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.”
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.
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)
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.”
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 thatrestaurants 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.”
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.”
(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.”
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.
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.
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.
{This story appeared on Civil Eats in February, 2018.}
As part of a Jane Goodall-inspired community action group, "Saving Pan" includes recipes from Michelle Obama, Michael Pollan, and world-famous chefs.
When Brooke Abbruzzese was in sixth grade, she had no idea what to expect when she wrote First Lady Michelle Obama to ask for her favorite vegetarian recipe—or if she’d even get a response. But a month later, she found in her mailbox a formal-looking envelope fastened with the official White House seal.
“I was like, ‘What the heck! Why is there something from the White House in our mailbox?’” recalled Abbruzzese, who is now 14 and a freshman at Grant Park High School in Portland.
Obama’s recipe—for White House Kitchen Garden Cucumber Soup—joins recipes from Michael Pollan, and chefs Thomas Keller and Ina Garten, and many other luminaries in Saving Pan, a new cookbook created by Abbruzzese and 13 other Portland teens. The cookbook benefits the work of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga Sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo.
“In sixth grade, I was really into the environment, and I wanted to help give back,” said Abbruzzese, who admits to an obsession with Goodall. She met a primatologist friend of her father’s who told her about Roots & Shoots, the Goodall Institute’s youth-led community action program. Abbruzzese was inspired to form a chapter in her own community, drawing mostly from her classmates at Portland’s Beverly Cleary School. After researching why chimpanzees are endangered, the girls decided to focus on raising awareness of the illegal bushmeat trade, which is one of the biggest threats to chimp populations in Africa.
“I got a group of people together and we brainstormed, and that’s kind of how the cookbook came about,” said Abbruzzese. Saving Pan is a collection of vegetarian recipes that Abbruzzese and her classmates created over the course of three years. The title refers to the genus name for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), but also to that most important cooking tool (the cover photo is a blackberry cobbler cooked in a cast-iron pan).
And then there’s Peter Pan, the classic children’s book. As the group explains in their introduction, “Think of it this way: Peter Pan was an orphaned child, similar to the orphaned chimps in Africa. It’s our biggest hope that they can go on to thrive as well as he did.”
McKenzie, Charlotte, and Willa cook up Mark Bittman's frittata
The cookbook was published in December and has already sold 800 copies—not bad for a self-published cookbook that so far has only been sold in Portland. The students have been featured in local news reports, and their U.S. Representative, Earl Blumenauer, recognized their achievement during a congressional session in December. And Saving Pan has already raised $8,000 to protect chimpanzees in Africa.
And the great apes need as much help as they can get. At the end of the 19th century, chimpanzees numbered as many as 1 million. Today, because of deforestation and illegal hunting, they are endangered. They have already disappeared from four African countries and are nearing extinction in many others. In fact, according to the World Wildlife Federation there are fewer than 250,000 chimps left in the wild.
Each Roots & Shoots project is supposed to be rooted in the chapter’s community, so the students—knowing Portland is recognized for its culinary scene—decided to engage local chefs. (The cookbook eventually grew to include chefs from all over the country—and even Canada, France, and Spain.) They thought a vegetarian cookbook would be a great way to educate others about the bushmeat trade in Africa and its effects on remaining chimpanzee populations.
“Because we’re trying to stop the hunting of animals, we thought that promoting vegetarianism would be a really good way to do that,” Abbruzzese said. Putting a vegetarian cookbook together involved writing to food-world leaders like Michelle Obama as well as the chefs at nationally known veg-centric restaurants like Angelica’s Kitchen in New York City (which has since closed), Greens in San Francisco, and the Green Door in Ottawa. The students went door-to-door in Portland, asking celebrated local chefs including Jenn Louis, Kelly Myers, Sarah Pliner, and Jaco Smith for recipes. And the book also contains favorite recipes from the girls’ families: Aunt Debbie’s Artichoke Lasagna, Grandma Eastman’s Macaroni & Cheese, and the blackberry-blueberry cobbler shown on the cover.
A Jane Goodall collage, from Saving Pan.
Over the course of three years, the students gathered to test recipes on Friday nights. “The Friday I joined, they were doing the Michelle Obama recipe. So, I was like, ‘This is even cooler than I thought,’” said Emma Francioch, 14.
To avoid the chaos of too many cooks in the kitchen, half of them cooked, while the other half worked on the collages of the chefs that illustrate each recipe. They learned basic cooking skills from each other, through trial and error, and from the hosting parents. “They even had to clean up their own mess!” said Shanta Abbruzzese, Brooke’s mom.
“I was a little bit interested in cooking prior to doing this cookbook, but I didn’t have a lot of skills,” said Willa Gagnon, 15. “And now I feel like I can go into the kitchen and look at a recipe—or not—and I can make food that my whole family wants to eat.”
The girls had some surprise favorites, including lime-tofu wraps, Moroccan chickpea soup, “Soba Sensation,” and Michael Pollan’s “Any-Veggie Frittata.” Stokes, who usually doesn’t like coconut, was surprised by how yummy the roasted cauliflower in a creamy coconut fennel sauce was. (Chef Roy Farmer at the Green Door in Ottawa contributed the recipe.) “I need to make that again. I just love this recipe!” she said.
The cauliflower recipe was a touchstone for the students, teaching them that even when they think they don’t like an ingredient they should try it in a new iteration. “A lot of people in the group were like, ‘Noooo! I don’t want to eat it—I don’t like cauliflower!’” said Abbruzzese. “But then, everybody’s like: ‘You have to try it!’ And I don’t think there was a single person who wouldn’t eat it.”
Many of the girls became vegetarians on and off throughout the project; Abbruzzese became a vegetarian because of the cookbook—and remains one today. “I fly fish and she’s prohibited me from keeping what I catch. I have to throw it back,” says Brooke’s father, Chris Abbruzzese.
Working on a project that took three years to see through was tough. “There were definitely times where I was like, ‘Is this really gonna happen?’” said Stokes.
Ultimately the project taught them not only how to cook and work effectively in a large group but the value of persistence and dedication.
That said, they think their next project for the Grant Park Chapter of Roots & Shoots won’t be quite as ambitious. “We’re starting to get busier, and we’re starting to get, like, more homework,” said Stokes. “Before the book came out, we didn’t even know what finals week was!”
Over a decade ago, while filmmaker Laura Dunn was making her first feature documentary, “The Unforeseen,” farmer and poet Wendell Berry graciously invited her into his Henry County, Kentucky home so she could record him reading the poem from which the movie’s title originates. Like many, Dunn was moved by Berry’s presence, and she’s been working to bring his worldview to a wider audience ever since.
Earlier this year, she released “Look and See,” an unconventional documentary about Berry’s life. In the film, Berry himself is elusive, never actually appearing on camera in the present day. Instead, the film is filled with still images of Berry on his farm in the early years, television footage from the 1970s of him opining about changes to agriculture, and his resonant voice floating over gorgeously shot images of Kentucky farmland.
Wendell Berry at his multipaned window, which he wrote about in the Window Poems.
Dunn knew early on that Berry would not agree to be filmed. But rather than abandon the project entirely, she took this as a creative challenge. As a result, “Look and See” offers a view of the world from Berry’s eyes instead. Over the course of the film, you meet Berry’s daughter, Mary; his wife, Tanya; and numerous Kentucky farmers whose struggle to stay on the land in the face of consolidation is the subject of much of Berry’s work.
The film also captures Berry’s debate with Earl Butz, the now famous U.S. secretary of agriculture under Nixon and Ford, and a major proponent of industrialization of agriculture. In his rebuttal, Berry pays homage to the “traditional farmer” who “first fed himself off his farm and then fed other people; who farmed with his family, and passed the land on to people who knew it and had the best reason to take care of it. That farmer stood at the convergence of traditional values. Our values. Independence, thrift, stewardship, private property, political liberty, family, marriage, parenthood, neighborhood. Values that declined as that farmer is replaced by technologies whose only standard is profit.”
“Look and See,” which has been screened in communities across the country through TUGG (a theatrical booking site for indie films), debuted on Netflix in October. Civil Eats spoke to Dunn about telling the story of Berry’s life, her unconventional filmmaking methods, and why she sees Berry’s novels as the heart of his oeuvre.
When did you first read Wendell Berry’s writing and what imprinted itself upon you?
I read The Unsettling of America in high school. My mom is a [corn] geneticist—and very much an environmentalist, an agricultural person. Because of that, I was interested in these ideas. And then I read more of his stuff in college; he was a writer I really loved. But when I was working on my first feature, “The Unforeseen,” [executive producer] Terrence Malik wanted me to find some voices to include in the film … So I delved deeply into his work—mostly his poetry. And then I reread The Unsettling. And I really fell in love with his poetry and his work again.
And why did you decide to make this film, so many years later?
When we toured “The Unforeseen,” I was really surprised by how few people knew who Wendell Berry was. I feel like more people should be familiar with Berry’s work.
Can you talk about what it was like to make a film about Berry without including him in it? And I take it that wasn’t your choice?
It was the constraint he put on me. He is really anti-screen: no computers, T.V., or movies. He thinks it contributes to the decline of literacy and the deterioration of imagination. And I knew that, so I knew this would be a challenge.
He didn’t want to be filmed—it makes him feel so inauthentic. So, in those early conversations, I said to him, “I understand. I actually think that’s very insightful information about you. If we could just do audio interviews, that would be interesting. I want you to point me to what we should see.” So I accepted that constraint. And it was his wife Tanya who would say, “This is who you should talk to.”
Can you say anything about the black-and-white still photos at the heart of the film?
James Baker Hall, one of Wendell’s dearest friends, passed away in 2009. He was a writer and professor at the University of Kentucky, and he took all these gorgeous black-and-white photos. His widow had boxes and boxes of never-before-seen negatives and when we found them, I thought, “There’s a film here that we could piece together.” It’s sort of impressionist-style.
Who are the farmers you interview throughout, and why do you choose not to name them in the course of the film?
Everyone in the film is a friend or a neighbor of Berry’s. Sometimes I watch the film and think, “Maybe I should have named them.” Form is something I’m constantly experimenting with. There are standard things you’re supposed to do in a documentary. I had it with their names for a long time. Then I thought, “It becomes so literal-minded.” I want people to feel something. We live in such an information age. I don’t want more data. I want something that’s going to transport me to a place. I’m making the film I want to see.
Can you speak about the beautiful wood engravings that start each chapter of the film?
Wesley Bates has illustrated a lot of Wendell’s books. [Co-director/producer] Jef Sewell, my husband, did the visual design. I wanted it to be chapters like in a book. So he said, “We have to find Wesley Bates.” He’s an amazing, vibrant artist in his 60s, who lives in Toronto. They’d have conversations over the phone and then he’d sketch something and then we’d give him feedback.
Throughout the film, we hear Berry reading his poems. How did you choose which poems to include?
It was really tough. “The Window Poem” was something I had read many years ago and that was really in mind when we started the film. It’s about the tension between the grit of our world and the patterns. My approach was to go to Henry County and do a portrait of this place. We’d go and I’d spend a few weeks, find what stories were compelling. We’d shoot all the footage and then you edit it and you find narratives—poems to frame things. This illustrates this idea, or that idea.
I was familiar with his essays and poetry, but I didn’t know that he also wrote novels. Can you say a little about them?
I honestly think his novels are the heart of his work. Basically, every single novel is told through the eyes of a different character in a small town in Kentucky. The more you read, the more complete a picture you get.
Berry is hard to categorize, and you get at that in the film where his wife Tanya says, “Some people would think he’s a novelist and some think he’s an essayist and some think he’s a poet…” How do you see him?
I see him as an artist. I think his nonfiction writing is infused with poetics all over the place. He sees segmentation or categorization as a function of the industrial mind. He very much believes in interdisciplinary thought. So I think he’s deliberately defying … category. He doesn’t want to be limited.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “Look and See” is available on Netflix; the trailer is below.
The food system, like every other sphere of life in America, has been shaped by structural racism and racial injustice. Civil Eats has chronicled some of the many efforts to expose and address the ways that structures in the food system actively work to silence, marginalize and take advantage of people of color.
Ricardo Salvador, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and director of its Food and Environment Program, has spent a lifetime writing and talking about what an equitable food system might look like. On a recent, unseasonably sunny October evening at The Redd on Salmon in Portland, Oregon, he offered 800 food system innovators a reminder about the size and scope of institutional racism in our current food system, underlined the urgency of food justice work, and offered concrete actions we can all take to create positive change.
“We live in a very unjust, inequitable society,” began Salvador. “And the brunt of the inequity is felt through the food system.” Salvador detailed how we got here through the dark history of colonization—from the genocide of the myriad Native American tribes, whose land we stole, to the African citizens who were abducted and enslaved by the English and then the Americans.
“From the standpoint of an economist, the way you generate wealth is that you have access to at least one of the factors of production: land, labor, rent,” Salvador said. From the 1830s until the 1880s, he noted, we drove the original inhabitants of this continent off their land, quite literally depriving them of their food as well as their food culture.
“If you want to find some of the most immiserated human beings on the planet—not just in the United States—you would go to the concentration camps that we call the reservations,” Salvador said. “Here is where you will find people whose land was taken from them, and therefore their foodways, their ways of accessing the natural resources upon which they based their entire cultures and they way that they nourished themselves.”
Similarly, the Africans who were taken from their homeland and brought to the U.S. by the slave trade were driven against their will from their land and were forced to be the unpaid labor to allow white Americans to profit. “What those people were enslaved to do was actually to drive the beginning of what today we call Big Ag,” Salvador said.
Tragically, slavery has not disappeared. To this day, exploited farm labor is what keeps the cost of food so cheap in this country. “Farm labor is the most essential, the most important part of our food system, and the most undervalued,” Salvador said.
“We spend as little as 6 to 12 percent of our disposable income on food. That is usually quoted as something that we should be very proud of. But it should be a national shame,” he said. “It’s as if the workers involved in the food industry and nature that is required to produce the food were costs to be minimized…We need to find a way in which we actually value all of those resources—the land and the people that are involved.”
One of the long-simmering questions facing those striving for better food for all is how to go beyond voting with your fork? Is it possible to create a new food system that does not rely on exploitation?
