Читать книгу Tales From the Sustainable Underground - Stephen Hren - Страница 11
ОглавлениеHOW CAN FOOD BE ILLEGAL? It’s pretty easy to understand in our excessively property rights-oriented society how using land that isn’t legally yours, like D-Town Farm and some other gardeners in Detroit, would irk the powers that be, but sitting down and eating a meal prepared by a neighbor? Twice on my travels I had the opportunity to witness the inner workings of community kitchens and watch them prepare local and organic meals that would cause the finickiest of eaters to salivate. Eating the one clandestine meal I actually got to sink my fork into, in the living room of a foreclosed home in Detroit, brought to mind being a tippler during Prohibition, the experience that much more heightened by a feeling of silly misbehavior. My father’s grandparents had run a speakeasy in Prohibition Milwaukee, and I felt, just a little, that I was channeling their maverick natures.
Food is one of the most amazing ways of bringing people together. Growing food not only connects us with the earth, but like the community gardens I visited in Detroit, it connects us with our neighbors. We work beside each other, get dirty together, battle bugs and heat, and then marvel at the bounty of the earth.
But the community-building aspect of food doesn’t stop there. Its most important place in this regard is sharing a meal together. Spending time cooking and eating together is often the primary place and time for families to be with one another, share their hopes and frustrations, and enjoy the wonders of satisfying the most primal of needs. Its importance is unique to the point of holiness. Think of Christ’s Last Supper, the breaking of bread after a day of fasting during Ramadan, or a Passover Seder. By sharing meals with one another we create bonds that are enduring and magical.
The food we don’t have the time, energy or space to grow and cook ourselves can also be an excellent opportunity for expanding our roots in the community. Shopping at farmers markets, actually getting to know the people who grow your food and supporting their vast efforts, buying your victuals from community-owned cooperative groceries and eating at local restaurants that patronize nearby farms help bring that community-building magic to life.
Much of this was in evidence when I stopped for a few days in a small midwestern college town on the advice of Brett Bloom, a virtual acquaintance who has spearheaded an amazing variety of grassroots projects. Among a dozen other goings-on, Brett and his wife were moving to Denmark just before I arrived. How he had the time to correspond with a meandering writer and give me not just platterfuls of mind-bogglingly cool leads all across the country, but also set me up with a place to stay and home-cooked meals from the director of the farmers market, Lisa BK and her husband Jim, I’ll never understand. In the front yard garden of the quaint bungalow where he arranged for me to stay was a testament to his last project, a bat box on a 12-foot pole. Bringing nature into urban environments through DIY community-led projects is one of Brett’s modus operandi, more of which can be found at temporaryservices.org, and I know that small college town is worse off for their departure.
One of Brett Bloom’s DIY urban bat boxes, in the front yard of the lovely home he set me up in.
Unfortunately, the first news I received in this idyllic burg, trapped though it is on all sides by a never-ending industrial corn desert, was grim. The self-described “underground chocolatier” that I had been intent on meeting had died the day before. We had traded a few e-mails and already set up a lunch date for me to hear his story. This depressing news sucked the wind from my sails and my first inclination was to lock myself up in the house and recover for a few days from the intense heat wave that had just broke.
But the little college town, and especially farmers market director Lisa BK, had too much pulsating energy to allow me to sit still for long. Much of what was on offer in the form of the local food movement was aboveboard, as should be expected. The thriving farmers market and a newly expanded cooperative grocery were testament to the community’s love of food, all the more poignant for it being not just stuck in the midst of vast fields of genetically modified corn, but also home to the state’s Ag university, a sprawling complex of labs and experimental fields where probably only the devil himself knows what heinous crimes were being perpetrated against mother nature.
The co-op was very interesting to me, mostly because I was on the board of a start-up cooperative grocery, Durham Central Market, back home. I interviewed Jacqueline, the general manager, getting great advice on fundraising ideas, but then as we starting talking about my book project, an interesting little gem popped out. Jacqueline told me about a clandestine community-supported kitchen run out of their home by a local couple, Ben and Kate, who did a lot of their shopping at the co-op. With a quick phone introduction from Jacqueline, I was in.
