Good News for SF Farmers

San Francisco urban agriculture advocates are rejoicing after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted last week to amend the zoning code to allow small-scale commercial farming in areas previously deemed residential.

The shift will allow farming enterprises under an acre in size to grow and sell produce within city limits without an expensive conditional use permit (CUP) (previously around $3,000) or a lengthy bureaucratic process. Little City Gardens, the only for-profit farm in San Francisco, has been engaged in a year-long process with the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA) and the Mayor’s office to draft new legislation for urban agriculture and shepherd it through the approval process. The cost of a permit is now only $300 and urban farmers will also be allowed to sell value-added products such as jams, salsa, and herb salts along with produce they grow.

Little City Gardens—whose farm near in the Mission Terrace neighborhood has earned a great deal of community support—has already announced plans for a CSA subscription program on their website. “Each week the box will include a bag of salad greens, cooking greens, roots, and herbs, as well as some form of communication (newsletter, artwork, recipe, etc) related to either the produce or the farm in general,” the site reads.

Although no one else appears ready to take advantage of the ruling just yet, Dana Perls, co-coordinator of the SFUAA, told the SF Weekly she thinks “this will have a trickle-down impact on people who work at Alemany [Farm] or Hayes Valley [Farm] who’ll be much more likely to farm their own land.”

Nonprofit urban farming groups also have the potential to have a larger impact on their communities, thanks to the new legislation. As SFUAA co-coordinator Antonio Roman-Alcalá wrote in a recent article here on Civil Eats, “Should for-benefit (i.e., non-profit) farm projects seek to raise some of their operating funds through sales, including of value-added products, this will now be allowed. This could also open the door for social justice-minded urban farms to create truly green jobs without requiring so much grant funding.”

It’s All About the Conditional Use Permit

In Oakland, the spotlight is on Novella Carpenter, the author of Farm City and an urban farmer known for her boundary-pushing experiments in backyard livestock. Until a few weeks ago, Carpenter had been selling her homegrown produce at a farm stand in her neighborhood; she stopped, however, after she was approached by a city official and told she was in violation for not having a permit.

Carpenter has blogged at length about her experience over the last three weeks as she’s struggled to untangle a knot of rules and regulations. She learned that growing vegetables on an empty lot in Oakland was in fact illegal without a permit (regardless of whether she was selling them). However, starting on April 14, when phase one of Oakland’s new urban agriculture laws took effect, that is not longer the case. Now, she’s been told, all she needs is a business license to grow and sell produce. But Carpenter’s goats, ducks, chickens, and rabbits are another case all together. Phase two of the urban agriculture laws will relate to animals, but it won’t take effect until next year. Although she raises the animals for home consumption alone, Carpenter is playing it safe. “I don’t know what kind of rules they’ll come up with and I’d rather have my CUP grandfathered in,” she says.

In the meantime, Carpenter has also been told that she may need a second permit for the farming she’s doing on property surrounding the apartment she rents, which is adjacent to the empty lot (the latter of which she owns). So, last week, she set out to raise the necessary $2,500 through her website, and on Wednesday announced that her goal had been met.

Meanwhile, thanks in part to a general petition supporting improved zoning for urban agriculture from the Oakland Food Policy Council and an outpouring of personal responses by Carpenter’s fans and supporters, Oakland mayor Jean Quan’s office has been inundated with phone calls and letters.

“I don’t want special treatment,” says Carpenter, who has been openly reluctant to ask for support. On the other hand, no one else has come forward to say they’ve been similarly fined. And, indeed, it may be Carpenter’s near-celebrity status (and a possible complaint by animal rights activists) that called attention to her farm.

The recent zoning changes in San Francisco happened in large part because of the existence of the SFUAA, which boasts nearly 50 member organizations and gained early support from Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor David Chiu. Carpenter has some hope that the nascent East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance, which was initiated by Esperanza Pallana from Pluck and Feather Farm, could take some of the pressure off Ghost Town Farm and initiate more of a community approach.

“It’s hard to be out on the front lines,” says the author/farmer. “I’m not made for politics.” But, as reluctant as she is, Carpenter is a powerful spokesperson for the right to farm in the city. When she learned that her home was in a zone of Oakland where farming was deemed illegal, she saw the problem as much bigger than her own. “This is a food sovereignty issue, especially in West Oakland,” she says, a traditionally under-resourced area, where grocery stores are scarce. She adds, “Folks around here have enough to deal with—and they’re not even allowed to grow chard?!”

