in April.

Me, cleaning the sink after someone has showered at the Sunnyside Methodist Church.  

 

If you had told me back in December that I’d soon know all the homeless people in my neighborhood on a first-name basis, I would have laughed. But not only is this true; I have a dozen of their names entered into my phone. I’ve delivered a home-cooked dinner to one guy after his eye surgery, I helped one fellow apply for a spot at Agape Village, and on Easter Sunday, I bought a cot for an elderly houseless guy who’d told me the day before, “I’m too old to sleep on the ground anymore.”

All because of the shower project that the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association launched at the Sunnyside Methodist Church in January.

Let me explain. Last December, I joined a Sunnyside Neighborhood Association Community Committee to do outreach to the unsheltered folks who had just relocated to Sunnyside Park. They’d moved there, in part, because the city had just “swept” Laurelhurst Park, and Sunnyside was the park nearest to Laurelhurst. Sunnyside Park also had two streets that did not face residences, which I later found most houseless folks are quite conscientious about. We invited Raven Drake from Street Roots’ new Ambassador Program to help us make contact with our unsheltered neighbors. John Mayer, executive director of Beacon PDX, was also there to facilitate introductions.

The first outreach was the most awkward. But after that initial round of “knocking” on folks’ tents and having conversations about the weather, it got easier. As a neighborhood association, we were trying to figure out how to best help these folks while they are living in a park so close to us. So we asked them, “What do you need?” A thin 30-something woman in a colorful scarf and puffy jacket said laundry would be nice, because she hadn’t washed her clothes in a long time. Someone else said he hated how messy the camp had become — but they had no way to dispose of trash once they’d collected it into trash bags.

We started with a volunteer-led trash pickup, with several residents taking truckloads of trash to the dump, paying the fees themselves. I took on the “hygiene coordinator” role and was responsible for calling the city’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program to get a porta-potty installed near the park as well as ensuring that someone was collecting and disposing of needles safely and properly.

One day, I got a call from Matt, a Sunnyside Neighborhood Association board member, saying that the Groves Church, the congregation now at the former Sunnyside Methodist Church, had said we could use their showers two days a week. Soon, my fellow committee member Ash and I were off to Ikea to buy white towels and bath mats.

In very short order, I became known as “the Shower Lady.” I wrote up a list of protocols for volunteers and for people using the showers.

I’d show up at 1 p.m. on Saturdays at the park, when Beacon PDX provided lunch, clipboard in hand, and ask folks when they wanted a shower. Another committee member, Jenna, who is an elementary school teacher, printed up adorable “Shower Reminder” tickets that I scribble a person’s appointment on so he or she would have a visible reminder. Someone at the church donated more towels; Jenna and her husband Daniel did a Costco run for shampoo, body wash and clean underwear; someone else donated a hair dryer. We were off and running.

I’ll be the first to admit that I had no idea what I was doing when we started this pilot. But with the help of a few great volunteers (many of whom are still volunteering on a weekly or every-other-week basis) and with the support of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association Community Committee, the “shower ministry,” as I call it, has become a reliable service for people experiencing homelessness in our neighborhood. In fact, the Groves recently gave us a third day: Saturday.

It’s humbling to be able to offer such a basic service as a warm shower and know that it’s making a difference in people’s lives. Each person who showers leaves the church with a lighter step. For most of them, this will be the only shower they have this week. Every single one of our houseless neighbors thanks us for being there and for the shower. (It’s not lost on them that most Neighborhood Associations are full of upset neighbors who just want them to go “somewhere else.”) I periodically get texts from some of my houseless friends saying, “I appreciate you and what you’re doing. Thank you.” Just today, one of our regulars, grateful that we didn’t leave early because he didn’t show up at the appointed time, texted me and my other volunteer, “I love you guys.”

Hannah Wallace gets a clean pair of pants for a person in need.

 

Getting to know my unhoused neighbors has enriched my life. I’ve learned to expect the questionable advice from one fellow who arrives by bike and always tells my co-volunteer and I that a daily shot of whiskey will keep COVID-19 at bay. Another regular arrives early just to chat with me about his day — or sometimes his past. A former meth addict, he’s been clean for a year and is living in a doorway, trying to stay safe and warm (and sober). He says he’s a loner, but he’s gregarious and clearly craves company. He’s been homeless for 17 years and has finally decided that he can’t live this way anymore. He wants a roof over his head. Then there’s the 40-something man who had never been homeless until 2020, when the bar he owned shuttered and his wife divorced him. He used to play bass in a rock band, and I bring him my back issues of Rolling Stone to read. I used to walk past houseless people on the street, feeling incapable of helping, let alone engaging. But getting to know these folks who come for showers makes me see them — really see them. Now, when I go running in the park, I say hello to the folks I know, sometimes even stopping for a chat.

Some people are punctual or even early for their shower appointments and don’t need reminders. Others are no-shows, not even texting to let me know they’re not going to make it. Others don’t have phones, so can’t tell me if something has come up to wreck their plans for their day. It’s OK — we volunteers have learned to roll with it. It’s not like we have to make an appointment to have our showers. We can have them whenever we like.

Some take short, military-style showers — in and out of the facility in 10 minutes. My favorite, though, is when people sing while they shower. One guy brings his radio, elevating his shower to a musical experience. We can hear his melodious voice drifting up the stairwell and it always makes me smile.

Finally, knowing more of my houseless neighbors has made me feel safer in my neighborhood. Perhaps that’s not surprising; we tend to fear the unknown.

When you don’t know individual houseless people, you are more likely to make assumptions about “houseless people” as a group. And, I think, you are more likely to lose touch with the humanity of each person. As I’ve gotten to know the individuals who come for showers, I realize how delightful, soulful, hilarious, creative and sweet they are. I can’t fix all of their problems or even get them housing, but I can help them get a warm shower. And for that I am grateful.

Learn more about the Sunnyside Shower Project or how to volunteer.

The Tiny-House Village That’s Changing Lives

I wrote this story about Agape Village in Portland, Oregon for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Agape Village is a place where people find community, structure, stability — and a path to permanent housing

Urban/Transportation

Photo courtesy Sarah Chapman

 

Brittany ran away from home when she was eight years old to escape an abusive situation and has lived without a permanent home in Portland, Oregon for much of the time since. During these years, she resided under bridges, in yurts in the forest, in a self-governed encampment for people experiencing homelessness and even in a treehouse before landing in a community called Agape Village.

After just four months of living at Agape, Brittany, now 36 years old, transitioned into her own two-bedroom apartment.

“Agape Village gave me a safe space to just be me,” she says. “It showed me that I needed to really get a hold of my life. I had been in the wind a long time.” 

Agape Village, located on the grounds of the city’s Central Nazarene Church, consists of 13 simple wooden huts. Sarah Chapman, outreach coordinator at Agape, calls them sleeping pods, but they are more like tiny homes — only without electricity or plumbing. “It’s rustic,” says Chapman. “A step up from camping, but definitely not like living indoors.” But to the people who live there, it is the community and the stability that are life-changing. 

Getting people into housing quickly requires sufficient affordable housing inventory, something Portland lacks. Smaller, cheaper shelters like Agape Village help fill the gap. Credit: Hannah Wallace

Chapman refers to Agape Village as a “transitional housing village” designed to bridge the gap between homelessness and permanent housing. Typically, transitional housing consists of a conventional house or apartment and is accompanied by intensive case management and other services for addiction and mental health issues. These days, though, the term has broadened to include low-cost, low-barrier-to-entry shelters such as sanctioned campgrounds or certain tiny-house villages. The people who live in them say having a roof over their heads has allowed them to address the challenges that have kept them chronically homeless in the past.  

Tiny homes, transformational community

Living on the streets or in unsanctioned campgrounds means risking having your belongings stolen or or confiscated by city officials who routinely sweep through to “clean up” such encampments. And though homeless shelters are warm and mostly safe from crime, they have their own downsides: a lack of privacy, risk of infection and strict limitations on belongings.    

Continue reading at Reasons to be Cheerful.

Canndor: the world's first cannabis herbarium

 

Two California women—Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law—have created the world's first archive of preserved cannabis specimens.  I wrote about their project, Canndor, for Broccoli, the magazine for cannabis lovers. 

Here's a short snippet of the article:  

When botanists or naturalists need to identify a particular plant, they head to the local herbarium to cross-check existing identified specimens of the plant.  Think of a herbarium as a library, only instead of books, it contains dried and labeled plant specimens. In the United States alone, there are hundreds of herbariums—from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium (one of the world’s most famous, with nearly 7 million specimens) to the one at Harvard University. Worldwide, there are more than 3,000 herbariums. 

But until recently, there hasn’t been a single herbarium dedicated to cannabis.

When plant geneticists Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law launched their botanical identification company LeafWorks in 2016, they quickly realized the need for one. 

At LeafWorks, Kuntz and Law do DNA sequencing tests for the natural products industry, which helps ensure accurate labeling and combats fraud. Herbal companies such as Traditional Medicinals will send small samples of herb particulate to LeafWorks be sure that it is what their suppliers say it is.

“If we’re going to do a test on ashwagandha or gingko, we’ll go to an herbarium and get vetted samples that occur throughout the plant range,” says Kuntz, who studied with renowned American herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. Through their connections at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Kew Gardens in England (where Kuntz interned for a summer), the two scientists are able to access fingernail-sized pieces of dried plant matter so they can sequence its DNA.  (In some cases, herbariums have their own DNA banks, in which case they can share the plant’s sequence with LeafWorks.) Kuntz and Law then uses those samples as a baseline for future tests on that species of plant.

To continue reading, get your copy of issue #10 on newsstands now or download a PDF of my article here:

Download 42-45_HERBARIUM (1)

The Casino That Farms Its Own Food

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful in November.

A stone’s throw from the blackjack tables, bison are grazing, beehives are buzzing, crops are growing — and nature is winning.

 

On the surface, Oklahoma’s Downstream Casino Resort looks like any other: lines of brightly lit slot machines snake past entrances to steakhouses and sports bars, while cocktail waitresses shuttle trays to craps and blackjack tables. A takeaway cafe serves gourmet coffee, and an all-you-can-eat buffet is stacked with prime rib on Saturday nights.  

But beneath this familiar facade is a very different kind of system — one that applies traditional Indigenous food and farming principles to modern hotel operations. The Quapaw tribe, which runs the Downstream Casino Resort, operates seven greenhouses and two sprawling gardens that provide the hotel with 20 varieties of vegetables and herbs. The tribe also has an apiary with 80 beehives, as well as a craft brewery and a coffee roaster that supplies the hotel and casino. The Quapaw is also the only tribe in the United States with its own USDA-certified meat packing and processing plant, where it processes bison and cattle that it raises on open pastures, selling the bulk of it to the casino’s five restaurants. (The rest is provided to the two tribal-run daycares, the Quapaw Farmers Market, the Quapaw Mercantile and a few other tribally-run shops.) 

Cattle grazing on pastureland behind the Downstream Casino Resort. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

With all these businesses — plus a construction firm — the Quapaw Nation is one of the largest employers in this part of Oklahoma, employing 2,000 tribal and non-tribal workers, while paying above-average wages and offering a full benefits package to all full-time employees. It’s a business model that preserves cultural heritage while providing a profit. 

Lucus Setterfield, director of food and beverage at Downstream, says 50 percent of the food served at the resort’s Red Oak Steakhouse comes from the Quapaw land. Even the mint in the restaurant’s mojitos is grown in the greenhouses.  

“The Quapaw are one of the most innovative tribes in the country when it comes to food sovereignty,” says Maria Givens, the communications director of the Native American Agricultural Fund (NAAF). 

Innovative as it may be, the Quapaw are essentially resurrecting a way of life — living off the land that sustained them before they were driven off of it by American settlers. Colonization — and the policies that created Indian reservations — deprived them of their traditional foodways of foraging, fishing and hunting and disrupted their long-established patterns of intense physical activity. Public health experts believe that these are two of the reasons Indigenous people have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the U.S. According to the CDC, Native American adults are three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than white adults, and 1.6 times more likely to be obese. 

With seven greenhouses and two gardens, the Quapaw gardeners harvest about 6,000 pounds of food per year. Each morning, the resort’s chefs stop by and place their orders. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

By retrofitting a modern resort with a system of locally sourced, sustainably raised food, the Quapaw are reclaiming their food sovereignty and, at the same time, benefitting every guest who visits their resort, whether those guests know it or not.

Bringing bison back

It all started in 2010 when then tribe chairman John Berrey, a fifth-generation cattle rancher, had a vision to reintroduce bison to this part of Oklahoma. The bison is the state mammal, but it’s also a traditional food for the Quapaw people, who lived in Northeastern Arkansas and then western Missouri before eventually moving to Oklahoma.

That year, the tribe was given eight bison from Yellowstone National Park via the InterTribal Buffalo Council. Now, ten years later, the tribe has a bison herd of close to 200 as well as a herd of 385 Black Angus cattle. (The bison have been breeding, but the tribe has also gotten additional bison from other national parks.) Both are pastured on fields of native grasses and the ones that are headed for slaughter are finished on grains and mushrooms. The tribe processes only five to 15 bison per year and doesn’t slaughter until they’ve sold out of every type of meat: steaks, ground bison, chuck roast and bison jerky. “We use the whole animal,” explains Quapaw Nation grants coordinator Shelby Crum — even the hides, which a Quapaw artist decorates with tribal paintings and sells at the farmers’ market. 

The 25,000-square-foot meatpacking plant, which opened in 2017, was designed to conform to renowned animal scientist Dr. Temple Grandin’s blueprint for humane animal handling. The Quapaw built the processing plant adjacent to the feeding facility to avoid the need for transport, which makes animals nervous. It also uses Grandin’s designs for curved chutes with high walls, which minimizes stressors, and the holding pens include extra crowd gates and bright colors. In addition to processing its own animals, the plant processes 50 to 60 head of cattle per week for nearby ranchers from Oklahoma and Missouri. 

A worker processes honey from one of the resort’s 80 beehives. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

The meat is broken apart into different cuts, smoked, flavored and packaged right there at the facility, which also has freezers and coolers for storage. Most is sold at a discounted price at tribally-owned retail outlets like the Quapaw Mercantile, the farmers’ market, the Quapaw C-Store and the Downstream Q-Store. “The whole goal is to make it affordable,” Crum says. That said, anyone from any state can order the meat via the Quapaw Cattle Company’s online store. 

Restaurant Workers Are Embracing Mental Wellness

I wrote this for Reasons to be Cheerful in November.

An industry that often celebrates pushing through the pain is turning its focus to mental health.

When employees clock into work at Mulvaneys B&L, a popular farm-to-table restaurant in Sacramento, California, they’re encouraged to slip one of four color-coded cards into a cardboard box. The cards have faces on them: one is happy, one is angry, one is neutral and one is stressed (in restaurant parlance, that’s “in the weeds.”)

“It’s like the pain signs at hospitals,” explains co-owner Patrick Mulvaney. Though the cards are anonymous, they give employees a chance to assess their own moods and share them with the manager or the peer helper on duty. During the staff’s pre-service meeting, the manager can share how many angry or stressed employees there are that day and ask if anyone needs additional support, empathy, or patience.

The box, which was co-owner (and Patrick’s wife) Bobbin Mulvaney’s idea, is just one measure put in place by I Got Your Back, a year-old peer-to-peer counseling program that the Mulvaneys helped start in response to several suicides in the Sacramento restaurant community in early 2018. In May of that year, Noah Zonca, the beloved, larger-than-life longtime chef of Sacramento’s the Kitchen, where Mulvaney also worked, died by suicide. He was one of 12 Sacramento restaurant workers to die by suicide that year. A month later, the issue of restaurant industry suicides was thrust into the spotlight when celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in a hotel in Alsace, France.  

Frankie Lopez, a manager at Mulvaneys B&L, and bartender Dan Mitchell. Photo courtesy Patrick Mulvaney

Even before Zonca’s death, the Mulvaneys had been having conversations with Sacramento chefs and restaurant owners, health care professionals, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, state senators and even Governor Gavin Newsom about how to tackle mental health issues in the hospitality industry. But the losses of Zonca and Bourdain added a sense of urgency. The final iteration of I Got Your Back came out of a design workshop at the Innovation Learning Network conference in October 2018. With the financial support of the James Beard Foundation and all four major area health systems — Dignity Health, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and the UC Davis Medical Center — a pilot was launched in September 2019.

Restaurant workers are especially prone to mental health and substance abuse issues. As journalist Kat Kinsman, founder of the blog Chefs with Issues, has written, “People who deal with mental health and addiction issues are drawn to this work because it has always been a haven for people who exist on the fringes; restaurant jobs have brutal hours and often pay very little and don’t offer health care; there is easy access to alcohol and illicit substances; and workers have traditionally been rewarded for their masochism — shut up and cook.” 

 

Continue reading at Reasons to be Cheerful. 

 

Black Grandmothers Feed their Communities and Pass on Food Traditions

 

 

I wrote about Grandma's Hands, a new program in Portland where grandmothers are reviving cultural connections and reducing food insecurity for Civil Eats.  

Laurie Palmer and Vanessa Chambers, two of the grandmothers in Grandma's Hands 

 

On a recent Saturday night in September, Mildred Braxton did something she never thought she’d do: she taught 20 or so others how to make succotash and steamed collard greens over Zoom.

With the confidence of a Food Network chef, Braxton, a parent of five and grandmother of three, put a skillet on the burner, poured some oil into the pan, and let it heat up before throwing in some chopped onion, frozen corn, frozen lima beans (called butter beans in the South), and black-eyed peas, narrating all the while. After covering the pan and letting it all heat up, she added stewed tomatoes, okra, and seasonings.

“Okra is the last vegetable I put in because it’s easy for it to fall apart,” said Braxton, who hails from Mississippi. “Okra has a bad rap. I’m standing up for okra!”

This virtual dinner party is part of a Portland, Oregon-based program called Grandma’s Hands, a platform for Black grandmothers to share family recipes and food traditions with future generations. So far, the 12 grandmothers involved have prepared four monthly meals for 30 to 40 participants at a time. In addition to delivering the food they make along with a bag of fresh produce grown by farmers of color to the participants throughout the community, the program brings everyone together virtually to partake of the food while sharing recipes and tips.

Though the focus of Grandma’s Hands is to facilitate community engagement and reconnect community members with culturally grounded natural foods and agricultural practices, the program may also help reduce food insecurity by teaching the younger generation the economic benefits of cooking at home for their families.

“Our [modern] life is not conducive to being healthy,” says Chuck Smith, co-founder of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC), which helps run the program. “Cooking as a regular family activity has been squeezed out of people’s schedules.” And yet, he stressed the fact that connection with food is a pathway to stronger identity in the Black community.  “When your [diet] is consciously connected to your cultural identity, then you can be more intentional in selecting what you eat and how you prepare it,” adds Smith.  

The idea for the series grew out of freewheeling conversations about sustainable food and food access that Willie Chambers and Lynn Ketch from the Rockwood Community Development Corporation (CDC) had with Lisa Cline and Katrina Ratzlaff, the CEO and advancement director at Wallace, a community health clinic.

Continue reading here.  

One Big Table

I wrote this story about one of my favorite Oregon wineries, Big Table Farm, for Food & Wine's October 2020 issue.

With the wildfires still raging in Oregon right now, we here at Food & Wine debated whether it was really the right time to run a story (which appears in our October print issue) about a happy communal dinner in the middle of Oregon wine country. So we reached out to Clare Carver, who owns and runs Big Table Farm together with her husband Brian, for her take on the matter. She told us, “You know, in my community right now, I think people are really tired, but we’re all looking for joy, and this is a joyful story. Thankfully the fires close to us have gotten under control quickly, so the resources and amazing people who were fighting them have headed over to the other side of the state. It’s still a terribly sad situation there, and things still feel off the rails here—even a few days ago I still had 10 evacuated animals at my farm—but we’re back to bringing in our crops.

“For me, this story is a great reminder of who we are in Oregon, and what we’ll look forward to when the smoke clears, literally. I feel that when you share a story or a picture or a bottle of wine, you inspire and create connection. This story was captured before this current moment in Oregon. Personally, I’m glad F&W is choosing to share it now, to help bring people hope and to spark joy.

“Taking care of our crew and sharing the food we raise and grow all year to nourish us through harvest is one of my greatest joys. So I hope these recipes and photos help bring you joy and hope, too. Although the table looks different this year, caring for people and giving them love and joy through food and wine is still as strong as ever. And together we are all stronger. So cheers from me to everyone reading this.”

It’s an October evening at Big Table Farm in Gaston, Oregon, and the conversation is raucous around the long dinner table.

As Clare Carver, farmer, artist, and currently host of this party, passes a bowl of sage-flecked potatoes to her husband, winemaker Brian Marcy, she recounts how the couple first met sea salt entrepreneur Ben Jacobsen, who sits at the far end of the table. It was nearly a decade ago, she says, while filming an episode of a show called Man Fire Food. The title alone makes everyone snort with laughter. Cellar hands Ben Luker, who is Australian and very tall, and Mark Kulpins, a Midwesterner who used to work in finance, cheerfully debate who will get to drink more of the exceptional Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that Carver and Marcy have laid out—and who will be tonight’s designated driver. (The two live in the same nearby town.) And Lily Gray, a North Carolina native who formerly worked for Marcy as a part-time cellar assistant, tells how she first discovered Big Table Farm: by selling Marcy’s wine at a shop in Raleigh. “I sent out 50 cover letters to wineries, and Brian was the first one to write me back,” she says. She came to Oregon with a backpack and $300 in her pocket.

Continue reading on Food & Wine.  

When Wine Pros Lose Their Senses to COVID-19

This story ran on SevenFifty Daily on Sept. 21st, 2020. 

After being temporarily robbed of career-essential senses, sommeliers and wine journalists reflect on how the experience changed them

 

A week after restaurants in Portland, Oregon, were allowed to reopen for on-site dinner service in June, Arden Wine Bar owner and sommelier Kelsey Glasser tested positive for COVID-19. Glasser was lucky; unlike Wesley Brown, one of the wine bar’s servers who also tested positive, she had barely any symptoms. But the one that terrified her was the one that threatened to undermine her career as a wine professional: the loss of smell and taste. 

“It was scary,” says Glasser. “I would blow my nose and stick it up to vanilla, cinnamon, or a lemon. And it was like: nothing.” Although she could feel the temperature and texture of food while eating, it had zero flavor. At one point, Glasser put a spoonful of fermented habanero hot sauce on her tongue, but she couldn’t sense any tingling or flavor. 

