Fauxtisanal: Or, Why You Can't Have it Both Ways (All the Time)

Recently, SF Magazine posted a 6-page interest piece on Pascal Rigo, previously the owner of the San Francisco Bay Area chain La Boulange. Several months ago, Rigo sold the company to Starbucks for a cool $100 million, which has spawned quite a bit of consternation in San Francisco, and a lot of speculation by business evaluators as to whether or not the attempted revamp of the national pastry program for Starbucks will be able to pump up this relatively nascent and stagnant part of the Starbucks bottom line. 

One of the more irritable things to come out of the SF Mag piece, besides its seemingly irrelevant and non sequitor of a title (nowhere is the analogy followed up in  the piece, nor does Rigo, to his credit, make the claim himself) is the quotation by Rigo regarding, in no small veil, the San Francisco bakery of Chad Robertson, Tartine. Money quote :: 

"[San Francisco] is the only place in the world where a bakery will make money by having bread at five o’clock in the afternoon. And it’s what—40 or 50 loaves, and each one costs seven bucks? It’s good, yes, but to call it a bakery ... it’s bull-sheet."

He continues on, talking about how a real bakery should have bread throughout the day, at a rate that is easily obtainable, and the article goes on to talk about how the La Boulange empire has done so -- along with providing wholesale bread to places like Olive Garden, Trader Joes, and other operations through a large-scale bread production facility that exists in San Mateo, south of San Francisco, one that will soon convey machinery able to pump out 6,000 baguettes an hour (that's 10 baguettes every 6 seconds, mind you).

Without getting into the qualitative issues regarding the bread itself -- something we cannot convey here beyond my own experience at having tasted much of La Boulanges roster as well as being an observer (and frequent buyer) of Tartine -- I do want to raise the question of whether or not Rigo can call this sort of work craft or artisan baking. Throughout the piece, Rigo makes the argument that by working the element of human error into his baking -- the irregularity of shape and cut, the slightly differed dimensions of doughs -- the work is made human, the quality high and the output increased substantially, this qualifying it for the title of artisan.  

There is something distracting in the arguments made though, calling this artisan yet accessible to "flyover country Middle Americans", the same Americans Rigo no doubt considers "will buy shit if you sell it to them well". This comes to a familiar crux in the argument over artisanal production/quality, which is that of cost and accessibility to the product itself. What qualifies a loaf of bread as affordable comes to an unspoken question, which is how well (or not) is the average person being paid, in conjunction with a number of factors. Namely, how much of this argument comes down to the rather typical issue that relative to wages, do people not pay for product because their wages don't allow for it? (And I say this knowing most other products, like Wonderbread, were very specifically designed to be as cheap as possible, and over time used to keep the overall cost of food purchases low. This, historically, has allowed for greater application of income to other consumption, and only recently has become an issue for American households attempting to shift their purchasing paradigms.) 

Part of this also comes to an issue about whether or not food products can be manufactured or scaled up in a way as to retain the integrity of the product with an updated capacity. This can and has happened in a number of capacities -- Heath Ceramics of California and Bodum of Denmark  represent two scales of that sort of success. Both marry good design precepts to larger scale production; Heath is a favorite insofar as it does so on a scale, thought to materials, and localized procurement and production that has kept it in operation for over 60 years, keeping well skilled labor and jobs in the Bay Area marketplace. Food, however, operates differently, with substitutions not really being able to reflect the same product (try making a pie with Red Delicious versus Pink Lady apples. They produce very different things, even if they both make "apple pie"). And as a friend of mine referenced in response to this article, especially in baking "process is product", with the methods very much affecting the actual outcome on the plate in a way that industrial manufacture does not have to contend with. 

In SF, Tartine limits the amount of bread it bakes off each day (closer to 60-80 loaves, including those produced for its sister restaurant) because of the time and oven space required for their production; in addition, the $7 price tag comes from not only the labor involved (a near 24-hour cycle) but also the space (being located smack dab in the middle of San Francisco) as well as ingredients (a fine tuned blend of flours produced by Central Milling Company of Idaho). They operate differently from La Boulange in that they have no wholesale clients, and operate as baking "in real time", baking off only what is needed at a given time, no major overlaps, and very little actual waste. This requires a skilled workforce, producing for orders and getting any number of different doughs and materials set up to be worked on and baked off at a moments notice. Whereas waste is built into a number of bakery schemes I have seen over the years in consulting, Tartine bakes in a way where waste is minimized through very flexible forecasting.