Of course, not everyone looking to produce their own food in Oakland will take it to the level that Carpenter has. “I understand I might be an extreme example,” she says. “But I think I might be the future. More and more people are going to look for ways to grow their own food. So we have to find a way to make it legal.”

A version of this article was originally published by CUESA

There are plenty of end-of-summer activities to take part in this time of year, trying to squeeze in that last stay-cation before fall descends. But for two years now, those of us here in the Bay area whose lives revolve around food more than, say, Burning Man, find salvation, and company, in the back-to-back food festival fun of SF Street Food and Eat Real. This year I caught up with Susan Coss, Director of Eat Real 2010, who filled me in on some of the reasons this food event continues to charm us all.

CE: How is this year different from last?

SC: Well, first of all it’s twice as big as it was last year. We have about 90 food vendors this year between the street food vendors, our craft collaborators and our urban farmstand cook stations, so a ton more food and like three times as much programming. This year we have four different stages that people are working off of and we’ve got a lot more hands on intensive workshops and food skills training. It’s just amazing and at the same time pretty mind-blowing.

CE: How are the participant’s selected and what is the tasting process like?

SC: We ask people for a sample of what they think their top items are. Sometimes there are three people involved in the tasting process, other times it’s the whole staff, it just depends on how we can get the most people to the same place at the same time. We pretty much just ask ourselves how does it taste? Where are the ingredients coming from? And we like to give feedback to the prospective vendors as well. We think we know our participants and the audience, so we want to be sure that they are bringing a product that they are going to sell through.

CE: Is the sourcing a big component of the selection process?

SC: It’s the whole package. We can really work with our vendors if they need to be sourcing a product that’s a more local and we can always help them work with farms. For example, we sourced a product through the Thumbs Up Growers Collaborative with CAFF, which is working with small and medium sized farms to really find a market and points of distribution. That was great because their distribution point is only located about three blocks away from Jack London Square. We also established a process with Del Monte Meat Company which works with Mary’s Chicken and Niman Ranch which enabled our vendors to get meat from there too. What we’re really hoping for is that the vendors will be encouraged to switch to these products after seeing that they worked at Eat Real and the consumer liked it. And the other exciting thing is being able to introduce the different vendors to one another and get them working together, which is what the craft collaborations were all about. Being able to put a Blue Chair jam with Bohemian Creamery cheese or creating tamales using Llano Seco pork and Queso Salazar cheese. Hopefully going forward, they can use each other’s products and create a regional food system that supports the local economy.

CE: Last year’s theme was street food and this year is more about craft?

SC: Yes, this year we are really talking about craft and what craft food means: that it requires a certain amount of skill and training and working with that food to create an amazing product. We are seeing an explosion of regional food producers here in the Bay area and this is a great way to really highlight why it’s important to be buying their jams or their cheeses and really honoring these types of producers that are out there. We are at a point that while there is an explosion of people that are interested in this, at the same time there needs to be a market that supports them and an infrastructure and platform that can launch new products. Big food companies have that opportunity all the time but the smaller guys don’t, so it’s wonderful to be here and help them with that. On top of it, we have this whole urban homesteading theme too, so on one hand we have these local food producers that are doing great things and then you also have these people who are just really interested in doing it themselves. We want to encourage people to take control of their own food, put it into their own hands, be their own picklers, be their own jammers.

CE: Eat Real seems to be promoting the idea that small food ventures can be financially viable, have you seen examples of the festival having a lasting affect on vendor’s businesses?

SC: Well I think, especially with the craft vendors this year, it’s new, and so I don’t think we have much traction yet. I do know that last year, some of the new businesses that launched at Eat Real are still around today and they’re going strong. You look at someone like Liba Falafel and she has hired one full time employee rather than just running the truck herself and having the occasional help. And she’s now looking at how she can open a brick and mortar restaurant. A great success story.

CE: Do you feel like Eat Real is a trendsetter?

SC: We would definitely like to be trendsetters and not trend followers, and just to be able to put on an event each year that piques people’s interest more and more in food and finding different creative ways to pull people in. Our goal remains the same every year. Our new line is Eat It, Make It, Grow It – it doesn’t have to go in a linear order like grow it, make it, eat it, because that isn’t really the point. It’s whatever you want to do and we’ve got it all!