                                                    Kelsey Glasser, owner and sommelier of Arden Wine Bar in Portland, Oregon 

 

The loss of smell is a disconcerting, unpleasant experience for anyone. But for wine professionals, the consequences are far more disastrous—and potentially even career ending. Glasser isn’t the only wine professional who lost her senses of smell and taste due to COVID-19. New York-based sommelier Amanda Smeltz penned an Esquire article in July about how losing her senses of smell and taste (during what she assumed was COVID-19) caused an existential crisis.

“This total blackout of smell was unlike anything I’d ever experienced,” she wrote. “I found myself thinking for days about what it would be like if this were permanent loss, if herbs or coffee disappeared from my life—if wine did.” Even after recovering from COVID-19, wine professionals are grappling with continuing changes to some of their most essential senses. Those who’ve regained those senses are more appreciative of them than ever.

A Shock to the Senses

“Taste and smell are of primal importance to people in our field,” says food and wine writer Jordan Mackay, who contracted COVID-19 in early March while visiting New York City. “I believe that it’s a heightened responsiveness to these senses that drew many of us into the gastronomic world in the first place. Losing them would be disastrous, akin to going to broke and having to completely reinvent one’s life.” 

Mackay says that as someone so passionate about wine and food, it was bizarre for him to suddenly feel so indifferent to it. “Without the immediate sensation of flavor, I have no interest in eating at all,” he says. “You can’t even appreciate texture without taste. And that’s the most despairing feeling I’ve known when it comes to food and drink. What’s most terrifying is that you don’t know if your senses will come back or not.” 

Jordan Mackay. Photo by Vanessa Yap.

Like many other COVID-19 symptoms, changes to smell and taste vary widely from one infected person to another. For wine writer Jamie Goode, the founder of WineAnorak and author of four books about wine, a disturbance in taste was an early indicator of COVID-19 when he caught the virus in early March. “I didn’t lose my sense of smell—it was just distorted,” says Goode. “Food tasted okay-ish, but because I’m tasting wines analytically, I noticed they weren’t right. They all had an additional taste—a sort of stony, slightly oxidized flavor—and the fruit was gone. Initially, I thought the wines were at fault, but shortly realized it was me.” 

After New York City-based wine and food writer Lisa Denning, the founder of the Wine Chef, got sick in late March, it took 11 days until she could smell even a few things: coffee grinds, orange peels, blue cheese. Her ability to taste again was a longer, more gradual process. “It took at least three weeks to even get up to what I estimated was 80 percent of my smell and taste back,” says Denning. 

Still, Denning’s sense of taste remained altered. For months, she noticed that her taste buds were more robust in the morning—“Sometimes I would purposefully save some of my dinner so I could eat it at breakfast!” she says—and she had no appetite for wine for more than a month. “It tasted horrible! Like bitter alcohol. There was no fruit,” she says, noting that she turned to refreshing gin and tonics instead. “When it stopped tasting horrible, it was still bland—lacking in fruit.” Finally, on May 4, when Denning was tasting a 2019 Domaine de Cala Rosé and a 2016 Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet Sauvignon, she says she felt as though her palate had fully returned. “The latter had all those lush cherry fruit flavors that had been lacking in red wines the previous couple of weeks,” she explains.  

Denning, who has just started experiencing an intermittent metallic taste with certain foods, says she’s one of the lucky ones. She belongs to a “COVID-19 loss of smell and taste” Facebook group and says that many people haven’t gotten their taste back. “I feel so bad for them,” she says. 

The Science of Anosmia

A week after Glasser first noticed she couldn’t smell anything, her sense of smell returned. “Every day when I woke up, I’d grab things and smell them,” she says. “Finally, I woke up and smelled some lotion and got the faintest hint of cocoa. I was so relieved.” Her senses of taste and smell took two full weeks to return entirely.

Most people who lose their sense of smell due to COVID-19 regain it within weeks, but some do not. Others regain partial smell, but they perceive aromas differently, something that could be just as difficult for wine professionals to cope with. 

Brown, the Arden Wine Bar server who also tested positive for COVID-19, suffered from fever, body pain, a sore throat, and extreme physical exhaustion in addition to losing his senses of taste and smell. Although he has regained his ability to taste and smell, he says the flavors are dialed down a bit. “Everything tastes a little less vibrant than before,” says Brown, who was studying for his Wine & Spirits Education Trust Level 3 exam when COVID-19 hit. “Everything is a little less intense. Sweet things are a little more bland than they were before.” 

Temporary anosmia, or loss of smell, is not uncommon with colds and sinus infections. But what’s different with COVID-19, says John Hayes, Ph.D., a professor of food science at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, is that loss of smell with the novel coronavirus is not due to “nasal obstruction,” or a stuffy nose. Instead, the virus indirectly affects olfactory sensory neurons.

In July, Sandeep Robert Datta, David Brann, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School published a paper in Science Advances showing that cells that contain our smell receptors don’t contain the ACE2 receptor, the backdoor by which the novel coronavirus is sneaking into our cells. These olfactory sensory neurons, which are located in the olfactory epithelium at the top of the nose, don’t have ACE2 on them, so the virus doesn’t attack them directly. Instead, the virus is aggressively attacking supporting cells that live “next door” to the sensory neurons, explains Dr. Hayes. “When those cells get inflamed, it perturbs the environment,” he says. “The cells and mucus layer get all screwed up. It’s a local perturbation of the region around the smell receptors.” 

This is good news because it means that the sensory neurons themselves aren’t damaged, which indicates that the novel coronavirus probably won’t cause permanent loss of smell in most people. Hayes, who is also the director of the Sensory Evaluation Center at Penn State, is one of the founders of the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research (GCCR), which is collecting data on the specificity of smell and taste symptoms in COVID-19 patients. In April, the consortium launched an online survey, which is available in more than 30 languages; it has received 40,000 responses so far.  

Wine writer Lisa Denning lost her senses of taste and smell in late March and didn't fully regain them for 3 weeks 

Hayes says that loss of smell is turning out to be one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19 infections, with half of all COVID patients reporting the symptom. That number climbs to 75 percent when looking at objective studies (studies where medical personnel are present to test the patient’s sense of smell). There is less data on loss of taste, but the first paper that Hayes and his colleagues at the GCCR published in Chemical Sciences about the results of the first 4,039 surveys they got back reveals that COVID-19-associated chemosensory impairment is not limited to smell; it also affects taste and chemesthesis, which is sensitivity to such chemicals as capsaicin (found in chile peppers) and menthol (found in peppermint). 

There’s much more to learn about COVID-19, but Hayes says that rough estimates show that 80 percent of patients regain their senses of taste and smell in two to three weeks after they recover.

Back to the Glass

The first week she was home sick, Glasser led Arden’s weekly online wine tasting as if nothing was awry. “They were wines I’d tasted before, so I had some notes,” says Glasser. “But I did feel like a fraud.” 

Brown says the whole ordeal shook his confidence a bit. “I get a little anxious when someone asks me to describe the wine,” he says. “What if what I’m tasting is a little bit different than what they’re going to taste?” Brown notices the biggest difference with the category that was previously his go-to preference: high-acid white wines, which taste slightly sour and less enjoyable now.

Mackay says that by day 14, he was back to his normal, healthy self, as though nothing had happened. But even this experienced wine professional had doubts. “Could I smell as finely as I did before? Was I able to get the whole aroma of a wine or a cup of coffee?” he asked. “I couldn’t be sure. Something didn’t seem exactly the same. Yet, when I compared notes with others, my sensations seemed as valid and precise as theirs.”

In the weeks after recovering from COVID-19, Mackay was able to get varietal cues from wines, but he was still plagued by the fear that he wasn’t smelling “the whole thing.” 

Then, during a virtual dinner party with friends six weeks after his COVID-19 experience, he blind-tasted and correctly identified a 2016 Littorai Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. “I pumped my fist in relief,” Mackay says. “I knew I was all the way back.”

 

Deepa Iyer Is Farming for Social Justice

This story appeared on Civil Eats on Sept. 18th. 

In Ghana, when a person passes a farmer in the field, they call out, “Ayekoo,” which loosely means “I see you” or “I acknowledge you farming the land.” In response, the farmer says, “Aye,” to thank the passerby for the acknowledgement.

When naming their new farm in rural Washington, Deepa Iyer, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and her partner Victor Anagli, who grew up in the Volta region of Ghana, wanted to honor this call and response tradition, so they christened their 21-acre property Ayeko. Located in the town of Enumclaw, Washington—40 miles southeast of Seattle—Ayeko is covered with fruit trees and raspberry and blueberry bushes and bisected by a creek.

“It’s magical,” says Iyer, who grew up in New Jersey.

 

The couple—who between them have two children and one full-time, off-farm job—are currently growing organic vegetables on one acre and have started a U-Pick for the berries. But in the future, they hope to invite other farmers and families who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to join them.

“We want to share this land with other people,” Iyer says. “Our vision is village-style, everyone growing food—a life where kids can run out the door and don’t have to make an appointment to have a play date.”

As of today, however, Iyer and her family and community—along with others across Washington state and along the entire West Coast—are largely sequestered indoors as a result of the wildfires that are burning around the state and region. “We are concerned because there are fires very close to here . . . we are surrounded by dry grass and anything could happen,” Iyer told Civil Eats in an email. “Crops are looking affected by smoke; nothing has been lost to fire, but it feels like the season is over in many ways.”

A group of people work in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Before the fires, Iyer found out she’d been chosen as one of 12 recipients of the Castanea Fellowship, a two-year program that helps support a racially just food system. The fellowship comes with a $40,000 grant and a connection to a network of experienced farmers who get together for six “learning immersion journeys.”

Farzana Serang, executive director at the Castanea Fellowship, says Iyer is a valuable part of the cohort. “What’s incredible about Deepa,” Serang says, “is she’s been farming for 20 years, making culturally relevant food more accessible, and still considers herself new to the work.”

Discovering a Love of Farming

Iyer fell in love with farming the year after college, when she took a six-month soul-searching trip to India. While there, she visited botanical sanctuaries and worked on intentional farming projects. When she returned home, she found an internship with a watershed organization, Stony Brook-Millstone (now the Watershed Institute), which also had an organic farm.

It was there that she discovered environmental education. She would take school children to the pond and collect water samples that were full of tadpoles and dragonfly nymphs. “I didn’t even know that this type of work existed,” Iyer says. “You can be out in nature with kids as they discover their love of nature?!”

She also got hooked on organic farming. “I would stand on the truck and the guys would come in with the harvest and throw pumpkins at me,” says Iyer, who describes herself as “a tomboy to the death.” She caught all the pumpkins.

Now, at 42, Iyer still relishes manual labor. “Bending over and pulling weeds all day? I love that!” she says.

Iyer also spent a year as a teacher-in-residence at Slide Ranch, an educational farm on the coast north of San Francisco that connects children to nature. That experience put Iyer more firmly on the path of food systems education and led her to launch an urban farm collective in Oakland called (SOL), which she ran for six years before heading to Michigan State University to study the intersection of social justice and the ecological impact of our food and farming systems.

Anagli, who she met in Michigan, comes from a long line of farmers in Ghana. One of the first questions he asked her was, “How do you want to change the world?”  

“I’d never been asked that before,” Iyer says.

Eventually, the couple moved to Oakland with their young son and began the hunt for a plot of fertile land.

Twenty-One Acres in Enumclaw

They started searching for land with some friends, but everything they found within a two-hour drive from Oakland was out of their price range. Iyer, who has family in Seattle, shifted the search to Washington and in early 2018, she found the property in Enumclaw.

Sunflowers in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Iyer also landed a full-time job at the International Rescue Committee in Tukwila, where she heads up a community agriculture and food security program with refugees from Burma, Bhutan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through this, she runs four community gardens in South King County, as well as two market garden production sites, and she co-runs the Tukwila Village Farmers Market.

At Ayeko, the couple farms using organic methods—like composting and minimal tillage—though they’re not certified organic. They grow the usual suspects—beets, carrots, kale, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and tomatoes—as well as foods that have roots in Iyer’s family food traditions, such as bottle gourds, which are light-green, smooth-skinned and so neutral tasting they’re “almost bland,” says Iyer. They’re also growing amaranth greens, or callaloo, as well as long beans, fenugreek leaves, and peanuts.

This kind of “cultural rescue” is very important to Iyer, who earned her master’s degree studying the food and farming practices of elder women in the Himalayas. “If we lose a vegetable type or variety, then we lose all the things that go with it—words, celebrations, colors, stories—so much richness,” Iyer says.

Not long ago, Iyer invited a group of her mom’s friends to Ayeko and one Indian-American woman in her 70s saw the long beans in the fields and grew animated. “All these conversations started happening about these recipes,” says Iyer. “‘Oh, my grandma used to make those!’ she said. Those are my dream-come-true moments.”

Because theirs is such a bare-bones operation—the crew is just Iyer and Anagli, and Iyer maintains a full-time off-farm job—they don’t yet have a booth at the farmers’ market or even a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.

So for now, their method of selling produce is very casual: they send e-mails to their community inviting them to come to the farm and get it or to access it at one of a few drop-off points in and around Seattle. They also started a U-Pick earlier this summer for their 400 raspberry bushes and hope to add blueberries soon. They have a number of fruit and nut trees as well, but those aren’t producing fruit yet.

Navigating Racism with a Dream of Bringing People Together

The Castanea Fellowship has been a boon, she says—both financially and emotionally. The grant will help with basic support operations like fixing the well and purchasing supplies and equipment, like a tractor. Iyer also hopes it will help launch some of their more ambitious projects, like creating an outdoor school for BIPOC kids or a co-op venture with other farmers.

Additionally, the Fellowship’s learning immersion journeys, which, for the foreseeable future, are all being conducted on Zoom, have been incredible, says Iyer. “It’s been super inspiring,” she says. “These are people who have been through so much and doing so much amazing work.”

The 2020 Castanea fellows, who include farmers, chefs, community organizers, and more, have been a source of inspiration for Iyer. Some, for instance “have been able to take [challenging life] experiences and build themselves into strong, positive people with a deep critique of our system and strong analysis of systemic racism and how it manifests in the food system.”

And although the work of running a farm in rural Washington has been deeply satisfying, living in a rural area as people of color has its challenges. “There are very, very few Black folks out here,” Iyer says. When they moved to Enumclaw, she jokes, Anagli and their kids doubled the town’s Black population. “All Lives Matter” signage abounds.

Two months after moving to the farm, Anagli was walking home from the bus stop when a white woman harassed him and threatened to call 911 because she didn’t think he lived there. The family also had their house robbed on the same day. “We went into a deep state of fear, and I just started feeling guilt, regret, and doubt,” Iyer says.

And yet, she holds out hope for reconciliation and healing within their community. “I keep thinking we can build community anywhere. If somebody is racist, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. We’re in a society that’s committed to systemic racism—it’s everywhere.”

Iyer is hopeful that the land and the food it brings forth can draw folks together. Before pandemic-times, the couple hosted the first of what they’d hoped would become an annual cooking and capoeira event called Grounded in Freedom. Though they cancelled the event this summer, they hope it’s safe to host it again next summer. In the meantime, Iyer hopes to connect with the Muckleshoot Tribe, which has a reservation nearby. “There’s a lot of opportunity to build community,” she says.

Lately, Iyer’s vision of subdividing the property and inviting other families to live there in a cooperative farming village is also much on her mind. She imagines there would be a shared meal once a week. Except for the indigenous folks, Iyer says, “The reality is that everyone’s grandma or great grandma is from somewhere else—we can all share those stories of our grandmother’s recipes.”

A New Generation of Black Farmers Is Cultivating Self-Determination

By going back to the land, Black farmers are resuming a journey toward “food sovereignty” that began centuries ago.

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful on August 21st, 2020.  

When Malcolm Shabazz Hoover and Mirabai Collins broke ground on the Black Futures Farm in January, it was the first time either of them had farmed on their own. On their one-acre plot in Portland’s Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood, the couple — with the help of a few interns — grows everything from purple king pole beans and heirloom tomatoes (trellised on string so they’ll climb upwards) to delicata and patty-pan squash, corn, okra, cabbages and zucchinis. 

“So many zucchinis. It might as well be a zucchini farm!” Mirabai laughs. They sell their produce via a small CSA program and several BIPOC farmers’ markets around town. 

Hoover and Collins are part of a new generation of Black farmers returning to the land to exercise their right to Black food sovereignty. Formally defined in 2007 at the Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty in Mali, food sovereignty is the right of people to determine their own food and agricultural systems, and have healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. People who have food sovereignty reject the notion that food is a commodity, and support local farmers and food providers instead of large agri-businesses. Charlie Smith, co-director of the Portland-based Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, puts it more succinctly: “Food sovereignty is people, place and economic opportunities.” 

Mirabai Collins and Malcolm Shabazz Hoover on their wedding day.

Hoover, 50, found his way to farming almost by accident. A U.S. Navy veteran, he worked in city government and as a school teacher in Oakland before taking a job at the Oregon Food Bank in 2017. Adjacent to the Food Bank was a farm named Unity Farm run by Art Shavers and Shantae Johnson. During his breaks, Hoover would walk over and chat with them, and help them weed when they asked him to. “Bro, we love talking to you, but this is hard work,” Hoover remembers Shavers saying. “If you’re going to be out here, you need to help.”

Though both his parents had grown up on farms, it wasn’t until these afternoons spent digging in the soil with his friends that Hoover realized how therapeutic gardening could be. He was hooked. 

Hoover also works at Impact NW, a homelessness nonprofit with offices across the street from a 13-acre farm. “I felt a real connection to the land and asked what it would take for us to occupy it,” says Hoover. With the help of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, who provided advice and infrastructure, Collins and Hoover took over stewardship of one of the 13 acres, and Black Futures Farm was born.

 

The couple did have some farming experience. Hoover, who took Oregon State University’s Master Gardener program, helped run a VA pilot program to teach veterans to be farmers. Collins had interned on several organic farms and worked on cannabis farms in Humboldt County, California. She also teaches horticulture classes in prisons for a nonprofit called Growing Gardens. Though their CSA is small by most standards — only 17 families are enrolled this year — all are Black or have Black children, and one third of these members pay with SNAP assistance (food stamps). It’s important to both Hoover and Collins that their CSA benefit those most in need. Hoover’s dad was a Black Panther and his parents were involved in the Black Arts Movement. For him, farming is personal and political. 

“I love growing food. It’s incredibly healing to me,” he says. “It’s been said that if you can’t feed the people, you can’t lead the people. So in these times, we are creating something for what’s next, for Black people.”

Cultivating farmers

Black Futures Farm belongs to the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC). Founded in 2018, it builds on a decade of work by local Black farmers, food justice activists and community organizers. It serves as a hub for Black and brown communities, helping them confront the systemic barriers that make food, place and economic opportunities inaccessible. 

BFSC provides technical and professional assistance to farms and food businesses and helps them incubate their ideas, says co-director Eddie Hill. But Hill and his team at BFSC are also looking to make systemic changes. “If we’re looking at the larger food system and best practices, it’s not just: ‘Hey, if you get Black people to start farms, that will solve the problem,’” says Hill. “No, you have to have them participating in all parts of the food system: manufacturing, composting, packaging, branding, transportation.”

Black farmers and food purveyors need concrete support for basic business and logistical challenges: storage, distribution and financing; Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification; and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) training, an internationally recognized method of identifying and managing food safety-related risk. “These systems don’t exist in our community right now,” says Hill. 

In addition to helping Black-run farms with lease agreements and food safety protocols, the BFSC works with Mudbone Grown to organize an annual “Back to the Root” conference for Black growers, producers, educators, advocates and ranchers. It also runs programs like Grandma’s Hands, where Black grandmothers in Portland share family recipes and food traditions, cook together and, these days, take turns hosting a monthly community dinner on Zoom. The program, funded by the Oregon Department of Agriculture, allows the grandmas to buy all their produce for the monthly community meal from Black- or brown-run farms. BFSC is also in negotiations for a centrally located food processing facility in Portland, where Black and brown farmers and food entrepreneurs can process vegetables and make and package products like salsa, juices, and bone broth for local grocery store chains.

The roots of sovereignty

Black farmers were once far more prevalent in America than they are today. Following Emancipation, even after the “40 Acres and a Mule” promise was overturned by Andrew Johnson in 1865, formerly enslaved Blacks were able to own land — and many did. By 1920, according to the 1930 Census of Agriculture, there were roughly one million Black farmers in the U.S., comprising 14 percent of all the farmers in the nation.

Black farmworkers till a 575-acre plot of land owned by Dave Lewis, an African-American farm owner in Alabama, in 1940.

Today, there are just 48,700 Black farmers in the United States, making up roughly 1.4 percent of the country’s 3.4 million farmers. There are many reasons for this decline, but as Vann R. Newkirk II recently wrote in the Atlantic, much of the land was wrested away from Black farmers by White people via legal, coercive and sometimes violent means. “A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of Black agricultural landowners in America,” according to Newkirk. 

Perhaps surprisingly, much of that was taken away during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Black farmers lost around six million acres of land between 1950 and 1969, according to Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund. “That’s a staggering amount of land loss during the heart of the Civil Rights period, when African Americans were struggling for social and political and economic rights,” says Savi Horne, founder and executive director of the Land Loss Prevention Project in North Carolina.  

There have been some attempts at land reparations, most notably a lawsuit against the USDA in 1997 that awarded a $2 billion settlement to thousands of Black farmers and their families. Horne and others who are actively helping Black farmers keep their land say that this lawsuit did not go far enough. Tens of thousands who lost their land and, along with it, their food sovereignty, have still never been compensated for it.

An encouraging sign is more localized efforts at helping Black farmers like Collins and Hoover reclaim food sovereignty in their communities. Many organizations and farms came together to help Black Futures Farm operate with almost no overhead in its first year. The property — which came with 18 fruit trees including apples, figs and cherries — is being leased to the couple at a low cost by Portland Parks and Recreation. The starts and seeds were donated by MudBone Grown, Red Barn Farms, Side Yard Farms, Portland State University, the OSU Master Gardeners and Territorial Seed, among others. The couple also has subsidized water bills this year.

“A lot of people gathered around the idea of letting go of what had long been a White-held space, and handing it over to the stewardship of Black people,” Collins says. “The farm has become what it is because people worked hard and believed in what it could be. We had no money or resources starting out, so all of what you see there is the result of people pulling together — or, essentially, what real community looks like.”  

