Devra Gartenstein's Blog, page 3

Street Food

Patty Pan is getting a tamale cart! I've spent much of the past few weeks brainstorming about logistics, filling out the cumbersome health department application, and driving down to Oregon to order my custom cart. I can't wait.



I've wanted a tamale cart for years; in fact, when I opened my ill-fated cafe a year and a half ago, I really wanted to get a tamale cart instead, but at that point the Seattle health department still wasn't letting you sell any savory food other than hot dogs off a street cart. Because, after all, hot dogs are so much safer than any other kind of food you could cook on a cart (?)



I'm still not quite sure how my tamale cart will fit in with Seattle's evolving street food scene. To be honest, I've been somewhat ambivalent about the recent hype about the rapidly expanding lineup of local food trucks. Growing up in New York, I knew street food as the experience of buying an expedient hot dog, knish, or pretzel from a no frills cart, and inhaling it while rushing down the street, weaving in and out of pedestrian crowds.



I've always thought of street food as a deeply populist eating experience. The gourmet trucks that have been proliferating lately are strange to me. One truck owner I've worked with struts around in a t-shirt that reads, "I'm only wearing this t-shirt because my chef coat is in the laundry."



I spent a night in Portland last week when I drove down to order my cart. I did a lot of walking, and I ate some street food. I learned from the guy who's building my cart that the health department regulations in Oregon are significantly more relaxed than the rules in Washington State. Unlike many of the Seattle trucks I've seen, most of the Portland trucks looked like low-budget ventures.



 Peeking in windows, I saw plenty of basic, home-style kitchen range hoods and domestic stoves. The Seattle health department requires you to have all professional equipment. I saw many complex and elaborate menus, and realized that the Portland model provides a relatively low budget opportunity for entrepreneurs with restaurant dreams to get started. On the other hand, some of the Seattle trucks likely required as much startup capital as a small restaurant.



So I'm trying to figure out how a Patty Pan cart will fit in. Our success at farmers' markets has come in part from the fact that we were in the right place at the right time and were lucky to be the city's first enduring, tenacious farmers' market concession. We also do well because our menu is set up to prepare and serve food very quickly during the limited hours when we operate. Oh yeah, and we also provide a great product.



To use a Moneyball reference, Patty Pan has never aimed to be the New York Yankees. We'd rather be the Oakland A's: smart, scrappy, and profitable.



The man I've been working with at the Seattle health department told me that they've gotten very few applications for new kinds of carts since they started allowing foods other than hot dogs. So I'm excited to be getting in on this early. In some ways a cart seems more versatile than a truck: it can operate in a smaller space--even a sidewalk--and it's less of a production to get it up and running on any given day.



We're going to offer plenty of tamale varieties, plenty of different salsas, and also chili. And we'll have griddles that can fit over the burners we use so that the operation can double as a quesadilla cart, but we won't try to sell both tamales and quesadillas at the same event. We want to keep it simple, and leverage our long-time experience in getting food into customers' hands as quickly as possible.



If everything goes according to plan, we should be up and running by early July. Stay tuned.

Farming Heroes

Farming is backbreaking work. You get up before the sunrise, and you often work until after sundown, tying up loose ends, tinkering with equipment, and taking care of paperwork. You’re at the mercy of weather systems and price fluctuations which can bankrupt you even when you make good choices and dedicate every waking hour to your harvest.


The state of farming in this country is a mixed bag. On the one hand, big companies have spent the past hundred and fifty years—or longer—getting as much land as possible into the hands of a few big players. At the turn of the twentieth century, forty eight percent of American families made a living from agriculture. A hundred years later, that number was closer to two percent.


Many of the families who were farming at the beginning of the last century but not at the end didn’t want to give up their land; they were forced to move because of bad harvests or unfavorable market conditions. You could say that small scale agriculture is dying, as families who have farmed for generations find that they can’t compete with the massive investments that their corporate competitors make to grow corn, wheat, and soy on an industrial scale.


Despite this bad news about family farms, there are more than ten times as many farmers’ markets in the United States today as there were forty years ago. Free-thinking farmers are somehow finding ways to start working small pieces of land, selling their produce directly to free-thinking customers. Farmers’ markets are so hot that even large mainstream corporations are aping them in tacky promotions.