CE: Is Eat Real going on the road?

SC: Rumor has it that we are going on the road. We’re looking in 2011 to add an additional location and it’s looking like that location is going to be L.A.

Here are some highlights from Sunday, August 29:

Craft Collaborations

• Blue Chair Fruit Co. & Bohemian Creamery teamed up and created a lovely cookie plate: Capriago whole wheat cookie w/ spiced tomato Bourbon conserve, BoDacious goat cheese Graham cookie and black fig jam, Boho Bel cow’s milk cheese & oat cookie w/ strawberry pink peppercorn jam.

Urban Homesteading

• An exciting and well-attended awards ceremony took place for the winners of all categories, from jam and pickles to kombucha and beer. The “Putting It Up” winner was Lisa Cramer with her Nasturtium Capers.

Demonstrations & Activities

• While most of the crowd was busy ogling over the live pig butchery competition on the main stage, I was enthralled with making my own bitters, lead by Greg Lindgren of Rye S.F. We will see how fig, marshmallow root, black walnut, cinnamon stick, Sichuan pepper, cardamom, and cocoa nib turns out…I got carried away.

Sightings, Etc.

• Alice Waters in line for a gordito at Tamarindo Antojeria Mexicana stand.
• While discussing beer with Dave McLean of Magnolia Brewery, specifically how collaborative and easy going “competing” brewers tend to be with each other, he sited a shocking statistic: The 1600 craft brewers in the U.S. make up a mere 5% of beer consumption, while Budweiser alone holds 41%.
• Nicole Kramer’s Farm Curious: A shop that provides all one would ever need to be a real urban homesteader…but without a storefront. She’s transient for now, sort of the retail parallel of a food truck.

Vendors

• Vesta Flatbread: Carrot-hazelnut pate, beet salad, yogurt & feta on freshly grilled, organic flatbread.
• Bhel Puri – California Chaat: Bicycle powered custom made chaat in newsprint cones.
• Gerard’s Paella: The largest paella pan I’ve ever seen, at least 10 feet wide.
• Kung Fu Tacos: Lemon Curd Mochi.
• Homeroom mac & cheese: Artisan and local cheeses.
• And tons more!

Have been mulling over just what to say about forageSF founder Iso Rabins ever since I attended one of his underground dinners back in February. The meal was a big hit and, as billed, featured plenty of wild foods plucked from local woods, parks, and seas to keep a trend-spotting foodista happy.

Plus my galpal and I felt vaguely au courant showing up for supper at an unknown Folsom Street location.

We shared a communal table with a gay couple who sung the praises of their forageSF CSA box, Asian-American friends from the outer SF neighborhoods in search of something a little edgier to celebrate Chinese New Year, and canners and jammers from Pacific Heights, of all places. Go figure.

And, as previously noted, the wild mushroom ice cream, rocked. Seriously.

In a relatively short amount of time, Rabins has developed a devoted culinary cult following for his off-the-grid, gourmet venture, which includes a CSA box filled with gleaned goodies such as miner’s lettuce, ramps, and nettles, secret seasonal feasts like the one I attended, and local wild food walks. Rabins says he hopes his foraging forays help city folks get in touch with the wider, wilder world. A worthy goal, for sure.

Rabins is also the driving force behind another clandestine city culinary event, the Underground Farmers Market, a monthly meet held in San Francisco’s Mission District that exudes more of a party vibe than a venue for earnest produce lovers  — with long lines snaking around the block filled with inner-city, health-conscious hipsters in search of pork-belly buns (Rabins specialty), baked goods, homebrews, pickles, and preserves, all for sale by DIY home cooks.

Stephanie Rosenbaum did a nice job conveying the scene in a post for Bay Area Bites. (This writer did swing by a recent farmers’ market but didn’t queue to get in. I gather since the market moved to a bigger space, the crowd control issues are a thing of the past.)

Vendors happily flog their foodstuffs sans city approval or permits — which can prove prohibitive for urban-homesteading types trying their hand selling on a small scale. (Rabins does his own, informal quality control, tasting every item for sale.)

The frequently plaid-clad Iso Rabins is a king of inner-city cool and in high demand in culinary circles. He writes an occasional column for CHOW, speaks at food panels like a recent Kitchen Table Talks, and gathers lots of press for his projects.