Next season, they’ll have to buy their own seeds and starts and pay more rent. “It’ll be more organized for that reason,” Collins says. “We’ll have a crop plan, we’ll order the things we want to grow. This season was very much a space, really hard work, and community. And probably some lunacy. And definitely some arguments.”

“Yeah. We’re going to have an argument today,” Hoover teases.

“We are,” Collins agrees, both of them laughing.

The couple were married two months ago — on the farm, dressed in overalls. They often finish each other’s sentences. 

They seem ideal partners in other ways, too. Both are passionate about growing their own food and feeding Portland’s Black community. Once they are more established and have a stronger foundation (and once the pandemic is over), they plan to bring more Black and brown folks onto the farm for education, community-building, art, training, certification and other pathways to food sovereignty. Just last week, Vanessa Chambers from Grandma’s Hands came to Black Futures Farm with two of her granddaughters to pick produce and be filmed for a segment to promote Oregon-grown foods in public schools. The farm has even had interest from an investor: Tampa Bay Buccaneers football player Ndamukong Suh, who attended Portland’s Grant High School and whose mom lives in the city.  

An urban farm with a CSA in the Pacific Northwest is nothing unique, Collins points out. “But a Black-centered, Black-run horticultural space that is wide open to the imaginings, hard work and possibilities of Black people, is — and I think that is more what Black Futures is about.”

Wine Country’s Farmworkers Are Staying Healthy Against All Odds

Populated by seasonal laborers, Oregon’s Willamette Valley could have been devastated by the coronavirus. Instead, it’s become a model for how to keep workers safe. 

I wrote this story on Salud! for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Santiago Garza Martinez, now 47, was a young man when he started working for Anne Amie Vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1999. He began as an equipment operator, and today, 21 years later, he’s the field manager, overseeing a crew of 38 vineyard workers, all but eight of whom are seasonal employees. They weed, plant vines, and pick Pinot Noir grapes for Anne Amie’s acclaimed bottles. And like many seasonal farmworkers, their access to health care is precarious at best.

“The majority of the farmworkers in my crew don’t have primary care physicians,” Garza Martinez says. Even if they did, paying for the care would be a challenge for many of them. There are 2.5 to 3 million farmworkers in the United States, and many lack access to health insurance, according to Silvia Partida, CEO of the Texas-based National Center for Farmworker Health. 

Since May 7, ¡Salud! has screened 400 farmworkers for Covid-19.

So when America’s first coronavirus cases were reported in January in Seattle, just four hours north of the vineyard, the need to protect the Anne Amie workers was immediately apparent. That’s where ¡Salud! came in. Founded in 1991 by two physicians who loved wine, ¡Salud! is a nonprofit health care service that runs mobile clinics in Oregon vineyards. It is supported by the state’s wine industry, which throws an annual fall gala where winemakers auction off special cases and experiences. (There’s also an online summertime auction — this year’s takes place this week July 14-16.) Last year’s two auctions brought in $1 million. Over the past 29 years, ¡Salud! has raised over $17.2 million. 

“¡Salud! is basically my crew’s primary care for wellness checks, referrals, follow-ups for any conditions they might discover in their health screenings,” says Garza Martinez. 

Over the past several months, it has also become a lifeline amid a national health crisis. Since May 7, ¡Salud! has screened 400 farmworkers for Covid-19, with roughly four percent testing positive. (Only two have been hospitalized thus far and both are recovering at home.) Leda Garside, chief nurse at ¡Salud!, estimates that roughly 70 percent of the vineyard workers she sees do not have any other healthcare.

A health care worker waits by the ¡Salud! van.

Garza Martinez himself, even though he has been on Anne Amie’s health insurance plan since 2008, has relied on ¡Salud! over the years for everything from basic physicals to vaccines. Recently, he’s availed himself of a flu vaccine, a tetanus shot and a Covid-19 nasal swab test, which he says was like having a pipe cleaner shoved up his nose until it hit the back of his tongue. “I cried!” he says, laughing at it now. (He tested negative.)

¡Salud! was excellent at educating farmworkers about Covid-19, says Garza Martinez. Not only did it send Spanish-language email and text updates from the CDC and the Oregon Health Authority on the importance of social distancing and wearing masks, it provided masks to farmworkers starting at the end of February.

In the beginning, when masks were in short supply, Garside sent out an information sheet from the CDC on how to make cloth masks. But before long, Garside’s friend, a retired nurse named Maria Michalczyk, launched the Pandemic Volunteer Mask Makers of Oregon, a group of over 500 volunteers from across the state who sewed masks for vineyard workers, donating a bunch to ¡Salud! In late April, when Governor Kate Brown received a donation of N-95 masks from China’s Fujian Province, ¡Salud! alerted field managers at all the wineries, and Garza Martinez retrieved boxes of them for his crew at Anne Amie.

“¡Salud! is really the soul of the Willamette Valley,” says Cooper Mountain Vineyard co-owner Barbara Gross, whose parents were founding members of the organization.

Leda Garside, chief nurse at ¡Salud!, estimates that roughly 70 percent of the vineyard workers she sees do not have any other healthcare.

Gross was impressed by how early ¡Salud! began testing for Covid-19 — in late March and early April, a time when many states were still struggling to implement comprehensive testing infrastructure. “I think my crew had access to testing before you, as a regular consumer, had access,” she says. “Leda and her crew proactively got out there and tested. That was 100 percent ¡Salud!”

“It’s really hard work”

Farmworkers regularly do back-breaking labor, often in harsh weather conditions. They’re out in the fields every day, picking berries, kale, asparagus and citrus — or pruning, thinning, training vines and weeding. When the Covid-19 crisis hit in mid-March, it disproportionately impacted Latinos, who comprise 72 percent of farmworkers in the U.S.

“It’s really hard work,” says Garside. “You’re exposed to the elements: cold, wind, rain — you name it.” Luckily, because most Willamette Valley vineyards farm organically or biodynamically, pesticide exposure is not a big factor. But laboring in the fields for years on end can cause health issues that accumulate over time. “And we do have workers who are in their seventies and eighties!” Garside says. A network of 174 federally funded community health centers across the country serves farmworkers, but these clinics only reach one million farmworkers and their family members, says Partida, from the National Center for Farmworker Health, leaving a big gap.

¡Salud! aims to fill that gap — at least in Oregon’s vineyards — providing healthcare to vineyard workers year-round. Spring through fall is the organization’s busiest season.

Before the pandemic, many medical procedures were conducted in the ¡Salud! van. Now, more often, they happen in the field.

“This time of year, we’re out in the vineyards every week, three to four times a week,” Garside says.

Garside, who has been working for ¡Salud! for 23 years, is its beating heart. Raptor Ridge Winery proprietor Annie Shull fondly calls her “the good witch of the Valley.” 

Garside and her team of bilingual nurses roll into vineyards in a retrofitted Sprinter Van that contains a reception area and a full examination room. Before the pandemic, they would see a patient in the van, where they’d do blood pressure checks, basic bloodwork, vision exams and vaccinations. But now, due to strict Covid protocols, the nurses set up outdoor service stations separated by dividers to maintain privacy. (They can still do basic tests and health education in the vineyard, but for other medical tests, they’re steering farmworkers to their clinic at OHSU Hillsboro Medical Center.) 

In 2019, over 900 farmworkers received wellness exams via ¡Salud! and over 500 received flu shots. Some 68 workers received free vision exams via a partnership with Oregon Health Sciences University’s Casey Eye Institute and Pacific School of Optometry. And 114 received dental services through ¡Salud!’s partnership with local dental hygiene science programs, Medical Teams International and community health centers. Until recently, most of this dental work was done in the ¡Salud! van, but that’s also on hold during the pandemic. 

Several farmworkers have tested positive for diabetes or pre-diabetes and with diet and lifestyle changes recommended by ¡Salud! nurses, have been able to manage and even reverse the condition.

Since diabetes is so prevalent in the migrant seasonal farmworker community, a blood sugar test is always done as part of routine bloodwork. Results are immediate, which allows ¡Salud! nurses to give advice on how to make diet and lifestyle changes, even if the patient is just pre-diabetic. If blood sugar levels are very high, they make an immediate referral to a primary care doctor. Garza Martinez says several of his crew have tested positive for diabetes or pre-diabetes and with diet and lifestyle changes recommended by ¡Salud! nurses, have been able to manage and even reverse the condition.

The day I spoke to Garside, she had seen 25 farmworkers on the picturesque grounds of Stoller Family Estate in Dayton. She made a dental referral for a worker whose bridge work, done in his native Guatemala a decade ago, had broken. “So he is walking around with these little stubs from four teeth and it’s super uncomfortable,” Garside says. 

“There’s a lot of conscientiousness about the land and how to maintain it and treat it well. It’s the same philosophy with health care.”

She called a local community health clinic that could squeeze him in the following day. (¡Salud! provides a dental grant if the patient cannot afford even the lower price that the health clinic charges.) Another patient had extremely high blood pressure and Garside was able to connect with his primary care doctor, who ordered a prescription he could pick up the next day. 

“We are a safety net service,” Garside says. She is grateful to the Oregon winemaking community for coming up with the idea of delivering these vital healthcare services 29 years ago. “There’s a lot of conscientiousness about the land and how to maintain it and treat it well. It’s the same philosophy with health care,” she says. “We are very fortunate that the industry has proven itself — how to take care of the land and do something for the seasonal agricultural workers.”

 

One Fair Wage Wants to Help Reopen Restaurants—and Change How They Pay Workers

I recently did a q&A with One Fair Wage's Saru Jayaraman for Civil Eats. 

In partnership with New York City, the organization is offering grants to 100 family-run restaurants forced to close due to COVID-19, with the goal of raising wages and increasing equity.

 

When the coronavirus pandemic hit New York City in mid-March, the city’s restaurant industry was among the first to feel the shock. With so many restaurants shuttered since then, restaurant workers are reeling. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 200,000 restaurant and bar staffers lost their jobs between March and April, a 68.1 percent reduction.

As part of an effort to lay the foundation for reopening, last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $3 million Restaurant Revitalization Program, which will provide funding to 100 family-run restaurants forced to close due to COVID-19.

The project is part of a collaboration with One Fair Wage, a national organization dedicated to raising wages and increasing equity for service workers. Restaurants are eligible for a $30,000 grant from New York City and a $5,000 grant from One Fair Wage. Restaurants that don’t land $30,000 from the city, but commit to One Fair Wage’s equity program, also have the opportunity to apply to get the entire $35,000 from One Fair Wage. The group launched a version of this initiative, which they call High Roads Kitchens, in California in May.

In line with One Fair Wage’s mission, the funding comes with a few stipulations: Restaurant owners must pay $20 an hour (before tips) to each worker for six weeks, and then must commit to paying $15 an hour for all workers—including tipped workers—within five years. The requirement is an effort to end a practice still in use in 43 states that allows workers who receive at least $30 per month in tips to be paid just $2.13 per hour.

Restaurants must also provide 500 free meals per week to low-wage workers, health care workers, or others who are struggling as a result of the pandemic. Priority will also be given to restaurants in neighborhoods hardest hit economically by the pandemic, especially in low-income communities of color.

“Having 100 restaurants commit . . . will go a long way toward moving to one fair wage at the state level,” says Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, and the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The idea that tips can count against wages is a direct legacy of slavery, [and] we were seeing it spread to other tipped workers, even gig workers,” she added. “So what we really needed to be fighting for is the notion of ‘no worker left behind.’ Nobody in America who works—tipped, not tipped, incarcerated, disabled—nobody should get less than a full minimum wage when they work.”

Civil Eats spoke with Jayaraman after the Restaurant Revitalization Program was unveiled about the program and what it means for restaurants—and food service workers—in New York City and nationwide.

 

Saru Jayaraman.

This project takes aim at the sub-minimum tipped wage. How has the pandemic highlighted why this is a terrible idea?

On Friday, March 13, 10 million restaurant and other service workers lost their jobs. We started an emergency fund for workers on March 16. We raised $23 million, we got almost 180,000 applicants from around the country, and we’ve been handing out cash payments. We have a legal clinic, financial counseling for these workers, and a tax prep program for them.

But most importantly, we’ve been organizing them at large tele-town halls with U.S. senators, governors, and state legislators. And what they are saying in vast numbers is that they are not able access unemployment insurance largely because of the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. Many states are being told that the wage plus tips is too low to meet the minimum threshold to qualify for benefits.

Or they’re being told, “Your boss never reported your tips, so you either don’t qualify or you’re gonna earn a lot less than you should have.” And it’s worse for workers of color, because they tend to work in more casual restaurants where there are cash tips, as opposed to fine dining, where tips are typically on credit cards.

What’s it like right now for restaurant employees in the seven states that have committed to paying a minimum wage for all workers?

Workers in California, Washington, Nevada, and the four other states that [pay all restaurant workers a fair wage] are all getting unemployment insurance measured on a $15 an hour minimum wage plus tips. They’re in the same occupation, it’s just that they happen to live in a different state. So maybe they’ll be able to survive while you’ve got these millions of people—mostly women of color—in other states not able to survive. The people who are applying to the fund are telling us that they have money for less than two weeks of groceries for their kids. It’s a dire situation.

“Workers are really up in arms about all across the country is being forced to go back to a sub-minimum wage job when tips are down nationally.”

But the other thing that workers are really up in arms about all across the country is being forced to go back to a sub-minimum wage job when tips are down nationally. We estimate [they’re down] by about 80 percent, because people don’t tip as much for takeout and delivery. Even when restaurants re-open, they’ll be at half capacity. Workers are saying, “How could you make me go back for $2 or $3 an hour, and there are no tips?” So all of this is has led to employers who had fought us in the past on this issue now saying that they want to work with us to move their own restaurants to one fair wage.

What do restaurants pay before tips in New York City?

It’s 66 percent of the overall minimum wage, which is now $15. So it’s $10. But outside of the city it’s $7. It doesn’t have as far to go: New York could do this—it’s only a $5 [difference]!—they could make this change, and when they do, it will have a significant reverberating impact on other blue states in the region.

And here’s the biggest thing: There are a number of industry leaders, who fought us in the past or who didn’t want to talk to us, who are now going to one fair wage or who are saying, “I’ll be vocal and fight!”

It looks like there are two ways to apply for this grant—through One Fair Wage and through the city. Which way should a restaurant apply?

I think it’s easier for people if they go through us, because we can help them through the process. And also, if they’re chosen by us, they [are more likely to get chosen] through the city. And the reason is that people who work with us go through our Equity Toolkit and Training Program.

Where does One Fair Wage get the funding for this program?

There were a lot of funders who wanted to support our relief efforts. Some gave to the Emergency Fund, some were very interested in the High Road Kitchens program, because it accomplishes many things at once. It hires people, it feeds people. But more importantly, it shapes the industry to be more resilient and equitable going forward. We also got a significant grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to support the effort in New York.

Is $35,000 going to be enough to help a restaurant re-open?

We did less in California—between $15,000 and $25,000—and it allowed restaurants to re-open. They’re not using the money to pay all their rent and pay off their debt. They’re using it to get inventory, bring back some workers, and re-open with takeout and delivery in a way that allows them to re-engage with their customers and get back on their feet.

Once the restaurants are all signed up, we’ll be doing events and promoting the hell out of them. Given the moment, there’s so much desire among consumers to support restaurants that are committed to racial equity, so I have no doubt that the restaurants participating will get a lot of extra business.

How will One Fair Wage and/or the Mayor’s office know whether these restaurants actually pay $20 an hour now and $15 an hour in the future?

In California, we do regular audits of the restaurants asking for reports on their payroll and their wages, and also talking to workers. We’ll be doing that every month for five years to make sure everybody goes to one fair wage. And if the restaurants don’t comply they won’t be eligible to apply for any future city programs.

Obviously, 100 is just a small fraction of New York City’s 26,000 restaurants. Is the hope that this program will inspire good practices throughout the industry?

Yes, exactly. The leader of an independent restaurant association is planning to move to one fair wage without the [grant] money. And there are other restaurants that are planning to do the same thing. We just have to fix this tip-sharing rule at the state level to allow everybody to … create some equity between front and back of the house as well. With some strict prohibitions against employers taking any portion of that.

Critics say that restaurants can’t afford to pay $20 an hour, especially now when so many have fallen into debt due to the coronavirus. What do you say to that?

We’ve had 31 restaurants sign up through us. So the idea that people don’t want to do this is factually incorrect. This money helps people get back on their feet! So I would turn the question back on them: How could these groups [the New York State Restaurant Association and the New York City Hospitality Alliance] look down on free cash grants to restaurants? The only reason they are condemning it is because they know as well as we do that this is the first step toward winning this as policy in New York state. I think it’s important for everybody to raise the question: If these people really represent small business, how could they condemn a free cash grant program?

One of our High Road restaurant owners—when she saw this response from Hospitality Alliance—she forwarded me a quote [from the statement Mississippi issued when it seceded from the Union before the Civil War]: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. . . . These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” This is how they’ve responded for 200 years when change is imminent: They claim there is no way we can make change.

And my God, if there’s any moment to think about change, it’s now. Even I was skeptical that we could do anything in this moment. It was restaurant owners who were like, “No Saru, this is exactly the right the time—we’re all closed, we’re all rethinking everything. This is the right time.”

 

 

 

Portland's Food Hub Keeps Local Food Stocked During COVID-19

When our convoluted national supply chains broke down during COVID-19 and meatpacking facilities shuttered due to outbreaks, The Redd on Salmon was able to pivot, helping Portlanders weather the pandemic with ample supplies of local food and locally-made hand sanitizer.  I wrote about this unique food hub's myriad projects for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

It’s Friday afternoon, and people on bikes and in cars are pulling up to an enormous red-brick warehouse in Portland’s Central Eastside to pick up their “Greater Good” boxes. Packed with local food, the $50 boxes are organized by local grocery chain New Seasons and wholesaler Organically Grown Co. A similar pick-up parade occurs on Wednesdays, when people cart away “Dock Boxes” of fish, shrimp and crab from popular Oregon Coast seafood restaurant Local Ocean. And on Monday evenings, Farm Punk, a farm in nearby Gresham, drops off its 50 community-supported agriculture (CSA) shares here, to be delivered the next day to eaters’ front porches via electric-assist trikes. 

This is the “new normal” at the Redd on Salmon, an enterprise that’s optimizing Portland’s local food system and helping farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk adapt to a post-Covid reality. Even in the before times, the Redd on Salmon served as a solution to the infrastructure dilemma for small and mid-size farmers, who face all kinds of logistical challenges as they try to get food to consumers. Without the production volume to justify large-scale storage and transport systems, small farmers often spend a full day on the road each week, burning precious time and money driving to restaurants and supermarkets, dropping off their wares one at a time. They also need to market and often sell their own goods — skills many farmers don’t know the first thing about. 

With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, small food producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices. Credit: The Redd

The Redd solves all these problems in one fell swoop, acting as a distribution hub, an affordable storage space and a shared industrial kitchen. Ecotrust, the environmental think tank behind the Redd, also hosts a business accelerator, helping small farmers to scale up. Currently, the Redd supports more than 150 small to mid-size food-related businesses. From 2018 to 2019, the facility’s core tenants saw a 45 percent increase in job creation and a 12 percent increase in jobs at or above the living wage. 

Medium-sizing small farms

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the failures of the industrial food system. Grocery stores have run short of pasta, canned beans, flour, yeast and meat. Farmers, unable to sell to school cafeterias and chain restaurants, are dumping their milk and plowing under their onions. When 20 gargantuan meat processing plants were shuttered by coronavirus outbreaks, farmers were left with no choice but to euthanize hundreds of thousands of pigs and millions of chickens. 

As Michael Pollan noted in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books, our industrial food chain is broken, but local food systems, like the one championed and supported by the Redd on Salmon, are proving to be more resilient. “The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy,” Pollan writes.

 

The Redd on Salmon is an integral part of this system. It is what is known as a food hub, a centrally located space that facilitates the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution and/or marketing of regionally produced food products. Not only does the block-long space provide farmers a 2,000-square-foot cold storage facility (half freezer, half refrigeration), it has offices and “dry storage” space so local companies like Ground Up PDX (nut butters) and Hoss Sauce (hot sauce) can stash boxes and product at a central location closer to their customers. 

The Redd solves the transport conundrum, too, with its main tenant, B-Line. A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Trike drivers load up their insulated trailers with up to 600 pounds of product and drop off food at restaurants, grocery stores and corporate cafeterias like AirBnB and Google. (B-Line also has one truck for deliveries that are further than three miles away. Founder and CEO Franklin Jones is saving up for an electric one.)  

By providing an all-in-one distribution hub to farmers who could never afford one on their own, the Redd was conceived as a way to support what food systems experts call “the agriculture of the middle.” Ag of the middle producers are larger than those who sell via local farmers’ markets or CSAs, but smaller than those supplying globalized commodity markets. With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, these producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices.

A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Credit: The Redd

And lest you think this is a quirky boutique solution unique to Portlandia, know that there are over 350 food hubs around the country—from Durham, North Carolina to Traverse City, Michigan. A traditional food hub offers aggregation, marketing and often distribution for agricultural products. It might also serve as an incubator for micro-businesses. But the Redd takes it a step further, offering shared kitchens, a co-working space and even (across the street in the Redd East) an 8,000-square-foot event space with a state-of-the-art kitchen. Jim Barham, an agricultural economist at the USDA, calls the Redd a food hub on steroids.

Founded by Ecotrust, which has long been a champion of ag of the middle producers, the Redd runs a two-year Ag of the Middle Accelerator Program that helps smaller-scale farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk learn the basics of marketing, accounting, taxation and business structure — as well as helping them apply for USDA value-added producer grants. As part of their orientation, participants in the accelerator tour the Redd’s facilities; graduates often end up using the space in some way. Over 70 producers have either graduated from the accelerator program or are in it right now. The current cohort of 17 businesses increased their sales by $1.5 million, collectively, after one year in the program. 

Keeping it local

Pre-pandemic, 30 to 40 percent of B-Line’s deliveries were to restaurants, corporate cafeterias or downtown businesses like Office Depot. Now that most of those are closed, the company has had to pivot, doing more frequent deliveries to New Seasons’ 18 area grocery stores, as well as serving as a physical hub for new direct-to-consumer services like the DockBox and Greater Good boxes. 