Salvador made a case for profound system shifts like reparations, loan forgiveness programs, and immigration reform. He urged people to work independently and collectively to support these goals and the great food-system reform work that’s already afoot in our communities around this country. Among his suggestions:
• Support Reparations to the descendants of enslaved peoples. One place to start is to urge your members of Congress to support Rep. John Conyers’ (D–MI) bill, HR 40: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.
• Support immigration and labor reforms that value labor and provide for dignified livelihood. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, and realistic transition initiatives such as the proposed “Blue Card” program.
• Get your elected officials to support U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree’s Local Food and Regional Market Supply FARMS bill, which will create local jobs, boost midsize farms’ sales, and increase access to healthy food.
• Get your elected officials to read and support Oregon senator Earl Blumenauer’s roadmap for an alternative Farm Bill “Growing Opportunities.”
• Get your local school district to sign onto the Good Food Purchasing program, a metric-based framework that encourages institutions to direct their buying power toward local economies, environmental sustainability, a valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. (L.A. Unified School District, San Francisco Unified, Oakland Unified, and Chicago Public Schools have all already signed on.)
In closing his presentation at the Redd, Salvador came back to his original question.
“Do we know enough to create a food system that does not rely on exploitation?” he asked. “Yes, we know enough to produce our food without exploiting nature, and we definitely know enough to produce our food without exploiting people…. Let me just put a very sharp point on it for you: The question is not really: ‘Do we know enough to be better?’ The question is: ‘Will we?’”
A new documentary chronicles the efforts of wheat farmers and urban gardeners as they shift to sustainable farming. {This story ran on Civil Eats on Sept. 29th, 2017.)
“I’ve never been comfortable growing lawns and golf courses when there’s a worldwide food shortage,” says Willow Coberly at the beginning of the new documentary “Gaining Ground.” Willow is married to Harry Stalford, a grass-seed farmer from Oregon’s Willamette Valley who, at the start of the film, is as conventional as they come. His transformation into a champion of organic wheat, thanks to his wife’s prodding and persistence, is the moral heart of this stirring film.
Farming in and of itself is a risky profession. “Gaining Ground” tells the stories of three farmers—two from rural Oregon and one from Richmond, California—who take additional risks to transition away from conventional, commodity farming to grow organic food. In the case of Doria Robinson, who returned to her hometown of Richmond to work at Urban Tilth, the mere act of growing sustainably farmed food in a food desert is a deeply courageous act. As she says in the film, “This is the front line, and somebody has to hold it.”
Filmmaker Elaine Velazquez and her wife, the producer and radio documentarian Barbara Bernstein, took five years to shoot and edit the film, which turned out to be a good thing. Just as they were about to wrap the shoot, two issues that had been looming in the background of their farmers’ lives—and their documentary—came front and center: The Chevron refinery in Richmond exploded and genetically modified wheat was found in an Oregon field.
The couple has been showing the film at events around Oregon and at film festivals across the country; it will have its Bay Area theatrical debut this weekend at the Food & Farm Film Festival in San Francisco. (The film will be shown on October 1 at 4 p.m.) Civil Eats spoke to Velazquez and Bernstein about the importance of forging rural-urban connections in the age of Trump, Richmond’s long tradition of farming, and why the next generation sees a future in organic farming.
When Cattail Creek Lamb owner John Neumeister was younger, he would devote one day per week to making the 110-mile drive from his ranch near Junction City, Oregon to Portland, where the bulk of his customers were located.
“I’d leave the farm, drive 100 miles to the processor, pack the order myself, do the invoices by hand in the truck, and then go make 20-25 deliveries at restaurants around Portland,” said Neumeister, who will turn 70 next month. He would crash at a friend’s house in Portland, then do more deliveries the next day, on the way back home.
These 15-hour-days took their toll, but they also didn’t allow Neumeister, who has been raising pastured lamb since he took over his family’s flock in high school, any time to drum up new business or work on long-term sales strategy. And if he got a last-minute order from a Portland restaurant who suddenly ran out of lamb mid-week there was little he could do about it.
“If a chef called me on Thursday, I might say ‘You know, I can see if UPS can deliver it,’” Neumeister said. Which meant trying—sometimes in vain—to stalk his local UPS driver, whose delivery route he knew by heart. If he couldn’t locate the UPS truck, Neumeister was out of luck.
“And then the restaurant would end up buying from one of my competitors.”
A B-Line trike rider leaves the Redd with a refrigerated box full of food for Portland area restaurants
Now, thanks to the Redd on Salmon, a Portland food hub created by the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust, Neumeister not only has freezer storage space for up to 3,600 pounds of lamb in Central Eastside Portland, he’s got a stall for staging orders, an office space, and built-in distribution via B-Line trikes to Portland area restaurants.
Best of all, there’s no need to chase down UPS drivers. When a restaurant needs a special order of pastured lamb, as happened earlier this month with chef Joshua McFadden’s Tusk, all Neumeister needs to do is call B-line, who also does fulfillment for Cattail Creek.
In the late spring of 2014, Janaki Jagannath and her colleagues had left a community meeting and were standing in the dusty basketball court inside Cantua Elementary School in Cantua Creek, California. Nestled deep in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, Cantua Creek is one of the poorest communities in the state—located in one of its most lucrative agricultural regions.
The residents of Cantua Creek had just been hit with three-fold water rate hikes, which would mean paying close to $300 a month for water the local health department had found to be contaminated with high levels of disinfection byproducts, leaving it undrinkable. And residents had just been told that their water would be shut off if they couldn’t pay the new rates. Jagannath, who was then working for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), was outraged.
“In California, water is the epitome of privilege,” Jagannath explained by e-mail. “At no point in this state’s history have rural residents—the people who do the work of growing, picking, and packing our agricultural commodities—had a say in where clean water should be directed. The odds have been stacked against small, local vegetable producers—and moreover against the health and safety of farmworkers—for the majority of California history.”
Standing around the local basketball court with colleagues from other farmworker advocacy organizations and environmental justice nonprofits, Jagannath realized an urgent need for these groups to come together strategically if they were to succeed in fighting the myriad injustices facing low-income farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley.
She got her wish. A year later, at just 26, Jagannath was hired to be the first coordinator of the San Joaquin Valley Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which she soon renamed the Community Alliance for Agroecology (CAFA). Now 28, Jagannath is known as a powerful advocate for farmworker rights, environmental justice, and political organizing in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
“Jagannath took the Alliance to a different level,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and one of the Alliance’s founders. “Her focus became ‘How do we work with small farmers of color in the valley? How do we build a good agricultural system from the ground up?’”
For two years at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), Jagannath had worked one-on-one with farmworkers who had experienced pesticide exposure, harassment in the fields, and wage theft. She also worked on some larger environmental justice cases—like the episode in Cantua Creek—that were focused on communities’ access to fresh water.
In Cantua Creek, Jagannath worked alongside residents to secure subsidy funding from the state to defray their water bills, and arranged for state-funded bottled water to be delivered to each home (which is still happening to this day). Situations like the ones at Cantua Creek are symptoms of a larger illness, of course. Members of CAFA get farmworkers involved in building environmental justice solutions. For example, CAFA is currently advocating for legislation known as the Farmer Equity Act (AB 1348), which would give socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers increased access to environmental stewardship funds.
Formative Experiences in Farming
Jagannath’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from South India, settling in Mobile, Alabama, where Jagannath was born. Her dad worked at paper mills in the South, and Jagannath’s childhood was punctuated by moves from one rural mill town to another. Her parents divorced when she was five, and eventually her mom moved to Southern California, where she raised Jagannath and her brother.
I fell in love with agriculture there,” Jagannath said. “I grew up wanting to farm.”
Jagannath may have been destined for a career in farming—after all, Janaki is the Hindu goddess of agriculture. “Overall, she is a central character in Hindu faith representing the ecological cycles of the planet upon which agriculture, and all of life on earth, depend,” said Jagannath. But during college at the University of California, Davis, Jagannath spent her summers working at Chino Nojo, a diversified fruit and vegetable farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California. She harvested crops—from carrots to strawberries—alongside the field crew and also worked at the farm’s vegetable shop.
She remembers picking the season’s finest heirloom tomatoes and then slicing them for Alice Waters at the back of the shed so she could taste them before loading up crates for Chez Panisse. She also recalls picking golden raspberries in late summer for Wolfgang Puck, who would drive all the way to the farm from Spago in Los Angeles.“
Working at Chino Nojo opened her eyes to the need for more farms like it—those that provide long-term, stable work for farmworkers, and employers who see farming as a dignified occupation.
“I learned a lot of what I know about farming from one farmworker there, Rene Herrera, who has worked there for most of his life, and his father before him,” Jagannath said. “Those kinds of jobs are rare as a farmworker—because farms like the Chino family’s are equally rare and precious places.”
At UC Davis, Jagannath “got politicized,” she said. She discovered the vocabulary with which to explain the environmental downside of her dad’s jobs working at paper mills throughout the South—and learned about the concept of environmental justice.
By the time she graduated in 2011—with a B.S. in International Agricultural Development—Jagannath had worked with faculty to build the University’s Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems degree, which is considered a paradigm-shifting step for agricultural education in California. She went on to get a certificate in ecological horticulture from UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.
Fighting for Policy and System Change
At the Community Alliance for Agroecology, there are three main areas of work: policy advocacy (as with the Farmer Equity Act, or trying to establish a drinking water fund for rural residents paid for by Big Ag polluters), local agroecology organizing (such as holding farmer-to-farmer exchanges on agroecology and market enhancement), and building political power for systems change (they host trainings in the areas of food systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy and organizing). Right now, the organization’s biggest policy push is on the Farmer Equity Act, though the group has also been actively trying to get the state to channel some of the subsidies it grants to large dairies with methane digesters to “alternative manure-management strategies” like pasture-based dairies.
Promoting soil health is another major area of the Alliance’s focus. “Janaki knows all this information about soil health,” said Genoveva Islas, Program Director at Cultiva La Salud. “It really does help to highlight our connection back to the earth, and why it’s so important to preserve it.”
In addition to composting and manure management, CAFA is championing a practice known as orchard recycling. “Rather than growing an almond tree for 25 years and pulling it out and burning it in field, you take that material and blend it back into the soil,” explained Janaki. “We’re essentially trying to close the loop.”
But probably the most exciting part of CAFA’s work right now—especially in the Trump era—lies in developing a so-called “organizer academy” led by two United Farm Workers-trained organizers that will teach community members and farmworkers about food-systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy, and organizing. “The curriculum is taught in a way that’s evocative of the 1960s and 70s organizing strategies that were successful in winning some of the major battles for equity for farmworkers,” said Jagannath. So far, the pilot project has been for CAFA staff only, but Janaki envisions trainings for farmworkers in the near future.
“We can’t just advocate for reform and regulation,” Jagannath said. “Instead, we’re working on how to build political power amongst farmworker communities, to ensure our local and state elections have representation for communities of color who have been paying taxes but not receiving any of the benefits.”
Update: Jagannath will be attending UC Davis law school in the fall to study Environmental Law with a focus on agriculture and land use. CAFA is currently seeking a new coordinator.
This story appeared on Civil Eats on January 20th. (And was later published on Grub Street as well.)
When a group of restaurant owners from the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United) held their most recent virtual meeting, members shared their employees’ fear of a Trump administration. “They expressed concern over the well-being of their employees, who are traumatized. And their concern over the feasibility of their businesses if Trump does enact all of these policies,” said Sheila Maddali, co-director of the Tipped Worker Resource Center at ROC United.
So in early January, members of ROC United’s national restaurant employer association, RAISE, wrote a letter to President-elect Trump asking for a pathway to citizenship. Inspired by their members’ courage, and their willingness to use their collective voice, ROC’s leadership banded together with Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino online organizing group, and launched the Sanctuary Restaurant campaign.
In just two weeks—and without publicizing the campaign—65 restaurants across the country signed on to become Sanctuary Restaurants, prominently displaying window signs that they are a safe place for undocumented immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community. Restaurants span the country and include Coi in San Francisco, Lil’s in Kittery, Maine, Honey Butter Fried Chicken in Chicago, and ROC United’s own restaurant, Colors, in Detroit and New York City.
In addition to publicly committing to a zero-tolerance policy for racism, sexism, and xenophobia, these restaurants are part of a rapid response network that will offer strategies for protecting targeted workers and informational trainings on legal rights. They have also created a number employees can text if they’re experiencing harassment or injustice: text TABLE to 225568.
ROC United’s effort is just one of many like it. As Trump is sworn is as the 45th president of the United States, the restaurant industry is understandably on the front lines: Trump made it crystal clear during the campaign that he wants to deport all undocumented immigrants and build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. This is serious news for restaurant workers, as the Pew Research Center estimates that at least 1.2 million in the U.S. are undocumented.
Chefs Take Action
In addition to longer-term planning to protect vulnerable communities from the Trump agenda, chefs across the country have taken the inauguration as an opportunity to do good in their own communities, by either welcoming them into their restaurants or hosting pop-up fundraisers for progressive causes.
Renee Erickson, the James Beard Award-winning chef from Seattle’s Walrus and the Carpenter and Whale Wins, is hosting a fundraiser at her Capitol Hill hotspot, Bar Melusine, on January 20. Funds will go to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry.
In Portland, Oregon, Le Pigeon and Little Bird will donate 5 percent of sales on Inauguration Day to three organizations that provide legal services for new immigrants. The same day, Chez Panisse, Mission Chinese, Zuni Café, and 21 other celebrated Bay Area restaurants will each serve a dish using manoomin, the wild rice cultivated by the Ojibwe people. Proceeds from that dish will go to Honor the Earth, a nonprofit that works to revive indigenous food traditions and has been deeply involved in the resistance at Standing Rock. The fundraiser, called #FoodStand, will extend to the Good Food Awards, which take place in San Francisco over inauguration weekend.
Cookie Grab & Other Fundraising Efforts
Other actions are already underway. In Portland, Oregon, 21 female bakers and chefs participated in a “Cookie Grab” that raised $27,500 for Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette. The pink boxes, costing $50 and containing 21 cookies, sold out within 24 hours.