His events typically sell out, and when he’s not foraging, cooking, or penning posts for cyberspace, he’s contemplating the contents of a book project about bringing wild food recipes to urban home cooks.

What most impresses me about Rabins is his quiet intention to make a living out of doing what he loves. He’s the sole proprietor of forageSF and while he’s hardly bringing in the big bucks — he tells me he’s now able to pay the rent without stress each month for the first time in a while — he’s doing what all those corporate big shots suggest: Building his brand, diversifying his portfolio, and expanding his franchise (an underground market is set to open in the East Bay in June).

His advice? “Just go for it, the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to move back in with your parents,” says the 28-year-old aspiring chef, who has done time toiling in brick-and-mortar restaurants. “Beyond that, think of something that you wouldn’t mind doing seven days a week for a year, and craft your business around that. If you enjoy doing it, you’ll keep doing it, even if money doesn’t come in immediately. Sooner or later it will support you.”

Hmmm. That’s the kind of advice we writers — the ones caught between the demise of the dead-tree-media and the advent of the don’t-pay-media — may do well to follow.

Rabins is one of the budding new food entrepreneurs buzzing around the Bay Area, reinventing how to build a culinary career in these post-recession, social-media savvy times. I’ve profiled two high-end confectionery makers who found their sweet spot in the marketplace while holding onto demanding day jobs. I’ve also showcased a successful non-profit cooking program for kids run by a recent graduate.

If you’re local, don’t just take my word for it, you can get a taste of Rabins’ foraging finds by attending a Wild Kitchen feast but check out previous underground eats and sign up for email invites for future events.

Or take a wild walk (an amble, really) in San Francisco or the East Bay. I attended a recent such meet-up in a modest park in Oakland led by a gregarious guide who goes by the moniker FeralKevin. The guy knows how to glean goodies like nobody’s business and was full of handy tips about how to incorporate wild weeds into home cooking.

Find out when the next SF underground market is slated by becoming a member. (To date, the city’s health department has given forageSF room to grow by making market goers sign up for his “club,” though Rabins suspects it’s a matter of time before he gets cited.)

What say you, readers? Share your thoughts about taking a walk on the wild side below.

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

Imagine gathering several friends for morning, midday, evening or weekend foraged city bicycle rides through your neighborhood. Rough maps are drawn, noting the forage-ables that can be found at each location and ‘cold calls’ are made to your neighbors asking if you can sample a fruit from their backyard tree. You have the courage to introduce yourself (despite the pervasiveness and acceptance of urban anomie) and they reward your neighborliness with a sample of Santa Rosa plums, for example. Later, when you find yourself with a surplus of Persian mulberries, you, in turn, deliver a small basket to said neighbor. With time and in this fashion, a community of people who care for and know one another is built, and rather than being the exception, this could be the norm.

This is not idealistic, rather it is necessary, pragmatic, and creative — especially in times when much of the world is suffering from lack of access to healthful and satisfying fresh food. Forage Oakland is a project that works to construct a new model, and is one of many neighborhood projects that will eventually create a network of local resources that address the need and desire for neighborhoods to be more self-sustaining in meeting their food needs. At its core, it works to address how we eat everyday, and how everyone can benefit from viewing their neighborhood as a veritable edible map, considering what is cultivated in any given neighborhood and why, and what histories influence those choices. The gleaning of unharvested fruits; the meeting of new neighbors; the joy of the season’s first hachiya persimmon (straight from your neighbor’s backyard, no less); the gathering and redistribution of fruits that would otherwise be wasted — can be powerful and can work to create a new paradigm around how we presently think about food in our collective consciousness.

I moved to the Bay Area in late August 2004, just after finishing college. What I remember about that first taxi ride from the Oakland airport to my new house at Oregon and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in South Berkeley are the pastel colored squat houses graced with citrus trees in the front yard. Some of the houses along Ashby between San Pablo and Sacramento Streets looked a bit derelict to my eyes, and I found it curious that they would have fruit trees in the front yard. I considered fruit trees to be a display of abundance, wealth, or stability, somehow seeming out of kilter with a house that might house transient residents.

