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.