“It was a truly amazing response that we did not expect,” said Sarah Minnick, owner of Portland’s Lovely’s Fifty-Fifty and co-organizer of the Cookie Grab. “When the donation coordinator for Planned Parenthood called to see how she could help us promote the fundraiser, I told her we were already sold out and she cried.”
Now, Minnick and co-organizer Kristen Murray, the chef and owner of Portland luncheonette Maurice, plan to do the Cookie Grab two times a year to generate money and excitement for Planned Parenthood. In Bellingham, Washington a group of bakers and chefs organized their own Cookie Grab in early January, selling all 75 boxes of cookies for $40 each in 24 hours, earning $3,000 for Mt. Baker Planned Parenthood Healthcare Center.
Organizer Cara Piscitello of Acme Farms + Kitchen says they already have plans in the works for a second fundraiser to mark Trump’s 100th day in office. “Should any other crisis or extreme injustice arise before then, we are ready to take action and pitch in where we can,” said Piscitello.
“A lot of people we love and support—our family and friends—are in groups that are potentially going to be ignored or treated poorly, based on the new administration,” said Erickson. She chose the ADL as her charity for its longstanding commitment to protecting civil rights for all. The group’s efforts cover a broad range, including cyberbullying prevention workshops in schools across the country.
“There are so many issues and this one covered the most bases,” said Erickson. The ADL looks out for all people who might experience discrimination or hate.” She added that the fundraiser at Bar Melusine is an open house party—there is no exclusive invite list or $200 per plate fee. “This way we can invite people from all parts of our lives—some that will give lots of money and some who will give nothing at all, but who will be supportive.”
In addition to asking guests for donations, Erickson and her staff will auction off works by prominent Seattle artists Curtis Steiner and Jeffry Mitchell. Erickson’s main suppliers—Hama Hama Oyster Co., Willowood Farms, and Sea Wolf Bakers—are all donating food to the event; cases of wine and liquor will also be donated.
In Washington, D.C., an all-volunteer initiative called All in Service has recruited 124 restaurants and retailers to donate a percentage of their profits from inauguration weekend to local charities. Establishments include places like Tryst, Momofuku CCDC, and Glen’s Garden Market; charities will range from those that support the local migrant community to LGBTQ issues and homelessness.
Also in D.C., on January 19 and 20, Italian café and food emporium Via Umbria in Georgetown will host a $25 cocktail class, “Cheers to Powerful Women,” that will feature classic American cocktails inspired by powerful American women. All profits from the classes will go to Planned Parenthood. Pizzeria Paradiso’s Dupont Circle location will be serving pints from women-owned Denizens Brewing Company; 100 percent of all proceeds will go to the League of Women Voters.
Instead of fundraising, Seattle chef Josh Henderson is opening up two of his restaurants on inauguration day to feed the houseless or any Seattleite who needs a free hearty meal. “Trump represents disunity. I just want to show that there are people who represent the opposite of that. That there’s love and hope,” said Henderson. The restaurants, Quality Athletics in Pioneer Square and Canteen in South Lake Union, will serve spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad, garlic bread, and apple pie on Friday afternoon.
Most chefs are quick to say that doing good is not a partisan issue—or shouldn’t be. “No matter what our guests’ political beliefs are, they are welcome in our restaurants,” said Le Pigeon co-owners Gabriel Rucker and Andy Fortgang in a statement explaining their choice to donate to local immigrant rights groups. Yet, the statement continues, the climate for immigrants could be more hostile with the incoming administration. “The restaurant business has always been a major employer of immigrants and it is a group we care deeply about. Helping others is not a protest—it’s what we feel is the right thing to do.”
Even so, there’s bound to be pushback—customers who will insist they don’t go to restaurants for political reasons. But Katherine Miller, executive director of the Chef Action Network and senior director of food policy advocacy at the James Beard Foundation, thinks it’s wonderful that so many restaurants are finding creative ways to be there for their employees and all customers during a time of fear and tension.
“Restaurants are your communities these days. These chefs are leaders in their communities,” said Miller. “They’re really showing their support for American values—the things that make us great as a country.”
Claw, who is from Burma, fries up veggies for a pad thai
It’s 10:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning in late July, and 15 families are lined up outside SnowCap Community Charities in the Rockwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Many have been waiting for over an hour in hopes that they’ll get first dibs at this food pantry, which is the largest in the state, serving over 9,000 people a month. The old model was that food pantries gave clients a pre-packed box of food. But SnowCap, like an increasing number of food pantries across the U.S., allows clients to “shop” or choose for themselves what they want to eat. There are limitations on some items, and generally speaking, the earlier they arrive, the better the pickings.
Another reason clients arrive early is SnowCap’s impressive assortment of seasonal produce from local farms. Amongst the offerings on display today are enormous green zucchinis, pattypan squash, purple turnips, greenbeans, lettuce, mushrooms, onions, and cherries from a farm in the Columbia River Gorge. There are also huge bags of frozen diced carrots, with or without corn.
A willowy 33-year-old woman named Erin takes a five-pound clamshell container of luscious-looking cherries and tells me she has been a regular at SnowCap for a year. “I cook a lot,” she says. “I make an ‘end of the week soup’ using up whatever is left in the fridge.” She especially loves the squash, radishes, and tomatoes, when they’re available. What will she do with the cherries? “Eat them immediately!”
Mona, a thirty-something woman from Egypt, has loaded her cart with apples, cherries, and purple turnips. She spurns the zucchini and the summer squash—“I don’t like these!” she says, wrinkling her nose—but loads up on purple turnips, which she likes to pickle. “My children love them!” she says. Claw, a Burmese woman wearing dangly silver earrings and a sequined T-shirt, says she likes to fry up vegetables with onions and chiles and make a Pad Thai.
The bulk of the fresh produce at SnowCap comes from Farmers Ending Hunger, a group of 100-plus farmers across the state who donate a portion of their crops. “Growers get the idea of feeding hungry people,” says executive director John Burt. “They get that and they step up.”
Like other organizations that have been popping up around the country—from Farm to Food Pantry in Washington state to Michigan Agricultural Surplus Program—Farmers Ending Hunger aims to recover the imperfect or “ugly” produce for which farmers can’t get top dollar. However, instead of purchasing produce, Farmers Ending Hunger asks farmers to make a donation. The organization was founded in 2006 by agricultural engineer and president of IRZ Consulting, Fred Ziari, when he learned that Oregon was one of the hungriest states in America. (Ten years later, it still clocks in at Number 10 in the USDA’s ranking of least food-secure states.)
At the time, Ziari, who lives in the farm belt on the eastern side of Oregon, began having conversations with nearby farmers and ranchers, asking them if they’d donate some of their crops to the hungry. What started with 173,000 pounds of frozen peas from a handful of growers has blossomed into an organization that donated 4.2 million pounds of farm-fresh food to the Oregon Food Bank last year. Two million pounds were potatoes and 1 million was onions, but the remainder was comprised of a huge variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, local wheat, and even hamburger meat from an eastern Oregon ranch.
Erin, 33, loves fresh cherries and plans to eat these immediately
Growers range in size from a philanthropist in Hood River who has a two-acre pear orchard to Orchard View Cherries (the source of the cherries at SnowCap), which grows fruit on 2,400 acres in and around The Dalles.
This was the first year that Orchard View Cherries, a 4th generation family-owned orchard, gave to Farmers Ending Hunger. Thanks to a new high-tech Italian sorting machine called Unitec Cherry Vision 2 (yes, it photographs each individual cherry!), the cherries are efficiently sorted into two channels. Perfect, unblemished are sent abroad to Japan or Dubai or to U.S. chains like Whole Foods and Safeway. Those that are slightly misshaped or off-color either go to the Oregon Cherry Growers for processing (into a brine or Maraschino cherries) and s Farmers Ending Hunger.
“When you’re selling to the retail buyer, they want the cherries to look pretty well perfect,” explains owner Ken Bailey. “The machine can determine what is too soft to put into the pack for retail.” So even though the cherries destined for Farmers Ending Hunger look flawless to most mortals, they’ll only remain that way for a few days.
In many states, farmers find it cheaper to leave fruit in the field rather than pay for labor and transport costs. In Oregon, according to Burt, the vast majority of farms giving to Farmers Ending Hunger give produce that would otherwise be sold for good money.
“We try to generate stuff right out of harvest,” says Burt. “It comes right out of the line—no different than what you buy in the store.” So farms are, in effect, donating product as well as labor. But Farmers Ending Hunger makes it easy for farmers to say “yes,” because they often provide transport (via the Oregon Food Bank or OFB), packaging, and sometimes even volunteer labor.
During harvest, an OFB truck arrives at Orchard View Cherry once a week, delivering the cherries to the central warehouse in NE Portland within two hours. There, OFB volunteers pack the cherries into plastic clamshells (purchased by Farmers Ending Hunger), stack them into cardboard totes which are then sent out to a network of 21 regional food banks throughout the state. (From there, they may be delivered to smaller school or church pantries in each community.)
“Without these materials, it would have been very difficult to deliver the product to the regional food banks and agencies in a client-friendly pack size, without damaging the cherries,” explains Katie Pearmine, the Strategic Sourcing Manager at the Oregon Food Bank. “Food banks don’t typically have budget for this type of material, so this is actually what made it work.” The whole delivery process takes about 24 hours, from farm to food bank. The same routine happens with other perishable crops across the state.
All-told, Orchard View Cherry donated 85,000 pounds of hand-picked fruit to Farmers Ending Hunger this summer. But Bailey wouldn’t have done it without the urging of executive director John Burt. “We get so wrapped up in our harvest and activities,” says Bailey. In addition to buying the plastic clamshell containers, Farmers Ending Hunger makes it easy for farmers by filling out the paperwork and (via its relationship with the OFB) handling distribution. The farm also gets an Oregon state tax credit of 15 percent of the value of the fruit donated. (Labor costs are not factored into tax credit.) Farmers who donate can also get a federal deduction on their taxes.
Pearmine at Oregon Food Bank, who is also a former Farmers Ending Hunger board member, emphasizes that getting fresh produce to food insecure Oregonians—while not easy or cheap—has everything to do with the strategic partnership between farmers and processors, Farmers Ending Hunger, and the Oregon Food Bank.
“You ask a farmer to donate and they are like, ‘I don’t have access to cash.’ And then you say, ‘Where do you have excess in your food stream?’ or ‘What can you do that can help people in poverty the most?’ Those are the questions that John Burt asks farmers.”
{This story was published on Civil Eatson July 27th.}
Sofresh Farms, in Canby, Oregon, is not what I expect. When I finally find it, on an out-of-the-way gravel road, I’m struck by how ordinary this rural neighborhood is. There’s a produce farm on one side; a man raising Longhorn cattle on the other. Magnificent Mount Hood dominates the skyline. Other than the 8-foot-high wooden fence surrounding the property, there’s nothing to tip me off that this is a cannabis farm.
Further complicating my notion of a typical pot farm, I’m met at the gate by a tow-headed three-year-old boy wearing silver wings. “Do you know where Tyson is?” I ask, mentioning the grower by name. The boy looks at me skeptically until I introduce myself.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Theo,” he says.
After texting Tyson again, I ask Theo if he might be able to help me locate him. He opens the gate, offers me his tiny hand, and leads me down a flagstone path to a greenhouse.
Tyson Haworth, a freckled 36-year-old farmer emerges from the greenhouse, wearing sunglasses and a worn Sofresh T-shirt. “I see you’ve met my son,” Haworth says, chuckling. As he shows me where to park, Haworth says he loves farming cannabis right where he lives.
“My kids will never know that pot was illegal,” he says.
Tyson Haworth at Sofresh Farms
Like many who have been growing for the medical marijuana market in Oregon, Haworth is over-the-moon that the state legalized recreational use of the drug last fall. He’s on a mission to destigmatize cannabis. “Marijuana was used for millennia,” he tells me, noting that the Chinese have long prescribed the plant for medicinal purposes. “And it was in the U.S. Pharmacopeia until 1942!” But he’s also on a mission to prove to other cannabis growers that you can successfully grow pot using agroecological farming methods.
“I’ve got little kids! I don’t want toxic chemicals around,” says Haworth, who intersperses his rapid-fire facts about cannabis farming with quotes from organic pioneer Elliot Coleman and organic soil guru Jeff Lowenfells. Though Haworth’s farm will never be USDA-certified organic (that is, until marijuana is legalized at the federal level), it is verified by Clean Green Certified, one of the only third-party certifiers to hold cannabis farmers to national and international organic standards.
The Making of an Eco-Label
If you smoke a joint, you’re not just inhaling THC and other cannabinoids. You’re also likely breathing in dangerous neurotoxins and cancer-causing chemicals.
Now that recreational marijuana is legal in four states—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—a dirty little secret about the pot industry has surfaced. Pot growers—especially those who cultivate plants indoors—rely heavily on pesticides.
A host of pests and other plagues can devastate cannabis crops: spider mites, root aphids, mosaic virus, and downy mildew are just a handful. Many cannabis farmers tend to turn to insecticides and other chemicals as a quick fix.
“Whether it’s medical or adult recreational use, you need to be concerned with the manner in which it’s grown, because you’re ingesting it,” cautions Van Hook. The way it’s ingested matters too; preliminary studies show that marijuana concentrates like oil and hash contain much higher pesticide residue levels than buds.
Pesticides aren’t the only problem, either. A new paper in the journal Bioscience documents the environmental havoc wreaked by illegal marijuana farming in California. In an interview with Yale 360, the paper’s author talks about the way these farms “siphon off scarce water resources, poison wildlife, erode fragile soils, and overload waters with nutrients.”
Van Hook founded Clean Green Certified a decade ago. A U.S. Department of Agriculture-accredited organic certifier as well as a lawyer, Van Hook has worked in agriculture and aquaculture his whole life. In 2003, Van Hook was approached by a grower who wanted him to certify her cannabis as USDA organic. Van Hook explained that he couldn’t do that with a crop that is still illegal at the federal level, but the grower argued that there was a need for third-party certification. Van Hook discovered he could use U.S. and international organic standards to certify cannabis as long as he and certified growers don’t use the word “organic” or “USDA organic” to describe their product. Clean Green was born.
