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Local Food Friday

ON ANY GIVEN FRIDAY a visitor to the plant who happened by at noon would hear the dinner bell ring and would be invited to stay for lunch.

Lunch would be prepared by a team of three to five volunteers who would have banded together throughout the week to put on an amazing spread for fifty to sixty enthusiastic eaters.

The food tends to come from across the street. Or sometimes from the other side of town. It has become an over-the-top study in excess, where giant platters of Eliza’s sausage, or slabs of mahimahi caught by Jacques and his kids are passed about by the meat eaters, while exquisite dishes of homemade tempeh and seitan are relished by the vegans in our midst.

We chose Friday as the lunch day because it was the day after the Pittsboro farmers market, and we wanted to ensure that the volunteer teams could avail themselves of local food.

But hyper-localism soon kicked in, and people started labeling where each ingredient came from, leading to snide remarks like, “These are remarkable new potatoes, Matt, where did you get them?”

“Doug grew them. They came from 100 yards from the kitchen.”

“Nice. What’s with the far-away ketchup?”

Peer pressure, and sport, and conviviality have descended on “Local Food Friday,” and it has become a durable institution on our project. Surely there are potlucks over at Oilseed Community, and on the bend in the Moncure Road, and there are a myriad of “family” dinners across project, where people persistently dine together without being “family” at all, but Local Food Friday is one place where almost all of us gather once a week.

Those who participate go through considerable effort to collect and prepare enough food for fifty, and then eat every Friday for free for eight or nine weeks after that. Teams form, people float from team to team based on food they procure, teams break up and reform, and it moves along.

Because there are humans involved, frictions arise. One challenge was the arrival of the “dumpster divers.” Those enthusiastic eaters who rummage through the food waste of area grocery stores, and provided their treasures to the rest of us. My first “dumpstered” dish was lamb that had been retrieved from behind a Trader Joes, and I remember marveling at how such an exquisite meal could have emerged from the largess of the machine.

Local eaters from across the project gather for Local Food Friday lunch.

Some of our eaters were squeamish about eating dumpstered food and insisted that it be labeled. Others felt that developing a dependency on a dumpster signaled an unsustainable relationship to the commodity food shed.

Since then, Moya has taken the whole notion up a notch by filling the company fridge with her “off spec” dairy program. She intentionally intercepts dairy products that are about to be thrown away and brings them onto project with a “use at your own risk” message. And they do get used.

There are other disputes, of course. There is the vegan camp that wants every ingredient labeled, and the carnivorous camp who wants to serve up monster racks of Emily’s “happy pig” ribs, and would like to merely pound a sign in the grass outside the kitchen with a label that says, “vegan option.”

There is also the problem of guests. Guys like me like to invite multiple people to Local Food Friday, such that I can knock out three meetings or obligations at a time. I’m guessing there is a bit of my brother Jim’s influence here. He is a time management guru, and he would approve of how I can cover a lot of ground with a lot of people in the least amount of time. But serving guests puts a strain on the budget, and so a “donations” fund has emerged in which guests throw some money into the pot and the pot is spent on staples like cooking oil and honey and molasses.

People have dropped out because it is too loud, or because preparing a sit down meal for fifty is overwhelming, but at its core Local Food Friday is a solid fixture that functions well.

What is less known about this institution is that it had its roots in the company lunch room of twenty years ago where a number of us would gather in our coats and our ties with our brown-bag fare.

I would turn to Steve and say, “You know, I could make you lunch everyday next week if you would reciprocate the week after that.”

Steve would reflect on the offer, and agree, and I would go out and shop for the two of us. That was an era before I understood my relationship to energy, or had ever contemplated local food. I recall those lunches as being well stocked with potato chips.

Steve and I would be happily sharing the lunch burden together and someone else at the table would enquire as to what we were doing, and I would explain that it was the “Communist Lunch Plan,” in which food was shared between us, and I would invite them to join. And they would. And one of us would find ourselves delivering five lunches for three, and taking weeks off. And so on.