But I soon learned that many of the houses in South Berkeley and North Oakland, regardless of the socio-economic status of the residents, are graced with fruit trees. I found this fascinating. I spent a year living in this house on Oregon Street, more or less oblivious to the bounty around me. While I passed the citrus trees every day, along with other fruits which were, at that point, less recognizable to me, I hadn’t begun to think about the politics of the harvesting, sharing, and possible redistribution of the neighborhood fruit. So, for some time, I happily noted the fruit trees in my neighborhood, and surely appreciated their aesthetic appeal, but the interaction was more or less passive.

The following school term, I began a one year position working at the Edible Schoolyard, which is a school garden based at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley. There, I worked in the ¾ acre garden along side the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students, guiding them in exercises of cultivating, composting building, harvesting and propagating seeds. This was the first time I’d spent such an extended amount of time in a garden and this experience was an awakening, as it suddenly brought to life the countless fruit trees that I passed in my daily travels through Berkeley and Oakland. In due time, I could identify the various fruit trees in my neighborhood, from the passion fruit vines to the loquats to the kaffir limes. A new enthusiasm was borne as I became aware of the countless possibilities of exploring my neighborhood anew.

I began to redefine my neighborhood has an abundant place filled with an ever-changing variety of edibles. I mapped new geographies of the streets I crossed, and with time I became increasingly aware of the nuanced changes in the season that would produce green walnuts perfect for nocino or passion fruit at their prime. Fruits’ coming into season became a secondary calendar with which I gauged the passing of time. I marked the beginning of the spring with the first loquat harvest. Nowadays, five years later, this is all second nature. But, it was only in moving to Northern California that I became more keenly aware of how the seasons change a bit each day, as I could actually see (and taste) these changes for myself. I could know exactly when pears were at their peak by cycling over to 45th Street and harvesting a pear for myself. During plum season, my neighbor on Lawton Avenue would leave a basket of ripe plums for passers by; there was no questioning whether plums were in season.

Coming to these conclusions regarding my food choices as a young adult has been richly empowering and not as linear or obvious as one might think. There has never been a clearer moment for me to understand that what I decide to eat has a direct and immediate impact on others than during the five years I’ve spent in the Bay Area. There is a dedicated community of activists, farmers, eaters, and cooks who are all deeply committed to educating themselves about their food choices with the hope that they will be able to make a well informed decision regarding the producers they support. When presented with the choice, what could be more powerful than taking such a precious matter into one’s own hands?

Forage Oakland is about viewing food as a shared pleasure and a shared resource, and redistributing it to those who will enjoy it. Invite your neighbors to exchange their surplus peaches for their neighbor’s surplus blackberries. Leave a fruit basket on your neighbor’s doorsteps: apples by the pound, Santa Rosa plums, sour cherries, persimmons, pineapple, guava, and apricots. New associations will form, and new geographies will be created. The street corner where Ashby Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way meet will no longer be marked by its corner store, rather it’ll defined by the prolific fig tree on the northeast corner. Encourage your neighbors to share their backyard bounty and barter what they don’t intend to use. Hop on your bicycle and redistribute the surplus to another neighbor, making a note of the location of the harvested bounty. An edible landscape can be formed that is interactive, a bit different every day as fruit ripens and falls and as the seasons change. The barter can translate to other areas of urban living, and can create a community of people who’d rather do it for themselves and play an active role in their consumerism. When there are plums in your neighbor’s backyard, enjoy them with your neighbor!

Please, if you are in the Bay Area, come and join us at our fundraiser dinner on Monday evening, and enjoy great food and meet your loyal editors. We will talk shop and inform you about what we’re working on, and it will be an all around smashing time. Promise! And if you are not in the Bay Area, could you pass this along to your friends who are? We appreciate it!

In addition to delicious paella made in the Camino fireplace, and beautiful, local, organic summer produce and cheeses from Andante Dairy and Harley Farms, there will be organic and biodynamic wines. We wouldn’t think of serving real food supporters anything less delicious. Here is the menu as it is looking right now:

Boiled peanuts

Spicy pickles

*

Tomato, cucumber and eggplant salads with

almonds and flatbread

*

Chicken paella cooked in the fireplace

with fresh shellbeans, romano beans and scallions

(Veg paella will also be available)

*

Eggplant, tomato confit and roasted escarole

with an egg cooked by the fire

Crepinettes

Butter lettuce salad

*

Cheese plate

*

Walnut meringue with pluots and cream

To reserve your spot for dinner, call (510) 547-5035 and make an old-fashioned reservation. We look forward to seeing you there!