I jumped on my borrowed bike and pedaled over to their home, just a few blocks from where I was staying. Ben and Kate were at home waiting on a delivery from a local farm. As we chatted about their enterprise for an hour or so, I was struck by how thoroughly sincere and respectable this couple was. They were both obviously motivated by a deep passion for food and their neighbors, and imbued with a stellar work ethic. Their two young boys frolicked on the patterned rug in their cozy living room as we spoke. Bonnie and Clyde they were not. Here were wholesome outlaws making delicious food for their community, in contrast to the legalized crimes being perpetrated by many of the farms just outside of town, whose excess fertilizers and pesticides flow down the Mississippi to poison the Gulf of Mexico, and whose third-rate product is force fed to sick cows in concentrated feed lots a few states to the west, making vast swaths of our country reek of shit and death.
So how did the idea of a community-supported kitchen come about? And what makes it illegal? In many municipalities, exchanging prepared food for money is illegal, unless it comes from an inspected kitchen such as a restaurant or catering business, or is done at the client’s home by a personal chef. But Ben and Kate had come across a demand for something in the middle that was neither a restaurant, catering or being a personal chef, and they did so quite by accident. A friend who had done some underground catering gave Ben a call, to see if he would be interested in preparing two to four meals a week for an acquaintance named Nancy, something the friend himself wasn’t interested in. The idea of being a personal chef didn’t appeal to Ben, but he and Kate sat down one Sunday at a cafe and gave the idea a thorough going over. While preparing meals for one family would require a huge expense to make it feasible, it didn’t take long to figure out that it wouldn’t add that many more hours of work to radically increase the number of meals prepared, and hence the potential number of customers. The idea of community-supported agriculture, where shares of veggies grown on a farm are allotted to customers and are paid for in advance, quickly sprung to mind. Why not do the same thing with prepared meals? Customers could pay in advance and then receive a few dinners a week, all prepared from fresh, local ingredients. Ben was getting burned out as a manager on a local farm, and had plenty of chef experience. Working at home would allow both he and Kate to work together and take care of their expanding family. The idea of the community-supported kitchen was born.
Ben and Kate’s little boy does a little quality control with the shiitakes before they go on the stove.
Ben and Kate told Nancy about their willingness to cook for her, but only if she could help round up a few more customers to see if the model would work. In early October of 2007, they had the customers and were ready to try it out. They made stir-fried vegetables with garlic sauce and sweet potato noodles for one meal, and a second of eggplant dumplings with roasted red pepper sauce and couscous. They were a hit. More shares came in, a few more each month, and the business started to take off. Starting a business is never easy, and Ben and Kate had their work cut out for them. Kate was working full time during the day, Ben was waiting tables three or four nights a week, and their nine-month-old boy needed constant attention. Being a local food outlaw was no walk in the park.
Edamame and red peppers on noodles, one of the delicious meals coming out of Ben and Kate’s community-supported kitchen.
But the strain of preparing more and more meals (they had a target of 50 customers) in a cramped kitchen with seven-foot ceilings, a leaky roof, no exhaust, little room for racks to put food coming out of the oven, crappy lighting and old appliances quickly made the project seem untenable in the existing circumstances. It was crunch time. Do they look to rent a place, outfit it with all the required but not always necessary equipment to become health code compliant, or do they risk a remodel of their existing kitchen — against zoning regulations that prohibit mixed commercial and residential uses — for a third of the cost so they can continue to take care of their boy, with another infant on the way, and greatly increase the value of their home? The latter, of course, was against the law, but other than that, all logic pointed towards it. Their customers did not care if their food was coming out of an inspected kitchen. They knew Ben and Kate personally and trusted them implicitly to not only prepare their food using as many local and organic ingredients as possible, but to also keep their kitchen clean. There were other financial and ecological costs to consider as well between the two options. An inspected kitchen likely meant using one-time disposable containers for delivery, and having to “sanitize” all their kitchen equipment using chlorine bleach. Harmful bacteria levels are pretty much equivalent whether kitchen equipment is washed using bleach, a vinegar/water solution, or hot, soapy water. Yet health code regulations require bleach. Chlorine is a toxic substance, proven to cause bladder, rectal and breast cancers. Vinegar is not toxic — it is food. When you personally know the customers you are cooking for, these decisions make a big difference.