And this brings us back to the issue of Pascal Rigo and his quotes. What he does is not artisanal, and the more I dwell on it I get angry with the notion that he puts in anything into his work that the team at Tartine does. He isn't training anyone the skills to open their own bakery; he is not scaling his operation to minimize waste. Like La Brea Bakery (sold to an Irish holding company in the early 2000's), it is a shell of what an artisan bakery is (or should be) as it does little to the overall service of the people who work for it (besides providing them a wage). If process is the product, Rigo owns a company that is now as much akin to a maker of bolts than it does to a bakery. 

Farmers Markets as a Gateway Drug

So as mentioned yesterday, I participated two weeks back in the Global Gateways Conference put on by the American Association of Food Studies and the Department of Food Studies at both NYU and New School. A splendid good time, I sat in on sessions regarding supply chain problems, zines & food memorandia, and a particularly fun session about food and protest movements. I also presented on a panel with several other graduate students on the issues facing farmers markets and food regulations. 

My topic specifically was rooted in farmers markets as a civic institution and as a jumping off point for greater engagement with sustainability issues. When we compare coventional agriculture and buying practices, most alternatives are just that, alternative systems that exist in parallel to conventional markets and goods and contain differing value chains. The types of practices and values contained in these systems are not exactly "legible" to people whose behaviors are ingrained or entrenched from conventional systems of agricultural consumption; the social legibility of sustainable agriculture may be one of its greatest hurdles. When we talk about social legibility, we're referencing a concept from landscape architecture, that explains how, simply by looking at a given layout or geography, a person can "read" or intuit how the space is supposed to be approached (a key example is how we learn to utilize jungle gyms -- that's a form of legibility). Social legibility takes this concept and applies it to how we understand and interact with social norms and behaviors -- like how we learn or elect to shop in certain ways, or participate in more abstracted forms of values-based actions. 

Case in point: community-supported agriculture (CSA). While there are many ways they are executed, the fundamental idea of how a CSA operates -- paying for an entire season of products before you actually receive them, possibly losing out if the season goes poorly -- requires a way of rethinking how we engage with food procurement. You have to understand that it is not a classic transaction of payment for goods. That requires a degree of understanding -- both intellectual as well as emphatic -- of how the system works and why you choose to participate in it. 

Long story short: farmers markets act as an endlessly modifiable medium by which people can interact with, purchase, and learn from farmers directly and indirectly. They meet people within their communities. They are, by most margins, accessible in terms of placement, interactivity, and monetary access. They can be moved or placed in spaces where food access is an issue, and modified in terms of the types of programs on offer (like WIC/SNAP benefits, "double-benefit" programs like those offered by Wholesome Wave, or registration drives) unlike brick and mortar institutions or private markets. They are also the most legible of form of alternative agricultural consumption, short of growing your own (small or large scale), and by our reckoning, are the perfect space by which to introduce coventional consumers to alternative agricultural models (for the reasons listed above as much as the fact that farmers markets are as close to the conventional shopping practice). 

Our premise: farmers markets lead people into activities like gardening, CSA's, growshares, or other types of alternative agricultural consumption and assists with increasing peoples agency and values where alternative agriculture is concerned. We examined CSA members and their participaton in farmers markets, and gave them blank response sites to tell us in their minds what linked the two together. (We hoped to avoid leading answers that might've influenced their answers, or made for selecting every single answer). 

 The study is still ongoing but our research proved this much (with over 150 samples from across the country): farmers markets do act as stepping stones to deepening or initiating the values of alternative and sustainable agriculture, as well as deepening participation in them. Of the surveys, 2/3 actively & explicitly identified the farmers market as a place where they met and interacted with farmers, learned about their practices and day-to-day, and led them to take a leap in participating in CSA's. While farmers markets  were rarely the place people learned about their CSA (that happened largely by word of mouth at a number of different institutions), the values were put in place through peoples participating in the farmers market environment. There's more geekery to be found in the data -- like the regional and gender distinctions in the surveys -- but this is the core of the research question.

And the significance of this outcome: namely that in understanding this implicit role that farmers markets can occupy, we have a stepping stone for not only increasing the resilience of local agricultural systems (by educating through participation in farmers markets) but also because farmers markets can act as the nodes and conduits by which greater interactivity -- a dialogue -- between conventional and alternative agricultural systems can exist to the benefit of local agricultural systems. If bringing in people from across experiences, ethnicities and economic categories can increase participation in -- and more importantly, explicit understanding of -- alternative agricultural systems, then there is a strong policy recommendation to be made in supporting farmers markets writ large. And that has a number of implications for everyone. 