Wherever you find an economy where small-scale farmers thrive, you find a system of government where individuals are willing and able to speak out. This has been the case since ancient times. When a small minority gains control of most of the land or resources, government grows corrupt, workers are exploited, and the average person doesn’t have much of a say.


Ancient Babylon (present day Iraq) lay between two mighty rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their water was rich in minerals, and when the rivers flooded their banks, the silt that was left behind created fertile and productive plots. At some point a proactive priest or engineer discovered that he could make the land even more bountiful by channeling river water into irrigation systems. As large scale irrigation projects grew successful, the folks who were organizing the effort grew rich and powerful, and came to own most of the land.


There’s a tablet bearing ancient Babylonian laws that turned up about a hundred years ago in what was once Persia. One of these laws states that when someone works land that another person owns, he is entitled to keep one third of the produce he grows there. One third. Think about it. That’s sharecropping. And yet some lawmaker took the trouble to pass a law and inscribe a tablet to protect the tenants’ right to keep that one third. It must have been even worse for many renters.


Nearby, in ancient Israel, folks followed a custom known as the Jubilee Year. According to this tradition, every fiftieth year all debts were forgiven, and all land that had changed hands due to unfortunate circumstances was returned to its original owner. In other words, if you lost the family farm, when the Jubilee Year came around, you’d get it back.


If a Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the dustbowl years, thousands of Great Plains farmers wouldn’t have lost their land and trekked out to California to become migrant workers. If the Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the recent mortgage and foreclosure crisis, we wouldn’t be facing the current level of homelessness and poverty. Homes excavated from the ruins of ancient Israel tend to be relatively uniform in size. That culture didn’t have the kind of wealth disparity that you found nearby in Babylon, where people who lost their land during tough times were unlikely to ever get it back.


 In early Greece, most of the good land was grabbed early on by the military elite, and regular folks were left with rocky hillsides which they had to nurture patiently in order to get anything to grow. They planted olives and grapes, crops that the richer landowners didn’t bother with because they took too much time and patience. But olives and grapes were the right crops to grow on rocky hillsides, which weren’t much good for the wheat and barley which the wealthier landowners grew on the better lands, delegating the labor to their slaves.


Unlike wheat or barley, which grow easily and are replanted every year, olive trees and grape vines can take generations to get established. Folks who grow them can make secondary items—olive oil and wine—which are much more valuable than the basic produce, especially if you learn your craft and put out a great product. Once you put in the time it takes to get a grape vine or olive tree to bear fruit, you feel proud of your work and you want to keep that vine or tree in your family.
These early Greek farmers developed pride and independence, and before long they had started history’s first democracy. It wasn’t perfect—slaves couldn’t vote, and even wealthy landowners were shut out at first—but it was a start.


After the fall of Rome, warlords again grabbed all of the good land in Europe, just as the military elite had done in ancient Greece. They used the feudal system to offer contracts to poor peasants, who farmed land they did not own under disadvantageous terms. But around the end of the first millennium, Europeans began inventing better agricultural technologies and becoming more successful farmers.


Land ownership arrangements changed. The wealthy land owners found that it was now more profitable to hire labor and harvest their own crops than to offer long term leases to peasants.  Poor people struck out on their own, and began clearing marginal hillsides of trees and shrubs. Like the ancient Greek olive farmers, they didn’t have the kind of resources that large scale land owners enjoyed, but the process of taking a piece of land, making it their own, and getting crops to grow there transformed them from peasants into free thinking citizens. They passed laws that recognized the rights of individuals, and began challenging authority.


There’s been a similar dynamic in the United States, reaching back hundreds of years. Like the warlords of ancient Greece and medieval Europe, cattle and railroad barons grabbed up much of the land as quickly and ruthlessly as they could. At the same time, this country was founded by people who were trying to get out from under oppressive governments. Forward thinking legislators and radical farmers have always challenged the efforts of cutthroat entrepreneurs to buy up as much land as possible.


Thomas Jefferson wrote prolifically about the importance of broad based prosperity and land ownership. He was a wealthy landowner and slave owner himself, but he did have some good ideas, and he helped to create an ethic and an ideal. During the following century, the federal government encouraged the settlement of the western part of the country by offering one hundred and sixty acre parcels to homesteaders who could demonstrate that they were capable of working the land.

Despite the fact that the railroad companies were awarded half of the land--and grabbed much of the other half by sponsoring sham claims--this policy on some level was intended to foster equality, once you factor out the fact that it displaced hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from areas where they had lived for centuries.