Kate in the revamped kitchen that allowed their community-supported kitchen to expand to fifty customers.
Beyond being more in tune with their ethics and long-term financial well-being (because it was cheaper and improved the value of their home), it turns out the decision to stay underground meant success rather than financial ruin for Ben and Kate in the short term too. A month into the kitchen remodel in late summer 2008, the economy went into a nosedive. America’s obsession with flimsy housing built in sprawled-out suburbs and its addiction to easy credit and cheap oil had finally collided with reality, bringing our country to the precipice of financial collapse. The stock market bit the dust and foreclosures went through the roof. Subscriptions to Ben and Kate’s community-supported kitchen fell in half. Their hearts skipped beats whenever a new customer would cancel or, increasingly rarely, sign up. If they had been saddled with a $100,000 loan and rent on a separate space, bankruptcy would have been all but assured. They sat tight, concentrating on the quality of their meals, finishing the revamped kitchen, strengthening ties to local farms and trying not to freak out. It worked. By the next fall subscriptions started to pick up again, and by the spring of 2010 they had achieved their goal of 50 customers. The business was a success.
Here was an enterprise that was bringing healthy, fresh, delicious, local food to customers who needed the extra time to take kids to music lessons, stay late at work or just have some free time puttering around. It supported local farms and provided meaningful work to a couple who loved food, and allowed them to take care of their children at home. Yet it was impossible to accomplish this within the existing structure of the county’s health codes and zoning laws. Their community-supported kitchen was an untested model, and starting an untested business doesn’t make sense if you have to plunk down 100 G’s before you can see if it works. Ben and Kate would love for their business to be legit, not least of all so that they can show others that it’s a working, replicable model. But supporting a compliant kitchen away from home would require substantially more than fifty customers. First of all, it wasn’t clear how many additional customers there would be in their small town, but it would also require additional employees, and Ben and Kate had no desire to manage anyone.
So here is an example of regulation, originally required to ensure that larger food businesses do not sell unsafe products, ending up prohibiting the formation of smaller food businesses. To sum up the history: food businesses got too large and started making people sick. Governments required inspections and health codes. Political influence by these large businesses then tweaked the health laws to prevent smaller competitors from entering the market. Less competition made for bigger food companies, resulting in more food poisoning and necessitating even more regulation.
This all played out according to script with the Food Safety Modernization Act of late 2010. Massive agribusiness concerns mix different types of food inputs from all over the country, using waste from concentrated feed lots and slaughterhouses for growing fruits and vegetables. On a small scale and with proper composting, livestock waste is beneficial to farming, and the limited distances food from smaller farms travels makes spreading diseases and pathogens unlikely. But just like everything else in life, what is good in small doses quickly becomes poisonous in larger ones. Industrial farming’s callous production techniques and enormous waste creation, combined with the relentless transportation of inputs around the country, has led in recent years to contamination of a wide variety of once “safe” crops such as strawberries and spinach with potentially life-threatening–pathogens like e. coli and salmonella. The events of the past decade played out in the media, and some kind of political action finally became unavoidable. Tracking food from Big Agriculture became necessary, because of its nationwide and even international distribution. Being able to trace food to its source on such a large scale requires tracking equipment such as bar codes and computer recording equipment, and more frequent (or, I should say, less infrequent) inspections. There are a lot of fixed costs involved in this, and as with all fixed costs, the larger the operation, the easier it is to spread out those costs. The original intent of the law was to apply it to all farms, no matter their size, even though tracking food that is only sold in nearby markets and groceries is much easier, to say nothing of the fact that local food is much less likely to be contaminated. Big Ag was initially in favor of the law, because they knew it would pretty much wipe out their smaller competition, and at least give the appearance of a safer food distribution system. Most small farms would not be able to cope with the increased costs, and Big Ag knew it. Fortunately, agitation from those concerned with the health of their local food networks resulted in the Tester-Hagan amendment. Although far from perfect, it does exempt many smaller farms (less than $500,000 in revenue) from the law’s provisions. Big Ag did an immediate about-face once the amendment was introduced and tried to kill the law, but it went through anyway. Without the vigilance of local food activists, most small farms nationwide would have been driven underground.