“When the pandemic hit, there was a flurry of ‘panic buying,’” says B-Line founder and CEO Franklin Jones. As it did at many supermarket chains, demand skyrocketed at New Seasons, causing a backlog with mainline distributors like KeHE, UNFI and Supervalu. As a result, says director of brand development at New Seasons Chris Tjersland, these distributors limited the amount of product that could be shipped to each store, leaving them with empty shelves. 

But because B-Line has pre-existing relationships with local farmers and producers, Jones was able to funnel products straight from these vendors through the Redd and into the aisles at New Seasons. Working with B-Line also allowed Tjersland and Jones to work directly with the producers of New Seasons’s private label line at a moment when traditional distribution channels were breaking down. While industrial farms were dumping perfectly good fruit and milk, B-Line was storing and delivering thousands of cases of Shepherd’s Grain flour, 800 cases of Rallenti Pasta and over 400 cases of Scenic Fruit frozen berries. Tjersland even worked with local companies Brew Dr Kombucha and Straightaway Cocktails to make New Seasons hand sanitizer, which was stored at the Redd and delivered via B-Line. 

The pandemic prompted other positive developments at the Redd. Redd Campus Manager Emma Sharer was tasked with how to optimize the Redd East event space, normally booked with weddings, natural wine fairs and food-focused conferences. In late March, she was doing an ab workout on the waterfront when she ran into Jacobsen Valentine, founder of Feed the Mass, an affordable cooking school that teaches people how to make healthy meals from scratch.

For the past month, a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. Credit: The Redd

The two struck up a conversation. “He was like, ‘My nonprofit is really struggling and I have this idea: how can we make meals for people who are missing access to them? Who are forced to buy fast food or packaged food?” 

They cooked up a collaborative plan. Ecotrust would donate its Redd East kitchen to Valentine two days a week, and he would cook meals for unhoused and food insecure folks around town.  

The FED Project was born. For the past month, Valentine and a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. The meals are packed up individually and delivered to folks around town who need them. 

Ecotrust gave Valentine a small food budget and stipend. Plus, Sharer scored a huge food donation from Airbnb when the company’s Portland offices, including its cafeteria, closed in March. Since the company had been sourcing via the Redd, much of the food was high-quality and local. “There was cheese, sour cream, Camas Country flour, a lot of spices, chicken from Marion Acres, pork products from Campfire Farm, confit garlic, frozen berries,” says Airbnb’s food program manager Abby Fammartino, who estimates that the donation was worth $10,000 in total. Jacobsen and his crew made mac and cheese the first week and channa masala the next. 

Sharer and Valentine hope that this particular project will live on even after the pandemic is over. “If we were to get more funding, could some of that go towards paying BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) farmers to purchase more product, supportive of the sourcing side of farming?” asks Sharer. “That’s our next step.”

One thing is clear: the Redd campus — and its robust local food community — helped keep flour and hand sanitizer on New Seasons shelves while mainline distributors couldn’t keep up with the spike in demand. 

“What it [the pandemic] made me realize is that the supply chain infrastructure is broken,” Tjersland from New Seasons says. Jones, who hasn’t had to lay off anyone at B-Line as a result of his increased business with New Seasons, agrees. “The whole pandemic really shone a spotlight on how resilient the local supply chain could be.” 

 

 

 

MilkRun Revives the Milkman Model for Farm Fresh Produce

 

I wrote this feature about Portland-based startup MilkRun for Businessweek's food issue. 

 

Julia Niiro on her farm in Canby, Oregon [CELESTE NOCHE FOR Bloomberg] 

When Julia Niiro founded MilkRun in Portland, Ore., in 2018, she wanted to combat two enduring challenges to local food systems: inefficient distribution and low farmer pay. Addressing these issues was necessary for smaller producers to disrupt an industry that’s “really, really good at processing cheap food and selling uniform waxed apples at the same place we go to buy our toilet paper,” as she put it in an impassioned 2019 TEDx Talk. But it’s much less successful at delivering the sustainably raised, flavorful food grown on nearby farms.

In America, efficiency and scale have superseded taste, nutrition, and the livelihood of the farmer who grows, raises, or otherwise produces our food. Producers get only 8¢ out of every dollar spent by consumers, on average.MilkRun’s mission is straightforward: “I want to make it as easy to buy from our local farmers as it is to book a stay in someone’s house or call a ride.”

The case for buying locally produced food is stronger than ever. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down Oregon and the rest of the country in mid-March, it both sped up the trend toward online grocery shopping and highlighted the shortcomings of the industrial food system. In just a few weeks, farmers, unable to sell to restaurants, school districts, and coffee shops, were dumping milk and plowing under onions. Not long after, 20 U.S. meat-processing plants were shuttered because of coronavirus outbreaks, leaving farmers to euthanize tens of thousands of pigs and chickens. By contrast, the small, nonindustrial supply chains of family-run ranches, dairies, mills, and produce farms were able to keep up with increased demand.

 

Continue reading on BusinessWeek's site. 

 

The New Wave of Oregon Chardonnay

I wrote this in May for British wine magazine Club Oenologique.

Back in early February, before the coronavirus pandemic had shuttered restaurants, bars and cafes everywhere, I met two Oregon winemakers for a lively lunch at Gabriel Rucker’s bustling Canard in Portland, Oregon.

“This is our waving-of-the-flag wine,” said winemaker Josh Bergström as he poured me a splash of his 2016 Sigrid, a restrained, acid-forward Chardonnay which sells for around $110 a bottle. Bergström, who has been making Chardonnay for 22 years, was joined by his wife Caroline and friend and colleague Ken Pahlow, winemaker at Walter Scott Wines in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills (pictured above).

Oregon is renowned for its Pinot Noir. Burgundian winemakers have been snapping up vineyards here since 1987, when Domaine Drouhin — the first Burgundy house to make wine outside of France — bought land in the Dundee Hills.

But lately, the buzz has been all about Chardonnay. The Oregon Chardonnay Celebration began in 2012 with 50 attendees. This February, 56 Oregon winemakers poured for over 500 attendees. While New World Chardonnays have a reputation (often unjustified) for being over-oaked and unctuous, the best of Oregon’s have a natural acidity, lower alcohol and an enormous textural expression.

The Willamette Valley, cooled by Pacific breezes coming through the Coastal Range, has a similar cool climate to Burgundy. Summer days are long, with ample sunshine, and nights are cool. Oregon Chardonnays can have the same brightness and minerality as the best white Burgundies and in order to achieve this, Bergström and Pahlow have to pick grapes early. Earlier, in some cases, than others would like.

“For us, a lot of times, we’re picking Chardonnay at the same time a lot of the sparkling guys are picking for their wines,” Bergström says. Winemakers can have heated arguments with growers. Bergström recalls one conversation in which a grower told him it would be “irresponsible” to pick when he wanted to. Finally they agreed: the grower would pick the fruit but Bergström would have to truck it out himself. This conversation — and others like it — pushed Bergström to move to the estate model.

Pahlow, who learned the perks of picking early while working harvest with Dominique Lafon (both in Burgundy and in the Willamette Valley), sources all of his own fruit. Luckily, most of his growers agree with his harvest dates for Chardonnay. He’s also sourcing from vineyards that practice sélection massale, a viticultural technique that replaces dying vines by grafting cuttings from old vines, thereby creating more clonal diversity (and hence uneven ripening) in the vineyard. “When you walk through the vineyard you think, ‘That’s not really ripe. That’s close.’ But when you pull it all together—Oh my god!” says Pahlow. “Like a symphony, you have all these different things contributing to the final voice.”

Josh and Caroline Bergström

The Bergström vineyard

Bergström and Pahlow namecheck roughly a dozen Oregon winemakers who fall into the “natural acidity camp”. In this coterie are such renowned producers as Bethel Heights, Brick House (founded by former CBS foreign correspondent Doug Tunnell), Crowley, Goodfellow, Lingua Franca (where Lafon is consulting winemaker) and Evening Land. Others, like the Drouhins, Brian O’Donnell at Belle Pente, and Brian Marcy at Big Table Farm, pick a little later, and so have some of that riper quality, though they still lead with natural acidity. “The styles diverge, but what [these Chardonnays] all have, regardless of when the winemakers picked, is this tension. This notion of tension and brightness that is indisputably Willamette Valley,” Bergström says.

Oregon’s success with Chardonnay can be traced back to the late 1980s, when pioneering winemaker David Adelsheim — who had studied at the Lycée Viticole in Burgundy — and a few forward-thinking colleagues travelled to Burgundy and asked the ministry of agriculture for Dijon clones. Amazingly, the French said yes. “We didn’t make a hearty Burgundy and we didn’t make a Chablis, so we posed no competition to France,” Bergström says. That’s when the Chardonnay scene in Oregon picked up steam.

All of a sudden, you could ripen Chardonnay alongside Pinot Noir and you were getting these classic aromas and flavors, Bergström says. Winemakers interested in classic expressions of Chardonnay started planting the Dijon clone and forming small groups to talk about techniques in the cellar and growing practices. These conversations have been going on for 30 years.

Ken Pahlow and Walter Scott Wines general manager Erica Landon

Pahlow in the vineyard

Today, with the realisation that Oregon Chardonnay can be as excellent and ageworthy as its Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris is being ripped out and replaced. “There is an unprecedented commitment to Chardonnay in this valley,” Pahlow says. “You’ve never seen more vineyards planting Chardonnay and placing it in the best spots, which in the past would have been reserved for Pinot Noir.”

This thrills both winemakers, who see themselves as Chardonnay champions—at least for their style of Chardonnay. “For the first time, [we’re seeing that] white wine in Oregon can be a world class wine, and can sell for the same price as Pinot Noir,” Bergström says.

Since the pandemic hit Oregon in mid-March, both wineries have had to pivot to online sales only, cancelling all tasting room visits and launch parties. “We are hanging in there, thanks to the fact that our wine warehouses and UPS and FedEX are considered essential businesses, and most Americans have been stuck at home for the past two months and are cooking more and drinking wine,” wrote Bergstrom via e-mail. That said, he’s had to get “much, much leaner” as a business. Pahlow, whose business was already fairly lean (he employs just three people), says everyone on his crew has had to take pay cuts. That said, direct-to-consumer sales have been solid. “We’ve been blown away by the support. We feel very lucky,” he says.

Who Does That? Tyler Malek

I've long been intrigued by people who have unconventional jobs. You know, the guy who makes robotic dinosaur models for museums, or the duo who composes the music for the Daily podcast. So it was fitting when my Inc. editors gave me a new column: Who Does That? 

My first subject, in the May/ June 2020 issue, is none other than Tyler Malek, the flavor whiz at Salt & Straw. (If you're not familiar with Salt & Straw, it's the Portland-based ice-cream company known for flavors like“Pots of Gold and Rainbows,” spiked with Lucky Charms, sea salt with caramel ribbons, and bone marrow with smoked cherries.)  

 

This ‘Carbon-Negative’ Burger Is Fighting Climate Change

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new online magazine. 

As fake meat floods the market, some fast-food joints are insisting that their ultra-sustainably raised beef is better for the planet.

Burgerville's No. 6 Burger uses regeneratively farmed grass-fed beef, wheat from farmers who plant cover crops and practice low-till agriculture, and cheese from a creamery in Southern Oregon that gets it milk from small, family-run farms.

 

Everyone from Miley Cyrus to Trevor Noah is raving about the Impossible Burger, the vegan beef with the trademark “bleed” that debuted in 2016. It’s one of a handful of plant-based meats that have surged in popularity on claims that they can “drastically reduce humanity’s destructive impact on the global environment,” as Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown has put it.

But what if there’s another, earth-friendlier option? What if a juice-dripping burger from an actual cow could be better for the planet than vegan-but-you’d-never-know-it imitation meat? A few burger chains are tacitly suggesting as much, offering real beef burgers that, by some measures, are more sustainable, and show how farming, done correctly, can be good for the earth.

Carbon-negative beef

Burgerville, a 60-year-old fast-food chain in the Pacific Northwest, launched the No. 6 Burger in September, so named for the sixth element in the periodic table, carbon. The No. 6 is a lesson in regenerative agriculture, a holistic land management practice that reverses climate change by rebuilding soil’s organic matter and restoring its biodiversity. 

The 100-percent grass-fed beef burger is from Carman Ranch, which practices rotational grazing on pasture, sequestering carbon back into the soil. (More on that later.) The brioche bun is baked at Grand Central Bakery from wheat grown on two Northwest farms (Small’s Family Farm and Camas Country Mill) that practice minimum tillage, which prevents erosion and carbon loss. And the aged cheddar melted atop is from Face Rock Creamery, which works with small-scale dairies within 15 miles of its facility. Every one of these enterprises is based in Oregon or Washington. The burger is currently sold at nine of Burgerville’s 41 locations. (It was slated to roll out at 16 additional locations in March, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit.) 

“Soil health is the core principle of what we do,” says Cory Carman, the 40-year-old owner of Carman Ranch. The pasture at Carman Ranch is rich with deeply rooted perennial grasses and nutrient-dense cover crops like winter pea, oats, sunflowers and a brassica mix—all plants that feed soil microbes as well as the cattle, eliminating the need for trucking in carbon-reliant feed like corn. The cattle are rotated on pasture and cycle the nutrients through their bodies, nourishing the soil with their manure, which in turn feeds the next cover crop. After they graze, that area is left fallow for as long as a year so it can regenerate. Crucially, the grasses and cover crops that the cattle munch on also pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. 

Though Carman doesn’t have funding to test how deep a carbon sink her grazeland is, other ranches that practice regenerative grazing have. White Oak Pastures, a Bluffton, Georgia-based farm, recently had an outside firm conduct a “Life Cycle Assessment” of its rotationally grazed beef. The results show that the operation produces a net total of negative-3.5 kilograms of carbon emissions for every kilogram of beef produced. In other words, the cattle of White Oak Pastures have a net-negative impact on the environment—the very process by which they’re raised reduces climate change.

A partnership, rare and well done

Back in 2017, before the No. 6 Burger was on their menu, a few Burgerville executives visited Carman on her family’s ranch in Wallowa County, Oregon. The company wanted to put its money where its values were—fostering a more resilient regional supply chain. But the executives were wary, in part, because of the premium price that Carman Ranch beef commands. 

Cory Carman on her ranch in Wallowa, Oregon. Credit: Steven Jackson / Flickr

Carman convinced them that supporting her ranch would help bring the operation to scale, allowing her to lower her prices —a virtuous cycle of its own. “I told them, ‘Listen, if you want us to scale up so we can become one of your suppliers eventually, you can’t just sit around!’” she recalls. The Burgerville execs agreed, and committed to making the ranch’s grass-fed beef about seven percent of the beef in all their burgers.

The partnership worked. Burgerville’s commitment to buying a steady weekly volume allowed Carman to scale up, doubling the ranch’s production from 20 head of cattle a week to 40. Today, the Carman Ranch beef Burgerville buys goes first to the No. 6 Burger, and if anything is leftover, they’ll use it in the grind for the regular burgers. (The chain uses Country Natural Beef, which is grass-fed and corn finished, for its other burgers.) And even though the coronavirus pandemic shuttered all Burgerville restaurants to dine-in customers (38 remain open for drive-through or delivery business), they’ve stuck by their weekly order from Carman Ranch. 

Despite its $8 price tag — several dollars more than Burgerville’s $5.39 Northwest Cheeseburger — the No. 6 has been a hit. “I thought there was going to be all this pushback on pricing, but there wasn’t,” says Michelle Battista, the chain’s senior vice president for brand and marketing. From September to April 5, Burgerville sold nearly 50,000 No. 6 Burgers, nearly 14 percent of the company’s quarter-pounder burger sales. 

Impossible in nature

The No. 6 Burger is a story of long-game sustainability, in which shared risk and commitment lead to scaled-up carbon-negative farming.

The Impossible Burger’s story is different. A Silicon Valley food-tech triumph, its genetically engineered soy-based “heme” compound (the part that makes it “bleed”) has won over even un-woke fast food chains like Burger King and White Castle. But as critics like Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, have pointed out, the company’s reliance on genetically modified soy is problematic in ways that have nothing to do with animal rights. 

GM soy is genetically engineered so that it can be sprayed with Bayer-Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Not only has glyphosate use been linked to the decline in honeybee and monarch butterfly populations, it has been classified by the World Health Organization as a probable carcinogen. The company’s reliance on a monoculture crop — genetically modified soy — also perpetuates one of the worst aspects of the industrial food system. Growing one crop year in and year out degrades the soil and contributes to erosion — because there are no cover crops to keep the soil in place — and also requires chemical fertilizers and other fossil fuels to harvest and transport. According to the World Food LCA Database, soybeans have a footprint of two kilograms of carbon for every kilogram of beans produced.  

Rachel Konrad, the chief communications officer at Impossible Foods, says that the company routinely scans for pesticides and herbicides and that there is no glyphosate in the Impossible Burger (though she did not deny that glyphosate is used on GM soy crops). She also disputed that relying on soy would perpetuate a monocultural food system, saying, “Animal agriculture is the No. 1 reason we’ve developed dangerous, biodiversity-killing monocultures… For what it’s worth, if you want to avoid soy for some reason, then you must eliminate animal products from your diet since livestock consumes the vast majority of all soy.” This is entirely true of the cheap feedlot beef raised in America, which is what most fast-food chains depend on. However, it is not true of ranches, like Carman’s, that practice regenerative agriculture, since their cattle is grazed on only pasture; they never eat soy or corn.  

There is also the question of whether heme, made from fermenting a genetically engineered yeast, is safe to eat. Konrad cites conclusions from the U.S. FDA and third-party food safety scientists “that the heme in the Impossible Burger is totally safe to eat.” But organizations like the Center for Food Safety and Moms Across America argue that we don’t really know, since this is the first time humans have ever consumed this unique lab-made form of heme. 

But the biggest impact of these products may be how quickly they have shifted focus away from more sustainable methods of farming and toward tech-based solutions instead. Before fake meat made a splash, at least one fast-food chain had just begun committing to more sustainably raised beef. In 2015, Carl’s Jr. introduced an antibiotic-free burger sourced from free range, grass-fed cattle. It’s no longer on the menu — now the chain sells the Beyond Burger instead. 

While some regional chains like Elevation and Bareburger have continued to source grass-fed beef from smaller family-run farms, most are still sourcing their beef from confined animal feeding lots, which are devastating for the environment, horrific for the animals and not great for human health. (Cows evolved to eat grass, not corn, which tends to make them sick). This, at least, is something that Impossible CEO Brown and proponents of regenerative agriculture agree on: our addiction to cheap feedlot beef is harming the planet. 

Burgerville’s business has been crucial to Carman Ranch’s growth. But more important than revenue, the chain has given Cory Carman — and the other farmers behind the No. 6 burger — a chance to share her mission with the wider world. “We want to get the message out: Why should you pay a premium for grass-fed beef? Why is our species dependent on the health of the soil?” She, like other practitioners of regenerative agriculture, is concerned that lab-based meat perpetuates monocultures. “The integration of animals, in some way, is critical to all ecological systems,” she says.  

The benefits of regenerative agriculture are complex, but once customers are educated, says Battista, they’re on board. “As a marketplace, we got people to grass fed,” she says. “We got people to see the difference between grass-fed and conventional feedlot beef. And people are like, ‘Yeah, I get it!’ And they connect the dots back to their own health and wellness.” 

 

Their Restaurants Closed, Chefs Take to Instagram

I wrote this story for Civil Eats. 

Chef Michael Symon, left; Rucker's radicchio salad and pork chops with kumkquats, center, with Instagram Live comments streaming in; Chef Chris Cosentino makes cavatelli with spring greens pesto, right.

 

It’s Friday at 6 p.m. and Gabe Rucker, chef at Le Pigeon and Canard in Portland, Oregon, is in his home kitchen demonstrating how to make a radicchio salad with Caesar dressing. To Rucker’s left is his three-year-old son, Freddy, who has his own chef’s station with a cutting board. Perched on a stool to his right is his six-year-old daughter, Babette, who has become her dad’s de facto sous chef. Roughly 230 fans, all hunkering down in their own homes, are watching this cooking lesson on Instagram Live.

Like many chefs, Rucker made the difficult decision to shutter his restaurants in mid-March in response to the coronavirus pandemic. While his business partner orchestrated an online wine sale and made sure all their employees were signed up for COBRA health insurance, Rucker decided to do what he does best: cook delicious food and share it with his customers and fans.

Last week, Rucker launched live cooking demos on Instagram at @RuckerGabriel, which he plans to host three days a week, every week, for the foreseeable future.

Rucker says the online cooking lessons have brought some levity amidst the challenges of staying at home. “And it’s a way to bring the family together, too. The kids love cooking, so, it’s connective for us.” But it also helps Rucker and his wife Hana—accustomed to throwing dinner parties—connect with people other than their three kids. (Gus, age 8, is more camera shy than Babette and Freddy.)

Hana, a metal artist, has taken on the role of videographer, and also funnels questions that pop up on the screen to Rucker while he’s cooking. “What cut of pork chop?” she relayed to Rucker last Friday during the class covering pork chops, radicchio salad, and steamed asparagus.

“Not the center cut,” said Rucker, wearing a “We Put the Pro in Profiterole” T-shirt. “The center cut is lean. What you really want is up toward the shoulder. It’s gonna have more marbling.”

Chef Gabriel Rucker and his family

As much of the country isolates at home, a handful of chefs are bringing solace to their fans and followers by showing them how to cook nourishing food. Many are also plugging local farms, ranches, and purveyors that risk going out of business now that restaurants have closed.

In this time of deep uncertainty and worry—nearly 10 million Americans are newly out of work, according to the latest bleak statistics from the Labor Department—many people have suddenly lost some or all of their income. As a result, many don’t have the ability to buy pork chops right now, or the mental energy to watch a cooking lesson about how to prepare them. (Even though out-of-work Americans are eligible for unemployment benefits and SNAP, many states have a backlog of claims, which can mean weeks-long delays.)

But with restaurants closed virtually everywhere, more people are forced to cook at home than ever before, and they’re seeking inspiration. And many chefs, including Rucker, are focusing on adaptable, budget-friendly comfort-food dishes like rice bowls, soups, vegetarian pastas, and hearty salads.

Chris Cosentino making cavatelli & spring green pesto.

Chris Cosentino, chef at San Fransisco’s Cockscomb (as well as Jackrabbit in Portland, Rosalie in Houston, and Acacia House in St. Helena, California) started a #recipesforthepeople series on Instagram that includes a spring greens pesto on cavatelli—“a great way to use up greens in the house,” he says. In his videos, which he posts at @chefchriscosentino, Cosentino plugs local farms like Santa Cruz County’s Dirty Girl Produce, which launched a pre-packed veggie box service when the crisis began, and Liberty Ducks in Petaluma.

