Farmers Market Report

I just read through the Farmers Market Report released by King County last month. It's a thoughtful document, assembled after a series of surveys and interviews with vendors and administrators.

The report described an enterprise and a community in the midst of a challenging growth phase. Beginning farmers find it difficult to compete and get into old, established markets. Administrators of established markets feel that newer markets are cutting into their turf. Too many farmers are selling too many of the same crops, but there's also a perception that it's unfair for markets to admit newer farmers over more established growers even if this helps to create a more interesting and appealing product mix.

It's certainly challenging for new farms to break in, but most of the established farms took time to hit their stride as well. Newer farmers feel shut out of the bigger markets, but markets of this size didn't even exist when most of the established farmers were getting started. Everyone wants to vend at Ballard, but when I first started vending at Ballard it was the size of many of the smaller markets today.

It takes time to build a business, and it takes time to establish seniority. The same people who are saying that there are too many markets are also saying that it's too hard for newer farmers to find places to vend. New markets are ideal venues for new farmers who can't get into more established markets. I've seen various farmers achieve success at small markets simply by sticking around until other farmers with unreasonable expectations pulled out, leaving the best stalls for the folks with staying power.

Personally, I find this turmoil fascinating and exciting. Things will sort themselves out eventually, until there's a new growth spurt and we're faced with a whole new set of issues. It's a great problem to have.

Brazilian Hot Sauce

One of my favorite things that I brought back from Brazil earlier this year was a collection of hot sauce bottles. Some were gifts, but others were for my own enjoyment pleasure.

1. I'd been working on a bottle of molho de pimento de cheiro during the past few months. That translates literally as "sauce of fragrant pepper." Pimento de cheiro is a small pepper indigenous to the Amazon region, where I visited. It's not outrageously hot but, as the name suggests, it has a wonderful aroma and flavor.

I dropped the bottle and broke it the other day. I was heartbroken, but it gave me an opportunity to get started on a new variety. Now I'm enjoying some molho de pimenta malagueta. I first encountered the Brazilian malagueta pepper during a very long airport layover, when I saw it on the ingredients list of a packaged snack food. I was familiar with the name "malagueta pepper" from my readings about food history. Known also as "grains of paradise," malagueta pepper was among the exotic spices that medieval spice merchants imported from Africa and India. In fact, the search for this spice (among others) was what sent the Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral in a wide arc around northwestern Africa in 1500, causing him to unwittingly "discover" Brazil.

Curious about their flavor, I've looked for grains of paradise in spice stores. (I once watched a cooking show where Alton Brown used them to season okra, so I figured they had to be available somewhere.) I was excited to see them on the label of a snack food at the Manaus airport, until my sweetie set me straight, explaining the ingredient on this particular label was actually a variety of Brazilian chile pepper.

I'm curious about how this food indigenous to Brazil came to be named after the spice from the other hemisphere. It's probably no great mystery: the New World chiles were all named after Old World spices as the meaning of the word "pepper" expanded to describe these newly found delicacies.

Speaking of Brazilian peppers, we went out for lunch one day while I was visiting, and there was a little crock on the restaurant table containing hot sauce, with a couple of small, hot chiles sitting attractively on either side of it. My mother in law, who is pushing 90 and not entirely in possession of her faculties, reached for the pepper and popped it in her mouth. My sweetie and her sister, who dote over their mother, flipped out. "Mae! Mae!"

Grinning, the matriarch reached into her mouth and pulled out the perfectly intact pepper. She knew exactly what she was doing. She just wanted to get a rise out of them.

This Winter

About four years ago I started thinking seriously about the future, and I came up with a five year plan to set up my business so I could sell it, and transition to a career writing about sustainable food.

My vision has shifted since then. In the process of setting up my business so I could sell it to someone else, it's evolved into an enterprise that meets my needs so well that I want to keep it. My thoughts about sustainable food have changed as well: I've discovered that nothing is as simple as it seems. I used to think that if everyone could just see the light and eat local, sustainable food, everything else that was wrong with the world would eventually work itself out.