After the Civil War, the government launched a similar program aimed at helping freed slaves to get back on their feet by offering them forty acres and a mule. Like the movement to settle the west, the reality of these land grants hardly lived up to the ideal. Many freed slaves ended up as sharecroppers, rather than landowners. Despite these failings, it was a good idea, and if it had been seriously implemented, it’s hard to imagine that we’d have the kind of social and economic disparity on the basis of race that we see today.


Once most of the land out west had been settled late in the nineteenth century, big railroad companies began getting into the food business. Food was an ideal product to transport on the new railroads because the demand for it was ongoing, and there was plenty of room out west to raise food for the densely populated Eastern cities, which were growing more densely populated every day.


The railroad companies got involved in food production in the west, raising cattle and growing lettuce. They also formed alliances with the giant meat packing companies, when they weren’t competing with them for their own share of a very profitable business. Cutthroat entrepreneurs grabbed up as much western land as possible. Their agricultural production technologies grew more expensive and efficient, as they bought bigger tractors to work bigger parcels of land.


The family farmers who had managed to get their hands on homesteaded plots had a hard time competing. They were often growing the same wheat and corn as the large-scale landowners, but they didn’t have the acreage and the equipment to achieve economies of scale, so they couldn’t put out the large enough quantities to succeed, and they couldn’t keep their small operations viable with the low prices that their industrial competitors were able to charge.


As these independent farmers found themselves unable to pay their bills and cover the cost of their seeds, they began mortgaging their land and borrowing against their equipment. The situation didn’t improve. Many were never able to pay back their loans, and eventually they lost their land. They left their livelihoods behind and went off in search of wage labor, often with young families in tow.


Big agriculture got bigger, and before long folks living in cities and even in rural towns were buying most of their food through grocery chains that did most of their business with the food conglomerates that managed most of the food chain. The big food companies built strong lobbies that shaped a political system where corporations had a disproportionately large voice, and individuals struggled to be heard.


Today we’re used to hearing about a monster food system that has so much political clout that it keeps many Americans unhealthy by offering products that are profitable but lethal, but this is hardly a new story. In the early years of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair published a muckraking novel about the industrial slaughterhouses in Chicago, exposing the filthy food processing operations and hazardous conditions for workers.


The public outrage that the novel stirred made it obvious that the government had to take some action. Unfortunately,  rather than taking the opportunity to pass laws that would really make folks safer, government officials worked with industry representatives to create the illusion that they were making the food supply safer, when they were mostly just managing their own images.


The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was certainly an improvement over the earlier regulatory environment. It put a cursory inspection system into place, and made it illegal to mislabel products. But the legislation was also a tragic missed opportunity to actually reform the food system by creating serious standards for regulation and food safety.


There’s a similar situation today, as monstrous factory farms breed diseases nobody could even have imagined a hundred years ago, diseases caused by overcrowding, indiscriminate use of hormones and antibiotics, and crazy practices like feeding byproducts from cow slaughterhouses back to cows, and byproducts from chicken slaughterhouses back to chickens.


We hear nearly every week about a new food safety scare linked directly to industrial farming practices. Pathogens that make their way into the industrial food supply ruin millions of pounds of meat, and outbreaks from food borne illnesses sicken thousands of people. And yet it’s tough to pass regulation that might actually improve the situation because large food companies fund such powerful lobbies, and contribute heavily to the campaigns of elected officials.


The consolidation of the food industry undermines democracy because the political influence that the large corporations enjoy ensures that fewer people have a real say in crafting laws and policies. However, the small-scale farmers who are driving the farmers’ market movement do manage to make some noise, and the more they prosper and find ways to sell their food and share their ideals, the less powerful corporate agriculture will ultimately become.


If it hadn’t been for the strong voices of independent farmers and the customers who support them, federal organic standards would allow genetically modified foods to be labeled as organic. These free thinking producers have been the force between today’s sustainable food movement, which has forced the government to overhaul nutritional recommendations, re-evaluate the school lunch program, and fund vouchers to help low income shoppers buy produce at farmers’ markets.


We’ve got a long way to go, when it comes to building a sensible, fair food system, and there’s certainly no shortage of bad news, from e coli and salmonella outbreaks, to epidemics of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. But the flashes of good news are more than just isolated incidents. Instead, they’re the work of a grassroots movement that gets stronger every day, and has the potential to change not only the way we eat, but also the way we live.