In Cleveland, Chef Michael Symon of Lola Bistro, Mabel’s BBQ, and B Spot Burgers, is posting short videos on Instagram at @ChefSymon, showing how to make comforting favorites like grilled cheese and tomato soup; pasta with garbanzo beans; crispy lunchmeat, spinach, and garlic; and root vegetable stew. He weaves in quotidian details about his day before launching into cooking.

“For those of you concerned yesterday, Norman is out of his time out, and wandering around my feet,” he says of his dog. “I’m in full pajamas today, with slippers,” he adds.

Over in Australia, Chef Jason Roberts of the Bistro at Manly Pavilion is posting recipes on Instagram at @ChefJasonRoberts for budget-friendly dishes like vegetarian lasagna and savory porridges. In Portland, Oregon, Vitaly Paley (of Paley’s Place, Headwaters, Imperial, and Rosa Rosa), is streaming on Instagram Live at @vit0bike every Friday at 5 p.m. pacific time, where he makes quick, user-friendly dishes like tuna tonnato and a Niçoise-style tapenade with crudités from the farmers’ market.

Local food champion and cook Katherine Deumling of Cook With What you Have, also based in Portland, has also been posting short videos on Instagram at @cookwithwhatyouhave, with an emphasis on local ranchers and farmers. In a recent post about vegetables, she urges followers to shop at farmers’ markets. “If they’re still open, please patronize them,” she says. “The best produce you can imagine will be there, which will help you stay strong and help support our local farmers.”

In her video for fried rice with strip steak and veggies, she mentions the beef comes from Carman Ranch, which now has a direct delivery service to Portland. (Deumling posts recipes and additional videos on her site; you can get a month of free access using the code Foodislove.)

Back in Rucker’s kitchen, he whisks egg yolks with Dijon mustard and garlic as he slowly, steadily drizzles oil into the metal bowl. “See how there’s a thin steady stream of oil going in there, right in the middle?” he asks his invisible audience.

He shakes in some Tabasco sauce and a dash of Worcestershire. “The recipe calls for red wine vinegar, but I don’t have that, so I’m gonna use malt vinegar,” he says. “You have to adapt.” He throws a bowl of pre-grated Parmesan into the dressing and a “pinch” of salt (though it’s more like a generous shake, from a squeeze tube bottle).

“What’s with the squeeze tube of salt?” Hana asks on behalf of an Instagram follower. “We cook a lot, and I’m using salt all the time, and I don’t want to put my fingers in the salt,” Rucker explains.

Rucker pauses to patiently slice a mandarin orange in half for Freddy. Later, Babette, now slicing kumquats, does bunny ears behind her dad’s head. “This is Gabe. He loves cooking. He loves doing videos,” Hana says.

“Babette is cutting up kumkquats,” Rucker says. “That citrus element on the pork will cut through the fattiness and richness. And also tie into the orange flavor of the Caesar salad.”

Rucker’s favorite source for pork chops, he divulges in response to an Instagram audience question, is Nicky USA, a Portland-based wholesaler of wild specialty meat, much of it from Northwest ranchers and farms. (During the pandemic, Nicky USA is selling direct-to-consumer by pick-up or delivery.) Later, he offers a hat tip to the produce market Rubinette Produce. “They source their produce from all of farms at the farmers’ market,” he says. He also praises Portland butcher shop Tails & Trotters, and the specialty food shop Real Good Food. All are currently offering curbside pickup or delivery, or both.

Rucker posts his recipes on Instagram ahead of time so followers can pre-shop and follow along at home. His first meal was miso black cod rice bowls; he’s also done steam burgers (a favorite from the Canard menu), and Cobb salad. Upcoming demos will cover braised chicken with mashed potatoes and roasted broccoli, and the Canard omelette.

The response has been larger than Rucker anticipated, and he’s gained 5,000 new followers over the past week alone. “People are saying it’s a real bright spot for them and that they love doing it,” he says. “Right now, it’s what we need.”

Farm Spirit, a high-end vegan restaurant in Portland, Oregon, was founded by chef Aaron Adams in 2015. Its mission—in addition to elevating plant-based cuisine to new heights—is to source all ingredients within 105 miles. Adams recently opened a more casual innovation lab next door, Fermenter, and in March of last year brought on friend and co-chef Scott Winegard to run the kitchen at Farm Spirit. The two collaborate on this “cheese plate of nuts and seeds,” which is as tasty as it is beguiling. 

See my deconstruction of the cheese plate for Hemispheres (United's in-flight magazine). 

 

 

 

The Oregon County that Stopped Big Water

I wrote this story on March 2nd for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new publication. 

As Washington State moves to ban companies from selling its spring water, the story of Hood River County shows how even a small place can stop the extraction of its most precious resource.

Two weeks ago, Washington State took a major step toward shutting off the tap for companies that want to haul away its spring water and sell it around the world. The state senate passed a bill that would prohibit companies like Crystal Geyser and Nestlé from extracting, bottling and selling water from spring-fed sources. If enacted, it would be the first state law in the nation to declare that “any use of water for the commercial production of bottled water is deemed to be detrimental to the public welfare and the public interest.” 

Governor Jay Inslee hasn’t taken a position on the bill, but observers say he will likely support it, setting a precedent for other states like Maine and Michigan that have pushed back against water bottling operations in recent years.

Washington’s law would be the toughest restriction on water bottling operations in the U.S. so far — but it wouldn’t be the first. Across the Columbia River from the state’s southern border, Hood River County, Oregon, won an improbable victory against a Nestlé bottling operation in 2016, setting the stage for efforts like the one in Washington today. Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé took a decade, but in the end it stopped the company from opening up a facility in the small town of Cascade Locks and banned commercial water bottling in the county entirely. The lessons of that fight offer a roadmap for similar efforts elsewhere.  

An extractive industry

Despite the snowy mountain peaks and sparkling waterfalls that adorn their labels, nearly two-thirds of all bottled water sold in the U.S. come from municipal tap water. Not only is this water no safer or purer than water from the faucet (tap water is actually tested more frequently) it is 2,000 times more expensive. In addition, the bottled water industry creates millions of single-use plastic bottles that will never be recycled. In 2016, four billion pounds of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic was used for bottled water production. 

But it’s bottled water from spring-fed sources that can have biggest ecological impacts. “Bottling spring water can be disastrous to the water table because the company sucks a large amount from a small source,” says Julia DeGraw, who was the senior Northwest organizer at Food & Water Watch during the decade when Nestlé was trying to open a bottling facility in Cascade Locks.

DeGraw says that communities in Mecosta County, Michigan have seen their wells run dry, their springs stop flowing and their fish die off because of Nestlé’s aggressive water pumping operations. A spokesperson from Nestlé Waters North America does not directly deny this, but points to data from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy showing that the state’s nearly 40 bottled water companies account for less than .01 percent of water used in the state.  

A fish ladder at Cascade Locks on the Columbia River. Credit: J. Stephen Conn / Flickr

Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé began back in 2008, when the multinational company approached Cascade Locks with plans to open a $50 million bottling plant that would have extracted more than 100 million gallons of water a year from Oxbow Springs, which feeds a salmon hatchery.  

DeGraw remembers those early days clearly. “We were the lead organization… really early on when we were trying to build a coalition,” she says. That coalition ended up being big, a fact that was key to the effort’s success. It included not just environmental groups like Food & Water Watch and the local Sierra Club chapter, but also public sector unions, Native American tribes, activist nuns, pro-bono lawyers, ultra runners, a hunger striker and ordinary people turned activists. 

Also critical was the fact that although the effort was grassroots, it was also well-resourced. Food & Water Watch put money behind the campaign, hiring DeGraw to be the local organizer and helping to pay for the county ballot measure. And in 2012 the Crag Law Center donated its services, filing two protests challenging the Oregon Water Resources Department’s (OWRD) approval of Nestlé’s water exchange permit. 

The broad reach and resources of the coalition, which named itself Keep Nestlé Out of the Gorge (KNOG), allowed it to confront the company’s U.S. water division, which has a pattern, the organizers say. They claim it seeks out economically distressed towns like Cascade Locks, which was once a boom town when the timber industry was thriving. In 2010, the town had a median income of just $42,917 and an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census. 

“When the mill closed down, it really had a profound effect on the economy,” says Aurora del Val, a retired English teacher who got involved in the campaign to keep Nestlé out. “Cascade Locks is a town that has the profile that I think a lot of these water companies are looking for. And they’re saying all the right things. The Nestlé guy would shake hands with all the business people and gave money to the food bank. He made all these promises. There is a real standard way that they operate in a small town.” Nestlé’s spokesperson confirmed that the company makes significant economic contributions in areas where they operate. “We support many community organizations, locally and nationally, through donations of water, food, supplies, and money,” he wrote via email. 

In Cascade Locks, Nestlé promised jobs and economic prosperity while playing down potential environmental consequences, and local officials took it at face value, del Val says. 

“It’s kind of like the tobacco industry saying ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t give you cancer!’” she continues. “The water plant might’ve provided a few jobs locally, but in terms of — for the larger economy — it would’ve put the water supply at risk.”

Resistance coalesces

Concerned about the negative repercussions — depleting groundwater that farmers and residents depend upon, siphoning off the cold creek water that’s essential for fish habitat — del Val started to talk to her neighbors, many of whom were also concerned. In the spring of 2015, she helped found a group called the Local Water Alliance, eventually becoming the group’s campaign director. Even though she calls herself a “reluctant activist,” del Val went door-to-door and talked to Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike. 

In Cascade Locks, she and others were able to persuade long-time residents and independents Kathy and Bob Tittle, who own the Chevron station in town, as well as Joseph Shelley and Lynn Pruitt — a Libertarian and Republican, respectively — who felt so strongly about the campaign that they allowed their photos on the Local Water Alliance’s materials. In Odell, in the heart of orchard country, Butch Gehrig, a registered Republican, endorsed the Alliance’s campaign, too. “Water matters, and it doesn’t matter which political affiliation you are,” she says. 

The Bridge of the Gods spanning the Columbia River between Cascade Locks, Oregon and Washington State. Credit: C. Hanchey / Flickr

The Yakama Nation opposed the bottling plant at around the same time. Chairman JoDe Goudy spoke on the steps of the Oregon Capitol saying that the Yakama Nation would sue the state of Oregon if Nestlé was authorized to bottle water from Oxbow Springs. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes also sent Governor Kate Brown letters opposing the bottling facility and critiquing the process. 

“Our natural resources are important and we can’t be extracting them,” says Carina Miller, who was a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs’ tribal council at the time. Miller says that tribal treaty rights were disregarded when the Nestlé deal was set into motion, and was troubled that this wasn’t what motivated Governor Kate Brown’s late-in-the-game decision to oppose the deal. On the other hand, Miller says, the fact that area environmentalists and conservative white farmers alike recognized that tribal people needed to be at the table was huge. “To go and have shared values — just that there was an acknowledgement that tribes should be included. That was a win.” 

Even though Nestlé spent $105,000 to oppose the Hood River County Water Protection Measure — more than double what backers of the measure raised — it passed in May 2016 by nearly 70 percent. “It was democracy in action,” del Val says. “The power of the vote was pretty inspiring. Even though this is a real dark time, people do really make a difference.” 

Even so, perhaps because Governor Brown hadn’t taken action, Nestlé, Cascade Locks and the ODFW continued to pursue a water rights swap, in violation of the voter-approved measure. (At question was whether a county government has the authority to tell a city government what it can and can’t do with its resources.) After a new round of emails and phone calls from local residents and a damning story from a local news affiliate, Brown finally told ODFW to halt its water exchange in October of 2017, putting the kibosh on the Nestlé facility for good. 

Today, business is booming in Cascade Locks, according to del Val. A Basque cidery called Son of Man recently opened, sharing space with two natural winemakers. Thunder Island Brewing just broke ground on a 10,000-square-foot facility on the main street. And Renewal Workshop, a startup that takes discarded apparel that would normally go into the landfill and transforms it into new products or upcycled material, opened in 2016. “Those are the kinds of companies that are opening here,” says del Val. “They’re green and sustainable… and they’re hiring!” 

Now Hood River County is passing on the lessons it learned from its epic battle. DeGraw and del Val have recently shared tactics and strategies with resident-turned-activists in Randle, Washington, who have been fighting a similar effort by Crystal Geyser. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” says del Val. “Not everyone involved is a career activist. We’re just ordinary people who care.”

Feed the Mass Aims to Bring Affordable Cooking Classes to Everyone

(This story originally appeared on Civil Eats on Feb. 10th, 2020.)  

On a recent Monday night, Jacobsen Valentine stood before a classroom filled with around a dozen adults and showed them how to make tamales. After mixing Maseca flour with baking powder and salt, he added shortening. “You want to make it flaky—try to get all the lumps out so it feels like wet sand,” he said, before adding a little bouillon and folding the masa down with a sushi paddle.

This is just one of the many classes offered by Feed the Mass (FTM). Valentine, 31, founded the nonprofit cooking school four years ago because he saw a need for affordable culinary education in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.

At the time, there were plenty of cooking classes in food-focused Portland, but they all cost $60 to $100 to attend. Valentine, who was managing the local chain Killer Burger at the time, wanted to offer classes that were accessible to everyone, especially low-income folks.

Feed the Mass’ curriculum is focused on whole foods made from scratch. Valentine usually offers a vegetarian option, and also tries to accommodate those who are dairy-free or gluten-free. The classes cover everything from tamales and dumplings to vegetable soups and Mexican mole, and range from $20 for “Little Chefs” (for kids ages 4-10 and a parent or guardian) or Family Night classes to $30 for the community classes. Ambitious chefs-to-be can also buy a three-class pass for $75. The price includes all ingredients—and the students get to eat what they make, of course.

And for those who can’t afford the fees, Valentine offers full scholarships. “You have to have under $30,000 household income and write a short little essay [explaining] why you want [to attend],” he said. Nearly 50 people received scholarships last year out of 1,200 total students. The scholarships are funded through the class passes and two annual fundraisers—one in June and another in December.

Diet-related diseases are at an all-time high in America, increasing the risk of chronic illness and premature death. And although Oregon is a coastal state often associated with the farm-to-fork movement diabetes affects around 1 in 8 adults.

There’s a consensus among public health experts, doctors, and educators that any long-term solution to the epidemic of diet-related illness will have to include instruction in basic food preparation and meal planning skills.

“Research suggests that frequent consumption of restaurant food, take-out food, and prepared snacks lowers dietary quality, and that food preparation by adolescents and young adults may have the opposite effect by displacing poor choices made outside the home,” wrote two Tufts University nutrition scientists in a 2010 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The paper argued that any long-term solution to the pediatric obesity epidemic will need to include a modern-day home economics curriculum in public high schools—”a version of hunting and gathering for the 21st century.” Though this hasn’t happened en masse over the past decade, affordable or free cooking classes like the ones at Feed the Mass are trying to fill the gap.

Maria and her son make dough during a Feed the Mass class.

Valentine chose the name Feed the Mass as a nod to the Biblical story from Mark 8. In it, Jesus feeds a crowd of 4,000 people with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.

“It teaches us that if we share what we have, there will always be enough,” Valentine said. He grew up attending non-denominational Christian churches in Hawaii and Portland and currently attends Grace City Portland.

In most classes—even the ones that include kids—Valentine and his staff teach basic knife skills. Nekicia Luckett, a regular FTM volunteer, recalls working with an eight-year-old who had “great knife skills.”

In the tamale-making class, Valentine demonstrated how to chop an onion and then took out some pre-peeled garlic cloves. “Garlic, you devious bugger!” he said, eliciting some laughs from his students. He sliced the garlic into thin slivers, and said, “A garlic press is fine—but you don’t need all these fancy implements!”

Valentine often stresses that having a well-equipped kitchen doesn’t cost much—you can get all the basic pots, pans, knives, and cutting boards for $100. He’s begun selling chef’s knives for $15 because he realized many people who come to his classes don’t have this essential cooking tool.

The students chatted as they sliced up heaps of mushrooms, garlic, onions, and jalapeños for the black bean vegetarian tamales, or shredded roasted chicken for the chicken and cheese tamales. After methodically filling their tamales, and while they were steaming in an 8-quart Instant Pot, Valentine told the class that all the ingredients (including the corn husks) came to a total of $40. “That’s enough tamales for four to six families,” he said. “And we’ll have plenty for you to all take some home.”

Some of the students at that night’s class were regulars, but for many it was their first time at Feed the Mass. Kelcy Adamec, a first-timer, stumbled across the school while hunting for a class she could take with her husband, David; she was learning to make tamales on the first of three classes she would attend through her class pass.

“I was looking up cooking classes in the area and I loved that it was mission-driven,” said Adamec.

A man named Neil said his son-in-law had given him a gift certificate for Christmas. “I love to cook—and one of my goals this year is to start eating healthier,” Neil said. “Taking this class is better than a cookbook!”

Even though none of the students at the tamale-making class were attending on a scholarship, by paying full price for the class they were helping to fund the scholarship program.

Feed the Mass has had three different homes since it was founded in 2016, but it recently found what Valentine hopes will be a permanent location at the Faubion School in Northeast Portland. The K-8 charter school has partnered with Concordia University on a holistic, nutrition- and health-focused education initiative called 3-to-PhD. The school is also home to a Kaiser Permanente wellness center, a food pantry, and a Basics Market, a new affordable grocery store chain founded by former Pacific Foods CEO Chuck Eggert.

Starting in April, Valentine and his staff will also teach after-school cooking classes to Faubion students. In a recent survey taken at the Title 1 school, 60 percent of the students identified themselves as the primary cooks in their families.

Free and affordable cooking classes are rare across the nation, but the number of them appears to be growing—at least on the West Coast. In Portland, the Oregon Food Bank hosts Cooking Matters, a free six-week class that teaches beginning home cooks how to make healthy meals on a budget.

Created by Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Share our Strength, Cooking Matters operates in most U.S. cities. Food Hero, an initiative funded by the Oregon’s SNAP-Ed program and developed by Oregon State University Extension agents, includes nutrition education and food preparation at 18 Portland area schools. (It also has a wealth of free resources on its web site, including kid-approved recipes, activity sheets, videos, and even food-related jokes.) In San Francisco, nonprofit cooking school 18 Reasons helps train volunteer “Health Promoters” to teach Cooking Matters classes.

Jacobsen Valentine and a student make fresh pasta.

Basics Market, which now has two, and soon will have three locations in Oregon, offers 20 to 30 free cooking classes per week. Nonetheless, founder Eggert says there’s still a real need for more culinary education in this country.

“Most people my age, grew up going to home ec. People cooked!” Not so anymore, he says. Eggert collects old home ec. text books from the 1920s and says they’re full of advice about things like keeping the water you cook potatoes in and eating carrots with the peels intact as a way to get the most vitamins. “It’s those kinds of thing, as a society, we’ve gotten away from teaching to kids,” he said.

Joanne Lyford, who is the SNAP-Ed program manager in Portland, is confident that programs like Food Hero and Feed the Mass can help contribute to lifelong healthy habits, reducing and preventing obesity. “There is evidence that shows when children are exposed to fruits and vegetables, over time that will increase the likelihood that they will choose those foods over sugary beverages and foods with lots of added sugar,” Lyford said.

Valentine, who learned to cook from his mother and grandmother, is passionate about passing what he knows on to the next generation. He also teaches cooking at an alternative school where he’s advising nine high-schoolers on how to start a pop-up restaurant.

Feed the Mass does offer some less health-focused classes, like the ones that teach students how to make gingerbread and baked doughnuts, but Valentine tends to subscribe to Michael Pollan’s 39th “Food Rule”: You can eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

And as he and his class sit down and feast on their homemade tamales, dumplings, and tikka masala, his students inevitably end up talking to one another, creating connections around food.

“We give people the opportunity to become part of our community, whether they’re wealthy or poor,” Valentine said. “Everybody has to eat.”

Photos courtesy of Feed the Mass.

Flower Power

The American cannabis boom goes far beyond the vast ranks of stoners who can finally roll their joints legally. Hannah Wallace looks at one grower focusing on terroir and nuance in the pursuit of weed that isn't about getting you high

                                          Nathan (left) and Aaron Howard (right) at East Fork Cultivars in Southern Oregon 

 

When he was a baby, Wesley Howard was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder with no known cure. Nine years later, doctors detected scoliosis, a spine-deforming symptom of the disease. At 20, Wesley had his first seizure. ‘It was random neurological mayhem,’ recalls his brother, Nathan. ‘A lot of pain, epilepsy, sleep problems.’ 

Though anti-seizure medications helped, they had negative side effects. Eventually, Nathan and his other brother, Aaron, came to realize that a long-stigmatized plant with which Wesley already had a lifelong relationship, might be a more stable alternative—cannabis. The drug not only gave Wesley relief from the pain, it allowed him to eat and sleep. But this was in 2004, when the only cannabis cultivars Aaron could get his hands on—illegally—were high in a compound known as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is intoxicating. And while he loved the relief and escape afforded by the THC high, Wesley didn’t necessarily want to be intoxicated all the time. 

Around 2009, Aaron began hearing about a non-intoxicating compound found in cannabis, cannabidiol (CBD). Known for its anti-seizure and pain-reducing effects, CBD also mitigates the sometimes negative effects of THC, such as anxiety and paranoia. The two are the most important naturally occurring cannabinoids found in plants of the Cannabis genus. And while they have an almost identical chemical structure, a slight difference in the arrangement of atoms is crucial: THC is intoxicating, getting you high; CBD is not, but has proven medicinal properties. 

But very few cannabis cultivars that were available in 2009 contained enough CBD to be medically effective. ‘At the time, you couldn’t find people who had CBD in their lexicon,’ says Nathan, whose position was complicated by the fact that he was then chief of staff for Oregon state senator Mark Hass. During the long period when cannabis was illegal in the US, most breeders bred for one main trait: high THC. Nathan likens high-THC strains of cannabis to home-produced moonshine during Prohibition’s ban on alcohol. ‘Their main goal is intoxication,’ he says. 

‘Everyone I talked to prior to the 2014 Farm Bill was like, “Weed that doesn’t get you high? One: that doesn’t exist. And two: no one is going to want that.” But the Howard brothers were determined not to listen to the naysayers. Instead, Nathan, 29, and his brother, Aaron, 33, set out to do something different: produce craft cannabis that is high in CBD with lower levels of THC than most consumers have come to expect.