Canning is hot and sticky (sometimes salty) work. Your fingers go pruny, you get sugar rushes (if you’re making jam) and salt dehydration (if you’re canning savory). Like everything that’s hot, sticky, exhausting, and a little risky, it’s way more fun with friends. Canning has historically been a community venture, with folks pitching in when the fruit and vegetables are abundant. But times have changed, Americans have been taught to be afraid of their own canned foods, “botulsim”, “contamination”, “microorganisms” are the words that come to mind when you mention home canning to most people instead of evoking the joyous sticky deliciousness of homemade jam.

I first started canning tomatoes, and noticed that every thing I made with them tasted better than the canned tomatoes I bought in the store. Next up were pickled peppers packed in olive oil, then I got heavily into apricot jam, then refrigerator pickles made from beets, cauliflower, or carrots. In my work, I face the constant struggle of figuring out how to produce better food for a cost that is within shouting distance of the cost of industrial mass-produced food. This spring I was working on a project that got me thinking more about this challenge, and I considered simply scaling up the same tools that I use to make sustainable locally-produced food affordable in my own life. First up: canning. How do you make organic local handmade jam affordable? Make it yourself. Yes We Can Food grew out of this thought process – figuring out how to make good food in large quantities affordable. And, along the way (and not incidentally), share the fun and exhilaration of doing it yourself.

Here’s the overview: 80 people pitch in to buy fruit, jars, and all the incidentals you need to make your product. 60 of those people pay approximately 85% of the cost of the inputs, and 20 of those people pay the remaining 15% but also contribute 4 hours of their labor to actually process and pack the product. The process is facilitated by the company I direct, Live Culture Co, which also provided umbrella liability insurance, storage, and a few other key contributions for the project. Yes We Can Food is run at break-even – we did not build profit into the model – with the goal of making the products as affordable as possible. The end result is $3 a jar jam (8 oz.), $3 a jar pickles (16 oz), and $3 a jar tomatoes (32 oz). So far, we have produced 700 jars of apricot halves in syrup and apricot jam and 700 jars of bread and butter and whole dill pickles. Next up, close to 900 jars of tomatoes and fresh tomato sauce scheduled for production on September 19. The canning sessions are truly work sessions – not canning lessons. Participants learn how to get their hands dirty and are given an overview of everything that’s happening, but are really contributing their labor to produce the product.

I hope that Yes We Can Food will provide a model and inspiration for others to develop and lead innovative programs to provide the know-how and infrastructure to make simple local canned foods more affordable and accessible. At the end of the project, Live Culture Co will share an overview of the recipes, cost model, and promotion strategy to facilitate the replication of this model. Next year, we will develop a new version of Yes We Can Food, probably in collaboration with a set group of local farms working to process any overflow of excess they have in order to make the products even more affordable.

To round out the Yes We Can 2009 season, we’re hosting a canning competition and home-canned foods exchange at this year’s Eat Real Festival as well as leading a canning program to jar up jam from locally-sourced fruit for one of San Francisco’s soup kitchens this fall. Stay tuned on our Facebook page for more info, and feel free to get in touch with questions, ideas, and thoughts.

Roots of Change deserves serious kudos for planning and executing a truly ground breaking event. The USDA, until now, has not focused efforts on supporting those small-scale, organic, sustainable operations of which we’d like to see more. In the area of hunger and food access, USDA has previously been content to provide food banks, food stamp and WIC program recipients, and childhood nutrition and school lunch programs with surplus industrial food. The idea that USDA, food justice and sustainability activists, and farmers, along with regional government officials would sit in the same room working together toward solutions to fix our broken food system would have been unthinkable just a year ago.

The main focus of the two-day summit was on enhancing opportunities for farmers and increasing community access to nutritious foods, with special emphasis on ways to replicate and scale up the efforts happening now. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made an important announcement at the conference about his plan for a regional sustainable food initiative in San Francisco. And Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums discussed the upcoming work of Oakland’s Food Policy Council.

The first day of the conference was organized around a series of presentations, or case studies, that attendees could participate in to learn about the work going on in communities along the west coast. Public and private funders were also invited to help gain an understanding of needs in various organizations and communities. The second day focused more on the nuts and bolts of getting things done with food policy council updates, funder reflections, working groups to plan prototypes and general overall sharing of what was learned.