Food Ghostwriting

A couple of weeks ago Julia Moskin wrote a New York Times article exposing the fact that (gasp) not all chefs write their own cookbooks. Cookbook authors such as Rachael Ray and Gwyneth Paltrow were quick to point out that they did, in fact, compose their own material, and they felt maligned by the suggestion that they didn't. The controversy has led to plenty of earnest discussion about the role of ghostwriters in creating and producing cookbooks, with plenty of focus--as usual--on high profile celebrities with big names and big egos.

This past winter I've been doing a bit of cookbook ghostwriting myself. I'm finding I really enjoy the process of helping other people to channel their food knowledge into written form. I love writing but I can't really market my way out of a paper bag, so ghostwriting feels like a perfect fit: I get to focus on the part that I do well, and another person has the job of promoting the material. I started out as a fiction writer, and ghostwriting also enables me to go back to chameleon mode, learning and imitating someone else's voice.

I've been working for peanuts so far, thinking of the process as an internship of sorts. If I get some experience, then down the line I may be able to work on more lucrative projects because, after all, a girl's got to earn a living. But reading Moskin's account of the treatment she received from some of the big names she worked with has given me a new appreciation of the type of work I've been doing.

I've mostly been helping non-native speakers express their food knowledge in ways that will be accessible to an American audience. I edited a cookbook for a Russian guy with a thick accent who had been working with voice recognition software: this became clear when I came across the phrase "feel the pastry shells." I worked with a Greek food personality who wants to teach American cooks about the food lessons that he and his compatriots have learned as a result of their country's economic turmoil.

I'm finding this work fascinating. In addition to learning a lot about unfamiliar cuisines, it's gotten me thinking about the role of food writing in the digital age. We all want to promote who we are and what we know. We create platforms, project personalities, and build audiences. But the people with the deepest, broadest food knowledge aren't necessarily the ones who have the writing skills or the tech savvy to communicate what they know.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the ways that new information technologies have been lowering the qualty of food writing and diluting the brands of folks who immerse themselves in the craft and the business of creating food books and magazines. But digital media and the recent innovations in self-publishing have also created a field that is potentially quite egalitarian and food is, after all, a deeply egalitarian medium.

By the way, if you're ever looking for a ghostwriter, I hope you'll keep me in mind...

Roasted Sunchokes

I used to scoff at sunchokes. Walking around the winter markets, it always seemed like everybody was selling them but nobody was buying them. I once even asked a farmer whether there was actually a demand for them, or whether farmers just offered them for sale because they were easy to grow. I'm not much of a gardener, but I've heard that they are, in fact, very easy to grow.

Sunchokes used to be known as "Jerusalem artichokes" until a bunch of marketing folks got together and tried to figure out why nobody was buying them. Someone suggested rebranding them as "sunchokes", which wasn't as big of a stretch as it sounds because they are, in fact, part of the sunflower family.

Nobody knows why they came to be known as "Jerusalem artichokes" in the first place. They're definitely not part of the artichoke family, although they do have a distinctly artichoke-like flavor. They're indigenous to this hemisphere, and one theory is that whoever first came up with the name was referring to the New World's one-time reputation as the New Jerusalem. Another theory as that the "Jerusalem" in the name is a bastardization of "girasole", which is a flower that bends towards the sun, like its sunflower cousins.

In any case, they're quite good for you. They're reminiscent of potatoes, but have almost no starch and plenty of fiber. They're also bountiful at a time of year when there isn't much other local produce available.

Up until the past few weeks, I never had much luck cooking sunchokes. For some reason I thought that you absolutely had to peel them, and they're knobby and small, and it seemed like a lot of work for not very much food. I also didn't seem to digest them well.

I brought some home a few weeks ago because a farmer had a big box of them left over at the end of a market and offered them to me for free. I said I didn't have the patience to peel them, and she said she never bothered. It was a revelation.

So here's how I've been preparing them. It's so simple that it seems silly to use a recipe format. Slice them thinly. Aim for the thinness of potato chips, although--if you're anything like me-- most of them won't end up quite that thin. Toss the slices with olive oil. Use your hands, so you can actually coat them without using an insane amount of oil. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and roast them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes.