Oregon has an increasing reputation for producing some of the best Pinot Noir in the world. But what few wine lovers know is that it is also recognised for producing top-shelf weed. Even before the state legalised recreational cannabis in 2015, breeders and growers flocked to Oregon for its climate (both political and agricultural). In the four years since, these folks have, for the most part, emerged from the shadows of Prohibition. Right now, there are so many recreational cannabis growers in the state – 1,141 at the last count, according to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission – that the market is flooded with high-quality craft cannabis. (Cannabis is still illegal federally in the United States and interstate commerce of cannabis – even from one ‘legal’ state to another – is currently prohibited.) Taking a cue from the wine industry, many of these cannabis growers are practising organic agriculture and marketing their unique cultivars with vivid tasting notes. ‘The familiar rich, vanilla, berry nose, and puffy pistillate development have been carefully nurtured,’ reads a description of Blue Dream from an indoor grower in Portland.

But as more and more ‘cannabis naive’ people explore the plant – whether for the aches and pains of ageing, serious medical conditions, or just for the pleasure of a few hours’ intoxication – it’s clear that less THC and more CBD makes for an easier transition. For those who are accustomed to sipping a glass or two of wine in the evening, nibbling on a half-square of a CBD-dominant chocolate bar could be just the thing. 

Continue reading at Club Oenologique. 

 

Tempeh, the 'OG of Fermented Foods,' is having a Moment

 

This story first appeared on Civil Eats on Dec. 20, 2019.

Forty-two years ago, when Seth Tibbott was 26, he visited a hippie commune in Tennessee called The Farm. A vegetarian since reading Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, he had been subsisting on vegetables and homemade “soy grit” burgers.

“They tasted bad and they digested worse,” Tibbott recalls. But while browsing the literature at The Farm, he learned about a fermented soybean product called tempeh. “So when I read that tempeh was this really digestible and fairly easy-to-make-thing, I was really intrigued.” At the time, he was working for the Youth Conservation Corps at Kinser Park. So he ordered some tempeh starter from The Farm and, a week later, he set about making his first batch.

“I got some soybeans and hand-hulled them, put the magic starter on them, put them out in the field.” For tempeh to ferment properly, you ideally need temperatures of 88 degrees, and Tennessee’s hot weather was perfect. “The next day, there was this beautiful white cake on the soybeans,” he recalls.  Tibbot later learned that when he brought his first tempeh back to his co-workers, they thought it might poison them. But they tried it anyway, and several went on to become early customers of his first commercial tempeh.

         Seth Tibbott in front of his first tempeh incubator, in 1980. (Photo courtesy of Seth Tibbott)

 

In 1980, in Oregon, Tibbot launched Turtle Island Soy Dairy, the company now known as Tofurky. But what few people know is that Tofurky—famous for its alternative holiday roast—began with this lesser-known soy product. Fermented with Rhizopus mold, tempeh is originally from Indonesia, and it can be made with any beans, seeds, or even noodles. For the first 15 years, the company barely broke even. Today, Tofurky has estimated sales of $40 million a year, and Tibbott says tempeh is one of the company’s fastest-growing product lines, increasing 17 percent from 2017 to 2018.

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Tibbott was 40 years ahead of the curve. With the popularity of plant-based burgers and fermented foods on the rise, tempeh is having a moment. It has a nutty flavor, a meaty texture, and it fries up nicely for stir-fry, tacos, or in place of a burger. Unlike the Impossible Burger (which relies on GMO soy, and, as a result, the use of glyphosate) and other ultra-processed plant-based meat substitutes, tempeh has only two ingredients: beans and culture. It’s also a nutritional powerhouse, containing almost as much protein as beef (without the saturated fat or cholesterol), all eight essential amino acids, calcium, iron, and zinc.

Though tempeh sales are still a fraction of all plant-based protein sales, there are dozens of new artisanal tempeh companies sprouting up around the country—from Squirrel and Crow in Portland, Oregon and Tempeh Tantrum in Minneapolis to Barry’s Tempeh in Brooklyn. And it’s not just popular at food co-ops—it’s on the menu at pizza franchise Mellow Mushroom’s 150 locations across the Southeast, Native Foods’ nine restaurants, and at high-end restaurants like Cafe Sunflower in Atlanta and Farm Spirit in Portland. You can even get a tempeh bowl at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. “Tempeh is like the OG fermented food,” Tibbott says.

Tempeh even has its own organization, the Indonesian Tempe Movement (without the “h” on the end), dedicated to increasing international awareness of tempeh and teaching everyone from hipsters to the incarcerated how to make it. Last winter, two food entrepreneurs in Portland, Oregon, Mike Hillis and Willie Chambers, formed a U.S. offshoot called the Tempeh Movement. They see themselves as ambassadors, spreading the good news of this often under-appreciated food.

 

Tempeh’s most tireless champion may be 27-year-old Amadeus Driando (“Ando”) Ahnan, the co-founder, with his mother and grandfather, of the Indonesian Tempe Movement. Ahnan, who grew up in Jakarta and now lives in western Massachusetts, jokes that he was weaned on tempeh. But his real conversion came later, when he was seeking a protein source that would help him bulk up for weightlifting as an adult. He realized that the food he had grown up eating every day left him feeling less bloated than beef. “I thought, ‘This is amazing! How could something that cheap have the same quantity of protein as beef?’” says Ahnan.

Around the same time, his mom, Wida Winarno, had taken a fermented foods class wherein she learned about the importance of tempeh in promoting gut health, and his grandfather, the respected Indonesian food scientist, F.G. Winarno, returned from a colleague’s seminar on the health benefits of tempeh. The serendipity was too much to ignore.

Squirrel and Crow’s tempeh flavors.

“I thought, ‘We should make an international conference on tempeh,’” recalls Ahnan. In 2015, the trio founded the Tempe Movement, starting with an online campaign. In Indonesia, as in other developing countries, eating meat is a sign of status and wealth. Vegetarian food, Ahnan says, is often seen as a sign of poverty. He and his family wanted to flip the script. “We made cartoons and videos saying ‘Hey, don’t be ashamed if you like tempeh!’” says Ahan.

Today, Ahnan is getting his Ph.D. in food science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (focusing is on tempeh’s potential anti-cancer properties.) In his spare time, he’s designed the prototype for a machine called Tempeasy, which allows people to make tempeh at home as easily as they make bread or yogurt. He’s also the co-founder of Better Nature Foods. The company will launch in the United Kingdom in January with six products, including tempeh rashers (i.e., bacon), tempeh mince, and smoked soy tempeh.

Last March, Ahnan organized an “eco-tempeh tour” across the island of Java for entrepreneurs from the U.S. and England, including Tibbott, Hillis, and Chambers.

Hillis discovered tempeh at a Grateful Dead concert in 1988 and then again through his wife, Priska, who is Indonesian. (At their wedding in Bali, his wife’s great-grandmother from Java watched him scarf down fried strips of tempeh and said to Priska, “You’re in good hands. He’ll eat your cooking!”) A few years ago, he introduced tempeh to Chambers, a former butcher who now works as a chef at the Sunrise Community Center in Portland’s Rockwood neighborhood.

         On the tempeh tour of Indonesia. (Photo courtesy of Better Nature Foods)

 

The fact that Tempeh is fermented won Chambers over, he says. He thinks tempeh is where kombucha was 10 years ago—on the cusp of ubiquity. “Now you can buy kombucha in gas stations!” he says.

The trip to Java allowed Hillis and Chambers to learn traditional tempeh-making practices from Indonesian women who have been doing it their whole lives. This fall, they hosted a tempeh event at Wajan, a new Indonesian restaurant in Portland where Tibbott spoke and guests got to sample several tempeh dishes.

The pair have big plans for the future, including community tempeh-making classes and work to get tempeh into institutional settings such as prisons and hospitals. “We want to introduce it to a much wider demographic,” says Hillis. They believe tempeh has the potential to bridge the urban-rural divide. “How many soybean farmers live 50 miles away from economically distressed urban centers where people don’t have enough food to eat? Tempeh can be a very powerful diplomatic tool,” he says.

Traditional tempe-makers in Indonesia. (Photo courtesy of Better Nature Foods)

To get there, though, tempeh has a number of obstacles to surmount—most notably an unfair reputation as a strange dish for hippies, but also, Tibbott thinks, a lack of value-added products on the market. (Mike Hillis is working on a savory tempeh snack called Tempeh Manis that tastes a bit like Chex Mix.) But the main key to the food’s ascendence may be the startling difference between fresh and pasteurized tempeh.

In Indonesia, where every small town has a tempeh-maker, tempeh is still fermented in banana leaves. It’s also rarely pasteurized. “Even in the big grocery stores, most of the tempeh they make is in banana leaves,” says Tibbott.

All the major tempeh brands in the U.S.—Surata, Tofurky, and LightLife—pasteurize their tempeh to give it a longer shelf life. Fresh tempeh will keep fermenting at room temperature—and even in the fridge. Most of the smaller tempeh startups in the U.S. are selling unpasteurized tempeh.

John Westdahl, co-founder of Squirrel and Crow in Portland, makes a variety of fresh tempeh products: chickpeas with quinoa, black bean with sunflower seeds, even one version with nixtamalized corn, pumpkin seeds, and beans. He doesn’t make a soy tempeh mostly because there are already two large companies in Oregon that do it well. “It was more or less a business decision to stand out,” he says.

This choice worked well for the many health-conscious Portlanders who are trying to limit their soy intake because of its estrogen-mimicking effects or because it’s a common allergen. Despite rumors, dietary soy has not been linked with an increased risk of any cancer.

Fresh tempeh, Westdahl says, “just tastes better. When it’s pasteurized, you don’t taste the fungus in it—which is quite nice and complex.”

Squirrel and Crow’s glazed tempeh.

Ahnan agrees, saying there’s also a texture change. “When it’s pasteurized, it loses its fluffiness,” he says. It’s best to eat fresh tempeh within three days—unless you’re curious to try the “overripe” version, known as tempe bosok, a delicacy in Indonesia. “Over-fermented tempeh produces a lot of umami compounds,” says Ahnan. He likes it in a coconut-based curry called sambal tumpang.

Despite tempeh’s new-found popularity, home cooks are still a bit clueless when it comes to preparing it, says Westdahl. At the farmers’ markets where he’s a vendor, he offers tips. “I try to read them to find out what their skill-set is. It can be put into any recipe—it’s almost too versatile,” he says. “So I ask, ‘Are you a burger person? Do you like stir-fry?’” His favorite way to prepare it is a traditional Indonesian dish called orek, which is a sticky, glazed deep-fried dish heavy on ginger and garlic. “It’s like heaven on earth,” he says.

Many eaters are just starting to experiment with tempeh. But Westdahl, Ahnan, Tibbott and many other evangelists believe that once they try it—whether at a high-end restaurant or in their own kitchens—they’ll be converts.

 

 

 

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Portland's Wine Bar Renaissance

I wrote this round-up of Portland wine bars for Club Oenologique's web site.

A decade ago, you could count the number of wine bars in Portland, Oregon on one hand, but over the past few years there’s been a flurry of openings, from tiny boîtes with simple fare to those that blur the line between wine bar and wine-driven restaurant. Here, a selection of our favourites

The new wave

Arden Wine Bar

Opened in 2018 by Kelsey Glasser (who is also the sommelier), this chic Pearl District restaurant has a fabulous wine list with many rare bottles available by the glass, thanks to the Coravin. Currently available are an ’05 Rioja Gran Reserva, a 2013 Barolo, and a 2005 Alsatian Auxerrois BTG. The bottle list has strengths in France, Italy, and the Northwest, with reserve bottles comprising 30% of the list at any given time.

Executive chef Erik van Kley turns out delectable seasonal dishes such as roasted squash, frisée, smoked soy brown butter, pepitas, and matsutake and goat cheese cappelletti with caramelized onion, walnut, and black vinegar. Glasser also runs a popular wine dinner series—intimate parties with Oregon winemakers like Brian O’Donnell from Belle Pente. The 2020 lineup will be all women winemakers.

Bar Diane

Earlier this year, natural wine maven and graphic designer Sami Gaston opened her jewel-box-like wine bar on Northwest 21st. The clandestine spot (its entrance is on the side of a building, and there’s no sign designating its location) is chic and cheery with hand-painted retro wallpaper and cozy booths.

The food menu is simple but delicious—cheese plates, beet hummus, roasted delicata with yuzu, and housemade pasta. And you’ll definitely discover unique pours—among them a Ramato from Viola and Wabi-Sabi, a light blend of carignan-syrah-zin from Populis. Every bottle on the wine list is available by the glass (for 1/4 the bottle price), and every wine available by the glass is also available by the half-glass. For happy hour (from 4-6PM, Tues.-Sun.), Gaston takes $2 off glass pours.

Bar Norman

Opened by natural wine champion Dana Frank a year ago, Bar Norman is a candelit boîte with a distinctly French vibe. Lights are strung from the ceiling, second-hand tables and chairs sit snugly beside one another, and the music sets an urbane ambience. This isn’t an accidental, as Frank was inspired by some of her favorite Parisian wine bars. 

Frank, who was the sommelier at renowned Italian restaurant Ava Gene’s and then opened Portland’s first all-natural-wine restaurant, Dame, also curates a small selection of bottles from Oregon, Italy, Georgia, Slovenia, and elsewhere. (You can take one to go or enjoy it in-house for a $10 corking fee.)

Come for the “Hummus Hang”—a monthly pop-up of silky hummus, labneh, and homemade challah—and you might get to hear Frank’s husband Scott Frank (winemaker at Bow & Arrow) DJ. All wines are $12 by the glass unless otherwise noted; flights are $18ish for 3 and $24ish for 4. 

The pared-down bottle list is always changing, with a focus on “time capsules”—bottles that are at least a decade old

Les Caves 

Opened two years ago by winemakers Jeff Vejr (of Golden Cluster) and John House and Ksenija Kostic House (of Ovum), this subterranean spot seats only 18 and is seemingly always full. (A tiny alcove in the wall seats four; the rest of the seats are at the bar.)

The fare is minimal—grilled cheese, tinned seafood, local cheeses, Iberian ham—so the wines become the main attraction. There’s usually an Oregon wine being poured by the glass, but Slovenian, Georgian, Hungarian, Spanish, or Portuguese producers are just as common. “We encourage people to drink globally,” says Vejr. The pared-down bottle list (just 50 bottles on hand) is always changing, with a focus on “time capsules”—bottles that are at least a decade old. Check their instagram @lescavespdx for events like a Bubbles tasting with Aurélien Gerbais from Champagne Pierre Gerbais.

Casual spin-offs of Portland institutions

Canard

Next to James Beard Award–winner Gabriel Rucker’s Le Pigeon is Canard, the chef’s all-day café, where you can enjoy high-end French fare like duck rillettes and foie gras dumplings, as well as decidedly more low-brow snacks like a steam burger (an homage to the White Castle patty) and garlic fries topped with an inspired combo of chermoula and shredded gouda.

The wine list, overseen by Andrew Fortgang, is rich in French, Spanish, Italian, and Oregon bottles as well as more unusual finds—a Pet-Nat rosé from Slovenia, an old-vine Palomina from Galicia. In the evenings, the restaurant often hosts wine tastings with producers like Stéphane and Carine Sérol from Loire Valley and Matthew Rorick and Danielle Shehab from Forlorn Hope in California. Get the steam burger for just $3 at happy hour (4-5PM, 10PM-midnight) and wash it down with an aperitif ($6) or a glass of Belle Oiseau, an Alsatian-style blend from Belle Pente ($7).   

Garlic fries at Canard. Photography by David Reamer

Enoteca Nostrana 

Chef Cathy Whims’ design-focused Italian wine spot—with its quartz bar, champagne cork-inspired stools (by Italian studio Orlandini & Radice), and a bathroom sound installation by surrealist poet Ken Nordine—has one of the best wine lists in town. Wine director Austin Bridges emphasises natural winemakers from Italy, France, and Spain (with a smattering of American producers as well). The impressive two-story glass-fronted wine cellar—which you can see from the first-floor dining room—holds over 3,000 bottles; Bridges chooses 24 or so to serve by the glass and half-glass.

The food menu—unlike Nostrana next door—is limited to mostly small plates, but if you come for happy hour (4-6PM) you can get pizzas for $9 and cool small producer wines for $6 a glass. Right now Bridges is most excited about his cache of Domaine Labet Chardonnay, which won’t last long, and the new Nerello Mascalese from Eduardo Torres at Acosta in Sicily. 

OK Omens

Chef Justin Woodward, who has worked at Noma in Denmark and Mugaritz in San Sebastian, came up with a fun seasonal menu at this casual off-shoot of Castagna next door. Luckily, though, the addictive cheddar-filled beignets and buttermilk fried chicken bites are year-round, as is the Torito—a salad of romaine topped with corn nuts, cotija, and a creamy cilantro dressing.

Wine director Brent Braun keeps the wine list playful and approachable, with bottles starting at $36 and descriptors getting right to the point. (“Zero Sulfite Spanish White that Tastes Like Kaffir Lime and Tepache,” and “Chenin Blanc that Probably is Older than Your Dog.”) A big fan of Riesling, Braun has an extensive selection with choices in the aged, dry, and off-dry categories. At happy hour (5-6PM and 10PM-close) food hovers at $10 and some bottles drop to $28. 

Enoteca Nostrana. Photography by John Valls

Wine bars with elevated fare 

Oui! Wine Bar 

For a while, chef Althea Grey Potter was working under the radar in Portland’s buzzy culinary scene. But no more: she was just on the Food Network’s Chopped and Guy’s Grocery Games. Potter turns out simple seasonal dishes that complement Oui’s wine—like chicken liver mousse with cranberry-pear chutney, chives, dijon, and crostini; roasted broccoli with kohlrabi, pickled golden raisins, capers, parsley, sunflower seeds, and caesar aioli; and elk ragu with whipped goat cheese, rosemary garlic grits, fennel pollen, and vegetable giardiniera.

The wine list is mostly Northwest-focused—with bottles from the urban winemaking collective next door and “featured friends” like Hiyu and A.D. Beckham—and an ever-changing rotation of European wines. The excellent happy hour (4-6PM Mon.-Fri. and Sat.-Sun. 1-6PM) includes $6 small plates and $2 off any glass of wine.

Park Ave. Wine Bar 

This wine shop/wine bar hybrid opened in summer of 2016, but it wasn’t until owners Stacey Gibson and Neil Thompson partnered with chef Karl Holl in 2017 that the spot became a go-to destination on the Portland foodie circuit. Holl won Portland Monthly‘s Chef of the Year award in 2018 for his dynamite religiously seasonal menu, full of foraged mushrooms and tempura-battered vegetables. (Don’t miss his signature dish, the 100-layer wild mushroom lasagna, which is off the charts delicious.)

As for wine, there’s a magnificent by-the-glass list—with a mix of Oregon and European favorites—and any bottle in the store can be consumed on site for a $10 corkage fee. One thing that sets Park Ave. apart are its “legacy pours”—old or rare vintages— offered by the 2-ounce or 5-ounce pour. Recently, Gibson poured a 1999 Marcel Deiss Burlenberg Alsace Pinot Noir/ Pinot Beurot and a 2012 Bergstrom Sigrid Chardonnay. In addition to winemaker tastings Friday nights, the shop hosts Blind Tastings on Tuesdays. Identify a flight of three wines correctly, and the whole flight is $1.

Wines at Dame. Photography by Carly E. Diaz

Dame

When Dame opened in 2016, it was the first wine bar/restaurant in Portland to serve 100% natural wine. Though Dana Frank is no longer involved, founding partner Jane Smith has maintained the spirit and depth of the wine list, with by-the-glass pours of Olivier Pithon’s Cuvée Lais from the Languedoc and Jeff Vejr’s Apini, an orange wine that’s bottled under his new Vinous Obscura label.

For the past year, the kitchen has been helmed by star chef Patrick McKee, whose pop-up restaurant within Dame, Estes, is named after his mother. Expect creative comfort dishes like smoky farro salad with grilled romaine and roasted leeks and a sublime spaghetti with meatballs. Dame has an excellent bottle list as well as a small but well-edited bottle shop, too. (Corkage is $25).

The Champagne bar

Ambonnay

Portland may be a mid-size city but it has had its very own Champagne bar for eight years. There was a small panic when longtime owner David Speer decided to up and move to Hood River. But luckily, new owner Michael Knisely—a New Orleans transplant who runs a pop-up Champagne bar there—is keeping it more-or-less the same.

The slip-of-a-bar seats just 20, has an extensive list of bubbly including Vilmart & Cie Grand Cellier d’Or Brut Premier Cru 2013 and Pierre Péters Cuvée de Réserve by the glass—as well as the occasional glass of Oregon sparkling wine. “Nibbles” include truffle popcorn, cheeses, pistachios, and Mantequilla olives.

Ambonnay

Bonus pours: wine shops that double as wine bars

Division Wines 

This is the kind of well-stocked wine shop/wine bar you wish was in your neighborhood. Will and Danyelle Prouty, who drove to Portland in a 1979 Ford Disco Van, opened Division in 2011 and it’s been going strong ever since.

The food menu is humble—large cheese plates, charcuterie boards, spicy carrot hummus and the like—but the real delight here is the broad selection of wines, which span the globe but are expressive and made with thoughtful practices. Even the most knowledgeable wine person will learn something from Will as he pours Oregon pinot noirs from little-known producers like Cória Estates and Shiba Wichern, or a carbonic red from the Loire called L’Hurluberlu.

Pairings Portland

If the Star Wars Wine Experience (eight wines paired to eight characters from Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker) is not your thing, never fear. Owner Jeffrey Weissler is trying to make wine accessible for all, but his knowledge of biodynamic and natural wine runs deep, and he has a well-edited list of some of the best examples of both in his small Northeast Portland bar. Bonus: he has frequent weekend wine tastings with some of the best up-and-coming natural winemakers in the state. He also allows guests to bring in food from the casual eateries across the street. 

KEX: the Cool Icelandic Youth Hostel—Now in Portland

 The sun-filled dining room at Dóttir (Photo by Mikael Lundblad)

These days, it seems like a new hotel opens in Portland every week. I wrote about the latest one—which has a fabulous ground-floor restaurant/bar—for Conde Nast Traveler.

