Eat All About It

“Goat meat can get you in at any farmers market.”

That’s just one of the interesting tidbits of information in a generally comprehensive and frank new study on farmers markets in King County. Staff from the county Agriculture Program surveyed market managers and farmers for the report, yielding a nice trove of data on the challenges markets face and some paths toward improving their long-term stability. Some of the summaries and conclusions will be no-brainers to dedicated market watchers: Farmers markets need good, long-term locations, which are in short supply. Having more vendors process debit cards and food stamp benefits would increase sales. It’s frustrating that so many shoppers believe prices are higher at farmers markets than grocery stores, and frustrating that grocery stores are now grabbing the “locally grown” label while selling a very different product. Still, the report has plenty of new information and plain-spoken advice for the future. Here’s a random sampling of points that caught my eye:

1. There were 39 farmers markets in the county last year. Ten years earlier, there had been just nine. The markets are clearly boons to communities, but they’ve grown so fast there hasn’t been time to research what makes for successful markets in different areas — or time to develop regulations and land use politicies to support them. The growth also is causing concern among some market managers that newer markets are pulling shoppers away from established markets, and some farmers are reporting that their per-market sales are dropping.”If the number of farmers markets is to continue to grow successfully, it will have to be matched with increasing the shopper base and increasing the number of farmers available to sell at them” — and there are plenty of roadblocks to both those goals.

2. Most farmers need to earn a minimum of $600 per market day. “Information from a number of county markets indicates their average vendor sales are less than $600.”

3. As more markets open or expand, it becomes harder for market managers to know all farmers personally. “Some markets have discovered vendors who claim to grow the crop they are selling, but in fact are buying it from a packing house or other farmer. Besides not complying with the market’s policies, these vendors tend to underprice the legitimate farmers at the market, who may decide to leave the market. It is extremely difficult for market managers to verify the accuracy of vendor claims…Farmers understand this is a difficult and sensitive issue and wish market managers had better tools to address it.

4. Long-time farmers with “a recognized product and an established presence” can pretty much choose the markets where they want to set up shop. New farmers find it harder to gain a spot, especially at more desirable markets with higher sales. Some immigrant farmers have a hard time getting into markets “because they tend to grow the same products which are overrepresented at many markets.” But farmers who have a specialized product in high demand can pick their market regardless of how long they’ve been in the business or how big their farm is. “As one farmer noted in a small group discussion, ‘Goat meat can get you in at any farmers market.”

Interested in seeing more? Take a look at the full study here.

One of the things that surprised me the most about the massive salmonella-related peanut recalls earlier this year was how many of the people we think of as “the good guys” got caught in the mess along with everyone else. Small, local companies, trying their best to source high-quality ingredients, wound up using the same nuts as the country’s biggest chains, from a company that reportedly knew it was sending out contaminated goods.

I wrote in the Sunday Seattle Times about how companies get caught in the national food distribution web, and how some locals are trying to disentangle themselves from it as best they can. We looked at why CB’s Nuts will never be another Peanut Corporation of America, and how Snoqualmie Gourmet Ice Cream is making its add-in ingredients by hand, from fresh caramel sauce to cookie dough. 

The full story is online here.

One of the first and best resources for eating local in the Northwest was Seasonal Cornucopia, chef Becky Selengut’s well-researched compendium of when local foods are in season. Most of us know when to expect fresh asparagus — and the site does include growing seasons for all the common fruits and vegetables — but for lingonberries, watercress, matsutakes, even sea cucumbers and sanddabs, it was the only place most of us had to turn.

I don’t mean to speak in the past tense, because Seasonal Cornucopia is actually entering a new era. Selengut just passed it on to John and Patricia Eddy of Cook Local, whose recipes and locavore resources were a logical match for her comprehensive database of fruits, vegetables, foraged goods, seafood, and more. They’ll be linking seasonal search results with Cook Local recipes, so that when visitors ask, say, when to expect apriums at the farmers market, they’ll also get some idea what to do with them. They’re excited about maintaining and even enhancing the site, “both regionally and technologically,” Patricia told me in an e-mail. (Cook Local already has a Bay Area branch site, which seems to me a logical spot for expansion.)

“It has always been our ultimate goal to connect our readers with the food that they eat and the farmers who grow that food,” Patricia wrote. “We had dreams of creating our own database, not necessarily to tell people when things were in season (since obviously SC did that very well), but to tell people where they could find everything. I wanted to have a database that told people that quinces were available from Mair-Taki at the U-District and Columbia City Farmers Markets in mid-October, or that if you wanted to make your own beef stock, you needed to talk to Eiko of Skagit River Ranch or Brent and Ang from Olsen Farms.”