The Organics Conundrum

The Terroirist has been away for a couple of weeks -- with presentation and participation at the 2012 Global Gateways conference (where I spoke on the institutional strength of farmers markets as a gateway drug -- more on that later), a week recouperating at home in Los Angeles and a week following in Provincetown, MA (both blissfully without internet access) -- and am now back to hit the ground running, after a much needed break from computers, analytics, and other such fun things.

One thing that caught me over the last several weeks has been the rising and recurring number of stories about the issue of organics standards. This isn't a new-ish thing: even wth its inception, the National Organics Standards Board (NOSB) has been in the crosshairs of everyone who has thought the issue of organics was ill-suited to regulation, from large scale corporations to smaller, orginator farmers who began the then unregulated but systematic organics movement. Coming along since then, there have been numerous instances of questionable regulatory decisions made by the body, usually over what are considered misunderstandings or misrepresentations of the science or disregard for the actual values of what the organics movement stands or stood for (one of the better articles in this is the fabulous Joan Dye Gussow article "Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified" -- which notes that it can, but do the principles behind organics as a movement want there to be such a thing. Really worth the read.) 

The most recent article to raise this question came from the New York Times last week, asking whether or not organics has gotten too big for its briches.  In the article, the author is alluding to two distinct issues at play with the NOSB, the organization that handles what can and cannot be constituted as organic products in the regulations: one, whether or not the constituent seats of the NOSB are effecting the integrity and perception of the National Organics Program, and two, whether or not the changes being made by the NOSB undermine organics in such a way as to make organics as a regulation and a label unreliable. 

First, a clarification: when we say organics in the context of the NOSB and the NOP, we are talking about a label and a series of regulations. (If you're looking for a rip-roaring good time of reading, you can evaluate the nature of the present rules here.) This should be seen as having a venn-diagram like overlap with the notion of organics as a series of values. When organics starting cropping up in the 1980's, organics was seen as an approach of soil remediation, environmental protection, and crop biodiversity reflecting the notion that the decades-long approach to farming was having a detrimental effect on soil health, as well as on the eating practices. To many, as indicated in the great book "Organic, Inc.", organics as value was as much about changing the eating habits of the population as it was changing the shape of farming itself. These two notions have been in tension since the inception of the NOP in 1997; many farmers and groups that utilized and promoted the term turned away from it because of fear that the regulatory board would eventually undermine the value of the concept. And even now, many groups fighting for (or in some ways, against) the NOSB are fighting by virtue of the values of organics, of which the regulatory rules are a part and parcel. 

Now as to the questions raised by the article, this is largely a matter of how you regard the nature of firms. Large multinationals grow through acquisition, not innovation. The buyout of organics, before we get to the dilution of the principles behind it, was something inevitable (especially with stagnating grocery prices and sales against organics value-added and niche dimensions). Many smaller firms courted by large industry prior to the establishment of the NOSB were promoting for more open-ended rules regarding specific compounds. This is especially true for preservatives, emulsifiers, and other products that, while constituting less than 5% of the overall constitution of the product, shift things like the nutriative value, extend shelflife, and in many cases have been known to have some claims to being toxic or potentially unhealthy. These products constitute the vast majority of cases where the NOSB has come up against opposition from nonprofits, consumer groups and the like. 

Here's where we come to the rub: the actor behavior we see with the NOSB -- especially the absense in the last decade of real farmers, consumer advocacy groups, or environmentalists, chemists, and biologists independent of industry connectons from the board -- has undermined much of the faith in the program from various farmers and institutional actors that have promoted it. In so doing, the plethora of alternatives -- from farmers labelling their product independently, to biodynamic certifications, to farmers laundry listing all the "NO's" of their farm work (no spray, no this, no that), that consumers are faced with a number of competing claims. Tack into it that they recieve the message from these parties that the organic certification label is broken, and slippage in the integrity of the regulations -- tho not necessarily the values -- has come into play. The firms acting within the NOSB are following standard firm behavior -- seeking out maximization of profit margins by extending the ways and means by which product can be enhanced or protecting investments in the field by adding new materials that skirt the letter of the regulations, and pushing the regulations to meet them. 