Before growers can become Clean Green certified, they must fill out an application with details about water use and energy use; soil erosion prevention; and how they plan to combat pests, weeds, and diseases. Clean Green inspects each farm annually, reviewing the farm’s inputs—from fertilizers and potting soils to sprays. Finally, the company tests the soil for 75 compounds at a federally licensed agricultural lab. (As Noelle Crombie at the Oregonianrecently reported, unlicensed labs tend to have inconsistent practices and can produce inaccurate results.)
To be Clean Green certified, you must also have a carbon reduction plan in place, whether that means buying renewable energy and using more efficient lighting or locating your dispensary close to your grow operation to cut down on transportation-related emissions.
“People in educated urban areas need to bring the same attention to the cannabis industry that they bring to their food and to their shade-grown, bird-friendly organic coffee. And they need to do it this year!” Van Hook says, a note of impatience creeping into his voice.
It seems some already are. To date, Van Hook has certified nearly 100 growers, processors, and handlers and says he’s seen an uptick in applications since Oregon legalized marijuana. Tyson Haworth at Sofresh Farms is one of them.
The greenhouse at Sofresh Farms
From Fish Oil to Beneficial Bugs: Taking it to the Next Level
Haworth came to cannabis farming via organic agriculture. He worked for the produce distribution company Organically Grown Co. for 13 years before starting an indoor tomato farm. But it wasn’t until his wife Michelle had her second back surgery that the couple started to grow marijuana. Michelle was hesitant to take the opiates her doctor prescribed because she feared addiction. Smoking pot gave her immediate relief from the incessant pain. Eventually, realizing he could earn much more growing medical marijuana than he could growing off-season tomatoes, Haworth started Sofresh in 2012. There was no question that he’d farm cannabis using organic practices.
This summer, Haworth is growing outdoors for the first time. The plants will grow to be nine feet wide and twelve feet tall. Although Haworth still cultivates some plants indoors, he doesn’t think it’s the future—especially now that pot is legal in Oregon.
“It’s harder to control pests indoors,” says Haworth. “You have to play mother nature. And she’s very good at her job.”
Soil health is of critical importance to Haworth. First, he puts down a layer of straw, then a layer of soil mixed with biochar, a soil amendment akin to what you’d find in an old growth forest. Then he adds a layer of compost or worm castings and then a final layer of straw. Finally, the soil and the plants are inoculated with mycorrhizae, which creates an intelligent food highway underneath the roots.
Sofresh is also one of the only cannabis farms in the U.S. that practices no-till agriculture. In its small 600 square-foot grow room (formerly a horse barn), I’m surprised to see wooden planks between the rows of impressively flowering Nuken, Black Betty, and Sweet Tooth—the strain that won the Amsterdam Cannabis Cup in 2001. Tattooed workers balance on the planks as they thin the canopy, so as not to disturb the soil.
“It’s important that there’s no compaction,” explains Haworth as he shows me around. “Lack of moisture and compaction are what kill the soil.” After harvest, the workers cut the plants and leave the stem to decay into the soil. Where other farmers apply myclobutanil, Haworth keeps mildew and mold at bay with fans and a large dehumidifier, and keeps the plants thinned for better air flow.
Haworth and his staff also spray the cannabis leaves with a compost-and-roasted-eggshell-tea, which is high in calcium, explains farm manager Missy LaGuardia. Calcium deficiencies can make cannabis plants more susceptible to pests. LaGuardia keeps the plant moist by spraying a mixture of aloe and fish oil on the leaves. “It mimics a really healthy mid-summer rain,” says LaGuardia, who usually sprays it at night.
LaGuardia says they populate the farm with ladybugs as soon as they see signs of aphids. Outdoors, natural predators like tree frogs and mice do their share of work, though LaGuardia admits they also eat the beneficial bugs.
The ladybugs released indoors are smart: Unless there’s a sustained source of food, they’ll escape. So LaGuardia keeps what she calls a “ladybug altar” in one corner of the greenhouse—a decomposing cannabis plant rife with aphids. She points out little orange clusters. “These are ladybug eggs!” she says, smiling triumphantly. I gasp, wondering if a conventional pot farmer would ever take such a risk. “Aren’t you worried this will lead to an aphid outbreak?” She shrugs her shoulders. “You’ve got to leave a little for nature.”
Photo of Tyson Haworth by Michael McDermott. Photo of marijuana plants courtesy of SoFresh.
{This story was published on Civil Eats earlier today.}
Last fall, after wondering for years about whether I should buy produce from farmers who claim that they are “organic, but not certified,” I dug into some big questions about certification. That process led me to explore many other seemingly respectable food labels that—while much less popular than organic—seemed to offer a similar, if slightly different level of transparency between eaters and farmers.
Back in 2002, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched its National Organic Program (NOP), sustainably minded farmers around the U.S. rejoiced. But a handful of farmers from New York’s Hudson Valley were less enthusiastic. Though they were committed to organic practices, they weren’t convinced that the USDA program was an ideal fit—especially considering the cost and paperwork involved.
So they formed a grassroots nonprofit called Certified Naturally Grown (CNG), with its own set of standards and a certification process to go with them. “They felt organic [certification] was better suited to larger operations and wholesale channels where there wasn’t that connection between the farmer and the eater,” explains Alice Varon, Executive Director of CNG.
The CNG standards are based on the organic standards; they don’t allow synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or GMO seeds, and they require crop rotation and soil amendments. But the program is broader in its scope. Since 2010, it has covered not only produce farmers and livestock producers, but beekeepers as well. (The USDA does have organic standards for apiculture in the works, but they aren’t scheduled to hit the market until 2016.) CNG is also in the process of developing standards for aquaponics and mushroom cultivation.
CNG involves much less paperwork than the USDA organic program—at a more reasonable cost. That’s in part because the organization employs a peer-review inspection process: Each annual on-farm inspection is done by another CNG farmer. For free. In fact, all certified farms must inspect at least one other farm.
“A lot of farmers are drawn to our peer-review inspection process,” says Varon. “They feel a great deal of ownership in it. And it gives them a chance to connect with one another.”
They’re also drawn to the lower certification cost. While USDA organic certification can be prohibitive for small-scale operations (as much as $1,000 a year, depending on the size), CNG has a sliding scale that starts at $100 per year. CNG also has a scholarship fund for beginning farmers or those who have suffered unusual difficulties such as extreme weather or physical injury.
Farmer Rick Reddaway, who has a “petite” vegetable farm in Orient, Oregon, grew weary of telling his farmers’ markets customers, “No, I’m not certified organic, but I do grow everything without pesticides or herbicides.” Wanting some accountability, he chose CNG both for its lower cost and because it doesn’t require conventionally farmed land go through a three-year transition period before it can get be certified.
The CNG application asks farmers if any prohibited pesticides or herbicides have been used on their fields over the past three years. If the answer is yes, CNG will allow a farmer to have “CNG transitional status” as she transitions her farm from conventional to organic. Reddaway was able to get full CNG certification because the East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District, which owns his land, told him it had been fallow for three years.
“I’m in an incubator program on land that I’ll soon have to leave, so it just didn’t make sense for me to do USDA organic certification,” says Reddaway.
Farmer Rashid Nuri, who runs an urban farm in Atlanta, Georgia called Truly Living Well, says USDA organic standards were much too onerous for him. “I have multiple farm sites and 10 years ago, each site had to have its own documents to be certified organic,” says Nuri. Though this rule has since changed, Nuri is a loyal member of CNG.
To make certification as transparent to consumers as possible, the grower’s complete application is posted on the CNG website, as is the last date of inspection and the name of the certifying farmer. “We take comfort in the fact that our website is completely up-to-date,” says Varon. When she gets the occasional call from a consumer saying that a farmer using the CNG logo isn’t up on the CNG site, Varon sends the farmer a letter.
So why would one choose CNG produce over organic? Since CNG is tailored to direct-market farmers, the CNG label typically means your produce is coming from a local farm. Though some organic produce comes from local farms as well, much of the organic produce you find at Whole Foods or Walmart has been shipped from great distances. Organic, in other words, does not always mean small, community-supported farms. CNG produce may also be less expensive than certified organic, though it depends on where the farmer is located and the scale of her operation.
On the down side for farmers, Certified Naturally Grown doesn’t have anywhere near the name recognition of the certified organic label, nor is it as ubiquitous. But since 2002, membership has been steadily climbing, mostly via word-of-mouth. CNG has 740 certified farms and apiaries in the U.S. The highest concentration of CNG-certified farms is in the Southeast, with a preponderance of them in Georgia.
Varon thinks that’s because organic never developed a strong foothold in the Southeast. “There wasn’t this sense that organic is the only game in town,” says Varon. “And certainly, in the South, you have a resistance to government-run programs!”
Food Alliance
While the organic standards are seen as relatively stringent by many, they are notoriously lacking when it comes to labor and and animal welfare standards. And some farmers believe they could have a wider environmental scope as well. That’s where the Food Alliance label comes in.
When Karl Kupers and Fred Fleming began selling Shepherd’s Grain flour in 2003, they went with Food Alliance because its standards went “beyond organic.”
“What appealed to us was Food Alliance’s broader and deeper look at agriculture and food in general,” says Shepard’s Grain General Manager Mike Moran. Like organic growers, Food Alliance-certified farmers cannot grow genetically modified seeds or use high-toxicity pesticides, and they must also practice integrated pest management, an ecosystem-based approach.
But in addition, Food Alliance farmers must practice soil and water conservation, wildlife habitat and biodiversity conservation, and prove that they’re offering safe and fair working conditions for employees. That last part means having a grievance procedure, a nondiscrimination policy, and offering benefits like health insurance and bonuses, among other things.
In addition to crops, Food Alliance has standards for livestock operations, shellfish farms, nurseries and greenhouses, and even food handling operations. “This appealed to us because you can certify that everybody who touches your product is aligned to the same philosophy,” says Moran. So, not only do all 38 farmer-owners at Shepherd’s Grain have to be certified, but the Old Centennial Mill in Spokane, Washington, owned by ADM, has to be certified as well.
Food Alliance was founded in 1998—four years before any national organic standards existed. The organization doesn’t forbid the use of all synthetic pesticides and herbicides, but it does ban all chemicals that the World Health Organization classifies as “extremely hazardous” and “highly hazardous.” This means that chemicals like glyphosate and diuron (both classified by the WHO as only “slightly hazardous”) are permitted. However, executive director Matthew Buck says the organization’s focus on Integrated Pest Management is meant to reduce if not eliminate the need for chemical applications.
“Our strategy is to first prevent the problem so no treatments are necessary,” says Buck. “Use of chemical treatment is absolutely your last resort—if you’re going to lose the crop and your livelihood.”
Some farmers prefer this because it gives them wiggle-room if they can’t use IPM to suppress a pest that’s decimating their crop. FA also allows farmers some leeway on chemical fertilizer applications (unlike organic), but the hope is that using cover-cropping, on-site composting, and integrating livestock into crop production will prod farmers to use much less commercial fertilizers.
Food Alliance’s inspection is not as affordable as CNG’s, but that’s because Food Alliance works with a third-party auditor, International Certification Services. The inspection fee ranges from $600-$1,100 for three years, which works out to around $200-$350 per year. (There is also an annual licensing fee, based on a percentage of gross sales, that’s paid directly to Food Alliance.)
For farmers, there are trade-offs. Buck likes to use the example of an organic wheat grower, who creates a risk of erosion every time he or she tills the ground. (Most organic wheat farmers rely on tillage to prevent weed growth.) A Food Alliance-certified wheat grower, on the other hand, can “direct-seed” with minute amounts of chemical fertilizer and they don’t need to take as many passes through the fields. Not only are they conserving oil, they’re building organic soil matter and sequestering carbon. “I think there are many benefits to organic agriculture and it represents an improvement over ‘conventional,’ but I don’t think organic is the paragon of sustainable agriculture,” says Buck.
Margaret Reeves, Ph.D., senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, supports organic because of the integrity of the label. But she understands the appeal of Food Alliance. “I have visited some of the big organic farms, that for all intents and purposes look pretty darn conventional, except they don’t use the disallowed products,” says Reeves. “Food Alliance goes beyond that by offering the environmental stewardship parts that organic does not.” Reeves has also been involved in the creation of a new business-to-business certification process called the Equitable Food Initiative, which is aimed at protecting farmworkers from pesticide exposure and abusive working conditions.
So what’s a conscientious consumer to do? Luckily, it’s not usually a choice between one sustainable label and the other. Usually—whether you’re at the farmers’ market, food co-op or the grocery store—you’re deciding between a conventional apple and and an organic apple or a conventional apple and a CNG apple.“There really are complimentary efforts out there,” says Reeves. “It comes down to what’s available.”
Find a list of Food Alliance-certified producers here and a Certified Naturally Grown-certified producers here.
Each winter, tens of millions of Americans buy and decorate Christmas trees. Yet few of us think about what it takes to keep these trees looking so healthy and lush.
For most growers, it takes pesticides–and lots of them. It turns out that the majority of Christmas tree farms are plagued with destructive pests and noxious weeds that suck nutrients and moisture from the soil, leaving young trees sickly and ugly. As a result, the Christmas tree industry has become dependent on chemicals of all sorts. Most Christmas tree growers regularly spray Roundup and other herbicides to control noxious weeds and Lorsban—an organophospate insecticide that has been linked to nervous system damage, among other things—to kill aphids, which damage trees by yellowing foliage and stunting growth. Growers also use fungicides to control diseases.
Noble Mountain Tree Farm, a 4,000 acre farm in Salem, Oregon, is SERF-certified
We don’t eat our Christmas trees, but we do live with them in our homes for a few weeks at a time. Should we be worried that our children or pets are being exposed to residual chemicals?
Though no studies have been conducted to see if Christmas trees still have pesticides on them at harvest, Chal Landgren, a Christmas tree specialist at Oregon State University’s Department of Horticulture, says the amount of residue still on the tree by the time it gets to your house is minor.
That’s because most pesticides are sprayed in the spring or summer, so by the time December comes around, they’ve been broken down by the elements. According to Jeffrey Jenkins, Ph.D., an environmental toxicologist and professor at Oregon State University, every pesticide label also has a “pre-harvest interval” on it telling farmers when they can apply their last spray before harvest. “These products have been evaluated by the EPA and they have a very long and involved process for evaluating potential impacts on human health,” says Jenkins.