It's that simple. The thicker ones will be tender and satisfying. The thinner ones will be almost crispy, like artichokey potato chips. It makes me think of the amazing possibilities for someone with a big budget and plenty of marketing savvy: Sun choke chips!!

The Farmers' Market Apostrophe

This winter I've been studying editing, taking online courses in an effort to become a better writer and also to improve my skillset as a freelancer. The other day I came across a disturbing piece of news in my course materials: the apostrophe I've been using in the phrase "farmers' market" may not actually belong there.

At the risk of sounding like a language nerd, I love that apostrophe. It says that the market belongs to the farmers. The instructor's rationale was that in this particular phrase, "farmers" functions as an adjective rather than a noun, therefore it shouldn't take the possessive form.

I've used the possesive form throughout this blog, even in the header. When I was working on my cookbook Local Bounty, the editor suggested that we drop the apostrophe. I suspect she used the adjective argument, but it was a while ago and I don't fully remember. I indicated that I felt strongly about it and she let me have my way.

In addition to the thorny intricacies of grammar, my coursework has also dealt with the interpersonal complexities of marking up someone else's work. I realize now that this editor exercised discretion and flexibility in a way that probably ran counter to her sensibilities, because it was apparent that this particular apostrophe mattered to me.

That's the kind of editor I want to be. And in the meantime, I'm going to keep right on using that apostrophe, consistently and defensibly.

Cooking is Subversive

I've been working a bit with the Occupy Wall Street folks in New York, who are putting together a cookbook, and it's gotten me thinking about the subversive nature of simply picking up a knife and preparing your own dinner.

When you cook for yourself instead of reheating processed convenience food, you opt out of the garbage that the mainstream food industry wants you to eat. Cooking for yourself is a way of thinking for yourself, choosing not to believe all of the advertisements telling you that it's too hard, or takes too much time, or you'll never make it taste as good as the celebrity chef who's got his name on the package.

Don't believe it. Don't let any celebrity chef ever convince you that you don't know the right way to hold a knife, chop an onion, or bone a chicken. There are as many ways to hold a knife as there are people handling knives. You may be able to learn some tricks that will make you more efficient, or make your cooking look more professional. But in the end, as long as you cook something reasonably tasty, don't hurt yourself, and don't make anyone sick, then you've done something right, regardless of how you're holding your knife or slicing your onion.

Cooking is a subversive act because it involves taking back the power to choose every ingredient in your meal, making the decision to buy from folks who give a damn about the people who work for them and about the soil, air, and water. When you buy ingredients from small farmers, you support individuals and families who have chosen to make a living outside of the mainstream food system. They're usually kinder to to their land than industrial operations, and they make their own calls about what they're going to grow, and where they're going to sell it.

Shopping at a farmers' market is a subversive act. When you choose heirloom fruits and vegetables rather than tasteless, industrial varieties, you do your part to preserve ancient plant knowledge and species diversity. At a farmers' market you have the chance to buy ingredients from farmers who use age-old seeds and knowledge to produce tasty, healthy food, rather than squeezing as much low quality produce as they can out of land that's already tired.

Shopping at a farmers' market or joining a community supported agriculture program is a subversive act because you're doing your part to help build on alternative economy, one that doesn't rely on multinational corporations or transnational trucking firms. You're paying for the fruits and vegetables that you actually get, rather than spending extra money for the services of middlemen who jack up the price of your groceries without giving back anything of value.

When you cook for yourself and plan your meals around fresh, local ingredients, you buy from people who keep your money close to home, as they turn around and support other local businesses instead of extracting profits that ultimately go to a corporate office in a distant city. When independent businesses can generate their own livelihood, fewer people are at the mercy of low paying jobs with companies that charge obscenely low prices for products made by people who work for even lower wages in developing nations.

Cooking is a subversive act because it is a magnet that brings people together to work collectively, gathering and prepping ingredients, and then sitting down and enjoying the results, taking time to exchange thoughts and ideas, visiting face to face instead of through a computer screen. Cooking creates connections, providing a meeting place with cooperation at its root. Cooking with a community involves sharing skills, and building something bigger than the work of lonely individuals. Cooking and sitting down to meals is time that you don't spend working, shopping, or watching television.

Cooking is a subversive act because it brings different cultures together to enjoy each other's food, creating connections instead of going to war. Strangers are less strange once you have tasted their recipes and sat at their tables. Each individual act of connecting to someone who is unlike yourself, someone the media teaches you to fear, helps to defang the myth that the world is a hostile place, and weapons are the only solution.

