Media Storm

There's been quite the media storm lately about food safety at Seattle farmers' markets. The PI ran an article citing a report that the health department found 252 violations in 265 routine inspections this year, including 189 that were considered critical. National sites such as Barfblog and Epicurious promptly ran articles parroting the same information.

As a long time farmers' market vendor, I've experienced hundreds of on site health inspections. Some have involved red "critical" violations. Once I hadn't prepared a bleach bucket, though I did have bleach, water, and a container for bleach water on hand. Several times I've been cited for having handwashing water that was a few degrees cooler than the 100 degrees that the health department requires.

The most common violation found on my company's health inspection reports lately involves a regulation called the four hour rule. The health department allows you to hold potentially hazardous foods in the danger zone (40 degrees F to 140 degrees F) for up to four hours as long as you discard them at the end of this time. In order to use this rule and be in full compliance, you must write down the time that you took the product in question out of your cooler, as well as the time (four hours later) that you plan to discard it.

Most of the markets where my business vends are only four hours long. If we take our cheese out of the cooler at the beginning of the market and discard it at the end of the market, we are complying with the spirit of this rule. But if the health department shows up and we haven't written down that we took the cheese out at, say, 10AM when the market started, they write it down as a red, critical violation.

I'm not downplaying the importance of genuine food safety, especially at farmers' markets. Food should be kept sufficiently cold or hot, surfaces should be kept clean, and folks handling food should never have bare hand contact with ready to eat foods. In addition, food should be handled conscientiously at every stage in the process, from the time we purchase ingredients, to the time we prepare it in our kitchen, to the time we serve it at the markets. But lumping together this failure to record the time we took the cheese out of the cooler with genuinely serious violations like failure to wash hands after using the bathroom does a disservice to vendors, customers, market administrators, and even health inspectors.

Although there have been articles in recent years claiming that health regulation at farmers' markets is particularly lax, farmers' market booths are actually more meticulously regulated than any other food service establishment I've ever known. Market administrators enter into an agreement with the health department requiring them to provide proxy inspections of booths handling potentially hazardous foods on every single market day.

This is the equivalent of having a restaurant inspected every single day that it is open to the public. (Most restaurants are inspected only once or twice a year.) The inspections certainly aren't as thorough as the ones the health department performs. For example, a market manager probably wouldn't notice if my hand washing water was a few degrees cooler than it should be. But the market managers rightfully take this responsibility very seriously, because all of our livelihoods and reputations depend on not making the public sick.

So why the media hype? I think it stems partly from the fact that farmers' market booths are so out in the open and transparent. You rarely see a restaurant kitchen as exposed as a market booth, and this leaves market vendors open to a higher level of scrutiny and judgement. If the cook at your favorite restaurant drops your food on the floor, he can pick it up and plate it and you'll never know. (Ever hear of the three second rule?) That could never happen at a farmers' market because someone would inevitably see and report the incident to a market manager, resulting in an earnest talk about how the reputations of all vendors are on the line when a single vendor puts customers at risk.

It also doesn't help that many smug, self satisfied market patrons play down the importance of food safety at farmers' markets, claiming that farmers' market food is inherently safer than mainstream industrial food. Artisan food producers do tend to care more about the food they produce, there is some evidence that grassfed beef does tend to have lower levels of e coli than factory farmed beef, and a foodborne illness from a farmers' market product is much easier to trace and address than one caused by a huge outfit that distributes product in many states, under multiple brand names. But that's no reason to be complacent, and food mishandled by small producers is just as likely to make you sick as food mishandled by industrial behemoths.

Last weekend a reporter from KUOW showed up at the Ballard Farmers' Market with a health inspector who works closely with local farmers' markets. The inspector performed a couple of inspections, including one of my booth, explaining about the regulations and checking temperatures and handwashing stations. As far as I know, the story hasn't aired yet, but it struck me as an effort to show another side of the story, about the hard work that we actually do put into keeping our booths and our product safe.

I'm assuming the reporter felt okay about what she saw and heard, because she swung back around after the interview and bought a quesadilla.

Food Knowledge

I've been teaching cooking classes regularly lately, and I keep bumping up against a paradox: people come to cooking classes to learn something they didn't previously know, from someone who has culinary skill and experience. Yet I'm convinced that most of my students know more than they think they know, and my objective is to help them build enough confidence to experiment, and to draw on their existing knowledge.

Food knowledge belongs to all of us. Folks were choosing foods, and preparing and eating them long before anyone ever wrote a cookbook or started a cooking school. Even people who don't really cook nearly always manage to feed themselves day to day, and folks who sign up for cooking classes most likely have at least a bare minimum of curiosity and familiarity with foods, knives, and cutting boards.