The Communist Lunch Plan would build, and then collapse under its own weight. For her week, Tami would go to Fresh Market and spend a fortune on exotic nuts and chocolates and deli meats with artisan bread. We would be appreciative of her efforts and enjoy her week, and the next week Skip would come in with bargain basement corned beef vacuum packed from the Sav-A-Lot, causing Tami to storm out, announcing that she would never participate in Communism again.

At which point the entire program would collapse, everyone involved would cite the reasons they preferred to dine exclusively on their own food, and we would all be back to our individual brown bag lunches.

Months would pass, and I would suggest to Steve that I would make his lunches for a week if he would agree to reciprocate. He would agree and Communism would rise again.

This pattern ensued for many years. I suppose it informed my thinking about the commons. Communism would rise and fall, the company grew and grew and it was not unusual to have a half dozen communists sharing lunch together at a table with a half dozen skeptics, and a couple of avowed individualist eaters.

I sold that company to the employees, and the new owners of the firm were skeptical of the Communist Lunch Plan. But I suspect they saw some sort of morale value in bringing people together for a common meal, so they instituted “Grill Thursday,” in which one group of people would take turns grilling for the others.

Grill Thursday worked for a while. It became an eclectic mix of people in an office building that housed a variety of firms. At the time I was entering into biodiesel, and I entered a “team” that would cook for everyone on our appointed Thursday. We were migrating deep into low energy food production and organics that was at odds with the palette of some. One eater claimed to be on doctor’s orders not to eat organic. It was bizarre. And the same thing that would repeatedly break the Communist Lunch Plan would happen to Grill Thursday. Tarus would bring in his propane tank and stand to deep fry a turkey when it was his week, and would quit the program all together when the next week he was served generic hot dogs on commodity buns.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, makes some astute observations about food and cooking. He suggests that Americans spend so much time watching cooking shows that they have no time to cook. He cites Richard Wrangham’s book, Catching Fire, when he suggests that cooking has been central to human evolution.

From an academic perspective the argument goes like this: because humans discovered how to cook, they could eat a wider range of foods, and because of that required less in the way of stomach, allowing for more in the way of brain. Not so for the cow. Adapted only to eat grass, it requires three guts to extract the food energy it needs. Yet nowadays the process appears to be working in reverse. Our food supply has become so over- processed and prepared, so cut with chemicals and non-food fillers that we are requiring more in the way of the gut. I’m not sure of the technical term for it. Human beings have started evolving in reverse?

I run a lot of Pollan’s work through the filter of Tami’s family. Her grandmother Ruby worked like a dog all her life. She canned, and cooked, and preserved the food her husband grew on the farm, at the same time holding down a job at a local department store in Raleigh. Unlike the cooking-show viewer of today, who presumably gets a lot of time on the couch, Ruby spent most of her time working to feed the family.

Ruby’s daughter Anne got a pass on the cooking grind. By the time she came along food was pre-prepared for her. It was cheap, and abundant, so she didn’t have the need to invest in cooking. Which is why, when I met her daughter Tami, Tami simply couldn’t cook. Her inability to cook, in fact, was legendary amongst her friends.

When we moved in together, I did all the cooking. Our only appliance at the time was a woodstove, which meant I subsequently started off almost every meal with bacon. A hot frying pan, pre-oiled with bacon grease was always a good start point. And from there, Tami not only learned to cook, but went on to become an excellent chef. Nowadays most people, who are intimate with the two of us, put Tami at the head of cooking for our household — which is at least true for those who have had her biscuits.

What I find intriguing is the yearning on our project to go back to the Ruby days. People have become so obsessed with meeting their own food needs that they belong to multiple CSAs, and run expansive gardens, and are taking up deer hunting, and figuring out ways to process foods for storage. We are returning to Ruby’s almost-lost arts in the name of increased nutrition, or in the name of food security, or in the name of increased self-reliance.

The weakness of Grill Thursday was the disparate relationships to food within the group. There were those of the “convenience generation” offering up fare to those of the local/organic crowd. Some locavores were serving up food to folks who cared less about the ingredients than about the performance of the recipe. Perhaps, as a collection of eaters, it was too diverse. It didn’t work very well. The final collapse of Grill Thursday was a great relief to all involved. People who care deeply about what they eat should not attempt to dine with those who could not care less.