Cooking is a subversive act because it gives you control over your health. The better you eat, the more likely you are to are to get up and do something rather than sitting on the couch. The better you eat, the less you need to support the mainstream medical industry, and the less you rely on highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs and an insurance industry that doesn't insure much. Using your own judgment and developing your own knowledge base about the way for you to eat makes you less vulnerable to bogus claims on food labels telling you that a product will help your heart, boost your energy level, or keep you regular.

Cooking for yourself is a process of getting to know your own needs and your own mind. The more you produce your own food, the more your food choices depend on what you really want and need, rather than what the food industry wants you to buy so they'll make more money. Choosing your own ingredients allows you to tune into the ways that different foods affect your well being and your metabolism, and choose combinations that help you thrive.

Learning about your own food allergies and sensitivities gives you the knowledge and power to heal yourself, and stay alert and engaged. Cooking for yourself allows you to choose your own portion size, figuring out how much food you really need, and it allows you to choose the right amount of salt for your meals, rather than consuming all of the extra sodium that convenience food manufacturers add to their products so they'll last long on supermarket shelves while they're sitting and waiting for you to buy them.

Cooking is easy, once you get past the idea that you have to make something complicated and dazzling. Use good, fresh ingredients, and prepare them simply. Practice and build your skills. Learn from the folks around you, and share your own knowledge. Cooking is power. Cooking is wealth. Cooking is subversive.

Reawakening

I own a business that makes the same food week after week, month after month, and year after year. The ingredients change seasonally, but the menu basically stays the same. So it's a big deal when we introduce a new menu item.



This past fall we started selling beef tamales. We'd been selling only vegetarian tamales for years, in fact, our entire menu had been completely vegetarian until we introduced a beef chili in an effort to limit competition at the Jubilee Farm pumpkin patch event. (They were talking about bringing in a burger vendor for the omnivores.) The chili was really tasty, but it was more work than we'd anticipated and it just didn't sell well.

The beef tamales however, were an instant hit. Once we introduced them at all of our markets, we quickly began selling more of them than of both of the vegetarian varieties combined. There were a couple of pissed off vegans, but not nearly as many as we'd expected. Ironic as it may sound, I felt like it was a step in the right direction as far as my big picture objective of encouraging folks to eat less meat. There's an ounce of beef in a beef tamale. If someone chooses to eat one along with a big pile of locally grown vegetables on the side instead of eating a burger or a hot dog, I feel like I'm making a difference.

We began buying our meat from Crown S Ranch, in Winthrop. My household has been enjoying their fine products for years, and they gave us a great deal on some overstocked meat that had been shaped into hamburger patties. We did some mutually beneficial cross marketing.

I drove out to visit the farm in late October. As the author of two vegan cookbooks, I wanted to be able to tell customers that I'd visited the farm that was raising the animals that went into my tamales, and I felt good about using their products.

It was a magical place. Jennifer and Louis, the owners, are both engineers and they've designed a wealth of technologies and systems --some simple, some complex--to make the most of natural cycles and synergies, and raise tasty, healthy animals. At one point Jennifer was showing me around and explaining some of the systems, and she stopped in mid-sentence, gestured at a nearby cow, and said, "Let's move away a bit. I'm talking too loud, and I'm stressing her out."

By the end of the visit, we'd brainstormed all kinds of ways we could collaborate. To start with, I agreed to make tamales using their beef and pork, for them to sell in their farm store and distribute to their wholesale accounts. They'd provide the meat, and I'd charge them a wholesale price that didn't include marking up the most expensive ingredient.

She ordered more than 700 tamales, and I made them and froze them for a pick-up in a couple of weeks. A week later, she sent me an email regarding a much smaller batch of tamales I'd brought to the farm store when I visited. Customers were asking whether I was using GMO corn and she was curious about the answer.

The GMO issue has always been a tricky one for me. On the one hand, I want good, clean food as much as the next person. On the other hand, I have a great working relationship with the Mexican distributor who suppliers my masa and corn husks, and their products make wonderful tamales. I could get a non-GMO masa from the behemoth natural foods distributor, but I have to drive far to get it, and they don't treat me like they value my business. I'm also not as happy with the way the tamales come out when I use that masa.