The way I see it, if you prepare a meal that tastes reasonably good, and you don't cut or burn yourself and nobody gets sick, you've done something right. Some of my favorite meals are incredibly simple, and incredibly tasty. The other night I sauteed some lovely peppers with garlic and olive oil, tossed it with fresh pasta, and ate it with grated cheese, and it was one of the best things I'd ever tasted. Sure, it helped to start with good ingredients, but sometimes I feel that, as a cooking instructor, the most important thing I can do is give students permission to keep it simple.

There's no glory in this, and I really don't dazzle anyone. Once a student wrote on a feedback form that I didn't have enough of a "backstory." But I like to think that when folks leave my cooking classes, they'll actually go home and cook. And that's what it's all about.

This Summer

In a way it's hard to believe that summer is almost over, especially here in Seattle where it only got going in earnest a few weeks ago. I turned 50 this summer, and I started feeling tired right afterwards. I think I mostly just gave myself permission to feel tired, after more than 20 years of pushing myself through the long days and small, everyday crises involved in running a small business on a shoestring.

So I've been pushing myself less this summer, working to define my role in the business. I do the purchasing, because it involves keeping track of so many details and prices. I keep an eye on the big picture, and I figure out ways to communicate big picture insights to the crew. I try to keep them motivated, challenged and engaged. And I crank out quesadillas during the busiest times: special events, the Ballard Market, and the dinner rush at Columbia City.

Because of the terrible weather earlier this summer, the farmers' markets got a slow start this year. There was hardly anything except greens available until nearly July. We didn't really see chiles or corn until nearly the middle of August. There were plenty of cold, damp and dreary market days, when produce wouldn't have sold even if it was available. Things have picked up for the farmers the past few weeks, but for much of the summer they largely seemed stressed and broke.

As a prepared food vendor, I've actually benefited in some way from their struggles. Spring tends to be the busiest time of year for my business, at least when the weather cooperates. Folks are excited that the markets are starting up, but there isn't that much to buy so they buy dinner. Once the heirloom tomatoes and the flats of berries show up, customers have a lot less money leftover for discretionary purchases like prepared food.

I'm thrilled that my business has done well this summer, but I'm also fully aware that farmers' markets are about farmers, and something is very wrong when the farmers are struggling and the quesadilla vendor is thriving. I try to give back every way I can, by buying ingredients from my market neighbors and prioritizing their needs when they're hungry.

I also like to think that maybe the farmers benefitted in a roundabout way from my spring sales: customers who came to the market early in the season and didn't find much produce to buy may have enjoyed the dinner they bought at one of the prepared food stands and felt like the excursion wasn't a total loss, so they kept up the habit of coming to the market until the selection became more bountiful.

Hot Sauce

This time of year, I tend to be up to my elbows in tomatoes and chiles. It's a wonderful problem to have: What am I going to do with all these beautiful ingredients?

Here's a new hot sauce recipe that I've been making the past few weeks. I can't get enough of it. I eat it with chips, with tamales, on fried eggs. I find myself planning my meals looking for opportunities to use it.

Hot Sauce (makes 2 cups)

2 ripe happy tomatoes
6 serrano chiles
1/2 teaspoon olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Arrange the tomatoes on a baking sheet. Rub the serrano chiles with olive oil and arrange them on the baking sheet as well.

Roast the tomatoes and chiles for about 40 minutes, until the tomatoes are a bit droopy and the serranos start to brown.

When the tomatoes and chiles are cool enough to handle, remove the cores from the tomatoes and the stems from the serranos. Puree the tomatoes and chiles in a blender until the mixture is smooth. Add the vinegar and salt, and puree a minute longer.

Choice

There's a scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love in which a character wanders through a marketplace where a waiter for an outdoor eating venue is reciting daily specials. I've heard that moviemakers making historical films employ historians as fact checkers, but in this case someone wasn't doing his job. The practice of giving diners a choice of what to eat actually evolved hundreds of years after Shakespeare's time, in Paris around the time of the French Revolution.

Innkeepers had sold meals to hungry, paying guests for millenia, but choices were limited to what that innkeeper happened to be offering on that particular day. Eating establishments in Paris before modern restaurants came into vogue were usually locations where a proprietor served the same thing to all of his guests, at designated times rather than whenever they happened to wander in the door.

The tradition of a "restaurant," where diners come on their own schedules and order off of a list of choices, caught on in Paris around the same time that the Industrial Revolution was getting into gear across the channel in England. Rural homesteaders forced off their land began moving to the cities, taking jobs in factories, and working for wages. They became the earliest modern consumers, spending their hard-earned income on afforable luxuries that helped them unwind after long, grueling work days.