Even if consumers aren’t being exposed to these chemicals, it’s still a worthy goal to reduce their use on Christmas tree farms–both to minimize workers’ exposure and to curtail the amount of toxic chemicals that trickle into our rivers and oceans, threatening the health of aquatic life.
Oregon is the largest Christmas tree producer in the nation. Over 6 million trees are harvested in the state every year, and they are shipped all over the world—from Hawaii and New York City to Mexico. In fact, one reason Christmas tree farmers use so many pesticides is because countries like Mexico strictly enforce rules banning pests on imports. (Hawaii, which just received a shipment of about 200,000 Oregon trees, is similarly strict.) Though no one knows how many pesticides the state’s Christmas tree industry uses—funding for a program requiring reporting was cut in 2008—over 500 pesticide labels are registered for use by the Oregon Christmas tree industry.
Exactly how much pesticide from Christmas tree farms is ending up in Oregon’s rivers and streams is unknown. But The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has been monitoring pesticide levels in the Clackamas River annually since 2005 and has found many toxic pesticides at levels exceeding EPA benchmarks. Among the most worrying, according to DEQ’s toxics coordinator Kevin Masterson, are chlorpyrifos (Lorsban), bifenthrin (Brigade), and chlorothalonil (Bravo Weather Stik). At least two of these—chlorpyrifos and chlorothalonil—are used by the Christmas tree industry, which is concentrated along the Clackamas River watershed. Not only does the Clackamas River provide drinking water for over 300,000 Oregonians, it’s a wild salmon stronghold and supports populations of winter steelhead, cutthroat trout, and lamprey.
Fortunately, two new Oregon programs are underway that teach Christmas tree growers how to reduce chemical use by practicing integrated pest management.
Last year, an interagency team called the Clackamas Basin Pesticide Stewardship Partnership was awarded state funding to work with the two biggest agriculture sectors along the Clackamas River: nurseries and Christmas tree farms. The Partnership—which is comprised of the Oregon Environmental Council, Oregon State University (OSU), and the Clackamas County Soil and Water Conservation District, among other groups—has focused on educating growers about how to reduce pesticide use, risk, and runoff. Over the past year, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) experts at OSU have designed pesticide risk reduction trainings, including a beneficial insect workshop for Christmas tree farmers. (There will be another training this February.)
These workshops give growers who do want to phase out pesticides the tools to do so. But they probably won’t phase them out entirely, admits Allison Hensey, program director for agriculture and watersheds at the Oregon Environmental Council. “Christmas tree customers demand a perfect-looking product,” she wrote via e-mail. “This means growers have to find highly effective pest control methods to avoid aesthetic damage to their crops.”
The other program is Socially and Environmentally Responsible Farm (SERF), a certification tool for sustainable Christmas tree farms that Landgren helped launch. Founded in 2011, SERF requires farms to prove they have a robust sustainability plan, with active programs in five areas: biodiversity, integrated pest management, soil and water conservation, worker safety, and farm stewardship. A SERF-certified Christmas tree isn’t 100 percent pesticide-free, but if you buy a tree with the SERF logo, you can be sure the farm is working to reduce its use of toxic chemicals and prevent soil erosion. So far, the program—which certifies only Oregon and Washington farms—has certified four farms. (If you can’t find a SERF-certified tree near you, Certified Naturally Grown has certified one Christmas tree farm in North Carolina and there are six USDA organic Christmas tree farms).
Straw water bars at Noble Mountain in Salem
Noble Mountain, a 4,000-acre Christmas tree farm in Salem, Oregon, was one of the first to apply for certification. “We’ve always tried to do what’s right for the ground and the soil—it’s our livelihood,” says farmer and General Manager Bob Schaefer. Back in 1985, Schaefer introduced “straw water bars”—bales of straw placed strategically along the hillside to reduce erosion (see photo above). He also discovered that ladybugs love to eat aphid eggs, which reduced reliance on broad-spectrum chemicals like Lorsban. “We were doing a lot of things right, but we weren’t documenting it,” he says.
The SERF program got him to document these proactive environmental practices, and pushed Schaefer and his crew of 70 full-time workers to take their practices to the next level.
To fulfill the IPM category, for example, Schaefer trained his crew to identify every plant on the farm—beneficial plants as well as weeds—in addition to insects, birds, and other animals. As a result, his employees have become indispensable to catching problems early, spotting pests that attack the trees’ roots, and patches of Canadian Thistle, which, like other weeds, compete with young trees for soil nutrients and moisture.
“Thirty years ago, you’d spray the whole field with Roundup,” says Schaefer. Today, workers use specific herbicides for specific weeds: Stinger for Canadian Thistle; Asulox for Bracken Fern. (The farm does still use Roundup for general weed control, but they use it far less.) Instead of spraying pesticides via helicopter, crew members now go out and target the few trees that are infested. This approach not only saves the farm money—renting a helicopter is not cheap—it’s better for the workers’ health.
The SERF standards are part of what motivated Schaefer to buy a small drone to map the entire farm with photos and videos. (The standards require baseline mapping, though most farmers do it via Google.) While it may seem extreme to buy a drone to monitor Christmas tree health, Schaefer says the device has already paid off. “The quality of the pictures is so good … you can actually see sick trees” says Schaefer.
Noble Mountain alone harvests 600,000 trees each winter—most of which are sold at Home Depot and Walmart in the Northwest, California, Arizona, and Texas. And even though Schaefer hasn’t noticed increased sales since he got his SERF certification, using fewer pesticides has meant thank-you letters from satisfied customers. Many include a snapshot of themselves standing aside their bedecked tree. “Thank you for our beautiful Christmas tree. It is full and lush and still moist after three weeks!” wrote a happy customer last Christmas. “Thank you for being a great steward of the forest.”
It's hard to keep up with all the money flowing into Oregon to defeat Measure 92, the state's GMO labeling measure. The day after I wrote this piece for Civil Eats, Dow, Monsanto, PepsiCo, and infant-formula company Mead Johnson gave an additional $2.37 million combined to the "No on 92" side's coffers, bringing their total to $19 million. This is by far the most expensive ballot measure in Oregon's history. Will money—and ads full of false claims—buy the "No on 92" side votes? We'll find out tomorrow.
Meanwhile, here's the piece I wrote for Civil Eats last week on the campaigns for and against the measure. I also deconstruct a few of the No on 92 side's claims. (After repeated calls and e-mails to the No side, I gave up trying to get their responses to the Yes on 92 ads.)
Oregon is awash in GMO labeling cash. Even before the seed giant DuPont Pioneer dumped $4.46 million to oppose mandatory GMO-labeling in Oregon late last week, Ballot Measure 92 had already been on record as the costliest in the state’s history.
As with California’s Proposition 37 and Washington’s Initiative 522 before it, Measure 92 has elicited a steady stream of donations from biotech and Big Food, including companies like Kraft, PepsiCo, CocaCola, and of course, Monsanto, which gave over $4 million against the Oregon measure.
So far, the “No on 92” campaign has brought in over $16 million. The pro-labeling side meanwhile, has raised a nearly $7 million, with several hefty donations from the soap company Dr. Bronner’s and organic food company Pacific Foods and a recent $500,000 donation from meat packing heir Tom Hormel. That brings the total contributions for both sides to $23 million.
Whether or not Oregon voters will opt to label GMO foods is yet to be seen, but the race is close. In an Oregon Public Broadcasting poll taken in October, 49 percent of voters supported Measure 92, while 44 percent opposed it, and 7 percent were undecided.
It’s clear that this state, known for many environmental firsts—including the country’s first bottle bill in 1971 and a pioneering urban growth boundary law—has the opposition scared. And unlike Washington and California, Oregon’s anti-GMO activists are coming off another win. Just last spring, voters in conservative Jackson County chose to ban the planting of genetically engineered crops.
With exactly one week to go before election day, we wanted to take a look at how the dollars are being spent—and examine some of the claims made by both sides.
Unfortunately, the No on 92 side did not return our phone calls or e-mails, but, judging by the nine different ads running on Oregon television stations, it seems safe to say that they’ve spent a bundle on production and air time. A quick glance of the campaign’s financial records confirms this, showing a half-dozen large payments—many over $280,000—to Seattle-based marketing firm Amplified Strategies, the same marketing firm that Washington’s “No on I-522” campaign hired.
The largest cash expenditures the No on 92 campaign has made were two $1 million payments to Target Enterprises, LLC, the same Los Angeles-based strategic media placement company that made the media buys for the Prop 37 campaign in California [PDF].
Below are a few of the claims the No on 92 campaign is making in their ads, with some background and explanation.
An oft-played No on 92 TV spot
1. “Special labels would not tell consumers which ingredients were GMOS.”
This is true, according to Kevin Glenn, the press secretary for the Yes on 92 campaign. Just as current nutrition labels don’t tell you which ingredients in your Oreos contain fats or sugars, the “genetically modified” label would merely tell you that your cookies contain genetically modified ingredients.
2. “The measure would require many products to be labeled genetically engineered even if they’re not.”
We can’t find any evidence to back up this claim. According to the language of the bill, foods that contain genetically engineered (GE) ingredients would be labeled.
3. “Thousands of products that contain GMOs would be exempt.”
This is somewhat true, according to Glenn. Fountain sodas and restaurant food are indeed exempt from the labeling law, but that’s because they don’t have labels to begin with. Measure 92 was written to conform with existing labeling guidelines. “Anything that is currently labeled would just get one more piece of information,” says Glenn.
Meat and dairy products that come from a genetically engineered animal would also have to be labeled. There are currently no foods from genetically engineered animals on the market, but if GE salmon is approved, it would be subject to the label. Meat and dairy from animals that eat GE feed wouldn’t need to be labeled, and neither would alcoholic beverages.
4. “Measure 92 would increase food prices for producers and consumers.”
Food companies change their labels all the time without increasing the price of their products. Think of the profusion of “gluten-free” and “all-natural” language added to labels in recent years.
Craig Ostbo, a managing partner at Portland-based marketing and communications firm Koopman-Ostbo has worked on packaging changes for a range of Oregon companies including Kettle Chips, Bob’s Red Mill, Lochmead Farms, and Coconut Bliss. Last year, in an interview he gave to Oregon Business Magazine, Koopman-Ostbo said he’d be hard-pressed to find an economic onus to adding “contains GMO ingredients” to existing packaging.
Studies that have found a potential cost to consumers say it would be negligible. For example, a study recently released by Consumers Union and ECONorthwest estimates that mandatory labeling would cost consumers an average of $2.30 per year—less than a penny a day.
According to journalistMichael Lipsky, if food companies choose to reformulate their foods with non-GMO ingredients, prices will likely go up, but that scenario represents a whole additional set of variables.
5. “GMO labeling in Oregon would conflicts with existing nationwide labeling systems.”
There is no Federal labeling policy for GMOs, and an existing statewide labeling law would likely cause the FDA to re-examine their stance. (One did pass in Vermont earlier this year, but it’s currently caught up in a lawsuit). In fact, for some activists, the larger goal of statewide initiatives like Measure 92 is to put pressure on the Federal agency.
The two existing nationwide labeling systems that flash on the screen as Frketich talks—the Non-GMO Verified label and the Organic label–have some things in common with Measure 92, but they are not required. The Non-GMO Project has endorsed Measure 92, saying it believes that there’s space for both efforts to exist simultaneously. But Organic and non-GMO labeled foods still make up only a tiny fraction of the market, and in our current system, they’re also more expensive. “We feel that people—regardless of income level—should known what’s in their food,” says Glenn.
Meanwhile, the “Yes on 92” campaign has field offices in five cities around Oregon. And while it has also produced five TV spots, including the one below, most of the money it has received is funding grassroots efforts.
So far, the campaign has dispatched 750 volunteers to go door-to-door and phone bank from their homes. “We know we’ll get outspent by the opposition on the air, but we have so much grassroots support,” says Glenn. “We can talk to voters face to face.”
Whenever we go to the farmers’ market together, my husband and I disagree about whether we should buy the pricey certified organic berries (my husband’s vote) or the less expensive ones grown without certification, but described by the farm as “sustainably produced.” If I look deep into a farmer’s eyes and she tells me that her fruit is “no-spray,” I’ll buy her berries, saving almost a buck a pint. (After all, the strawberries we grow in our own backyard are not certified organic, but I feel good about eating them.)
Lately I’ve been wondering–is my husband right, or is no-spray enough? And what about the assertion—sometimes made by conventional growers—that certified organic farms use pesticides too?
Toxicity: It’s All Relative
In most cases, even certified organic produce is not pesticide-free. But compared to most conventional produce, it can mean a big step in a less-toxic direction.
“The overarching concept is that natural pesticides are allowed and synthetics are prohibited, unless specifically allowed,” says Nate Lewis, a senior crop and livestock specialist at the Organic Trade Association. Furthermore, before they can use any approved pesticides, organic farmers must prove that they have a preventative plan in place—and that the plan is failing to prevent pests.
So while most organic farmers rely on plant-based pesticides such as Pyrethrum (from chrysanthemum flowers), extracts of the Benin tree, neem oil, or an extract of the Japanese knotweed root (an effective fungicide), they can occasionally use synthetic pesticides—with strict limitations.
There are roughly 40 synthetic substances farmers can use under U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic standards, says Lewis. Some of these are as innocuous as newspaper, which is allowed for use as mulch or as a “feedstock” for compost, or sticky traps, which provide a physical function (trapping insects) and then are removed from the field at the end of the year.
Others include zinc, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, and cobalt—essential plant micronutrients that cannot be used as insecticides or fungicides in most cases. Instead, they’re usually used as soil amendments. (A full list of the chemicals that are allowed under USDA organic standards is available at the Organic Materials Review Institute.)
About 26 of the 40 synthetic substances allowed in organic crop production are considered pesticides. But these have restrictions, too. For example, soap-based herbicides can only be used on right-of-ways and ditches, but can’t come into contact with organic food. Boric acid, which is a synthetic insecticide, can be used for pest control, but can’t come into contact with crops or soil. Similarly, ammonium carbonate can only be used as bait in insect traps.