Of course Big Ag screamed unfair. What’s fair about a marketplace that applies different rules to different entities, based solely on their size? It’s interesting to consider the alternative: a regulation-free environment where “the invisible hand,” so supposedly beloved by big business types, was allowed to operate. In this scenario, Big Ag would of course continue its race to the bottom. It would use the cheapest inputs possible, treat workers as callously as possible and try to make up for poor quality with expensive advertising and marketing. Since large outbreaks of disease have happened frequently even with some regulation, the likely result would be even more contamination. With such a complex chain of operations, it would be impossible to pinpoint where these large outbreaks of disease might have originated. The reputation of cheap food from Big Ag would be under constant bombardment. You would literally be risking the lives of yourself and your family every time you ate their food.
Unlike with such large-scale operations, Ben and Kate’s –community-supported kitchen, like small-scale food producers everywhere, is directly responsible to their consumers. To quote Ben: “As a business grows, quality declines. In food at least, this relationship between size and quality is absolute and immediate. Given that this relationship exists, scale-appropriate regulation acknowledges the relationship between growth and responsibility. A business should not be rewarded for unlimited growth without oversight, nor should it be penalized for investing in quality preservation and artisanal scale.”
An outbreak of sickness among Ben and Kate’s customers would likely be catastrophic for their business. In addition, they know and care about the people they are serving. They are their neighbors. Their kids play together. They live in the same neighborhood. They run into each other at the co-op. Direct human-to-human interactions between producer and consumer are the most effective form of regulation there can ever be.
I know nothing about running any kind of professional kitchen. I love to garden and cook, so I understand seasonality, but my meals are always cooked slowly, in small volumes, generally done with a cold beer or glass of wine in hand, and served immediately. My only restaurant experience was working at a Pizza Hut for two months when I was eighteen. I was unable to eat pizza for years afterwards. Talking with Ben made the stories I’d heard from friends who worked at or owned restaurants hit home. It takes a tremendous amount of work to get delicious local food to waiting customers.
The foundation of Ben and Kate’s community-supported kitchen is the local farms where they get the lion’s share of their vegetables, dairy and meat. Deep midwestern soils, ample rainfall and plenty of summer sun ensures foods of the highest quality can be grown. Of course, these amazing inputs are mostly used to grow cheap #2 corn by the silo-full, much of it used to feed our starving automobiles or make cows sick before they’re slaughtered. But fortunately the surrounding land, the farmers market and the co-op in their little burg support a great variety of dedicated farmers growing yummy veggies, raising pasture-raised pork, beef and chicken, and crafting artisanal cheeses. Deepening the relationship between their kitchen and the local farms is predicated on a respectful relationship, primarily with three local farms, one of which Ben used to manage. The farms know they are committed to buying their products, they give the farms as much lead time as possible for orders, there’s no haggling or cross-competing, and they often purchase surpluses at a somewhat reduced price. Their buying consistently and buying big makes the relationship worthwhile to the farms.
Ben pulling a ham cut from a locally-raised Tamsworth pig out of its salt bath, on its way to being prosciutto.
Running the kitchen requires skill in cooking seasonally, and most importantly, planning ahead. The summer months are grueling. This is when huge quantities of produce are prepped and either frozen or canned, at some considerable risk to the enterprise, since memberships are monthly and Ben and Kate are putting away food for the winter. Hundreds of pounds of tomatoes are canned, fresh corn is frozen, pestos and other sauces are prepared in bulk and frozen for the long, cold winters. The true test of a community-supported kitchen, in Mark’s words, are “managing and planning for using local foods year-round artfully and gracefully.”