Today we take for granted the act of visiting a store and choosing from hundreds or thousands of options. We craft identities based on whether we choose organic or exotic food products, or whether we're partial to high end chocolate. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals first, and then members of a tribe, country, or community and, for better or worse, much of our identity as individuals is tied up in what we buy and how we eat.

As a business owner, I struggle with this. Vending at farmers' markets, my livelihood depends on feeding as many customers as possible as quickly as possible. The more choices you offer, the longer it takes folks to make up their minds. Limiting the number of options also cuts way down on waste. I'm aware that I sometimes lose customers because I don't offer the option of choosing different types of tortillas or different types of cheese, but this business model mostly works for me so I stick with it.

As I was serving this month's Humble Feast Dinner, it occurred to me that this type of dining event is actually more like the pre-industrial common table than a modern restaurant setup. There's a buffet with multiple courses, but they're the same offerings for everyone, and we serve at a set time. This month we came up with a novel approach: we set up a taco bar. Rice, beans, beef, seitan, salsa, hot sauce, cheese, marinated cabbage, pickled carrots and jalapenos. I doubt any two tacos were the same.

Social Media

I often find pictures of my hands and my quesadillas on market shoppers' blogs when I idly surf the internet, procrastinating from more urgent tasks. I've even found recipes and calorie counts. Or I'll learn on Twitter that a seasonal vegetable has finally shown up at the farmers' market. Sometimes I'll find the answer to a perplexing question like how to cook cardoons by typing into a search engine.

Today it's easier than ever to access basic culinary information over the internet. But this trend of blogs, websites, and social media is really just the most recent chapter in a story about food and communication technologies that goes back at least as far as the invention of writing.

The earliest written recipes were inscribed on ancient Babylonian tablets. They contain instructions for preparing different types of broths and meats. Cooks and scribes set down this information at a time when it was new and exciting to store learning in a format that could be deciphered by anyone with access to the code. These cooks and scribes must have belonged to the cultural elite, those who knew how to read and write.

The English sociologist Jack Goody wrote a great book called Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, in which he ruminated on the differences between cultures that have a haute cuisine, or a more complex and varied eating style for the upper classes, versus cultures where ordinary folk and their richer compatriots eat basically the same foods, only the wealthy eat more of them. He concluded that cultures with haute cuisines tend to have written traditions while cultures with simpler food systems are more likely to communicate general and culinary knowledge orally.

Ancient Babylonian had perhaps the earliest haute cuisine, that is, it included a body of knowledge that was the province of sophisticated professionals. The ability to preserve information in writing to share with fellow experts and future generations gave the craft of cooking a platform and a reference point, a medium to store and accumulate nuggets of knowledge.

Down the line, the invention of the printing press eventually turned cookbooks into household items. Naturally, the first cookbooks were written by rich folks for rich folks, but eventually more cookbooks were written, and they became more widely available. By the time a few centuries had passed, a typical housewife could get her hands on a basic cookbook geared specifically for a typical household.

Despite the staggering amount of information that we now have available about food via the internet, we really don't have any idea of how this technology will ultimately affect the way we cook. On the one hand, we're able to watch videos about simple things like how to peel a carrot, while we can also learn obscure arts such as how to make tempeh or recreate medieval trenchers.

At its worst, this vast storehouse of food knowledge has the potential to be confusing and unduly complicated, discouraging would-be cooks seeking simple, accessible information. At its best, it can be a powerful tool for healthier, happier eating. Time will tell where it's all heading. In the meantime, I'm going to go peck around for some ideas on how to use those donut peaches I just picked up at the market.

It's a Book!

It's called Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well, and it's about our ever changing relationship with the food we eat. I was talking to someone at some point during the writing process, and she said that she'd never been particularly interested in history because it was all about wars. I disagreed. Personally, I grew interested in history when I realized that it was actually all about food.

We first became human when changes to our teeth and legs enabled us to hunt, gather and eat a more interesting diet than our simian ancestors had enjoyed. Civilization and farming evolved hand in hand, and more recently the industrial and technological revolutions both hinged on having an ample food supply.

As a farmers' market vendor, I was especially fascinated to learn about the many important social and political developments that occurred when small-scale agriculture managed to thrive. Ancient Greek democracy emerged among independent olive and grape growers, and the bleak years of medieval feudalism drew to a close when enterprising farmers began clearing and claiming marginal land, and striking out on their own.

But there are already plenty of terrific food history books out there telling you how we came to eat what we eat. I was more interested in exploring how we came to enjoy the foods that we prefer, and how longstanding attitudes and feelings about food tie into today's issues and debates, such as organic foods, local eating, vegetarianism, and whether foodies are inevitably snobbish.

Copies are available on Amazon, and I'm working hard to get it into bookstores and libraries. In the meantime, I'll be blogging more regularly about the long view. Thanks for listening.