This list is constantly under scrutiny and is therefore always being revised. For example, until recently, USDA organic standards made an exemption for the use of antibiotics—specifically tetracycline and streptomycin—to be sprayed on organic apple and pear orchards to prevent fire blight, which is highly contagious and can wipe out a whole orchard.
“It was only allowed at bloom time, which is the only time the orchard is susceptible, so there’s no residue on fruit,” explains Lewis. Nonetheless, the National Organics Standards Board (NOSB) let the exemptions for these antibiotics expire—starting October 2014.
But just because a chemical comes from a plant doesn’t make it safe. Rotenone, a toxic pesticide that’s derived from the roots of several tropical and sub-tropical plants such as the jicama, can no longer be used on crops in the U.S.—even conventionally farmed ones.
“Rotenone has quite the sordid past,” says Lewis. Toxic to humans—it’s classified as “mildly hazardous” by the World Health Organization—rotenone has been linked to Parkinson’s disease in farmworkers. The Environmental Protection Agency revoked its use as a pesticide in 2007, after the companies distributing and selling rotenone voluntarily cancelled all food use registrations for it.
Last year, the NOSB recommended that it be put on the prohibited list by January 2016. But according to Miles McEvoy, Deputy Administrator of the National Organics Program at the USDA, the agency has more work to do before it can follow the NOSB’s recommendation. Until that happens, Rotenone can still be used on organic banana crops grown in tropical countries like Ecuador.
Despite these allowances, the pesticides and herbicides used on conventional farms are still significantly worse. Take organophosphates, for instance. This class of pesticide is used on conventional peaches, apples, grapes, green beans, and pears. According to Pesticide Action Network’s database, organophosphates are some of the most toxic insecticides used today. They have been shown to “adversely affect the human nervous system even at low levels of exposure” and hamper neurological development in children. The commonly used herbicides Glyphosate (Roundup) and Atrazine, have also both been shown to act as endocrine disruptors, meaning they interfere with the endocrine (or hormone system) in people and many animals.
Is Talking to Your Farmer Enough?
Oregon farmer Don Kruger, the owner of a 150-acre farm on Sauvie Island and two Portland farm stands, abhors labels. “I honestly would rather talk to the customers, if I could, or have them talk to my staff,” he says.
In the 14 years he’s owned his farm, he’s never sprayed a pesticide directly on any food crop. Yet, he says, “I have no interest in being straight-up organic. It gives me a little wiggle room to do things I might need to do.
Kruger uses a conventional fungicide on his raspberries. “The Tulameen is the best tasting raspberry—it’s fabulous. But the problem is, it’s prone to root rot,” he says. “I could grow another, inferior grade raspberry, but I don’t want to.” He sprays the plant just as it’s starting to leaf—before it blossoms or fruits.
He also uses an herbicide called Impact (a broad spectrum herbicide with topramezone as the active ingredient) on his corn. It kills the weeds—grass, pig weed, thistle, etc.—that would otherwise hinder the corn’s growth. “Otherwise you have to hand hoe it, and it’s really tough to do,” Kruger says. He sprays when the plant is two inches high and that’s it. “There’s no chance it’s on the corn,” he says.
Kruger believes he is offering a more affordable option, a middle-ground for folks who want local food that’s not conventional, but don’t mind that it’s not certified organic either. He is known in Portland for having the most affordable produce around and he prides himself on that.
But not everyone has the time for a 10 minute long conversation with their farmer about his growing practices and the nuances of what and when they spray. Furthermore, there are a lot of unregulated terms—like “no-spray” and “sustainably grown”—that get tossed around. And not everyone is as forthright about their practices as Kruger.
David Lively, vice president of sales and marketing at Organically Grown Company, the largest organic produce wholesaler in the Northwest, says farmers markets aren’t always as transparent as many customers believe. “There have been instances where growers selling produce at farmers’ markets have been busted for selling conventional as organic and product they bought off the market as their own.” Lively thinks—and many others in the organic movement agree—that organic certification offers the consumer extra assurance.
Other Reasons to Go Organic
At the end of the day, organic agriculture is about much more than reducing pesticide use. To grow food organically, farmers must build their soil, using techniques like composting, cover crops, and crop rotations rather than fossil fuel-intensive synthetic fertilizer. Doing so is a lot more work. But on an environmental level, that matters.
It’s true that organic certification requires a time commitment on the part of the grower. In addition to a 12-page application, as well as regular audits, organic farmers must document a great deal of what they do. The cost to farmers is also a factor, but it doesn’t have to be prohibitive. The USDA has a cost-share program that reimburses farmers 75 percent of the cost of certification, up to $750 per type of farming. Connie Carr, the certification director at Oregon Tilth, which inspects and certifies food producers for the USDA, says farmers take advantage of it.
“So if your certification costs $1,000”—the upper end of what a small farmer would pay per year—“you’ll get $750 back,” says Carr. Fortunately for farmers, this funding was renewed in the 2014 farm bill.
To help streamline the paperwork, which Carr says is no more arduous than applying for a loan or for college, the National Organic Program at the USDA introduced a “Sound & Sensible” initiative in 2013, which works with farmers to remove barriers to certification. Now, re-applying for certification each year is much easier (a farmer only has to submit changes) and some certifiers have launched online applications.
Will these changes lead to more certified organic farmers? It’s too soon to say. But one thing is clear: Consumer demand for organic food continues to grow. Organic food in the U.S. has been growing by an average of 13 percent per year over the past decade and reached $35 billion last year. Most farmers who take the plunge and go organic will have no problem selling their crops—and they’ll be able to charge a premium for them, too. And why shouldn’t they? Hoeing weeds by hand, cover-cropping, and keeping meticulous records is hard work. Maybe next time I’ll spring for those certified organic berries.
In many ways, Shari Sirkin and Bryan Dickerson, the farmers at Dancing Roots Farm in Troutdale, Oregon, have made it. They run a popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, their heirloom vegetables grace the menus at some of Portland’s finest restaurants—including Ned Ludd, Irving Street Kitchen, and Luce—and last year they won the prestigious Local Hero award from the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust. But despite all this, the farmers barely make ends meet. They drive a 1995 Toyota wagon, never go on vacation, and had to take out a loan to buy a used tractor. “We rarely eat out. Even though we want to support the restaurants that love us,” says Sirkin.
The odds are so stacked against small-scale farmers, it’s a wonder any of them can make a living at all. In fact, statistics show that most don’t: According to the latest agriculture census, 57 percent of America’s 2.1 million farms gross less than $10,000 a year, forcing them to rely on “off-farm” income.
But a new real estate trend might just help farmers pay the bills and allow them to go out for an occasional meal to boot.
Development Supported Agriculture (DSA) or “agrihoods,” are suburban housing developments built around working farms. Unlike traditional suburbs, DSAs make a commitment to preserving some rural land for agriculture—be it six or 100 acres. Though there’s no firm count on how many agrihoods exist in the U.S., a recent story in The New York Times listed a dozen. The most well-known DSAs range from the 16-acre Agritopia, outside Phoenix, Arizona, whose farm supplies a farm-to-table restaurant, to Serenbe, which has a 7-acre organic farm and CSA just south of Atlanta, Georgia. (Serenbe also has three restaurants that make use of the farm’s produce.) And Daron “Farmer D” Joffe, a consultant to many agrihoods, estimates that there are actually more like two dozen, with that number expected to rise exponentially over the next decade.
The benefit to residents is obvious: farm-fresh produce, pastoral views, and the chance to support a super-local food economy. But what’s in it for farmers?
First, they earn a salary–anywhere from $30,000-$100,000, depending on experience. The job also often comes with on-farm housing. Ashley Rodgers, 28, the current farm manager at Serenbe, gets free housing—as do her (paid) interns. This is a huge perk, because, as she points out, farmers do best when they can live on or very near to the farm. “Right now I’m running irrigation,” said Rodgers on the phone recently. “I’m going to have to come back in four hours so I can turn it off before I go to sleep.”
Unlike many sole proprietors, Rodgers doesn’t need to put aside a chunk of her income for the mortgage. Rodgers, who started the organic vegetable farm on a ranch called White Oaks Pastures, also gets profit-sharing at Serenbe. Roughly 50 of Serenbe’s 200 households subscribe to Rodger’s weekly CSA. She also sells fresh produce—lettuce, kholrabi, squash, cabbages, eggplants, tomatoes, you name it—at Serenbe’s Saturday farmers’ market, where residents set up an account and can shop without using cash.
“It’s very old-school,” says Rodgers. “There’s a small-town feel to it.” Though she thinks the farm will be lucky to break even this year, she hopes it will make a profit next year, which gives her incentive to stick around.
For Eric Calberg, farm manager of the educational programs at Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Illinois, shared infrastructure is a big upside to working in an agrihood. Prairie Crossing devotes 100 acres to agriculture, but leases most of that land to Sandhill Family Farms and a coterie of beginning farmers via an incubator program. Five acres are designated for farming education and workforce development. It is here that Calberg runs a job training program for area high school students called Prairie Farm Corps.
“We all use the same tractor,” says Calberg. “And well, we’re sharing a lot of knowledge, too, helping each other out.”
The lack of affordable farmland is what steered 36-year-old Michael Snow towards a job as farm manager at Willowsford a 4,000-acre agrihood in Ashburn, Virginia. “Like a lot of young farmers, I was in a position where capital and land were the tough spots,” he says.
For now, Snow and his crew farm eight acres, but eventually—when they finish cover-cropping—they’ll have 25-30 tilled acres of veggies. The developers hope the farm will eventually be self-sustaining, but in the meantime they are paying several full-time farmers.
Jobs like these are rare, but they’re worth it, says Daron Joffe, who used to run a CSA on his own farm in Wisconsin. “An insane amount of work goes into farming and at the end of the day, there is just not that much money to it,” he adds. Joffe, who is now the ranch development director at the Leichtag Foundation in Encinitas, California, sold his farm and became the first farm manager at Serenbe. As he sees it, one of the biggest rewards of working at a DSA—at least for sociable farmers—is community-building.
“When you’re under the pressure of trying to make a living, you don’t have time to shoot the breeze with the neighbors. It’s like ‘You wanna talk? Pull some weeds and follow me.’ In a DSA environment, it’s not about pure survival and production, it’s about community. Taking that pressure off and adding community-building is very attractive,” he says.
Of course, even for farmers with paying jobs in agrihoods, the grass often looks greener on their own farm–even if it doesn’t exist yet. Ashley Rodgers finds her work at Serenbe all-consuming and gratifying for now, but adds: “Eventually it gets old. You just want that something to call your own.”
My latest story for Civil Eats' Good Food Vanguard series:
Amy Kleinman had never had a job with lasting appeal. Most recently, Kleinman, 28 and living with Asperger syndrome, taught at a day care center. “I was having a lot of trouble there,” says Kleinman. “Not with the kids—I loved the babies. I was having problems with the adults.”
Then, three years ago, Kleinman got a job at Cleveland Crops, an urban farm and nonprofit dedicated to community development and food security.
"This is the first job I’ve had that keeps me getting up and wanting to go to work,” says Kleinman, who does everything from harvesting and washing vegetables to making deliveries to local restaurants. This season, she has been learning the basics of permaculture and worm composting.
She also helps New Product Development Supervisor, Nonni Casino, grow flowers and create swags and wreaths. “Someday Amy could work in a wonderful flower shop,” says Casino.
Cleveland Crops is just one of many farming projects in a city that has established itself as a mecca of urban farming. Not only does the rust belt city boast one of the largest contiguous urban farms in the country, but it has 20 farmers’ markets—all of which accept food stamps—and dozens of popular farm-to-table restaurants, many of which source ingredients from farms that are just blocks away. But what makes Cleveland Crops unique is that each of the 65 farmers who work there has a developmental disability of some sort—from autism and epilepsy to Down syndrome.
Founded four years ago by the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities and SAW, Inc., Cleveland Crops started with one acre in 2010 and will be farming a whopping 40 acres at a dozen locations around Cleveland by the end of this year. The farms—which include a 15,000 square-foot greenhouse and half a dozen hoop houses—provide pesticide-freeproduce for local restaurants, farmers’ markets, and a 300-member CSA. (They also sell produce to a popular grocery store in the area called Nature’s Bin.)
Traditionally, Clevelanders with developmental disabilities would have been trained for jobs in the manufacturing sector, but those jobs have been waning for decades, while urban farming is on the upswing. And in Cleveland, as in other parts of the country, demand for local, pesticide-free food is on the rise.
Cleveland chef/restaurateur Zach Bruell has worked with Cleveland Crops since it started four years ago and now uses the organization’s produce in six of his seven restaurants. “They’re real farmers, real agronomists,” says Bruell. He’s asked the crew to custom plant specialty vegetables like mâche, mico-greens, and pasilla bajio peppers.
Al Ives, the chef de cuisine at Bruell’s Italian restaurant Chinato, orders kale, mustard greens, lettuce, micro-greens, tomatoes, herbs, beets, radishes, squashes, and carrots. “Pretty much anything they’ve got, I’ll take it,” says Ives, who bases his weekly specials around what they have.
Cleveland Crops is meant to be a temporary training venue. The goal, according to executive director Rich Hoban, is to train adults with developmental disabilities for jobs either in the urban farming sector, the food service industry, or—perhaps in Kleinman’s case—at a high-end flower shop.
“Our long-term objective is to get people permanent employment with other businesses,” says Hoban. For now—maybe because Cleveland Crops is the largest farming operation in the county and needs more staff than other area farming businesses—most trainees have stuck around. And that’s working out okay for most of them. Whereas some organizations that hire people with developmental disabilities get a federal waiver to pay below the minimum wage, Kleinman, like the other 64 trainees at Cleveland Crops, earn minimum wage ($7.95 an hour in Ohio).
Cleveland Crops farmers (from left): Paris Mötley, Amy Kleinman, Janette Venable, and Roderick Peoples
Of course, the employees are also gaining transferable skills. Case in point: The organization has just opened a 5,000 square-foot Food Innovation Center—a commercial kitchen complete with three double convection ovens, a double walk-in fridge, and 11 commercial dehydrators. Trainees are already learning how to dehydrate fruits and kale (for kale chips) to be sold at farmers’ markets and CSA shares this summer. Soon they’ll learn how to make soups, barbecue sauce, salsa, and tomato sauce. They’re also co-packing for local food businesses like Twenty-4 Zen, a granola company.