These days I see the problems with our food chain as a symptom of deeper, broader difficulties like greed, hegemony and colonization. I certainly feel called to spread these insights by writing about them, but it's hard to imagine that this will turn into a career that will support me. It's a complex message, not a tidy one that is easy to sell, and my challenge is to work at my own pace to figure out the right way to communicate it. I enjoy writing this blog, though the traffic is nothing to write home about. (And I really do appreciate those of you who read it regularly.)

Working on both of my cookbooks during the spring of 2008 I realized that creating book length manuscripts suits me well. I love immersing myself in a project, and I enjoy the give and take of working with engaged, professional editors. I spent the winters of 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 putting together a book length manuscript that gives a historical perspective on the current sustainable food movement, and this winter I've been sending it around. I got an exciting nibble last week, but sometimes (more often than not) a nibble is just a nibble. So we'll see.

Because the economy has been difficult, and because I'm getting too old to keep saving money over the summer and then depleting it all winter, I decided to try to earn a living this winter doing something other than running my business (which can't support me over the winter anyway.) I taught some classes at PCC. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed that.

I've also been doing some online copywriting for a company that is, for all practical purposes, a content factory. They gather information about key words that folks submit to search engines, and they pay freelance writers to write articles targeted to the search terms. The articles get traffic, the company gets ad revenue, and the writers and editors get paid. Despite my ambivalence, this has worked well for me this winter. I've been working from home, making my own schedule and earning a living. For the first time ever, my bank balance is higher at the end of the winter than it was at the beginning. Not by much, but it still feels like an important milestone.

A few weeks ago, things started to change. The company's editors seemed to change their standards and criteria overnight, demanding scholarly references and extensive rewrites. I don't have anything against scholarly references and extensive rewrites under the right circumstances, but not for the amount they pay per article.

Fortunately, this happened right around the same time my business started getting back into gear. I also got started with a new writing project of my own which has been germinating all winter. Now I wake up in the morning and I get started right away on my own stuff. If there's time later in the day, I generate content.

It feels good. I'm looking forward to market season.

Makeover

I finally did it. I invested in some new signs for my booth. I mostly stay away from purchases that don't directly add to my bottom line. I'd much rather buy a bigger grill so we can crank out more food in the same amount of time than upgrade my signs so the booth looks prettier. But there's a time and a place for everything. For better or for worse, customers do care about appearances.

Why I Bought Estrella Cheese Last Weekend

The immediate and obvious reason why I bought Estrella cheese last weekend was because it's outrageously wonderful cheese, made by nice people, and I wanted some. I got a chunk of the Old Apple Tree Tomme, my long time favorite, and I've been enjoying it for breakfast all week.

The other reason I bought Estrella cheese last weekend was because I heard some of their cheeses had been recalled because of possible listeria contamination. That may be a strange reason to buy cheese, but I didn't feel like there was a real danger. The recalled cheese, by definition, was no longer available for sale. As far as anyone knows, nobody even actually got sick from it. Some microbes showed up on a random preemptive FDA test, so Estrella was told to recall the product and they complied.

To me this seemed like a perfect example of the system at work. I like to think that maybe one of the reasons why nobody got sick was because of the dairy's limited distribution, and the fact that whatever contamination there may have been was extremely contained. Unlike the e coli spinach incident a few years ago, harmful bacteria was not processed along with product that was shipped to 50 states under a variety of brand names. This was all Estrella cheese.

I don't know how this contamination happened, but I do know from my own experience that food borne illnesses are a fact of life in the industry, even when you're careful. It's like taking good care of your health and getting sick occasionally anyway. A company should take responsibility, recall contaminated product, track the problem to its source, and take steps to prevent it from happening again in the future. But if there's every indication that a company is handling a problem responsibly, I'm not sure what we gain, as consumers, by treating them like pariahs.