You have to be a big-time foodie to make one of these things work. The hours are long. Delivering the two meals for each member on Tuesday afternoons entails six days of prep and planning. Thursday the menu is planned and all the produce and meats are ordered. On Friday, they’re delivered and stored in preparation for cooking. Saturday is for shopping at the farmers market and the co-op for smaller items. Sunday often means soaking beans and other minor prep work like pulling goods from the freezer to thaw. Monday is the big prep day, and Ben and Kate tag-team taking care of the kids with working in the kitchen. Fillings, sauces and bread doughs are made. Some items, like soups, are packaged up Monday evening. But by the end of the day the kitchen has to be clean and ready to go for the big day.
Tuesday is when it all comes together. Ben is up and cooking by 7 am. Breads go in the oven, and then the most technically difficult foods are assembled. More subtly flavored foods like salads and rice dishes are saved for last to keep them as fresh as possible, as are garnishes and dressings. Packing everything up has to start by noon, and it’s no mean task. Ben takes care of the kids and Kate takes over in the kitchen, breaking down portions according to how many shares there are by household. There are distinct containers (mostly glass) for separate portions of the meal as well as for portion size. Their proper number has to be calculated, retrieved from storage and wiped clean. The meals are portioned out by weight, then lidded or cellophaned. The final part of assembly is packing the entire meal into a reusable, color-coded grocery bag, with the containers on the bottom and more delicate items like bags of salad on top. Different colored bags are for specific diets — vegetarian, gluten-free, etc. Next the bags go into coolers and the coolers are loaded into the station wagon. All this needs to be done by 2 pm. The 24 separate deliveries take about two hours. Finally, it’s all done and Ben and Kate get to enjoy dinner with their kids, knowing they have Wednesday to themselves.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to taste one of Ben and Kate’s scrumptious meals. My timing was wrong, having shown up on a weekend when only minor prep work was happening. This bummed me out, so I was all the more excited when I stumbled upon another clandestine kitchen in Detroit on the tail end of my trip. While I was on my tour of the D-Town farm, I watched as another member of the tour pulled out a bag and began stuffing it with purslane, a troublesome weed that volunteers spent many hours yanking out of the garden beds. I have a funny relationship with this plant. It has always piqued my curiosity, being one of the more choice edible weeds, high in Omega.3s and a great soup thickener. But for the life of me, I’ve never been able to get it to grow. I’d hypothesized that it’s because of the long hot summers in North Carolina, but a summer or two back I was walking along the highway in Birmingham, Alabama, (don’t ask) and found a patch of purslane sprouting out of the scalding black pavement, semis rumbling by, as happy as could be. Some weeds, I guess, are just stubborn, and value their independence above all else. They won’t be civilized in a garden patch.
I couldn’t help but inquire about the purslane’s ultimate destination. The woman, Rakiza, explained she was going to chop it up and put it in a salad for a dinner club she was having later that evening. After some more conversation, and, I expect, some sizing me up on her part, she extended an invitation. She apologized for having to charge for the meal. Little did she know that this would only pique my interest that much more. After some additional inquiry, I learned she was running a raw/vegan speakeasy restaurant every Thursday out of the foreclosed home she was housesitting for a friend. I won’t pretend that I eat raw or vegan very often, but after five weeks on the road eating peanut butter sandwiches and greasy diner eggs, I could feel my colon jumping for joy at the thought.
I showed up that evening, and found a cast of characters from the African-American community of Detroit not often represented in the media. About a dozen folks cycled through over the course of a few hours, many nattily dressed, all devoted to their health and the well-being of their beloved city. There were a fair number of single men, and I can sympathize with the difficulty of cooking healthy meals when alone at home. Teachers, salesmen and delivery drivers came in, served themselves up a plate of raw zucchini-noodle lasagna with a blendered squash-seed filling, a delicious salad with the aforementioned purslane and many other greens, peeled carrots and slices of red peppers, and all washed down with fresh lemonade and apple cider. There was much talk of the city’s troubles and the poor health of Detroit’s citizenry and how that has likely led to much of its social decline. I couldn’t help but butt in and offer some words of encouragement. Okay, Detroit had fallen on hard times, there was no denying that, but I had to give my kudos to everyone in the room, who by concerning themselves with their own health and well-being were acting to reinvigorate their city at its core. Just like the subscribers to Ben and Kate’s community-supported kitchen, the folks spending ten dollars for a scrumptious meal once a week in that quaint foreclosed home were helping to employ Rakiza and her cooking partner, as well as providing revenue for local farms. They were literally sowing the seeds for their community’s revival amongst its decay.