Raizel Michelow, Twenty-4 Zen’s owner, has her granola sealed, packed, and labeled at the new kitchen. “These are well-trained workers with lots of experience,” says Michelow. “They’re so efficient—they’ve helped me triple my business.”
For the workers, many of whom live in food deserts, there’s another benefit to working at Cleveland Crops: access to fresh, free food.
“I never used to eat tomatoes,” says Kleinman. Now, she says she regularly takes home veggies she didn’t eat fresh before she had this job. “It’s quality control,” she says joking. “I ate an asparagus stalk right out in the field the other day.”
Casino, who is a chef and food justice activist, offers employees misshapen produce and dehydrated foods like kale chips, which are tossed in an addictive topping of nutritional yeast, sea salt, lemon juice, and cashew bits. “This is not just about growing food,” she says. “This is about educating the people who really need this quality food.”
Now that the kitchen is open, Casino will start making soups and other healthy prepared foods, which she intends to tempt trainees with.
One of the organization’s biggest fans is city councilman Joe Cimperman. “They are at the forefront of the urban agriculture movement in Cleveland. But it’s not just that they’re taking over abandoned lots,” says Cimperman. “They’ve been an instigator of economic and community development.” Just one example: Before Cleveland Crops converted an abandoned school into the organization’s first farm, there were eight condemned or foreclosed homes surrounding the property. Three years later, those homes have all been purchased or rehabbed.
“Bricks were falling on the sidewalk and hitting people. It was absolute disinvestment,” recalls Cimperman of the school. “People used to drop off burned-up cars in the parking lot.” Today, that lot is covered with hoop houses filled with vegetable starts. “It’s beautiful,” says Cimperman. “They’re producing beautiful stuff!”
When Daron Joffe dropped out of college to become an organic farmer, his parents cheered him on. “Okay, Farmer D, let’s see where this goes,” his mom said. He apprenticed on several organic farms in the Midwest, picked up biodynamic farming from Hugh Lovel at the Union Agriculture Institute, and eventually bought a 175-acre farm in Wisconsin where he launched a successful community supported agriculture (CSA) program. After several stints in the nonprofit world, Joffe was asked to help design and run an organic farm at one of the first “agrihoods” in the country, Serenbe. A planned community built around an organic farm, Serenbe was the beginning of Joffe’s career as an “entre-manure.
Appropriating his mom’s nickname, Joffe branded himself Farmer D and launched a farm consulting business as well as a line of biodynamic compost. Eventually, he opened a gardening supply shop in Atlanta, where he still sells compost, gardening tools, seeds, plants, and raised beds. In his new memoir/farming guidebook, Citizen Farmers: the Biodynamic Way to Grow Healthy Food, Build Thriving Communities, and Give Back to the Earth, he tells his story and shares his passion for social justice. We talked to Joffe recently about beginning farm finances, biodynamics, and how to get more fresh produce into under-resourced areas.
How do you define a “citizen farmer”?
Essentially anyone who is committed in some way to improving our food system and the health of our planet through action. You can be a citizen farmer from a classroom, a kitchen, a board room, or the mayor’s office. You left your own farm in Wisconsin because you wanted to raise awareness about biodynamic agriculture among the masses.
How did you go from being a farmer to a farmer-activist?
I loved the CSA model—the farm as a platform for education and community building. But I felt that I wasn’t going to be able to make a big enough impact on my farm. And so, my first inclination was “I need to be more urban.” So I bought a food truck in Madison—it was a farm-to-table food truck (the falafel had heirloom tomatoes and fresh arugula from my farm)—and started doing more urban gardening. That kind of reinforced for me: [Cities] are where change needs to happen. I thought, “I’m going to sell the farm, and come back to farming later in life. But I need to devote this energetic time of life in communities that need it.”
After working at a few nonprofits, you found yourself becoming what you call an “entre-manure.” How did that transformation come about?
I had had this idea for years, of bringing the farm into the Jewish summer camp environment. It would be a way to get better food into the cafeteria, get kids connected to the environment and farming. I presented this idea to a Jewish Community Center, near where I was going to school in Georgia, and I managed to raise the money and build this garden that’s still there. It was a huge success.
One day, this development person from the JCC asked me to apply for a social entrepreneurship grant called the Joshua Venture Fellowship. It’s a two-year fellowship and they pick eight people from around the country. I got it. They gave me a mentor who was this guru of nonprofits. I sat down and had coffee with him. I said, “Here’s what I do: I design and build these gardens, train somebody to run them, and then I check in on them and then I’m done.”
And he said, “That sounds like a business. Why are you doing it as a nonprofit?”
I didn’t even realize it, but for those few years, I had been building my consulting expertise. When I got the opportunity to work at Serenbe, just southwest of Atlanta, I’d been doing it already.
Was Serenbe the first of these so-called “agrihoods”—planned communities built around a farm?
It was one of the first. There was Prairie Crossing, and a few really small things had happened—co-housing communities with small farms. But Serenbe was the first that had clustered, hamlet-style villages around a farm. It was also the first on this scale.
Though you’ve worked as a consultant on private developments around the country, you’ve kept doing pro bono work, building farms and gardens for homeless shelters, youth prisons, and boys & girls clubs. Is that part of your company’s mission?
My bread and butter clients are big developments and high-end resorts and I take on as much of the discounted nonprofit stuff that I can afford. I’m in a position now, in my new role [as ranch development director] at the Leichtag Foundation, where that’s more my core.
You say in your book that “most biodynamic farming lessons are no more mystical than The Farmers’ Almanac.” Is there a misconception about biodynamic farming?
The other day, I got an e-mail from an agroecology professor I worked for at the University of Georgia-Athens, to whom I’d sent a copy of the book. He wrote a wonderful review of the book and at the end of it he said, “I only have one criticism: The biodynamic subtitle. Organic agriculture has been scientifically proven and accepted by scientists. But biodynamic remains in the realm of superstition. It may be proven someday, but why not just call it the ‘organic way to grow healthy food?’”
And I can appreciate that. But last night I had a drink with a good friend of mine, who said, “I love that you have biodynamic on the cover of this book!”
So it’s important to shine a light on this; it has been a big part of my experience with agriculture. It brings a spiritual approach that I relate to; organics doesn’t necessarily have that component. From the science perspective, sure, organic agriculture is more developed and scientifically proven. But I’ve seen biodynamics in practice and I’ve seen it work. The book is not all about biodynamics, but my goal was to demystify it a bit, and show that it can be effective.
The latest Agriculture Census data shows that over half of America’s farmers don’t call farming their primary occupation—presumably because they can’t make enough money. What financial advice would you give young farmers?
Most farmers already know this: It’s a labor-of-love career. The quality of life is the richness that you get. My advice is to [prioritize] good planning, good management, delegate, and engage your customers so that they can participate as much as possible. Building a good team is key. And having somebody in the family that has a stable job is always a good thing! Farming is fickle, and you never know. So, have another creative revenue stream that’s not as dependent on the crop harvest–whether that’s something you do collectively as a family or via events, cooking, consulting, or whatever.
Find opportunities that can relieve some of the financial burden or provide you with stability. If you can work within an existing infrastructure—whether that’s an incubator or an existing agricultural or land trust operation where you could share equipment.
The last thing I would say is do a CSA. It provides you with low-risk seed capital.
Are there other entre-manurial ways of making a living as a farmer?
There are more and more farm management and educator roles out there. Universities are starting farms, and so are developers, nonprofits—even cities. And there are some ways to save money with government programs—subsidizing organic certification, or putting land into conservation easement to reduce taxes.
Where can farmers learn more about these programs?
ATTRA (National Sustainable Agricultural Information Service) is a government resources site for alternative farming. And SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) program, lists grants. The USDA is also a good resource, too. There’s a whole beginning farmer section that helps identify resources; it’s amazing!
You went to 13 banks before you found one that would secure you a loan. Any tips?
Ha! Part of it was having a good business plan. I said: Here’s how a CSA works, and here’s my financial plan, and here’s my experience. And part of it was my dad guaranteeing the loan!
Today there are beginning farmer loans through the FSA (Farm Service Agency at the USDA), but there weren’t at the time. A lot of the banks just looked at my crop list and their eyes rolled back. “You’re not doing corn and soybeans?” They just did not understand it. There is a lot more support from social venture type funds now. Slow Money, for example. And lot of starter farms are being funded by angels–wealthy people who are passionate about this.
Aside from donating extra produce to the local food bank, what can citizen farmers do to get more healthy food into low-income neighborhoods?
Encourage vegetable gardening, especially in neighborhoods that lack access and resources. Some CSAs offer programs where you can sponsor a CSA share for a family in need. Advocate to local government, business, and community leaders about how important it is to get fresh food into low-income communities, schools, and shelters and support local sustainable agriculture.
Why did you decide to write a book?
I’ve always had a really hard time explaining what I do. So the book has been a good way to express my philosophy, my motivation, and my goals. My driving passion has always been to raise awareness and make change on a big scale; a book seemed like a great way to do that.
This story first appeared on CivilEats last Friday. That very day, Michelle Obama announced a new phase of Let's Move! that will encourage American families to get into the kitchen and cook together—! Here are some of the First Lady's remarks, which hint at what she and nutrition policy tsar Sam Kass have in mind for the near future:
So the benefits of cooking couldn’t be more clear. The question is how do we help families start cooking again, even if it’s just one or two meals a week? Can we work with supermarkets to do more to distribute recipes on how to cook, and do demonstrations? Can we develop the home-ec class of the future that will give kids—both girls and boys—the basic skills they need to feed themselves on a budget? Can we inspire chefs to offer affordable cooking classes in their restaurants?
I couldn't be more excited—and await concrete details of their initiatives in the coming weeks and months!
My CivilEats story starts below the Pure Food Kids video.
Two months ago, Seattle-area 4th grader Michael Kenny came home from school with a burning desire to make vegetarian chili. His mom Liz nearly fell out of her seat. She knew her son was not fond of peppers—and he’d never shown much interest in cooking before. “They sent all the students home with a recipe, and when he came home he wanted to make it right away,” Liz says. “And most of the ingredients were vegetables!”
Michael and his classmates at Island Park Elementary on Washington’s Mercer Island had a chance to participate in a workshop called Pure Food Kids, run by the Beecher’s Cheese Flagship Foundation. Though it’s a one-time, two-and-a-half hour lesson, Pure Food Kids packs a lot in. The instructors, hired by the nonprofit arm of a successful Seattle artisan cheese company, ask the students to be “food detectives.” They show them how companies use marketing techniques to make their products look healthier than they actually are; how to carefully inspect nutrition statements and ingredient lists; and how to spot unhealthy additives like dyes and preservatives. They also give kids a quick cooking lesson, showing them how to make a simple chili. Most kids enjoy this part the most. “I liked chopping the peppers,” says Michael, who was in the “pepper group.”
Research shows that engaging kids with growing, choosing, and cooking food increases the likelihood they will eat a healthy diet. And that’s why classes like Pure Food Kids are having an impact.
Beecher’s Flagship Foundation executive director Kristin Hyde recently sent a survey to parents of middle school students to find out what information from the workshop their students retain from the 4th grade. A full 79 percent said their kids still read nutrition labels and ingredient lists before buying a product and 60 percent said their kids express an interest in avoiding processed foods as a result of the workshop. The workshop—which was launched in 2005—has been taught in 70 percent of Seattle’s elementary schools and is in about half of the school districts surrounding Seattle—reaching a combined 10,000 students a year.
“I have never seen another nutrition education program that has had this far of a reach,” says Hyde, who has worked on school food reform for over a decade. The program recently expanded to four elementary schools in New York City, where Beecher’s Cheese has a second store. Hyde’s goal is to have the workshop in 10 to 20 New York City schools by this fall.
Beecher’s Cheese owner Kurt Dammeier (the man behind Sugar Mountain, a portfolio of restaurants and food companies that includes Beecher’s) had an epiphany 20 years ago when he discovered he had an allergy to MSG. “MSG was the tip of the iceberg, really,” Dammeier says. “That’s when I realized that our industrial food system might be delivering food that’s not good for me.” He started a foundation, funded by 1 percent of sales from each Sugar Mountain company, to get this message out via kids.
Seattle-area students are gobbling up these nutrition facts and marketing tricks. Interviewed for a Pure Food Kids video, a handful of 4th and 5th graders remember what they picked up during the workshop. “I learned that if a word rhymes with gross, it’s a sugar,” says one girl. “I learned that trans fats are really, really, really, really bad for you,” says another. But most importantly, they’re also changing their habits. “I used to eat a little bit of candy when I got home, but now I eat fruits and vegetables,” says a girl with pigtails. A boy with curly red hair says the workshop inspired him to try fruits he thought he wouldn’t like.
Programs like Pure Food Kids are becoming more common across the country. FoodFight, a New York City nonprofit, now in 40 schools, teaches students media literacy, nutrition education, and basic cooking skills. National programs like FoodCorps, deploy young service members into low-income public schools around the country to teach kids about healthy food, instruct them in gardening and cooking, and help school food directors get more local food into schools (including, sometimes, the very produce kids grow themselves). And countless individual teachers bring their own passion for gardening and cooking into public schools.
But these programs—while an amazing start—are piecemeal attempts to reverse decades of food illiteracy and lack of basic cooking skills amongst American kids. Every time she leads one of these workshops, Hyde sees a dire need for basic nutrition education. “Kids don’t even know what fiber or protein is. They don’t know what vitamins are. They don’t know how to read an ingredient list. They don’t know anything!”
In recent weeks, Michelle Obama has shown how fierce she can be when it comes to leading on policy issues related to her Let’s Move! campaign. Last week, she announced new federal standards on junk food marketing in public schools as well as proposed changes to the nutrition facts labels, requiring added sugar to be listed for the first time, and calories-per-serving to be listed in a larger font.