The case studies spotlighted a number of diverse topics including, developing technologies for government food assistance recipients to help them access fresh food from farmers’ markets; sustainable food logistic web platforms; and both web-based and farmers’ market-based food distribution hubs. There were also urban and suburban farm education projects; business incubators; regional government food initiatives; mobile farmers’ market and slaughtering facility models, and more.

The case studies and activities I attended were fascinating. I attended the Soil Born Farms case study on Urban Agriculture, the study on Seattle’s Food Action Initiative, and an open space working session on providing support for value added food businesses and young farmers. A few reoccurring themes came up as areas to focus on in future work:

• The need for a central clearinghouse for government grants and stimulus monies. In every session, people were hungry for information on how to find and apply for the money that is available.
• The need for government to learn from the groups doing the work and then provide a framework and support for those grassroots efforts. This was illustrated extremely well in the session on The Seattle Local Food Action Initiative.
• The need to tie the sustainable, fair food movement to the green job movement. (At one point, somebody said, “Where’s Van Jones?”)

It was truly thrilling to witness so many smart, committed individuals sharing information and resources. I look forward to seeing the good work that is sure to come out of this summit.

OPENrestaurant, an ongoing series of conceptual art/dinners put on by Chez Panisse employees Jerome Waag, Stacie Pierce, and Sam White, had its third installment at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on January 6. The happening, which melds performance and dinner party, inadvertently weighed in on an argument that’s been circulating in food politics circles for a while.

Its founders’ and ingredients’ provenances (for the food, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley city limits), and the solid attendance of Chez Panisse cooks and waiters, made a justifiable claim: whatever you think about the grande dame restaurant’s role in today’s food movement, you’ve got to admit she’s still pretty fertile.

In its first decades, Chez Panisse, famous for bringing agriculture back to the American table, produced a new generation of conscientious cooks, who went on to open their own sustainability-focused restaurants, helping to reignite interest in local, seasonal, organic food in the process. But in the last few years, as farm names and vegetable varietals have become the norm on Bay Area menus, food activists have questioned Chez Panisse’s relevance.

While you can’t chalk their whole project up to their employer, with OPENrestaurant, Waag, Pierce, and White are leveraging what they’ve learned at work to change how we think about sustainable food. The project, whose tagline is “seed the sensible…harvest the impossible,” is geared toward shifting Bay Area food conversation away from the now familiar, if valuable, rural farm-to-table connection and toward the gritty question of how the other fifty percent (who live in urban neighborhoods) can eat well.

The events, which comprise a series of meta-transparent dinners—attendees of the whole series have seen photographs of their dinner’s birth as a piglet, its slaughter, and its transformation into food—are quite beautiful and absurd, and serious without being earnest, a rare combination in the sustainable-food world.

Each of the exhibition/restaurant’s editions has had a different focus—the March debut, OPENsoil, encouraging conversation about food’s beginnings by including soil on its menu, the September follow-up, OPENcity, looking at the city as a farm by buying (and gleaning) all its ingredients from urban farms and municipal fruit trees, and the January event, OPENrestaurant at Yerba Buena Center, using the gallery format to turn urban-agriculture activists into the dinner’s centerpiece.

OPENrestaurant at YBC was in some ways the most ambitious of the series (even accounting for a pig-butchery demonstration at MoMA they did in between the second and third dinners.) Along with eleven other urban food-project heads, I was asked to sit on a “panel” for dinner at a compost-table at the center of the room. Our only job was to talk to each other, and attending guests, about how to make the urban landscape more productive for food.

To help frame the night, Waag drew three long, black banners which he hung from a mezzanine above the gallery (in the end they were too high to read, but they were lovely). The banners said, in sequence: “seed the sensible;” under which were listed generative urban sites, like “pothole,” “sidewalk,” “menu;” where you could see the ingredients of the night’s dinner, “kale,” “cannelini beans,” sunflower,” and “harvest the impossible,” which listed traditional agricultural spaces, like “field,” and “patch.”

Our conversation, which was productive on its own, with two urban foragers, an eat-in activist, and a food writer talking about how to organize around subsidies for people who create green spaces, and project collaborations planned, didn’t inform the event itself. OPENrestaurant’s rejection of restaurant formalities means that attendees’ attentions are not directed, specifically, to anything. As Waag told me, that is the idea. “It is Chez Panisse turned loose.”