The lessons learned from Grill Thursday formed a valuable building block in the creation of Local Food Friday. I should note that Local Food Friday often collides with our First Friday Tours, for which I am frequently the tour guide. One memorable collision was between a group of retirees from Clayton, North Carolina, and Jason and Haruka from Edible Earthscapes. We tend to think of Edible Earthscapes as part of our project, even though it is five miles from our eco-industrial park.

Local Food Food Friday often spills out of the kitchen into the yard.

On this occasion Jason and Haruka were simply in the kitchen preparing stuffed peppers with rice because it “was their week.” Their apprentice, Devon was also helping out. My tour group was early, and standing about in the kitchen, and the conversation came around to rice, which they are now growing at Edible Earthscapes. When I came in to pick up my charges, they were enthralled with Jason, and the notion that we could grow rice here. He was holding court, talking about water requirements and varieties and how he was on his way to Japan to pick up a rice-hulling machine.

Jason was used to it. Tourism is so engrained in our corporate culture that, he simply set down his paring knife and started explaining his rice project. I became interested too, but had to interrupt to pull the group away in order to start our tour on time.

And while this is a normal interaction for us, Local Food Friday is often jarring for the uninitiated. While we find it completely normal for a few farmers to be filling the kitchen with stuffed peppers for a forty person sit down lunch, and taking time out to discuss their rice experiment with visitors, our visitors often leave scratching their heads in wonder at what they have just encountered.

One of my regrets is that we did not design our kitchen with food service for fifty in mind. The space was constructed as a break room. The fact that it routinely bursts at the seams speaks to our urgent need for a commercial kitchen that will allow us to not only serve meals large enough for the whole project, but also allow us to move into legally canning, preserving, and selling the myriad varieties of food we have on our project.

Food is an interlocking piece in the evolution of our project. We have a large number of eaters who truly value the food produced, which leads to growers that are deeply appreciated for the work they do. Appreciation leads to meaningful work, and the consumption of that work leads to a deeper appreciation all around.

Our approach to food on project is to produce it year round. Our first greenhouse was a monstrous ninety-foot affair heated by wood. Since then Screech erected a thirty footer for hydroponics lettuce production. Then we added another thirty footer for Piedmont Biofarm, thinking it would be a good way to house our worm composting experiment. Then Screech doubled his operation. Then Piedmont Biofarm ordered another ninety-foot greenhouse, at which point Screech decided to put up four more thirty-foot greenhouses, and go into peppers, tomatoes, and cucumber production.

Matt Rudolf participates in preparing a lunch for dozens of guests.

A large part of successful food marketing is season extension. If you are growing tomatoes, for instance, the trick is to have your product on the grocer’s shelves before anyone else, in early spring, and to be out of the tomato business before everyone has them in abundance in their backyard gardens. Surely the master of this was Jim LeTendre, who routinely stunned the region with bountiful loads of “Sunny Slope” tomatoes.

Because season extension is key, a visitor to the plant will see row covers to offset sunlight at hot times of the year, and plastic to shield peppers from frost from time to time.

We eat seasonally, and we focus on year-round food. Fall brings a mushroom harvest from the woods and deer meat fills our freezers. It’s not long before the bananas have been eaten and the peanuts have been devoured, but even in the dead of winter we are feasting on greens and sweet potatoes and we look forward to the February carrot harvest.

Our approach is not planned. It just is. And because we are surrounded by food production, food is not something we worry about whenever the conversation turns to complete societal collapse.

I have a dear friend who has taken the Mormon approach. He brings in big bins of red beans and flour and has a room in his basement dedicated to a year’s supply of food. He claims it is hard to come by — difficult to buy rations in bulk — and he is pondering the formation of a new web-based company that would make it easier for people to stock up.

I wonder about the “store your own food approach,” and if perhaps it is exactly the mentality that brought our world to the brink of collapse in the first place. The notion of individual stores of food is about the polar opposite of our project. What we do is contribute what we can. Fence posts, or labor, or cash, or soil amendments to the folks who grow the food, and in exchange we find ourselves not only well fed, but also not in fear of food shortages.

As I was working on this manuscript, Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, and when Michael Tiemann pointed out the “Ostrom-like” nature of our project, I paid attention.