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.

Week 1 at the Cafe

My little cafe is now just over a week old and I'm pleased to say that I think it has potential.

We offered free coffee all week, including espresso drinks, and that generated some buzz. People tweeted about it and retweeted about it. You don't see free espresso every day.

We met many of the neighbors, who wished us well and said they desperately wanted a business to succeed in the spot, although they also warned us about all the endeavors that had failed there. I'm taking those warnings to heart, though I also think we have a better thing going than our predecessors had. It's easy to look at an operation from the outside and think you know better, but it's hard to look at the remnants of those previous businesses, from scribbled signs to bizarre inventory, without speculating about the reasons they didn't make it.

Customers enjoyed the food and the coffee. There were times when we felt downright busy. Having started several similar operations in the past, I know that it takes time to get established. I keep looking back to our first few weeks in Ballard as reference points. Our sales at this location are considerably higher than they were at the old spot during this period, although we still have a way to go before we break even.

When I opened the shop in Ballard I was having issues with the plumbing inspector, who took weeks to approve the gas line running to the grill. I'd said I was going to open on the 2nd of November, and I was determined to do so with or without a gas line. I cooked on a hot plate and kept food warm with a chafing dish. The first few days it felt heroic. By the time nearly 2 weeks had gone by I was feeling like a loser.

I kept reminding myself of that experience last week when we opened. The new place felt ready and I had plenty of support from my wonderful staff. It's not going to be easy, but I've got a good feeling about this one.

Picking Collards

Recently I drove out to Jubilee Farm to harvest some collard greens. I needed the greens for my grilled veggie mix but, more than that, I just needed to get out of town and slow down a bit. I'd been running hard all week working to get the cafe open and I still had a long list of things to do, but I went with my gut feeling that said to go harvest the greens.

It was a gorgeous day. It had rained a lot recently so it was too muddy for me to drive out to the rows of greens so I hiked with my big plastic totes. The leaves snapped right off so I was able to gather a lot of them very quickly. I was getting a very good deal so I looked for leaves with some bug holes, perfectly good food that might otherwise have gone to waste. Even the slightly damaged leaves were healthy and gorgeous. I was happy with my haul.

I can't think of a better way to have used my time on that particular afternoon. I came back feeling rejuvenated, and rich in collard greens.

I love collard greens. I've heard that I shouldn't eat a lot of them because they have some chemical that impedes thyroid activity and I have thyroid issues, but they've got so much else going for them nutritionally that I figure the benefits outweigh the negatives.My favorite way to cook collard greens is to slice them really finely, to pieces the size of cole slaw cabbage. It's easiest to take a few leaves and roll them tightly before slicing. Then I heat some olive oil, saute a few chopped cloves of garlic, and add the collard greens with a bit of salt. They cook in just a few minutes, and they're great with beans and rice, Brazilian style.

Pumpkin Season at Jubilee Farm

Weekends this month we've been vending out at the Jubilee Farm pumpkin patch. It's a good time, with hay rides, hot cider, a corn maze and a catapult that shoots pumpkins far out into the fields.

I love going out to this farm. I headed out there one day this past week to pick up some produce to use in my veggie mix. I'd had a stressful morning, with time constraints and everything taking longer than it should have. Then I hit farm country and I just felt the tension easing.

Jubilee has an unusual business model, doing most of their business through their CSA and offering work shares, where folks come out and work in exchange for a lower rate on their weekly boxes. As a manager, I imagine this must be a nightmare from an efficiency standpoint, with so many workers working such short shifts that few of them really gain the knowledge and experience to do things right. But that doesn't seem to be the point. The point is to get folks out to the farm, getting their hands dirty and feeling at home in the fields. And the members really do see to feel at home there. They know their way around and they talk about the place with proprietary pride.

I also love the name "Jubilee." The biblical tradition of the Jubilee Year designates periodic intervals when everyone who lost their land because of debt and misfortune would have it returned to them. Think about how different our recent history would have been if we'd had a similar tradition in this country. The families displaced during the Dust Bowl years and even folks who lost their houses during the recent foreclosure crisis would all have been allowed to keep their property. It's a wise tradition, one that spreads dignity and justice, and honors the struggles of small-scale farmers.

The Coffeeshop

One of the toughest things about owning a farmers' market business is the fact that it's so hard to keep good people when I can only offer them seasonal work. As this season began drawing to a close I started thinking about ways that I could keep some of my employees employed during the off season. It's been a good year, and I felt I wanted to make a small investment in a new venture, ideally something where I could make back most of that capital outlay in a relatively short period of time.

I started browsing Craigslist for opportunities. I called about a food cart, but winter is the wrong time of year for a food cart business, and besides, Seattle still hasn't changed the regulation that forbids selling anything other than hot dogs out of a cart. I could have looked into a full fledged truck, but that involved more of an investment than I was willing to make.

Then I saw an ad for a fully furnished coffeeshop, with the equipment included. I called and went to see it, and I was thoroughly charmed. The building owner had furnished it and tried to make a go of it, but she had no experience in the coffee business. She leased it to someone else who kept it open for a few months, but didn't want to make any investment in keeping it open longer.

The shop is on 23rd and Madison, across from Crush. There isn't a lot of parking, but there are quite a few condos and bus stops in a three block radius, and no coffee in either direction for 4 or 5 blocks. I went ahead and signed a lease.

We're going to serve soups, salads, stuffed breads and coffee. Everything will be homemade. (There's not much kitchen space, but it's half a mile from my big, underused commercial kitchen.) We'll use plenty of local and organic ingredients, including sustainable meat.

It's going to be a tricky location, but certainly not an impossible one. Because it's fully equipped, I'll be able to invest in things I could never afford before, like advertising, signage and decor.

When I signed the lease I didn't have a good feeling or a queasy feeling, I just felt that this venture was inevitable. I've made plenty of mistakes at the storefronts I tried to open in the past. I like to think that I've learned a thing or two from those mistakes, lessons that will serve me well this time around.

Dress Code

I spent last week at the Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers. I learned many interesting and important things there (including the fact that I have a lot to learn about blogging.)

I realized before I set out that I'd need to dress better than I usually do. (These days my idea of dressing well is wearing clothes that aren't covered with food stains.) I did a bit of shopping and felt somewhat prepared.

The first night there was a reception in the main dining room. I wore a pair of clean Carhartts and a presentable blouse. Virtually all of the other women wore dresses and the men wore jackets and ties. At first I felt embarassed but then I figured that I am who I am, and if I let myself feel uncomfortable I would only make the situation worse.

Nonetheless, I wanted to apologize to the event's director. When we spoke on the last day she told me that there is, in fact, a dress code in the main dining room but the hotel staff looks the other way for the food writers because years ago Julia Child showed up in pants and things didn't go well when they tried to eject her. I can just imagine the indignation in her soprano lilt. "Do you know who I am?"

I was in good company.