An Interview with Ben
I began by asking Ben what membership in his community-supported kitchen means.
Membership is the keystone of our business.
Membership is what differentiates our business model from that of the personal chef, caterer or a restaurant. Underlying the membership premise is the concept of commitment and relationships.
First of all, members pay us in advance, not a la carte. This financial commitment helps us manage our cash flow and make purchasing decisions with minimized risk, thus allowing us to control our overhead. This in turn allows us to keep membership dues affordable. This concept is radically different from the restaurant model in which owners accept considerable risk buying food in anticipation of sales that may or may not be realized. High mark-ups, decreased quality, and waste become accepted practices.
Secondly, members commit to taking their shares every week of the month. Of course, we are flexible with travel plans or unforeseen circumstances. But in general, if you are here, you agree to receive your share. Again, this helps us know what our monthly income will be and allows us to make business and personal decisions accordingly. Mitigating our risk and providing financial stability, so different from waiting tables or event catering, again reciprocates in keeping prices affordable for the members. We have yet to raise prices, and have even offered discounts for members who commit to every week for the academic calendar (September to June). If they need to miss a week or so, they still pay for the whole month, but we allocate their missed shares into extra portions when they want them for extra-busy weeks, or when guests come to town. We happily exchange discount for stability.
For us, we are committed to constancy. Having members means that we are committed to providing meals for them every week. When the weather is snowy, we do our damnedest to deliver. When it is sweltering, we still fire up the stove. When one of us falls ill, the other picks up the slack and friends and family come to the rescue with child care. We time our travels with the majority of our members’, and we never, never just flake out (“Hey everybody! Just a quick e-mail to let you know that we decided to stay an extra night in Madison to catch a Willy Nelson show, so deliveries will be on Wednesday! Thanks for understanding!!!”). Never. We need our members and, I dare say, they need us.
We are committed to professionalism. We do our best and push our skills to deliver excellent quality meals each week and to accommodate special dietary needs. Learning about gluten-free baking recently is a great example. It also means that we are committed to our slogan of local, seasonal and organic and our mantra of “Quality pays.” We don’t have an explicit contract, but I know our members assume that we are using the best quality local and organic food that we can. When the pressure of food costs squeezes us, and I am faced with choosing local/organic over conventional, I know what my members are expecting me to do. I do use some conventional produce, but as a last choice, and often I just change the menu to fit what I do have as opposed to compromising to get what I want. Ultimately, membership means that we enter into a mutualistic relationship. A series of mutualistic relationships, really, because the relationships we maintain with our farmers are directly related to our membership relationships and vice versa. This differs greatly from the service, or even subservience, context of restaurant or catering work where everyone is trying to squeeze the other person for all they can get. Our model is based on trust.
For us, the CSK has been revelatory. We are finally putting together all of our seemingly disparate skills: agriculture, culinary arts, environmental education, management and urban homesteading into one cohesive piece — our business. We value having a home-based business, employment that matches our values, and an income that, while modest, allows us to grow our savings while also having a flexible, quality of life-based schedule.
To our members we offer, in exchange, an opportunity for them to also realize their own quality of life goals. The extra breathing room we give them each week helps them more readily balance their careers, their growing families, their kids’ extra-curriculars and community involvement. Our members are active, involved people with strong career paths. They are educated and aware of social and environmental issues. They value the provenance and health value of our food. I imagine that many of our members make sacrifices for their careers. Eating food of inferior quality, buying into a corrupt food system or paying a premium for crap don’t need to be among them.
Ultimately, we care about our members. Our work has paralleled our members through births, deaths, comings of age, sabbaticals and returns, growth and recession. I know their jobs, their homes, their families, their likes, dislikes, aversions and allergies. I can infer their income, style and politics and they, mine. We come to know each other. Feeding people in this way has a strong aspect of intimacy. It is honest work, and it enriches us.
