Georgetown Carnival

"It's like a carnival," a farmer friend excitedly told me last weekend about the brand new Georgetown Market. (I wasn't able to be there personally on opening day because I was at the Bastyr Herb and Food Fair.)

I found it ironic that she described the event's vibrant atmosphere using exactly the same word that some farmers' market managers use disparagingly to describe events that don't focus sufficiently on farmers.

The Georgetown Market feels a lot like Fremont 1995, before the event split and the farmers' moved west to Ballard. There are crafts and flea market stuff as well as farmers and prepared food. There's even a guy selling Vermont maple syrup, which seems to defy the local focus, except that he divides his time between Washington and Vermont and actually does make the syrup himself. He's in the craft section rather than the farmer section, which is an interesting way of integrating this unusual compromise.

Rebekah Denn wrote an interesting piece in this month's Seattle Magazine exploring the question of whether Seattle has too many farmers' markets. Reading it, I was struck by the thought that I've always regarded farmers' markets as an ancient phenomenon in the sense of people gathering in public spaces for commerce, but they're actually quite modern in the sense of providing a venue with a strict focus on farmers, as a way to foster local, small scale agriculture. If that really is the point of a farmers' market, then perhaps these "carnivals" are getting in the way and creating debilitating competition.

On the other hand, farmers' markets are many things to many people. They're public gathering places as well as places where local economies can thrive. Food happens to be the ideal product for this type of event because local food is the freshest food, so locally food producers can offer great value on the best food around. But a great market has to give customers more than just food as an excuse to come down week after week. Even the farmers-only markets recognize this when they offer live music and chef demos.

The Georgetown market has room for 100 vendors, There are about 50 vendors there now, so there is considerable room for growth. It's got a unique setting, with railroad cars and a defunct brick brewery as a backdrop. Last week was crazy busy. This week was considerably less busy, but that's not unusual at a new market that holds a big opening. I'm looking forward to watching it evolve.

Food Stamp Foodies

I've been reading lately about controversy swirling around food savvy food stamp recipients spending their food stamp dollars at establishments that focus on quality food, like farmers' markets and Whole Foods. A recent article in Salon.com, titled Hipsters on Food Stamps, has generated a flood of responses from outraged foodies defending their right to buy sustainably produced food products, even with government subsidies. (Many aptly point out that the industrial food system is heavily subsidized as well.)

But the discussion, like so many other others, seems like an unfortunate collection of one dimensional, knee jerk reactions. The Salon.com article uses phrases like "a local, free-range chicken in every Le Creuset pot" and makes reference to "organic salmon". (What is that anyway? If you could control everything going into a salmon's diet it would be a farmed salmon, and no self respecting foodie would want to eat it anyway.)

Although the line often grows blurry, there is a real difference between fussy gourmet food products and honestly produced staples. Both are available at farmers' markets and at Whole Foods, and both tend to cost more than the highly processed industrial foods that are killing and sickening so many people. But there is a real difference between expensive food as a pretentious status symbol, and quality products that happen to cost more than the garbage on the shelves of the typical American supermarket. Fancy food may be a luxury, but good food is a necessity.

Covenant

I read weather reports obsessively. When I don't like what one says, I check another. Yesterday morning I checked at least four and they all said the same thing: a major storm would be moving in during the afternoon.

I gave my Columbia City crew the day off, figuring I could handle things myself and cut my losses. By 1 in the afternoon, however, it was still sunny and 70 degrees, and I was starting to second guess myself.

Sure enough at about 1:15 the sky got very dark very fast, and on my way to the market it started raining. By 2 o'clock there were gusts of wind strong enough to lift the tent off the ground, even with 25 pound weights on each leg.

If this had kept up consistently all afternoon, it would have been among the worst market weather days I'd experienced in more than 12 years of vending. Fortunately it was only intermittent bursts of crazy wind and heavy, sideways rain.

As soon as the market ended, a spectacular rainbow made an appearance. I like the biblical take on rainbows, seeing them as signs that everything is going to be okay. It's going to be a great season. But on any given day, anything can happen.

Update: Beware of Leafy Greens

I wrote recently that the health department is in the process of designating leafy greens as potentially hazardous food. That means they would have to be held at 41 degrees Fahrenheit or colder, seriously complicating things for farmers' market vendors like myself.

I've been reading up on the issue, and I've learned that they're mostly concerned with leafy greens that have been cut rather than leaves that are intact such as heads of cabbage or romaine, or bunches of chard. There's some clarification about exactly what they mean by "cut". Apparently the first cut, detaching the leaf from the plant, doesn't count. One person I spoke to also thought that the regulation would only apply to greens that have been repeatedly cut in multiple facilities but I haven't found anything to support this.

The health inspector I've been talking to sent links to the FDA recommendations to local health departments, and the proposed Washington state changes based on these recommendations. The FDA recommendations use the phrase "ready to eat" multiple times, while the propsed Washington state changes do not. This is important.

