Winter Farmers' Markets Vermont Style

Three years ago I visited the Brattleboro Winter Farmers' Market the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The weekend after Thanksgiving tends to be a rough weekend for market vendors, even in Seattle. Fridges are full of leftovers and many customers are out of town.

Three years ago there were very few customers and most of the vendors looked depressed. There wasn't much produce, either. It may have been the first year they tried holding a market through the winter, and I remember thinking that I hoped they would keep at it until folks got used to the idea of coming out to buy local produce even during the colder months, and farmers adjusted their planting schedules to a longer season.

Today I visited the market again and was excited by the change. The place was downright crowded and there were plenty of fresh vegetables. I even got some of the last of the year's tomatoes.

I met a vegetable named scorzonera that was completely new to me. It's related to salsify and burdock. Mother Earth News compares its flavor to oysters, but I actually thought of melon when I tasted it, only it wasn't quite as sweet.

There was prepared food as well, from breads, jams and cured meats to jars of pickles and mustard. Musicians played to a tabled area where eaters enjoyed Thai food and focaccia. There were crafts as well, in fact, folks in this area find it strange that there's such a raging controversy among Seattle market managers over the issue of whether or not craft vendors belong at local markets. The relaxed approach here goes both ways: The famous Putney Craft Tour (which includes my sister's fine work) also features a cheese maker.

The Estrella Tragedy: A Vendor's Perspective

The Sunday after federal marshals closed the Estrella cheese facility, Kelli and Anthony Estrella showed up at the Ballard Farmers' Market with stacks of lab reports and health department correspondence, as well as copies of their many cheese making awards. They stood at their table and dialogued with customers about their situation.

Earlier this year, some of Estrella's raw milk cheese tested positive for listeria in random monitoring by the Washington state health department. The couple worked with state authorities, recalling, cleaning and retesting. Despite their efforts, problems persisted. Then late in October month federal officials got involved and shut down their facility without warning.

Listeria is a tenacious bug. Unlike salmonella, it survives even in refrigerated foods. It can be dangerous to pregnant women, babies and the elderly, but we don't know much about its effects on healthy adults. It is difficult to link listeria with actual occurrences of food borne illness because it can take over a month for symptoms to appear and these are often generic and flulike. Some food scientists believe that once you start looking for listeria, you'll find it almost anywhere.

Health officials all over the country have tried to limit the production and sale of raw milk cheeses like Estrella's on the grounds that they are more likely to harbor food borne illness than their pasteurized, highly processed counterparts. Cheese aficionados insist that the flavor and health benefits of raw milk enzymes are well worth the risk.

The raw milk controversy is fertile ground for conspiracy theorists, and they have a point. The FDA and local health departments give a disproportionate amount of energy and attention to the issue. Authorities found the legal tools to shut down the Estrella Creamery, a small-scale artisan operation, but they claim to lack the authority to close industrial meat facilities linked to verifiable clusters of food borne illnesses involving millions of pounds of contaminated meat.

Every year at one of the local farmers' market vendor meetings, a board representative gets up and reminds us of the importance of rigorously following food safety protocols. He explains that, as market vendors, we are all responsible for keeping our products clean and safe, and that a highly publicized incident of food borne illness would affect all of us, spreading the perception that farmers' market products are unsafe in general.

I've heard farmers and market vendors expressing compassion for the Estrellas while also worrying about the effect the incident could have on general perceptions about the safety of market food. Each of us has chosen in our own way to sell food outside of mainstream channels, so we take the issue personally.

Estrella's product tested positive for a bug that shouldn't have been there. But the situation has many shades of gray, including the incomplete science about listeria and the fact that, as far as we know, there have been no illnesses directly linked to their cheese.

Coincidentally, the Estrella case has been in the news just as Congress was debating the recent food safety bill. We want the government to hold big companies accountable but we are also angry at these same agencies for being so hard on one of our own, especially a lovely couple who has demonstrated a willingness to comply with reasonable regulatory measures.

In the meantime, I miss their cheese.

Serving Meat

After owning and operating vegetarian businesses for more than 23 years, I recently started cooking and serving meat. I expected the sky to fall. I expected the vegetarian police to issue a warrant for my arrest. Instead, the transition was largely smooth and uneventful.

I learned to cook in vegetarian restaurants and natural foods stores. The store where I cooked in Virginia didn't even sell eggs, although they did have an impressive cheese counter. Local farmers used to bring eggs to sell to the staff. We'd meet them out in the parking lot, like high school drug dealers.

When I moved out to the West Coast I was delighted to find a wider selection of organic and natural meat products. But I started a vegetarian business largely because it was the food I knew, and also because there were fewer food safety issues to worry about. Over time I began embracing the decision for other reasons, including the health benefits and the atrocities associated with industrial meat.

I published two vegan cookbooks. I'd sent out proposals for all kinds of books, but these were the ones that editors wanted. The Accidental Vegan made no secret of my omnivorous tendencies and some vegans found that, well, controversial.

When I began vending at farmers' markets, and later when I opened my shop in Ballard, I had more direct contact with potential customers than I'd had with my earlier wholesale company and meal delivery service. Over and over again I saw people evaluate the menu and move on because it was all vegetarian. I'd naively assumed that if you offered vegetarian food that was appealing enough, folks wouldn't care that it didn't have meat in it.

Watching these powerful negative reactions, I grew interested in the question of why we are so emotionally attached to meat (aside from the fact that it's tasty) and why vegetarianism is so likely to push people's buttons. I learned that our relationship with meat is old, deep, and complicated. It involves venerable traditions, persistent class issues, and even our identity as a species: toolmaking was at the heart of what first made us human, and we first began making stone tools for the purpose of butchering meat.

My decision to start cooking and serving meat was less a matter of caving in to popular demand as it was a realization that doing so would actually put me in a better position to spread the message that we should eat less meat and better meat.

I now offer a couple of meat-based items on the menu at the cafe, and we served chili (with Jubilee beef!) at our gig at the Jubilee pumpkin patch. I'm hesitant to add it to my market menu because everything is so smooth and streamlined, but I may experiment with it a bit this winter, when things are slow. We use only locally raised, sustainable meat and we always buy it directly from the producers.

We're still selling a lot more vegetarian and vegan food than meat based items, probably because the vegetarian and vegan food we sell is so appealing. But nobody walks away indignantly anymore because the menu is entirely vegetarian.