And yet Jennifer's email was so friendly and non-judgemental that I found myself revisiting the issue. I researched prices, tried thinking outside the box, and made a sample batch. I found myself liking them more.

But I still had more than 700 tamales in the freezer made with the GMO corn. I offered her an out. I'd been using this masa for many years, and I knew I'd be able to sell these tamales. If she wanted to wait until I could use all non-GMO ingredients, that wasn't a problem for me: I'd simply pay for the meat that she'd provided.


She bought them anyway, saying that she'd just treat them as a transitional batch. In the meantime, I went ahead placed an order with the behemoth natural foods distributor for quite a bit of the non-GMO masa. I've even found parchment paper "corn husks" that have the look and feel of the real thing.

Once I got started, I began revisiting all of my other ingredients as well. I've always been comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction, and I believe that incremental change can be as effective as all-or-nothing dogmatism. I use plenty of clean, local, organic ingredients, but I also use GMO masa and cheap, industrial cheese. I've never set out to provide an absolutely wholesome product. Instead, I've aimed to create a reasonably wholesome product that's a great value.

For the most part, the few customers who have called me out about these inferior ingredients over the years have seemed smug and self-righteous, and that kind of attitude makes me want to dig in more than it makes me want to change. But Jennifer's attitude about the tamales was sensible and easygoing, and it really got me thinking.

Media Storm

There's been quite the media storm lately about food safety at Seattle farmers' markets. The PI ran an article citing a report that the health department found 252 violations in 265 routine inspections this year, including 189 that were considered critical. National sites such as Barfblog and Epicurious promptly ran articles parroting the same information.

As a long time farmers' market vendor, I've experienced hundreds of on site health inspections. Some have involved red "critical" violations. Once I hadn't prepared a bleach bucket, though I did have bleach, water, and a container for bleach water on hand. Several times I've been cited for having handwashing water that was a few degrees cooler than the 100 degrees that the health department requires.

The most common violation found on my company's health inspection reports lately involves a regulation called the four hour rule. The health department allows you to hold potentially hazardous foods in the danger zone (40 degrees F to 140 degrees F) for up to four hours as long as you discard them at the end of this time. In order to use this rule and be in full compliance, you must write down the time that you took the product in question out of your cooler, as well as the time (four hours later) that you plan to discard it.

Most of the markets where my business vends are only four hours long. If we take our cheese out of the cooler at the beginning of the market and discard it at the end of the market, we are complying with the spirit of this rule. But if the health department shows up and we haven't written down that we took the cheese out at, say, 10AM when the market started, they write it down as a red, critical violation.

I'm not downplaying the importance of genuine food safety, especially at farmers' markets. Food should be kept sufficiently cold or hot, surfaces should be kept clean, and folks handling food should never have bare hand contact with ready to eat foods. In addition, food should be handled conscientiously at every stage in the process, from the time we purchase ingredients, to the time we prepare it in our kitchen, to the time we serve it at the markets. But lumping together this failure to record the time we took the cheese out of the cooler with genuinely serious violations like failure to wash hands after using the bathroom does a disservice to vendors, customers, market administrators, and even health inspectors.

Although there have been articles in recent years claiming that health regulation at farmers' markets is particularly lax, farmers' market booths are actually more meticulously regulated than any other food service establishment I've ever known. Market administrators enter into an agreement with the health department requiring them to provide proxy inspections of booths handling potentially hazardous foods on every single market day.

This is the equivalent of having a restaurant inspected every single day that it is open to the public. (Most restaurants are inspected only once or twice a year.) The inspections certainly aren't as thorough as the ones the health department performs. For example, a market manager probably wouldn't notice if my hand washing water was a few degrees cooler than it should be. But the market managers rightfully take this responsibility very seriously, because all of our livelihoods and reputations depend on not making the public sick.

So why the media hype? I think it stems partly from the fact that farmers' market booths are so out in the open and transparent. You rarely see a restaurant kitchen as exposed as a market booth, and this leaves market vendors open to a higher level of scrutiny and judgement. If the cook at your favorite restaurant drops your food on the floor, he can pick it up and plate it and you'll never know. (Ever hear of the three second rule?) That could never happen at a farmers' market because someone would inevitably see and report the incident to a market manager, resulting in an earnest talk about how the reputations of all vendors are on the line when a single vendor puts customers at risk.