Let's put aside for a moment the very important consideration that industrial farms handle their produce in ways that are much more likely to widely spread pathogens than the scale and methods used by small, local farms. A salad mix or cole slaw mix with cut greens that will not be cooked before you eat them is much more likely to make someone sick than a braising mix, which is meant to be cooked. The process of cooking kills pathogens. That's why we're instructed to handle raw chicken with all manner of precautions while cooked chicken is generally regarded as safe.

I've never been someone inclined to get involved in the process of agitating for change. Under "politics" on my Facebook profile I wrote "complacent radical", meaning that I'm very much in favor of dramatic change, but I see my own potential to affect change mainly in terms of just living in ways that are consistent with my ideals. But this new regulation about cut leafy greens is a concrete issue that could have serious consequences, and its really just a matter of sloppy wording.

I sent in a comment form (there's a link for "Issue Submittal Form" in the Washington state document) and I've been contacting market managers and vendors about the issue. I've been encouraged by the fact that several market managers had already learned about it by the time I approached them because an email I sent has been making the rounds.

One market manager said that she'd like to see farmers' market vendors classified as exempt from these kinds of regulations because their production processes are so different from the mainstream industrial paradigm behind most of the difficulties. That's a beautiful thought, but I have a hard time imagining it actually happening. But in the meantime, this matters.

Simple, Tasty Sorrel Soup

This one's for Dena, who's been wanting sorrel soup. It's supports my conviction that a recipe isn't necessarily better with twenty ingredients than it is with only a handful, assuming they're the right handful. The parsnips are sweet. The sorrel is tart. The leeks, garlic and stock give it depth.

I started with a few cups of stock. Cleaned a leek, chopped it coarsely and threw it in. Then I cut a couple of parsnips into chunks and added them too, along with a couple of peeled garlic cloves. I used one bunch of sorrel, which turned out to be about a packed cup of leaves, once I trimmed the thick part of the stems and chopped the leaves coarsely. Then I seasoned it simply with salt and pepper. After boiling it for about 45 minutes, I whizzed it all in the food processor. It made a hearty, thick soup. You can use extra stock, of course, if you don't want it to be so thick.

Enjoy!

The Northwest Vegetarian Cookbook

I first met Debra Daniels-Zeller when I was regularly catering monthly dinners for the Vegetarians of Washington. She was the guest chef, and I was the "ghost chef". I'd work with chefs the organization wanted to feature, collaborating to develop menus and then executing the recipes myself because I had a commercial kitchen and catering gear.

It was sometimes a tricky job. The guest chefs wanted to show themselves off while I wanted, first and foremost, to earn enough money to make the endeavor worthwhile. I learned a lot about putting my ego aside.

When I first learned I'd be working with Debra, I went to a bookstore to check out her book, and promptly bought a copy. It was a lovely, self-published volume filled with enticing recipes as well as profiles of some of my favorite farms. By the time we touched base and began discussing recipes, I had already picked out a menu, which turned out to be very similar to the one that she had in mind.

We've crossed paths regularly since then, since we both frequent local farmers' markets. Getting to know her better I discovered that the original decision to self-publish her book was actually very much in line with her ideal of supporting local businesses and maintaining short supply chains in every possible way. I'd never seen anyone promote a self-published book as thoroughly or as conscientiously and I was continually impressed, though I also wished I could see the book receive the benefit of a publisher's established distribution channels.

The Northwest Vegetarian Cookbook, which came out just this week, is an updated version of the original volume, with new insights and recipes, and an expanded reach, profiling farms in Oregon as well as Washington. It's a beautiful book. I rarely cook from recipes, but I'll definitely be trying some of these, such as the Potato, Fennel and Tomato Soup, and the Orzo with Shallots, Kale and Walnuts.

Congratulations Debra!

Beware of Leafy Greens

This afternoon I spoke with a health inspector who informed me that the USDA has recommended that local health departments begin treating leafy greens as potentially hazardous foods, and the King County Health Department is considering following this recommendation. I asked her whether the proposed regulations would cover greens like collards and kale that are cooked before you eat them, and she said it would.

If what she said is accurate and these regulations go into effect, they could have serious consequences for farmers' markets. Treating leafy greens as potentially hazardous foods would mean handling them in the same way you're supposed to treat chicken, at least with respect to temperature control. This means that any farmer selling leafy greens would have to keep them in closed ice chests. Not only would farmers be unable to display leafy greens, but they would also be severely limited as far as what they could transport back and forth to markets because ice chests take up a lot more space than boxes. The implications for my own business would be tragic, because my vehicle couldn't hold enough coolers to keep my greens cold.

I did some cursory online research and learned that the stricter standards for temperature control for leafy greens is coming about in part because of the initiative and voluntary compliance of vegetable grower trade associations, or groups that lobby on behalf of industrial scale commercial farmers. This was equally disturbing: commercial growers truck their product in refrigerated vehicles to refrigerated warehouses. It's mainly the little guys who store their greens at room temperature on the way from the farm to the market.