Portland, Oregon, might seem like an unlikely destination for the second location of an Iceland-based hostel. After opening the first Kex hostel in Reykjavik in 2011, Kex owner Kristinn Vilbergsson moved to Vancouver and began taking exploratory train trips to Seattle and Portland to figure out his next hostel location.

Vilbergsson enjoyed Seattle, but it was the Rose City that stole his heart. “It’s close to nature, outdoorsy—very similar to Iceland that way,” says Vilbergsson, who goes by Kiddi. The same day he arrived in town, Vilbergsson began fantasizing about a Portland outpost of Kex. A food writer had given him the number for chef Greg Denton (of Ox and Bistro Agnes), and before long Denton had put Vilbergsson in touch with Portland power player and restaurant backer Kurt Huffman. The two met for coffee, and discussed the proposition of partnering on an upscale hostel.

Seven years later, Kex Portland has opened at the Burnside Bridgehead, an area in the city's lively Central Eastside. The four-floor hotel has stylish accommodations that come with exclusive access to a basement sauna, as well as a splashy new restaurant and bar, Dóttir, helmed by top Icelandic chef Ólafur “Óli” Ágústsson and Ned Ludd alumnus Alex Jackson. (A rooftop bar will open in spring.) All of this is sure to be a hit with locals in this formerly industrial neighborhood, already a destination for its restaurant scene

The 15 shared rooms—some with bunk beds that sleep eight, others that sleep 16—don’t skimp on amenities, and much of it is locally designed. Mattresses are made by Suite Sleep (the same ones used at the Ace Hotel), pillows are filled with down, and each bed comes equipped with canvas privacy curtains and nifty storage bags (both handmade by local Portland craftsman Leland Duck at Revive). The industrial-looking bunk beds, designed in-house, were fabricated by Black Mouth Design in Seattle. Each bunk has its own electrical outlet and a sliding drawer where guests can securely lock their belongings. But for those craving a more traditional hotel experience, there are also 14 private rooms with queen or king beds. The whimsical wallpaper in the hallways is hand-drawn by Portland artist Melanie Nead.

                                                                                The whimsical wallpaper by Melanie Nead (Photo by Mikael Lundblad)

Kex's restaurant/cocktail bar, and killer design make it an appealing destination for locals. (Jeremy Fenske)

 

“This is not the first property of its kind,” says general manger and partner Sean O’Connor, referring to the popularity of design-forward hotels that merge a youthful hostel-like vibe with luxury amenities. (The Society Hotel, Freehand and Generator are just a few examples.) “But this style of travel is becoming more popular. And Americans are embracing it.” Couples who spend $38 per person on their bunk room at Kex (the winter rate in the 16-person room) may be scrimping on their lodging so they can splurge at dinner; say, the five-course tasting menu at Le Pigeon, a short walk away. “It’s about experience first,” says O’Connor.

 

Speaking of experience, Dóttir, on the ground floor, has already become a social hub for travelers and Portlanders alike. Icelandic designer Dáni Pedersen, a former Hollywood set designer, took great care to use repurposed items from the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. As a result, the space has a worn-in feel with bookshelves, a refurbished Douglas fir floor (salvaged from a train station at Fort Vancouver), and the façade from an old bakery in Cairo. There will be live music in the evenings, and much thought (and expense) was put into adding an acoustic sub-ceiling so that no sound will spill into the upstairs bedrooms.

 

Drinks maven Lydia McLuen (formerly of the Hoxton Portland’s Tope) has put a Scandinavian stamp on the seasonal cocktail list with drinks like Lady of the Mountain (raspberry-infused Reyka vodka, hazelnut orgeat, lemon, and skyr) and the Dagsson (George Dickel rye, Cocchi Torino sweet vermouth, Gammel Dansk—a Norwegian bitter—and Cynar). But don’t miss the wine. Because of O’Connor’s deep connections in the wine industry (he used to work at Antica Terra and Le Pigeon), he has access to some Oregon wines that you won’t taste anywhere else from gems like Cameron, Bow & Arrow, Ovum, Pierce, and Holden Wine Co.

 

As in Iceland, Kex brews its own beers in Portland. Pro brewer Carston Haney is collaborating with Stumptown on a “lactose porter,” with Gigantic on a “Viking Juice,” and with Mikkeller (the acclaimed Danish brewery that’s had a Portland pop-up since June) on a sour pale ale for the hotel. The Nordic-meets-Northwest menu at Dóttir is accessible—with plates small (chicken liver mousse, shrimp smorrebrod with caramelized root veggies) and large (roasted trout with sauerkraut, mushroom, and bacon; roasted duck breast and leg confit with roasted Brussels sprouts and smoked leek). It remains to be seen if the kitchen will offer a take on the kex—an Icelandic biscuit that's the hostel's namesake—for dessert.

where2go without car2go?

My husband and I have been car-free for a decade, and one of the things that made this lifestyle possible was the existence of car2go, a car-share service that allowed us to pay by the minute and drop off the vehicle in any legal parking space in town. So, a week after the international climate strikes, I was upset to discover that car2go was leaving Portland (and 4 other North American cities). I wrote this op-ed in Portland Business Journal to express my discontent and take the pulse of other car-free Portlanders.  

Download Opinion_ In Portland where2go now_ - Portland Business Journal

Portland, the birthplace of car-sharing in the U.S., has always been a leader when it comes to transportation alternatives. The MAX debuted in 1986. CarSharing Portland launched in 1998, well before merging with Flexcar, later bought by Zipcar, in 2001.

So when car2go, one of our most popular car-sharing services, announced last month that it would cease operations in Portland, it felt like a slap in the face. The company’s e-mail to users — which came just one week after the Climate Strike rally — said Portland “is a complex transportation market that requires a significant investment on the part of any mobility provider wanting to enter the city and unfortunately, we are unable to continue doing so in a manner that’s sustainable for our business.” Car2go is also exiting its headquarters city of Austin as well as Calgary, Denver and Chicago.

Car-free Portlanders like Katherine Deumling, CEO of Cook with What you Have, are shocked and upset.

“We used it all the time. The system worked so well,” says Deumling, who with her husband and son went car-free in the fall 2012. “If Car2go had to raise its prices, I would’ve been fine with that. Don’t throw the whole thing away.”

Susan Towers, founder of Forerunner PR, adds, "It was such a sustainable solution. I was hoping they would add more cars, not remove the service altogether,” she says.

The former New Yorker had used Zipcar before arriving in Portland, but considered Car2go superior. “Car2go was a revelation,” Towers says. “I loved having the free-floating model and being able to park and walk away on one way trips.”

My husband and I were car-free for two years before Car2go debuted in Portland in 2012. It radically improved the quality of our lives. Unlike Zipcar, which you have to return to the same spot an hour or two later, Car2go allowed for one-way trips. It also made sense for short trips, especially if you were running late (which we always seem to be doing). We relied on it during Portland’s long rainy season, when biking didn’t look terribly appealing.

Car2go charged a reasonable by-the-minute fee and its original fleet of eco-friendly Smart Cars were easy to park. (And free to park, as long as you parked in designated city parking marked for 30 minutes or longer.) We used car2go for doctors appointments, lunch dates, family gatherings and get our daughter to far-away basketball practices. All for a fraction of the cost of a Lyft or Uber.

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. accounting for 29 percent in 2017. Light-duty vehicles like cars comprise the largest category within transportation.

Interestingly, according to data from Boston University’s Database of Road Transportation Emissions, Portland’s per person emissions have decreased by 22 percent since 1990. Certainly some of that decrease is due to the success of car-sharing programs like Car2go, Get Around, BMW’s ReachNow (which, joined with car2go last February to make ShareNow, in certain cities) and ZipCar.

It may be counterintuitive to argue that Car2go, with its latest fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles introduced throughout North America in 2017, helped mitigate climate change. But research conducted by Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley, shows that people who sell their vehicles and replace them with a carshare membership reduce their “vehicle miles traveled” by as much as 27 percent to 43 percent.

According to Car2go, Portland’s fleet as of October included 450 vehicles. There were 110,165 active Car2go users. If Car2go kept just a fraction of those 110,165 Portlanders from buying a car, then it certainly was a potent tool in our toolbox for reducing overall carbon emissions.

My husband and I won’t be caving in and buying a car. We’ll use this opportunity to embrace biking in the rain. We may even splurge on an electric bike for my husband’s commute to work. But many of the other 110,165 active Car2go users won’t have such tenacity. At a time when our climate is in crisis, Car2go’s decision to abandon Portland feels a bit like a betrayal.

High Drama: A Cannabis Biotech Company Roils Small Growers

Back in July, I reported on the Phylos Bioscience saga for Wired. 

 

When Mowgli Holmes and his childhood friend Nishan Karassik founded Phylos Bioscience in 2014 they had one major goal: to provide more transparency in the cannabis industry. That “and science, truth, consistency—and better weed,” Holmes wrote me in an email back in 2017.

They never could have guessed in 2014 that within a few years, they would be the subject of suspicion and outright contempt in some quarters of the tight-knit cannabis-growing world. But maybe they should have, because the transition from the illicit trade in marijuana to the mostly licit cannabis industry was never going to be without its complications and conflicts. Large science firms and Big Agriculture see an opportunity. Little cannabis sees a threat.

One of the first services Phylos launched was a “plant sex test,” which saves pot growers time and money by determining the sex of a seedling within a week of germination. (Only female cannabis plants contain usable amounts of THC, CBD, and other cannabinoids, so you want to cull the males ASAP.)

The company also began a collaboration with Rob DeSalle, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and professor at Columbia University, to sequence the DNA of as many cultivated varieties of cannabis (or cultivars) as possible to shed some light on the plant’s evolution. The results were published—on April 20, 2016, 4/20 naturally—in an open source forum called the Galaxy.

A splashy visual representation of the genetic relationships between cannabis varieties, the Galaxy is also, in essence, a road map for breeders. At first, the Phylos Galaxy was a kind of community science project—anyone who sent in tiny piece of stem (swabbed with alcohol to remove any traces of THC) got their cultivars genetically sequenced for free. (A fee was added later.)

But later in 2016, Phylos began offering a “plant genotype test,” which included a placement on the Galaxy as well as a full report on its relationship to other cultivars. Because the Galaxy is public, it allows any breeder, scientist, or curious pot consumer to see how their favorite cultivar fits into the big picture—and it also helps growers decide what to breed next. (The farther apart two plants are genetically, the more likely they are to yield a plant with higher vigor and more disease resistance.)

Genotyping also offers a quick fact-check, allowing growers to know if they’re mislabeling cultivars—which, due to the clandestine nature of the black market, happens with some regularity. From the beginning, Phylos positioned itself as a “new kind of agriculture company,” one that mistrusted Monsanto and championed small-scale growers and breeders, the people responsible for the vast genetic diversity in the cannabis category. At last count, the Phylos Galaxy had 3,000 samples from 80 different countries, making it the largest database of cannabis genetics in the world.

So when Holmes announced on April 16 via Instagram that Phylos would be launching its own breeding program in a facility west of Portland, it wasn’t all hearts and smiley faces. Many in the cannabis community were outraged. “How about staying in your lane,” said one early response. “Damn, maybe you really have been stealing genetics this entire time,” began another. And finally: “Every idiot that allowed your company to put their genetics into their system just lost all their intellectual property.”

At first glance, the haters’ comments might’ve been dismissed as paranoia, jealousy, or at the very least anti-science. After all, you can’t resurrect a cannabis plant from a dead stem and 2,000 sites on the genome, which was all Phylos was sequencing.

But a few days later, a video surfaced that showed Holmes pitching investors at the Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference in Miami in February. In it, Holmes tells a roomful of would-be investors that Phylos has a huge lead as a cannabis breeder. “We’ve been collecting data and IP for four years. We have really huge barriers to entry protecting us,” and that “we have more trust in the cannabis industry than any other science company.”

The real bombshell, though, was when Holmes introduced a few members of the Phylos advisory board, one of whom had worked for Syngenta for years, and another who was VP of technology acquisition at the merged Dow and DuPont. Holmes continued: “So, having these guys around is just critical for us, because we’re building a company that is ultimately going to be acquired by that universe.”

 

To breeders and growers who had often heard Phylos employees publicly disparage Monsanto, affiliation with Syngenta and Dow/DuPont sounded like a deal with the devil. Also the idea that Phylos would use its storehouse of genetic data—in some cases freely donated by small growers—to pump up its market value and attract a major industry buyer sounded like an underhanded double-cross.

It was too much for brothers Aaron and Nathan Howard, co-owners of Southern Oregon cannabis farm East Fork Cultivars, who had been working with Phylos on a high-CBD hemp breeding project since February as part of something called the Breeding Innovation Network. In late April, East Fork was still publicly defending Phylos—both on Instagram and in real life.

The Howards knew the company was about to launch a breeding program—it wasn’t a secret—and although they had believed in the company’s integrity and commitment to helping small family-run cannabis farms like theirs, they were growing increasingly worried that they had been misled. “For so long, Phylos had been talking about being a different kind of agriculture company,” says East Fork CEO Mason Walker. “It would be one thing to be under crazy financial pressure and eventually have to sell under duress, but to actually have that as an intentional strategy? That really changed my mind.” East Fork left the Breeding Innovation Network in early May.

The episode is emblematic of a larger trend unfolding in the still-nascent legal cannabis business: The science and technology of mainstream agriculture is about to revolutionize marijuana. But old-school, pre-legalization cannabis growers fear they’ll be snuffed out in the process.

Though cannabis remains federally illegal, 11 states plus the District of Columbia have legalized recreational adult use, and 33 states along with DC have legalized medical use. Overall, members of the legal cannabis industry view the prospect of federal legalization—which some expect to happen in five to 10 years—with a mixture of hope and trepidation.

Once cannabis is legal, Big Agriculture will be able to invest enormous sums into improving cannabis. Once that happens, it will become extremely difficult for longtime breeders and growers to compete. Other monied interests from Big Pharma and the alcohol beverage industries have already jumped in. (Look no further than liquor conglomerate Constellation Brands, which last year invested $4 billion in Canadian cannabis firm Canopy Growth.)

To keep reading more, go to Wired. 

 

An Interview with Winemaker Barnaby Tuttle

 

I interviewed Portland winemaker and raconteur Barnaby Tuttle for the British wine magazine Club Oenologique.

Tuttle during harvest time

 

Drop into Barnaby Tuttle’s southeast Portland winery, and chances are he’ll be tending bar wearing a baseball cap and rocking out to Miles Davis’s psychedelic Bitches Brew.

Tuttle, who runs Teutonic Wine Company with his wife Olga, is one of Oregon’s most interesting winemakers. Though his favourite grape is Riesling—and he makes some truly excellent Rieslings—he also makes Pinot Noir, a Pinot-Gamay blend, a Tannat, and a Pinot Noir, Tannat and Gewürztraminer blend he calls Red Fang, named in honor of a Portland heavy metal band.

Unafraid to challenge conventional wine orthodoxy, Tuttle has made wine from grapes that were kissed with smoke from the 2017 Gorge fires (he called this Rauchwein), and a medium-dry Riesling from grapes that had 100% botrytis (called Candied Mushroom). He’s even made several wines inspired by scenes in This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest’s hilarious mockumentary about a metal band.

Portland’s Nostrana wine buyer Austin Bridges is a big fan of Tuttle and his wines – particularly his Rieslings: “they are so unique and different, so powerful and deep,” he says. “But they are also very drinkable and good food wines. They’re top notch Rieslings.” Right now, he has Teutonic’s 1908 Riesling on the menu (made in a dry style, as it was in the early 20th century in the Mosel Valley), and he’s bringing on the Candied Mushroom soon. The Teutonic wines are also found in restaurants like California’s Chez Panisse and Atelier Crenn, as well as New York’s Gramercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park.

Teutonic Wine Company Rieslings

It shouldn’t surprise you that Tuttle had an unorthodox path to becoming a winemaker. Before discovering wine in 2000, he was an ironworker and worked in a wrecking yard. Wanting to save up for a trip to New Zealand, he got a job waiting tables at Papa Haydn, an upscale restaurant/cake shop in Portland, Oregon. “It was a lot more money than at the wrecking yard,” says Tuttle, now 51.

One day, the manager took him aside and said he’d need to take a wine class if he wanted to keep his job. Tuttle, who grew up working class in North Portland, showed up to the class in his Plymouth Barracuda. “I didn’t belong,” he says. But it was at one of these classes, taught at Great Wine Buys, that Tuttle had an epiphany that would change the trajectory of his life. He had always dismissed silent tastings as “pretentious nonsense,” but was amazed when they yielded similar tasting notes from 80% of his classmates.

The moment that really blew his mind, though, was when the instructor organised a side-by-side tasting of three Oregon Pinot Noirs, all from the same producer but from three different vineyard sites in the Willamette Valley. Even though he was just beginning to train his palate, Tuttle could taste differences between the three wines. “The instructor said, ‘That’s this thing called terroir.’”

The concept of terroir—which Tuttle says was “the coolest thing I’d ever been told”—changed everything. He began devoting himself to tasting wines from around the world. A year later, in 2001, he was promoted to wine buyer at Papa Hadyn. In 2005, he and Olga bought a vineyard in Alsea, Oregon (about 20 miles from the coast), and Tuttle started making his own Riesling.

You have a particular interest in German-style wines. How did you come to grow and make Riesling?
When I was the buyer at Papa Hadyn, I needed some Mosel wine and I heard about this guy Ewald Moseler. He brought in 14 Mosel Rieslings, and I bought everything in the bag and said to Olga, “I’m gonna have to figure out how to do that.” It scared the shit out of her because she knows I follow through on crazy shit. I planted a vineyard a short time later, in 2005. That was the Alsea vineyard.

What was it about those wines that excited you so much?

I had already been into cool-climate wines. Dirty, natty are fashionable now – but those wines took it to the next level. Their acid was off the hook, they pair with food really well, and they last a long time. I used to buy a 1979 Riesling from Moseler for $19.

Did people like German Rieslings at Papa Hadyn?
Not always, but it was like helping an old lady cross the street. It doesn’t make any money, but it’s the right thing to do. I loved selling it and it’s fun, but it isn’t the easiest path.

I think people are apprehensive about sweet wines. I call it sugar shame. They think, “You’re an idiot, why are you drinking sweet stuff?” You have to tell them, “No, it tastes good to me.” 

Riesling is confusing because a lot of the high-tone aromatics add to the perception of sweetness and if it smells fruity, people think it’s sweet. It may have 12 grams of acid and a tiny bit of sugar. There’s this Chardonnay: Rombauer. It probably has 14-15 grams of sugar and 5 grams of acid, so the sugar profile is way sweeter, but when people taste it in a buttery Chardonnay they don’t taste the sugar. You have to educate people in a way that’s super respectful to them. The people who I want to educate the most are people like me, who didn’t grow up with privilege.

One more thing about Moseler – I got to be super good friends with him. He took me to Germany in 2007 to meet all these Riesling producers, and one of them became my mentor: Harald Junglen of Weingut Ackermann. I have so many friends over there—I call them the Mosel Mafia. I’m this crazy American with a passion for Riesling. When I’m there, I’ll wake up in the morning and start working with whomever I can.

Tell me about one of your early failures and what you learned from it.

There are so many. When we planted the vineyard at Alsea, I was a purist. This revolution in wine hadn’t happened yet. There were a lot of good Oregon wines – Eyrie, Cristom, Cameron – but there were also all these Pinots that had to chase this Parker profile that was more like Syrah than Pinot Noir. There was that expectation of dark red or purple. A lot of these guys were using enzymes and new oak or oak chips. Some of those wines are probably objectively really good, but I don’t need the sales rep to pour me 15 wines that taste like the same thing.

A lot of the institutionalized things people were telling me, I was rejecting. In France and Germany, you’re not allowed to irrigate your vines—just a little bit of water the first year. I liked these wines so much more. So I planted Alsea, and I said, “I’m not gonna irrigate. Bugger off!”

But they were right. Being very provincial growing up on the west coast and never spending a summer anywhere else, I thought that the dry summers we get here were like everywhere else in the world. Luckily the farmer next to me ran some sprinklers through and saved my vineyard.

I irrigated the first year and let it ride after that—no more irrigation.

Did you have a lack of money at first? Have you had any outside investment?

Oh, fuck. We had no money. We still have no money. I mean, everybody says they have no money and then the check comes after dinner, and it’s $300 per person so you have to cough it up. I’m like the Top Ramen queen. I know how to make things stretch.

After I left Papa Hadyn, I got hired on at Laurel Ridge Winery in Carlton and was promoted to assistant winemaker. I was mechanically inclined. I started fixing all the machines, dialing in the bottling line. Susan Teppola [the owner] let me make my wine there as a privilege. Then I outgrew the space. We got a tiny bit of family help and stripped every nickel out of our house. I could make more money waiting tables, but I wouldn’t get to have this quality of life.

You’ve done some interesting wine experiments. Tell me about the most successful ones.

The Candied Mushroom is my favourite thing in the world. We’ve been able to do it two years in a row—I was fortunate enough to have 100% botrytis twice. It may not happen again. I’m at the mercy of nature. I mean for dessert wines, it’s a desirable thing, but I’m finding that a lot of the things people are taught to believe are not always true.

Last year, you sent a couple of your wines in to a cannabis testing lab to see if they contained terpenes [the aromatic components in plants that give them their particular aroma and, in the case of cannabis, contribute to the type of high you experience.] Why did you do this?

I don’t like to speak in absolutes, and I kept telling people that this wine shares things with cannabis. I knew it was true, but I just wanted to have it on paper. I think it was the Muscat that came back, and it had the same profile as Lemon Sour Diesel.

Is that a strain you particularly like?
It’s an okay strain. I like heady, cerebral stuff. I don’t like to go numb, I like to be tripped out.

What are your favourite wines around the world?

I like most wines. I typically don’t like Sauvignon Blanc, but once in a while I’ll have it and love it. Olga and I recently had a Sauv Blanc from our friends at Division Wine (in Portland) and we looked at each other and said, “I hate Sauv Blanc, but I love this!”

Pinot Noir I love. Chenin Blanc from the Loire (but also from Tom Monroe and Kate Norris’s Division and Jeff Fischer’s Habit Wine). Nebbiolo, Valtellina stuff. It’s the region right up against Switzerland. They have a distinct strain of Nebbiolo called Chiavennasca, and it’s kind of like Barolo but with the finesse of Burgundy. A super mineral, Alpine wine.

Your winery doubles as a jazz club. How does your interest in jazz inform your winemaking?