It also doesn't help that many smug, self satisfied market patrons play down the importance of food safety at farmers' markets, claiming that farmers' market food is inherently safer than mainstream industrial food. Artisan food producers do tend to care more about the food they produce, there is some evidence that grassfed beef does tend to have lower levels of e coli than factory farmed beef, and a foodborne illness from a farmers' market product is much easier to trace and address than one caused by a huge outfit that distributes product in many states, under multiple brand names. But that's no reason to be complacent, and food mishandled by small producers is just as likely to make you sick as food mishandled by industrial behemoths.

Last weekend a reporter from KUOW showed up at the Ballard Farmers' Market with a health inspector who works closely with local farmers' markets. The inspector performed a couple of inspections, including one of my booth, explaining about the regulations and checking temperatures and handwashing stations. As far as I know, the story hasn't aired yet, but it struck me as an effort to show another side of the story, about the hard work that we actually do put into keeping our booths and our product safe.

I'm assuming the reporter felt okay about what she saw and heard, because she swung back around after the interview and bought a quesadilla.

Food Knowledge

I've been teaching cooking classes regularly lately, and I keep bumping up against a paradox: people come to cooking classes to learn something they didn't previously know, from someone who has culinary skill and experience. Yet I'm convinced that most of my students know more than they think they know, and my objective is to help them build enough confidence to experiment, and to draw on their existing knowledge.

Food knowledge belongs to all of us. Folks were choosing foods, and preparing and eating them long before anyone ever wrote a cookbook or started a cooking school. Even people who don't really cook nearly always manage to feed themselves day to day, and folks who sign up for cooking classes most likely have at least a bare minimum of curiosity and familiarity with foods, knives, and cutting boards.

The way I see it, if you prepare a meal that tastes reasonably good, and you don't cut or burn yourself and nobody gets sick, you've done something right. Some of my favorite meals are incredibly simple, and incredibly tasty. The other night I sauteed some lovely peppers with garlic and olive oil, tossed it with fresh pasta, and ate it with grated cheese, and it was one of the best things I'd ever tasted. Sure, it helped to start with good ingredients, but sometimes I feel that, as a cooking instructor, the most important thing I can do is give students permission to keep it simple.

There's no glory in this, and I really don't dazzle anyone. Once a student wrote on a feedback form that I didn't have enough of a "backstory." But I like to think that when folks leave my cooking classes, they'll actually go home and cook. And that's what it's all about.

This Summer

In a way it's hard to believe that summer is almost over, especially here in Seattle where it only got going in earnest a few weeks ago. I turned 50 this summer, and I started feeling tired right afterwards. I think I mostly just gave myself permission to feel tired, after more than 20 years of pushing myself through the long days and small, everyday crises involved in running a small business on a shoestring.

So I've been pushing myself less this summer, working to define my role in the business. I do the purchasing, because it involves keeping track of so many details and prices. I keep an eye on the big picture, and I figure out ways to communicate big picture insights to the crew. I try to keep them motivated, challenged and engaged. And I crank out quesadillas during the busiest times: special events, the Ballard Market, and the dinner rush at Columbia City.

Because of the terrible weather earlier this summer, the farmers' markets got a slow start this year. There was hardly anything except greens available until nearly July. We didn't really see chiles or corn until nearly the middle of August. There were plenty of cold, damp and dreary market days, when produce wouldn't have sold even if it was available. Things have picked up for the farmers the past few weeks, but for much of the summer they largely seemed stressed and broke.

As a prepared food vendor, I've actually benefited in some way from their struggles. Spring tends to be the busiest time of year for my business, at least when the weather cooperates. Folks are excited that the markets are starting up, but there isn't that much to buy so they buy dinner. Once the heirloom tomatoes and the flats of berries show up, customers have a lot less money leftover for discretionary purchases like prepared food.

I'm thrilled that my business has done well this summer, but I'm also fully aware that farmers' markets are about farmers, and something is very wrong when the farmers are struggling and the quesadilla vendor is thriving. I try to give back every way I can, by buying ingredients from my market neighbors and prioritizing their needs when they're hungry.

I also like to think that maybe the farmers benefitted in a roundabout way from my spring sales: customers who came to the market early in the season and didn't find much produce to buy may have enjoyed the dinner they bought at one of the prepared food stands and felt like the excursion wasn't a total loss, so they kept up the habit of coming to the market until the selection became more bountiful.