Becky told me in an e-mail that she thought of Cook Local as “the perfect sister site to SC, in that it provided all the things that SC didn’t, up to date farmer’s market info, CSA stuff, and recipes. I respect their commitment to our local food and providers.” She thinks they’ll be able to bring the site to a more useful level, with photos, recipes, maybe even an iPhone application — all things she wanted, but couldn’t afford the time to do.  Selengut “sold” the site for $10 (and, if it were to make money, a percentage of revenue), but she’ll stay involved to advise and help the Eddys if they want or need it. And she says she’s thrilled to see it going strong.

 ”It was my baby and now it’s growin’ up and off to bigger and better things with my 100% support.”

I have an article in Pacific Northwest magazine in The Seattle Times this week on veal — specifially, a look at the calves raised on Vashon Island’s Sea Breeze Farm. I became interested in the topic after seeing veal on the Sea Breeze tables at the farmers markets — a meat that’s been so closely associated with animal cruelty campaigns that it was hard to find a companion willing to order a piccata or parmigiana in my food critic days.

You can read the full story here. And, just to drum in the reality of farm life, Sea Breeze noted on Twitter that the calf featured in the story is currently being served up on the dinner menu at La Boucherie.

 Between recession and home-cooking renaissance, canning is making a comeback.

You can join in with a national “Cans Across America” event Aug. 29-30, spearheaded by some of our own Seattleites. Or, get an in-depth head start with a series of canning classes in Everett, offered by the WSU Snohomish County extension. 

Plenty of people have avoided canning because they’re afraid of risking botulism. Until recently, that category included me. I only canned my first tomatoes last year, taking a WSU King County Extension class to gain confidence, due to my acute… ah… awareness of food safety. As I wrote then, in my childhood home “any word association game would have paired “pork” in the same column as “trichinosis,” and the words “canned mushrooms” would logically have been followed by the term “botulism.”

I’ve had the canning bug since, moving on to jams and other preserves and pickles, reveling in the classic “ping” of a jar lid and the recipes of mavens like Marisa McClellan. But, as I’ve grown more comfortable with the safety procedures myself, I’ve started wondering: Is botulism really that prevalent? Do I need to wash my jars in hot soapy water AND sterilize them in boiling water AND dry them in an oven at the appropriate temperature AND add the proper amount of acidifying ingredients AND process them for the recommended length of time in boiling water? 

I don’t want to fool around with anything marked “fatal nerve toxin,” of course, but I also wondered how significant the risk is. While we do hear about occasional botulism cases –a nurse and her young children dangerously sickened by green beans this year, for instance — we hear about far more deaths from e. coli and salmonella and listeriosis. I don’t hear a lot about death by jam.

Checking in with the experts, here’s what I learned: (more…)

I love CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), where customers pay for a weekly box of whatever’s fresh from a given farm’s fields. I also love gardening, though, and I especially love regular browsing trips through the farmers markets — and there isn’t room in my budget or refrigerator to do all three.

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Frndly garden in south SEA, huge lot, gd sun, seeks gardener for mutual fruit+veggie fun.

Could that lot be the right match for “green mama dying to grow her own tomatoes again”? Or for “new gardener looking to cultivate food, friendship, & a productive hobby”?

Only on Urban Garden Share,  a new site hooking up homeowners who have unused garden space with gardeners who have no land. 

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Stone-Buhr flour, which has long advertised that it uses wheat grown in the Northwest, went one better in January: Its “Find The Farmer” website now lets buyers see exactly which farms grew the wheat for each separate bag of flour. Stone-Buhr owner Josh Dorf blogged that he was inspired by the writings of Michael Pollan.

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The New York Times has discovered the fatty, old-style pleasures of the Mangalitsa, featuring the fascinating Hungarian pigs in a full-fledged feature. While we simply flew to Spokane to discourse on the Mangalitsa’s unique qualities and conundrums last year, after sampling the meat at the University District Farmers Market, the Grey Lady reported straight from the hog’s mouth, with a reporter in Hungary. The Times also talked to Heath Putnam of Spokane’s Wooly Pigs, the Mangalitsa’s zealous American champion, and looked at how restaurants like The Herbfarm and French Laundry are using Putnam’s pigs.

Kurt Timmermeister, who has sold raw milk from his Vashon Island dairy farm for the past four years, is done. In the next few weeks, he wrote, he will give up his license to sell fluid milk and will concentrate instead on making cheese. He’s ordered a cheese vat-pasteurizer from the Netherlands, and a holding/chilling tank from Canada, and will only sell milk until the new equipment is here and hooked up. First on his cheese list is a Camembert, well-suited to the “rich, creamy milk” from his Jersey cows.

Timmermeister has written eloquently about the licensing and health department hassles surrounding raw milk, and its potential benefits and dangers have long spurred debates and lawsuits — but he didn’t invoke the controversies when describing the changeover.

He wrote:

Read more, and keep up with his cheesemaking journey, here.