Smoking weed and listening to jazz is probably the impetus for the Candied Mushroom. But it’s just like anything else: it’s music that takes you out of your safe space. Something that challenges you. I’m one of those people who when he gets curious about something he chases it really hard. 

Do you listen to jazz when you make wine?

A lot. We’ll put Slayer on and country, too. But a lot of psychedelic jazz. I didn’t listen to jazz before the winery. We kept making it sound better and better.

I hadn’t smoked pot in 25 years, and then Olga and I had these big dinner parties, and I’m like “Wait! No one is on their phones, on their computers! This is probably what it was like for my parents in the ’70s. Sitting around the sound system, eating, smoking, drinking.” In that context, it was like “Wow, I get it now. I need to know everything about this music.” I just threw myself out there and started meeting jazz musicians.

How often can people hear jazz at Teutonic now?

Three times a week: Wednesday and Friday nights, and then we have jam sessions on Sunday. There is a word in jazz: motherfucker. It’s the highest compliment: when someone in jazz thinks someone is a very skilled musician. Miles Davis started it. So Wednesday night is for the motherfuckers, and Friday nights are for the younger guys. It’s more of a hip-hop party vibe sometimes. It’s all up-and-coming—people who are taking lessons from older people. Then a jam session on Sunday at 4PM.

Heath Ceramics, Back from the Brink

This story on the evolution of Heath Ceramics appears in the July/August issue of Inc.

 

Mention Heath Ceramics to design nerds or high-end restaurateurs, and chances are they'll fawn endlessly over its retro, midcentury tile or brightly glazed stoneware. Heath devotees are nothing new: Since visionary ceramicist Edith Heath and her husband started the company in 1948, enthusiasts have included architect Frank Lloyd Wright and chef Alice Waters.

Yet the company likely wouldn't be around today were it not for Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic. When the couple--designers prowling about for a new project--stumbled into Heath's Sausalito, California, showroom in 2003, the company was struggling, unable to cover its bills and pay all of its employees. At the time, Edith was in her early 90s, with failing health and no succession plan. Forget diversification or modern­ization--a lone typewriter was still being used in the office.

After discovering that Heath was for sale, the couple immediately wrote the company a letter. Three months later, the now-70-year-old business was theirs. "The whole process was simpler than buying a house," Bailey says.

 

Over the past 16 years, Bailey and Petravic have brought Heath back from the brink by evolving everything from its product lines to its ownership structure, striking a delicate balance between respecting die-hard fans and bringing new ones on board. They've shifted the business from wholesale to direct-to-consumer, built a San Francisco experiential destination, expanded into the bridal registry business, and forged creative collaborations with everyone from fashion designers to furniture makers.

 

"We don't want to be forced to do things we don't want to do."

But perhaps the couple's biggest impact, says Bailey, will come from employing a "slow business" approach to growth that enables the company to go all in on creativity, quality, and transparency. Since Bailey and Petravic took over, Heath has steadily grown from 25 employees to 246 and from $1.2 million in sales to $30 million, putting it on track to be debt free by the end of 2020. Earlier this year, they even converted 8 percent of the company to an ESOP, with the goal of increasing that to 25 percent. Says Petravic, with the stark contrast of San Francisco's tech scene bustling around him, "We're setting things up for the next generation."

KELSEY MCCLELLAN

 

Since Petravic and Bailey took over Heath Ceramics in 2003, they've continued working with some of the country's best restaurants, creating dinnerware lines with two of them: Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in 2006, and, in 2016, Tartine, whose outpost at Heath's Mission District location inspired a bright new glaze--Tartine Teal (above). The collection features Heath's signature rim, and extends the company's 70-year tradition of sourcing clay from Lincoln, California. 

 

KELSEY MCCLELLAN

 

Founder Edith Heath began manufacturing tiles in the early 1970s at this Sausalito factory, but the new owners "wanted to be where our customers are," says Petravic. In 2012, they moved the tile factory to a 60,000-square-foot former commercial laundry in San Francisco's Mission District--keeping dinnerware production in Sausalito--and also opened a second showroom and the Heath Clay Studio.

 

A tilemaker working the Ram press, a machine that uses hydraulics to press clay tiles into different shapes, like this retro design created by designer Leon Galetto in the 1950s. Today, tiles are 29 percent of Heath's business, while ceramics account for 55 percent and home goods--ranging from wallpaper to furniture--make up 16 percent.

 

 

Petravic, Heath's managing director, and Bailey, its creative director, standing in front of Heath's iconic, color-saturated tiles. The couple--designers with a 14-year-old son--didn't want to fall into the trap of increasing volume to meet demand, which often sacrifices quality. Instead, at maximum capacity at both factories, they took Heath in the opposite direction: creating limited-release lines sold only in the showrooms that channel the experimen­tation and playfulness of founder Edith Heath. "It's the heart and soul of where we come from," says Petravic.

 

Bailey is always looking for interesting collaborations, like the ones Heath has with Alabama fashion designer Natalie Chanin and with Finnish furniture maker Artek. Pairing her designers with artists who inspire them, says Bailey, allows them to create more interesting designs than they would on their own. It's also expanded Heath into new categories, like textiles (including tote bags and cloth napkins) manufactured in Heath Sews, and flatware, which Heath produced in partnership with the last remaining flatware maker in the U.S., Sherrill Manufacturing.

 

KELSEY MCCLELLAN

At Heath's Mission tile factory (left), a small army of kiln posts are stacked on a table, where the public can view them on one of the company's many tours. The showroom there is also a bustling hub of small-scale bakers, makers, and craftspeople. In addition to Tartine, there's a Japanese pop-up boutique, a printer's shop, a jewelry studio, and the Heath Newsstand, run by Ema Iwata (right). Launched in 2017, the newsstand--which offers 400 magazines from around the world--is an extension of Bailey and Petravic's deep interest in human-scale, tactile experiences. "We want to encourage a richness of face-to-face interaction," says Petravic.

The Columbia Gorge: A Food and Wine Paradise

I live just an hour from the glorious Columbia Gorge, and whenever I go there to hike or taste wine, I take mental notes of all the new arrivals—especially in the natural wine sector. Last year, Nate Ready at Hiyu Wine Farm mentioned that Italian winemaker Josko Gravner's nephew, baker Jure Poberaj (who, with his girlfriend Nina Jimenez, owns the White Salmon Baking Co.) was going to start making wine, too. I realized it was time to pitch a story. The imminent opening of the stylish Society Hotel Bingen didn't hurt my chances of getting an assignment. 

It was such a delight to be able to report on all the latest food, brewery, and wine news for Bloomberg Businessweek's Pursuits section. Here's the article in PDF form— Download Gorgenow or see the link to the online version here. 

Or, you can just read it here: 

A decade ago, after graduating college, Jure Poberaj moved to Hood River, Ore. (population 7,806), in search of outdoor adventure. Born in Slovenia and raised in Washington, D.C., Poberaj, now 31, was drawn to the magnificent Columbia River Gorge an hour east of Portland for its mountain biking and world-famous kitesurfing (gusts of wind here, where the river stretches about a mile across, can reach 70 mph). The lively brewery scene didn’t hurt either.

As life happens, he met his girlfriend, pastry chef Nina Jimenez, and together they decided to create their own shop, with Poberaj learning how to bake bread by apprenticing around the Northwest. The duo opened the White Salmon Baking Co. four years ago on the sunny Washington side of the gorge, and it’s been crowded ever since, its counters heavy with luscious huckleberry galettes, rhubarb-poppyseed scones, and hearty wood-fired sourdough loaves. As I sat on the patio savoring a latte and messy bacon-avocado toast topped with jammy egg, Mount Hood’s snow-capped 11,250-foot peak standing majestic in the distance, Poberaj told me of his plans to convert some of his land in White Salmon into a vineyard.

 

 

Jure Poberaj and Nina Jimenez

Photographer: Kate Schwager

In 2017 the Eagle Creek Fire razed almost 50,000 acres of forest in the area, leaving many hiking trails closed and causing $8 million in economic loss to the region, according to a study commissioned by Travel Oregon. Today, as the forest slowly recovers, tourists aren’t waiting, particularly foodies seeking out-in-the-wild natural wine experiences—that is, tasting vintages made with organically farmed grapes, native yeasts, and no additives in the cellar (aside from a bit of sulfur). And as of May, there’s a new stylish place to stay: Society Hotel Bingen.

A standard queen room at the Society Hotel Bingen.

Source: The Society Hotel

The Scandinavian-chic property just down the hill from White Salmon, in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Bingen (population 737), is the second Society property from the Portland-based hospitality group. They converted a 1920s schoolhouse into a book-lined lobby that winks to its past with library carts and a door marked “Principal’s Office.” The gym still has a basketball hoop and original bleachers—and now some kettle bells and yoga mats. “We want to appeal to the adventurous traveler at various stages of life,” says co-owner Matt Siegel.

To that end, there are modern, well-designed bunk rooms and standard rooms with king or queen beds, all with shared baths, while the 20 interconnected private cabins (from $269) offer kitchenettes and hammocks. A spa—complete with saltwater soaking pool, cold plunge, and spacious sauna—has a bar and several fire pits around which guests congregate for drinks and conversation post-shvitz.

The spa pool at the Society Hotel.

Photographer: Micah Cruver

The Wineries

Start your wine-tasting circuit with Savage Grace, about 7 miles west of Bingen in the bucolic community of Underwood, Wash. Winemaker Michael Savage recently bought a vineyard here and is organically farming all 10 acres. Pull up a stool at his new tasting room and gaze down at the spectacular beauty of the gorge as you sip an unexpected 2017 orange gewürtztraminer.

On the other side of Bingen, in Lyle, James Mantone at Syncline Winery makes Rhone-style varietals including mourvèdre, syrah, grenache, and carignan, as well as a bone-dry picpoul and a spicy gamay noir. Pack a picnic lunch for the picturesque garden under white oak trees.

The new tasting room at Savage Grace.

Source: Savage Grace Wines

At Domaine Pouillon, a winding 4-mile drive east past fields with roaming horses and grazing cows, Juliet Pouillon pours her husband Alexis’s fruity and biodynamic Alsatian-style wine, edelzwicker. “There’s something magical about the gorge,” she says, “There’s a can-do energy.” Their first fizzy pétillant naturel will be released on Bastille Day. (Most tasting rooms don’t serve food, but Domaine Pouillon will whip up a cheese or salmon plate on request.)

Back over the bridge to Oregon, a picturesque 10-minute drive east to Mosier, Analemma Wines’ Steven Thompson makes some of the best terroir-driven biodynamic wines around—from a single-vineyard sparkling blanc de noirs to a vibrant tinto blend, which tastes of dark red cherry and dried herbs. The micro-climate in Mosier is similar to Galicia, and he’s lately been experimenting with varieties like the floral-tasting mencia.

Analemma’s vineyards above the hamlet of Mosier (population 459).

Source: Analemma Wines

Dining and Beer

Resolutely casual Hood River is your best bet for healthy, delicious fare. Start your day with Broder Øst’s aebleskivers, Danish-style spherical “pancakes” dusted with powdered sugar and served with lingonberry jam and housemade lemon curd. (The kitchen also makes a mean Swedish hash with two baked eggs, smoked trout, pickled beets, and walnut toast.) Upstairs, the funky—and reportedly haunted—1912 Hood River Hotel has 41 rooms and suites, many with fantastic gorge views.

PFriem Family Brewers, one of Oregon’s best breweries, offers about 20 beers on tap—from a hazy IPA to a Belgian strong. The new seasonal menu is excellent, too, in which sambal honey kicks up buttermilk fried chicken and a lentil-mushroom veggie burger with spring garlic aioli sets a new standard.

New on PFriem’s spring menu: buttermilk fried chicken, served over creamy polenta with braised chard.

Source: PFriem Family Brewers

Down the street, New Yorkers Dan and Jenn Peterson opened Ferment Brewing Co. last August. Dan, who cut his teeth at Brooklyn Brewery, makes flavor-packed Belgian and French farmhouse ales as well as lagers, pale ales, and stouts. In a state where hoppy IPAs are king, this is a refreshing change, and the offerings pair perfectly with the Mediterranean-inflected menu of flatbreads and slow-roasted meats—plus Jenn’s housemade frozen yogurt, a light treat befitting active Hood River.

On the upscale end of the dining spectrum, Celilo still stands strong after 14 years, with skillet-roasted Totten Inlet clams and rich pork sugo over rye-flour gnocchi, served with purple broccoli sprouts.

A charcuterie board and beers from PFriem.

Source: PFriem Family Brewers

But the area’s most memorable reservation is high in the hills above town at Hiyu Wine Farm. Hiyu means “the big party” in Chinook Jargon, a Pacific Northwest pidgin language, and Nate Ready and his partner, China Tresemer, don’t disappoint, bringing in chefs such as Gunnar Gislason from Michelin-starred Dill in Iceland to collaborate on locally legendary dinners. If you aren’t in town for one, opt for a lavish family-style weekend lunch. Otherwise, wine tastings are Thursday through Monday by appointment and include seasonal snacks such as Columbia River smelt escabèche and griddled pea shoots with cured duck yolk. Ready’s field blends are wild experiments in natural wines with historical antecedents: Some 120 grape varieties are grown side-by-side, then fermented together. Falcon Box, a Burgundian field blend made to approximate a wine made in 1800s Burgundy, has a brothy, umami flavor.

Some Hiyu wines—including a dolcetto made by Poberaj—are served at White Salmon Baking Co.’s Monday night pizza parties, with its seasonal wood-fired pies and a natural-veering list that also includes little-known producers in Slovenia and Italy. Turns out Poberaj’s great uncle is cult Italian winemaker Josko Gravner, known for aging wines in terracotta amphorae, and he’ll be heading to Oslavia, Italy, to work harvest with him this fall.

Sandwiches at White Salmon Baking Co.

Photographer: Kate Schwager

Explore the Gorge

The food and wine may be great, but the best part of the gorge is the outdoors

Biking
Rent an e-bike from Sol Rides for the 16-mile round-trip journey from Hood River to the hamlet of Mosier via the Historic Columbia River Highway, the first designated scenic highway in the U.S., now a pedestrian and bike path. The 1920s feat of engineering clings to sheer cliffs and burrows through basalt rock. Pause under the Mosier Twin Tunnels for unparalleled views.

Hiking
On the Oregon side of the gorge, the popular, short-but-steep Angel’s Rest Trail has reopened after the fires, though the forest service still urges caution. Head to the Washington side for views of Mount Hood. Beginners can try Catherine Creek; the longest trail is just 5.5 miles round-trip. East of Bingen, the 7.8-mile Coyote Wall Trail is more of a challenge and also popular with mountain bikers. For more hikes, the Friends of the Columbia Gorge maintains a detailed list—just remember to be on the lookout for poison oak and ticks.

Kitesurfing
For lessons, Kite the Gorge is the best place to find a pro. Private two-and-a-half-hour lessons start at $285.

Kitesurfing on Hood River.

Photographer: Zach Dischner

Vignerons to Watch

Three up-and-coming Gorge winemakers Hiyu’s Nate Ready is excited about right now. Not all have tasting rooms, so check local stores for a bottle to take home.

Michael Garofola of Cutter Cascadia
“Michael comes from this Italian-influenced background, and he’s also steeped in classical wine,” says Ready of Garofola, currently the sommelier at Portland’s James Beard Award-winning Beast. Now he’s making his own dolcetto (a red and a rosé) from fruit he farms at Flotow Vineyard, above Hood River. His 2017 vintage of Strawberry Mullet captured the smoke from the Eagle Creek fires; the 2018 vintage is juicy with hints of watermelon.

Bethany Kimmel at Color Collector
After working in the cellar at Analemma, Kimmel struck out on her own. So far, she’s focusing on gamay—“the wines are lovely and perfumed and have amazing textures,” says Ready—but she just purchased a vineyard above Snowden, Wash., and plans to plant grapes like jacquère, chasselas, and persan.

Graham Markel at Buono Notte
Markel, who started his project within Hiyu, focuses on Italian varietals like sangiovese and pinot grigio. (He also makes a vermouth.) “The wines have an amazing fragrance and texture and, I think, a rare beauty,” Ready says. “They’re really special.”

 

 

 

Miami's Sizzling Startup Scene

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.

Women in Weed

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.)  

 

This article was first published in the June 2019 issue of Traveller magazine

 

Walk into Ladies of Paradise on Portland’s Division Street, and you’ll first be struck by the vintage fashion, the mid-century-modern, gold-chrome shelving and all the pink – from the walls to the cat-eye sunglasses. It might take you a few beats to realise that the hanging black sweatshirt is emblazoned with ‘Keep Blazing, Stay Amazing’; that the green, ceramic objets d’art are actually smoking pipes; that the facial serum is made with CBD oil; or that the gold triangle necklace doubles as a roach clip. As it turns out, this expression of fierce, retro femininity is cannabis-themed. 

Ladies of Paradise is a creative agency and shop, founded by stylist Jade Daniels and photographer Harlee Case (both pictured above) around the tenets of ‘women, weed, fashion’. Its Instagram – all candy colours and punky thrift-store glamour – has more than 40,000 followers, and its party-hard events, with themes such as Moroccan Nights or Cowboys vs Aliens, are big draws, taking place in Portland, Denver and Los Angeles. As well as helping to market mostly female-made cannabis products for other brands, the company has now launched its own, including Lady Jays, a line of strain-specific pre-rolled joints that come in Miami Vice-style pink-and-green boxes.

 ‘We wanted to bring some fun and creativity to the smoking lifestyle,’ says Case, who right now has purple-streaked blonde hair. ‘Everything we do is very extra; we want people to dress up and be themselves, and to mix cannabis with art, fashion and pop culture.’

She and Daniels met in Southern Oregon, when Case was running an online vintage shop and shot Daniels’s jewellery for its website. They bonded over their love of weed and eclectic, era-bending fashion, and soon found themselves photographing female cannabis growers in ball gowns. Things have developed quickly since they moved to Portland a few years ago, with Ladies of Paradise hiring a graphic designer, social-media editor and project manager. In 2018 the female-focused, smoker-themed store opened, and many of the items for sale are made by locals. ‘Our aim is to uplift people who are doing awesome things, and to get rid of stigmas,’ says Case.

Ladies of Paradise isn’t alone in what Case calls ‘this wild weed culture that’s driven by women who all really support each other’. As Portland becomes the USA's progressive cannabis-lifestyle capital, a diverse set of ladies have created everything from Aesop-like dispensaries to a Kinfolk-style magazine and a business course for female CEOs. They meet up in loft spaces and yoga classes, as high on get-up-and-go as they are on locavore marionberry gummies.

One of the scene’s pioneers is Cambria Benson Noecker, brand director at cannabis company Groundworks Industries. Noecker, who has a pomeranian-chihuahua mix called Gucci, was the driving force behind two of the state’s coolest dispensaries, Serra and Electric Lettuce. When designing Serra in 2014, she was adamant that she ‘didn’t want that tie-dyed Bob Marley vibe.’

Instead, her team created two airy, apothecary-inspired concept stores, one of which has a plant wall and a neon-blue sign that reads ‘Quality Drugs’. Little buds from high-grade Oregon growers such as East Fork Cultivars are presented worshipfully in glass cabinets, which also house an obsessively curated selection of paraphernalia, including Stonedware’s geometric porcelain pipes, designed by local artist Ariel Zimman, and Leif Goods organic CBD chocolate bars. The next outpost will open in LA.

 

Another figure who has defined Portland’s new feminine-cannabis aesthetic is Anja Charbonneau, the former Kinfolk creative director who launched female-staffed, visually lush Broccoli magazine in 2017 (broccoli is slang for weed). ‘Most of the existing publications were male and news-oriented,’ says Charbonneau. ‘We wanted something deeper that stimulates the senses.’ The first issue’s beautifully spare cover story was on Japanese ikebana flower arranging, but with cannabis plants; stories since have touched on everything from smoking etiquette to reproductive health for users. Next, it will hold a three-day festival called In Bloom at Portland’s sceney Jupiter Next Hotel.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, in the city’s Chinatown, The Commune is a brick-walled, Brooklyn-ish office and gathering space devoted to weed culture. Founder Amy Margolis, a high-flying lawyer, is also behind The Initiative, a business boot camp for women who want to launch cannabis-related businesses. Graduates include Yvonne Perez Emerson of Make & Mary, which produces CBD skincare and aromatherapy inhalers, and Meryl Montgomery and Valarie Sakota, founders of chic Barbari, a lifestyle brand and shop (Montgomery is also the partnerships manager at Broccoli).

Events are a big part of the scene. Everyone goes to bars such as Rontoms, with its fire pit and stage, and the Escape Bar and Grill, a queer, female-owned joint with karaoke and games. But the real fun is DIY, largely because pre-legalisation smokers got good at putting on house parties. Take Make & Mary’s Emerson, who hosts yoga sessions and workshops in her hangar-like Tillamook Station studio. There is a BYOW (bring-your-own-weed) policy, and meet-ups have included hemp-flower arranging, pipe decorating and abstract-art classes. Tokeativity is even more ambitious: the global ladies’ cannabis club, which started in Portland, now has chapters in Seattle and South Africa. Founders Lisa Snyder, a women’s rights activist, and artist Samantha Montanaro, also came through The Initiative, and facilitate regular functions, from Alice in Wonderland-themed parties to meetings for mothers. The early get-togethers often took place at Montanaro’s home: for the Witchy Woman social in 2017, rooms hosted tarot readings, mala-bracelet crafts and a spooky photobooth, where Case took the photographs.

What none of them are doing is lying on the sofa watching Cheech and Chong videos. ‘People used to say to me: how do you get anything done?’ says Case. ‘But that’s changing. No one would look at this bunch of women doing amazing things in Portland and call us lazy. 

Ani Difranco Unplugged

 

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 I was asked to review Ani's memoir for the Women's Review of Books. Here's the review, for your reading pleasure:  Download DifrancoReview PDF

Destination: Denver

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Celebrating the Maialata—Italy's Festival of the Pig

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.”

 

The Futurist: Oregon's Bertony Faustin

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, called Red, 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.

Travel + Leisure's It List/ The Hoxton Portland

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. 

Green Zebra: the Healthy Convenience Store

Lisa Sedlar, founder and CEO of Green Zebra, an Oregon-based healthy convenience store chain 

 

I wrote about Green Zebra for Inc.

 

Green Zebra is the anti-7-Eleven.

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 slurpees and 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.