But speaking ot the impact to that, and the second point as well, the dilution of the regulations is minute in one way, but significant if you view organics as a series of values rather than a series of regulations. For purposes of regulations, most of these minute additions to the list are just that -- unwarrented and on a short list of items that typically constitute no more than 5% of products (in food stores) or trace elements in fertilizing and planting techniques. From a regulatory/firm perspective, these are minor shifts that do not, fundamentally, undermine the way the NOSB, the NOP, or organics as a regulatory system work. However, when you see organics as a series of values, much of what is being engaged with here is problematic -- from large firms buying up smaller players, in turn destroying their impact on local economies, growers, and subjecting their behavior to a more regimented corporatist firm behavior, to the issues of supplier behavior and payout, to whether or not the foods being produced under that label are actually in line with the idea of changing eating habits or producing healthy products -- and this has been, and is becoming moreso, a problem where the NOSB and the integrity of organic products are concerned. 

The Groupe Danone buyout of Stonybrook Farms is a key example. While the sale of Stonybrook expanded their marketshare and distribution (not to mention an influx of cash that sated the desires of the intial VC investors in Stonybrook), Stonybrook began to make a shift from organics as a system of values to organics as a regulatory framework. Within several years of the sale, many of Stonybrooks intial suppliers were told to scale up or end their contracts, with much of  the buying being transferred to the dairy cooperative CROPP; the addition of multiple product lines that expanded marketshare but also ran afoul of previous statements to not advertise products to children; and the continued statements from Gary Hirschberg that expanded marketshare of organic products was more important than the notion of organics itself. This is not an uncommon case, but one of the earliest, and one of the case studies in how the acquisition of food companies is not the same as the acquisition of tech firms, a case I've attempted to make several times now.

When one considers the questions raised above, one has to define where they stand on the organics spectrum -- and it is just that. Personally, I feel it is fine to view organics as both a series of values as much as a regulatory scheme. It's okay for one to believe that one has to take a whole systems approach -- to reject the organic twinkie as it were -- as much as it is ok to simply view it as a holistic agricutural and food production system with minimum inputs. But the latter, the regulatory project, must remain sincere and have the integrity to still abide by the core concept -- removing as much as possible, adding as little as needed, and revitalizing as much land and ecology as possible. And that last bit is clearly questionable when we look at the evidence. Organics is still a burgeoning market -- hitting nearly 22 billion in sales in the United States alone, and one of the few sectors of the grocery aisle still growing. So this issue is not going away. However, if the industry isn't going to collapse on itself, it needs both greater degrees of independent agency on the NOSB board, as well as more activity from consumers and co-producers to see that it sticks to it. Farmers who decry the regulations do well by informing consumers, but do more harm when they do not actively agitate or organize to maintain the integrity of the program. Organics are not the only program, but they are the most prominent and well known public example of environmentally conscious consumer goods, and we do best to try across the board to preserve the integrity of the program. 

CSA Week 2 :: Strategizing the Box

So we're in week 2 of the Prince George-Norwich Meadows CSA, which at this point has had two major components :: one, a lot of salad greens, and two, a lot of garlic scapes. This has proven useful, as it's given me the chance to make large sums of salsa verde, as done in Tamar Adlers delightful book The Everlasting Meal. In it, she sort of posits the long-run view of looking at both food shopping and cooking; namely, that doing one-off meals ain't the most efficient thing, but making some parts of a meal turn into the next can  be both rewarding and useful. 

This is especially true with the CSA. Since I'm doing a split with a friend, there's never much of the larger items -- like kohlrabi or turnips -- to do anything more substantial than either (a) nosh on them or (b) place them in the context of a larger dish. We did that last week, turning scapes, salad greens, and onion tops into a salsa verde that has graced eggs, toast, and soon to be a marinade; this week has become stew, with garlic greens, scapes, turnips + turnip greens and kale all being put together into a stew that'll last well into the coming weeks.Ultimately, you're asked to look at the box, look at your pantry, see what works, and add a few residuals to make up the difference...or innovate, as the cases calls for. 

I don't mind this kind of batching -- it sort of forces one to both think creatively and plan a little ahead in the cookery category -- as it makes for meals not just for now, but later too. And in a NYC kitchen, sometimes you don't wanna come home and cook, just get something out of the freezer and nuke it. 

The Recipes

Salsa verde is pretty straightfoward, as its simply about taking a lot of green items -- bitter salad greens, cilantro, mint, basil, chiles -- and blending them together with lemon juice (to keep the color) oil (preferably olive oil) and sometimes chile or nuts (which effectively would make it a pesto of sorts), until you have a smooth-ish paste or sauce. A personal favorite is a 3-2-1 method, using those proportions of salad greens, cilantro, and the garlic scapes, mixed with oil until a thick soupy consistency was wrought, and added a small handful of dried chiles de tepin for some kick and sea salt to season. 