But if she’s really serious about ending childhood obesity within a generation, she might consider supporting a home economics program for the 21st century. It’s an idea Dammeier and Hyde can get behind. “You can’t just plop down a salad bar,” says Hyde. “You need to inspire kids to cook—not just lecture them about labels.”
Everyone from Tom Philpott at Mother Jones to academics writing in the op-ed pages of the New York Times have already called for more, better home ec in schools. Earlier this month, Chef Ann Cooper (aka the “renegade lunch lady”), made an impassioned plea at Tedx Manhattan for integrating food literacy into academic curriculums. “If we want to fix the food system, if we want healthy kids, and a healthy planet, our next great battle is food literacy in every school in America.”
Biwa owners Gabe Rosen and Kina Voelz discuss their new "Health & Wellness" surcharge
Last week, Civil Eats published my story on restaurants that provide health insurance to all employees. My focus was on independent restaurants like Biwa and Xico that are boldly asking customers to kick in a little extra so that all workers—even bussers and dishwashers—can receive affordable health insurance. Response to the story was mixed: some local food businesses such as Grand Central Bakery pointed out that they, like Burgerville, have been offering health insurance (and paid sick days) to their employees for years. (My bad for not knowing this!) Local café Zell's apparently offers low-cost, high-quality health insurance, too. (Or so says one former employee, who notes that's why the kitchen staff hasn't changed for over a decade.) But most of the feedback I got was positive. Most restaurant-goers don't mind paying a bit extra if it ensures workers will have access to affordable health care.
Here's the story in its entirety:
Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)
As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.
That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent "Health & Wellness" charge to customers' bills to pay for their employees' health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa's cooks and dishwashers.
The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video (see above), noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.
Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)
Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.
They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.
At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”
But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.
Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.
The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.
“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”
When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring San Francisco businesses with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive (“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”) to outrage that diners were being taxed. “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer. (A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)
Then there's the issue of oversight. In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exlusively for workers' health insurance.
Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”
Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.
Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.
Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.
“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.
Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.
Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.
Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)
As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.
That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.
The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.
Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)
Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.
They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.
At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”
But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.
Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.
The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.
“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”
Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”
(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)
Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.
Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”
Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.
Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.
Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.
“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.
Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.
- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf
workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)
As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.
That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.
The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.
Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)
Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.
They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.
At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”
But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.
Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.
The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.
“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”
Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”
(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)
Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.
Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”
Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.
Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.
Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.
“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.
Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.
Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.
- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf
Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)
As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.
That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.
The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.
Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)
Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.
They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.
At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”
But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.
Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.
The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.
“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”
Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”
(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)
Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.
Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”
Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.
Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.
Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.
“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.
Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.
Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.
- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf
Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)
As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.
That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.
The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.
Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)
Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.
They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.
At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”
But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.
Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.
The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.
“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”
Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”
(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)
Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.
Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”
Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.
Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.
Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.
“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.
Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.
Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.
- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf
The organic food stamp challenge has been, well, a challenge lately. It's not that we've run out of money—yet. But because we went to Seattle for the weekend (a trip that was excluded from the challenge), we didn't have our usual two days of intensive food preparation. As a result, we have no granola, no bread, no waffles, no stock, and no black beans. On Monday morning, we woke to discover that we were not only out of eggs and milk, but honey, jam, and salad greens. Oh, right—we didn't go grocery shopping this weekend! Meals have been sorry affairs, cobbled together from leftovers in the fridge. On Monday, I grazed on apples, cheese, and leftover pasta (I was on a deadline so too busy to run to the store). For dinner, I roasted cauliflower (leftover from last week's cauliflower mac and cheese) with olive oil and garlic and heated up some already cooked salmon from last week. (Don worked late and ate leftovers at the office, I presume.) Tuesday night, because Safeway doesn't carry organic tortillas, I literally ate beans and rice. Some weeks, creating balanced home-cooked meals is harder than others.
But yesterday, I was inspired to do better after sitting in on a "Cooking Matters" class at the Oregon Food Bank. Part nutrition education and part hands-on cooking lessons, Cooking Matters is a 6-week-long class that teaches low-income folks how to cook healthy meals from scratch. The curriculum, which was developed by the the anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength, covers everything from knife safety to buying fruits and vegetables on a budget. Demand for the class, which is free, is high—in the Portland Metro area alone, the Oregon Food Bank runs about 50 classes a year. (In 2012, there were 73 classes in the state of Oregon.) Impressively, more than 30,000 people nationwide took either Cooking Matters classes or participated in a stand-alone "Store tour" last year. (Store tours teach people how to inspect labels, shop for whole grains, and calculate unit pricing.)
Once peeled, broccoli stems are great to eat
I wanted to observe a Cooking Matters class so I could better understand the challenges of living on food stamps (or any limited budget) while still getting healthy food on the table. As I've mentioned in previous posts, Don and I have an unfair advantage in that we both know our way around a kitchen, which makes sticking to a budget much easier. (We don't buy any processed foods except for the MorningStar vegetarian sausages Don likes so much—but he can't buy them until Lent is over because they're not organic.)
Merrill Maiano, the volunteer chef who teaches this particular class, started by announcing the menu: turkey meatloaf with quinoa and roasted veggies—broccoli, cauliflower, and butternut squash. (The mention of squash elicited an "ewww!" from one opinionated student.) Ignoring the outburst, Merrill explained that turkey, unlike beef or veal, is a lean source of protein and that quinoa is both healthier and more flavorful than rice. (Note: quinoa is actually a seed, not a grain. It comes from a plant that's related to spinach and chard and it contains all nine amino acids, making it one of the most protein-rich vegetarian foods on the planet.) One of the cool things about Cooking Matters is that at the end of each class, students are sent home with several ingredients from the day's meal—incentive to recreate it at home. This day, each student went home with turkey, onions, carrots, celery, and a baggie of quinoa.
The 12 students—a diverse group of women and men (one of whom was deaf)—trooped into the kitchen, washed their hands, and dove right in. This was their graduation class, so I shouldn't have been surprised to see such excellent knife skills in action: lots of deft chopping of garlic, onion, celery and carrots. Half the class made a mirepoixfor the meatloaf while the other half started chopping the veggies. Merrill showed us a trick for splitting open the squash. Using a small frying pan like a hammer, she hit the back of the chef's knife, wedging it deeper into the squash. (It's a safer technique than using your hand to push the blade, because the squash is so tough.)
Merrill uses a pan to wedge the knife deeper
As Merrill expertly peeled and chopped broccoli stems into bite-sized pieces (to roast with the florets), I asked her if she ever taught students how to make vegetable stock. (One frugal way to do this is to save peelings from veggies in the fridge or freezer until you have enough to make stock.)
"I've had people in this class who don't know the difference between broccoli and asparagus," she told me, by way of an answer. "And who have never baked before in their lives." The upshot: When you're starting with such a limited knowledge base, it's best to stick to the syllabus. (Though of course, if a student asks her how to make stock, Merrill will happily tell him how it's done.) Merrill reminded me of another hurdle many of her students face: insufficient equipment. One man in this class doesn't have an oven at home, only an electric skillet. You can't very well recreate carrot-pineapple muffins at home if you don't have an oven. At the beginning of the six weeks, though, many of Merrill's students are consuming a diet of mostly processed, packaged foods, but by the end they know how to make stir fry, bean soup, grain-based salads, meatloaf, and muffins. This is progress, indeed!
Back in the class, the students were sautéing the mirepoix on the stovetop, filling the kitchen with the lovely sweet scent of browning onions. Meanwhile, their classmates began preparing the turkey meatloaf, whisking a dressing of egg, Dijon, herbs, hot sauce, and parmesan cheese together with breadcrumbs.
Turkey Meatloaf, Serves 4
Recipe by Merrill Maiano
Ingredients:
2 teaspoons olive or vegetable oil 1 onion, chopped fine 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine 1 carrot, chopped fine 1 celery stalk, chopped fine
1 egg, whisked 2 Tablespoons water 2 Tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped fine
1 tsp. dry thyme 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce (optional) ½ teaspoon hot sauce (optional) ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon black pepper 2 Tablespoons Parmesan cheese ¼ cup bread crumbs
1 pound ground turkey up to ½ cup cooked quinoa
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line the baking dish with foil and lightly grease it with cooking spray.
Heat the oil in a large sauté pan or skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook until the onions soften and begin to become translucent.
Add the garlic and sauté for 30 seconds, until fragrant. Transfer the entire mixture to a bowl to cool.
In another large bowl, whisk the egg, water, herbs, Dijon, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, salt, and pepper, and parmesan cheese together until completely combined.
Whisk in the breadcrumbs until just evenly distributed. Then, stir in the cooled onion mixture.
Add the ground turkey and cooked grains until the mixture is uniform.
Press the meat into a ball and transfer it to the baking dish. Once in the dish, shape the meat into a rectangular 2-inch thick loaf. There should be about an inch or so of space between the loaf and the sides of your baking dish. Spray the loaf lightly with cooking spray or brush with a little oil.
Bake the loaf for approximately 45 minutes, or until the center of the loaf reads 160 degrees on a meat thermometer. If you don’t have a thermometer, cut into the loaf to confirm that it is opaque and no longer pink in the middle.
When the loaf is done, remove it from the oven and let it rest for 10-15 minutes before serving. Slice into 1-inch thick pieces and serve.
As the meatloaf cooked and the veggies roasted, I chatted with a few students about their favorite parts of the class. One man told me he made a garbanzo bean soup at home and his cousin and her son, who had never tasted garbanzo beans before, weren't quite sure what to make of them. "It was something new," he said, which was "pretty cool." A blonde woman in her '50s said she loved discovering new foods in this class—like pea pods (in a veggie stir fry) and the carrot-pineapple muffins, which were also a hit at home. Yet another woman said this class has taught her a lot about "seasoning, how to cut things, what to put in your pantry, and how to improvise without a recipe."
Turkey quinoa meatloaf & roasted vegetables—yum!
At last, it was time to eat. I was invited to stay and taste the fruits of their labors, which I gladly did. As we helped ourselves to the food, one student was applauded for making vegetables half of his plate, following the USDA's "MyPlate" guidelines. (I got the sense that six weeks ago, he was eating more meat than veggies.) The meatloaf was moist and flavorful--with a nice crunch and nuttiness because of the quinoa. The vegetables, which had been tossed with olive oil and some spices and roasted in the oven for about 20 minutes, were a little caramelized and simply delicious.
Before I left, I asked assistant chef Stacy Flaherty whether the issue of organic produce ever arises. It turns out it does. "The people we get in these classes—they know organic food is out there and they know it can be expensive," Flaherty says. Though the instructors are careful not to tell students what they should or shouldn't buy, they may mention which fruits and vegetables are safer to eat conventionally. (Those with thicker skins or rinds like avocado, watermelon, or grapefruit.)
Erin Carver, the Americorps Member who works in the Food Bank's nutrition education program, reminded students that farmers' markets will be opening soon, and that all of the Portland Farmers Markets accept food stamps. A few of these, she noted, even have matching programs—free money, in effect, for you to spend on fresh fruits & vegetables.
More soon on "Beyond Organic" foods and how we weather the final two weeks of the Food Stamp Challenge.
[A version of this blog was published March 28th on Civil Eats.]
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen says that organic food is elitist and assumes that the only people who demand healthy, pesticide-free food are well-off Whole Foods shoppers. I don't know how else to say this: he's wrong.
Times columnist Roger Cohen says that organic food is elitist, and assumes that the only people who demand healthy, pesticide-free food are well-off Whole Foods shoppers. Well, I don’t know how else to put it: he’s wrong. - See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/01/30/eradicating-food-deserts-one-congregation-at-a-time/#sthash.eHS6ryhr
Times columnist Roger Cohen says that organic food is elitist, and assumes that the only people who demand healthy, pesticide-free food are well-off Whole Foods shoppers. Well, I don’t know how else to put it: he’s wrong. - See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/01/30/eradicating-food-deserts-one-congregation-at-a-time/#sthash.eHS6ryhr.blog on why Roger Cohen gets it wrong. How Ecumenical Ministres of Oregon makes sure that organic food is anything but elitist, for Civil Eats.
When he was seven years old, Malik Yakini, inspired by his grandfather, planted his own backyard garden in Detroit, seeding it with carrots and other vegetables. Should it come as any surprise that today, Yakini has made urban farming his vocation? The Executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), which he co-founded in 2006, he is also chair of the Detroit Food Policy Council, which advocates for a sustainable, localized food system and a food-secure Detroit.
It’s well known that Detroit has been hard hit by the economic crisis—its unemployment rate is a staggering 28%—but it also has one of the most well-developed urban agriculture scenes in the country. Over the past decade, resourceful Detroiters and organizations such as DBCFSN have been converting the city’s vacant lots and fallow land into lush farms and community gardens. According to the Greening of Detroit, there are now over 1,351 gardens in the city.
I spoke to Yakini, one of the leaders of Detroit’s vibrant food justice movement, about the problem with the term “food desert,” how Detroit vegans survive the winter, and what the DBCFSN is doing to change the food landscape in Detroit. “We’re really making an effort to reach beyond the foodies—to get to the common folk who are not really involved in food system reform,” says Yakini. Continue reading my interview on Civil Eats.
When you hear the words Slow Food, do you conjure up a multi-course locavore dinner with wine pairings? If so, think again. Over the past three years, Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel has hammered home the mission of Slow Food: it's about advocating for food that is good (healthy), clean (i.e. no pesticides), and fair (farmers and workers get paid a living wage). As Viertel makes it clear in this interview I did with him for Civil Eats, Slow Food is at heart a social justice organization that's rallying members to be politically engaged, whether that's by taking up the $5 challenge or pressuring Congress for changes to the 2012 Food and Farm Bill. Taking pleasure in food—and in cooking—will always be inextricably linked to the organization's larger goal of ensuring that, "Everyone can eat food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it." For inspiration, here's a video of a group of farmers who took the $5 challenge.
When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.
When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair.
- See more at: http://civileats.com/2011/10/26/on-food-justice-an-interview-with-slow-foods-josh-viertel/#sthash.dxbwA5Oo.dpuf
When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.
When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair.
- See more at: http://civileats.com/2011/10/26/on-food-justice-an-interview-with-slow-foods-josh-viertel/#sthash.dxbwA5Oo.dpuf
McKenzie, Charlotte, and Willa cook up Mark Bittman's frittata