The organizers are true to their evolving mission. Pierce collected the meal’s salt at Ocean Beach, in San Francisco, wading in, in jeans, with a five-gallon bucket and then drying it on her Bernal Heights deck. The long-lasting pig’s snout and tail sat akimbo in a bowl next to the coat check. Guests were given compostable seed-starting containers and packets of kale, cannelini, and sunflower seeds, as well as directions to scoop compost from the center table; then they were told to go home and plant their dinners.

Photos: Sarah Rich

The ingredients for green collar economic renewal via food-based businesses have been stewing for a few years in the Mission at La Cocina. Entering its fifth year of operation in 2009, La Cocina was founded to provide kitchen space and assistance to food entrepreneurs – many of them low-income and all of them women – helping them in starting new businesses or grow their home-based businesses into stable ventures.

Speaking with Caleb Zigas – the Director of Operations – the clarity and focus of the La Cocina mission is evidently an asset. “We are supporting the entrepreneurs to the point where they can graduate into owning their independent operations – so it’s pretty clear how we define success,” says Caleb. The services they provide are varied, from monthly meetings to set goals for each entrepreneur to introduction to new products (Niman Ranch recently presented to the group). The day I visited, Culinary Director Jason Rose had spent the morning making Huaraches with one of the organization’s soon-to-graduate entrepreneurs, Veronica Salazar, and was busy scheduling the center’s four commercial kitchen spaces – which are used by La Cocina entrepreneurs as well as rented by local caterers and chefs who are not part of the program.

In a video hosted on the homepage of La Cocina featuring the story of Brazilian cookie star and owner of Kika’s Treats Cristina Besher, she explains “I like calling La Cocina ‘La Madre’, because that’s what it is – it nurtures you through the first years of business”. That is definitely the vibe and feeling of La Cocina – a warm welcoming kitchen, with a clear sense that you’ll also learn to balance your checkbook and to never leave the sink full of dirty dishes.

The support of La Cocina also extends to providing website and packaging assistance to entrepreneurs. Cellophane bags of spicy pepitas have a simple logo sticker, while sumptuous cookies filled with dulce di leche are crisply boxed. La Cocina also provides marketing support, selling products from entrepreneurs at Bay Area farmers’ markets on commission (the center consolidates products from many of the entrepreneurs in a single stand), and also works with entrepreneurs to assist them in developing direct-to-public sales at markets.

The fabric of a local food system is made up of the type of entrepreneurs that La Cocina is inspiring, supporting, and growing. Although La Cocina does not advocate for organic/local ingredients with their entrepreneurs (many opt into purchasing these ingredients of their own accord), the role they play in building a greener food system is crucial. These local entrepreneurs are providing access to quality foods prepared on a human – not industrial – scale, and they are supporting direct marketing efforts around the city by providing great value-added products for sale.

In 2009, Caleb estimates that six entrepreneurs will graduate from the program. When asked about how and if the program will expand given its evident success, Caleb responds that although they’d like to maintain their current size, they are not interested in expanding the operation beyond a potential future store or permanent marketplace to sell their entrepreneurs’ products. They’d like to share their model, though, by working with other groups and businesses to assist them in building incubators that learn from and build on La Cocina’s success. Find out more by checking out the great products on the La Cocina website, and check back to the site in December for gift boxes of foods made by La Cocina entrepreneurs. Also, if you live in the Bay Area, El Huarache Loco – at the Alemany market on Saturdays – is a La Cocina experience not to be missed. The Huarache is delicious and crisp, topped with onions, peppers, sausage – or, for the especially indulgent, fried eggs and mole sauce.

Photo: La Cocina

Edible City is a documentary film focusing on food justice and food security, seen through different urban farming projects in the San Francisco Bay area. It aims to show the grassroots response communities are having to issues like climate change, rising food and gas prices, and health concerns. The film is slated for release in the fall of 2009, but in the meantime, here is a taste of what it is all about. (Enjoy the clips from Food for Thought? Check out the videos)

You to can join the party! There are two upcoming fundraiser events for the film in Berkeley, featuring delicious local nibbles, dessert and wine, October 6th, 7:30 – 9:00 pm and November 1st, 6:00 – 8:00 pm. If you are interested in attending, write: contact@eastbaypictures.com.