The stew came from a a basic method: browning meat (in this case, chuck beef), adding succulents (the garlic stems and onions), waiting till they get translucent, then adding beans (Mackay beans) and their fluid, crushed tomatoes, chiles de arbol, and then all the greens, plus some of my chicken stalk for good measure. Seasoning is along the lines of a huntsman stew, so cinnamon, nutmeg, and black pepper for good measure. It's still bubbling away as we speak. 

Farm Bill Almanac :: The Austerity of SNAP

EBT and SNAP benefits have been increasingly accepted at farmers markets.

As news today broke about the compromise in the Senate to move forward with Farm Bill negotiations prior to its ending in July of this year (the previous 5-year Farm Bill was signed and passed in 2008). As the $969 billion dollar piece of legislation gets moved through the Senate, not much has changed since the murmors of the fall legislation battle -- there are cuts being made to direct payments and other forms of direct subsidy while more the egregious programs are being moved into crop insurance programs; steep cuts are being made to programs like conservation and many rural development programs (we have written previously on both here and here). Nowhere are these cuts being more hard-felt than in the Title I Nutrition programs -- namely the never-contentious-until-now food stamp program, now referred to as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). 

In this most recent Farm Bill, it's been important to note that much of the austerity/budget-streamlining talk has been about programs that have been, mostly, uncontentious in years past; SNAP is largely been supported by both sides of the aisle (with the most wasteful expenditures in the program being those that uselessly attempt to root out "fraud" in the program), and only recently has come under fire, primarily from Tea Party activists within the Republican tent. Cuts targeting SNAP have been proportionate to its size; at $10 billion alone per year in SNAP, it is one of the largest programs in the Nutrition title, and in FY2012 was distributing to 44.7 million elligible recipients (households) 144 dollars a month in supplemental food aid.  All recipients must be working / employed in order to be elligible to recieve SNAP/WIC benefits. 

The proposed cuts are not really cuts so much as restructuring of the qualifiers for obtaining aid, namely, what constitutes the poverty line. Presently, to qualify, one must have a collected worth and earnings at 130% below the understood poverty line, and the level at which one obtains full benefits goes on a sliding scale from that amount. Presently Republicans, moved by Jeff Sessions of Alaska, are attempting to redefine those limits, which would cut an average of $90 per month from most current recipients. (For reference, the average recipient would receive approximately $50/month per household.) The other attempted effort, led by Rand Paul in the House, that would have restructured SNAP as a block-grant program, failed, but would have eliminated much of the federal infrastructure built around SNAP and WIC programs (leaving, of course, the detail of who would run it at the state level up to the cash-strapped states). This is being done, by the by, while the expanded use of the program neatly aligns with the increased rate of joblessness and underemployment happening nationwide, and in certain geographies, the use of food stamps keeps some businesses afloat (exempting, of course, Wal-Mart, who in certain geographies is the beneficiary of over 50-75% of all SNAP sales). 

There are clear changes to be made to the Farm Bill, but most of the stated goals in changing the Title I nutrition program will not help with the goals of the program, namely, assuring a basic level of food security in times of hardship, especially for those most in need. But these proposed changes are not them -- they don't even account for the type of punting happening in the direct-payments-to-crop insurance cross-over, because what this amounts to, in every sense of the word, is gutting the program. The program is run on high efficiency, with the CRS giving the SNAP and WIC programs high marks for reliability of execution and turn around. And fraud cases within the SNAP/WIC system amount to less than 3% of all transactions, amounting to little over thousands of dollars a cycle (whereas the efforts to counteract fraud in the system amount to several million dollars annually). The numbers represented above are per household, not individual, so a family of 3 or 5 is asked to use $50/month to make ends meet nutriatively, if the proposed changes were to be made. Add to this the psychological stress of being unable to make food ends meet, and you can begin to imagine the type of psychological impact this has on participants in the program -- a program that was intended to alleviate that kind of stress to begin with. 

This attempt at reform is, at its core, an easy way to score political points while not answering the key questions about budget balancing and large entitlement reform, and doing so on the backs of the hungry and those least able to promote their interests in Congress. It will hit them in ways that will make it harder for them to go maintain their work. And it will undermine the businesses who can use SNAP/WIC to help maintain and expand their customer bases, from mom and pops, to farmers markets & gardens (yes, gardens), even Wal-Mart. Ultimately, the economic drivers from the SNAP program are a more important variable to consider, and short-sighted political aims to  dismantle or otherwise cripple this piece of the Farm Bill do so at the risk of further crippling local economies across the country.