Chefs Collaborative

It’s not just in Boston that Collaborative members are doing exciting things, but we live here, so we get to see it close up. We recently hosted our partners on the Renewing America’s Food Traditions project for a meeting, and took them to visit the Taza chocolate factory, where Alex Whitmore and Larry Slotnick gave us a tour of the facilities, showed us how they hand-make their fantastic, dynamic chocolate bars, and let us taste lots of samples.

Then they handed us off to Lourdes Smith of Fiore di Nonno, who made mozzarella while we watched and told us the story of how she came to make cheese in the tradition of her grandfather–by hand, daily. If you haven’t yet tasted her burrata–a mozzarella “purse” filled with marscapone cheese–you can find it at CC members Lionette’s Market. You need this cheese.

And most recently, Lumiere chef-owner and Collaborative leader Michael Leviton opened Persephone, right down the street from our office! He’s serving local hook-caught cod, braised veal and beef marrow from humanely raised animals, Maine pink shrimp, and other carefully sourced and prepared foods. The restaurant-boutique is sexy and green. We like that combination.

Go team!

The FDA declared on January 15 that cloned animals were safe to eat. After studying the chemical makeup of beef, pork and milk from clones, FDA scientists determined that they didn’t differ from food already for sale in the US. Cloned meat and milk are “as safe as food we eat every day,” says the FDA. The agency also ruled that the identification of cloned food would not be necessary, which prompted Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) to introduce legislation requiring labeling on cloned products.

Chefs around the country wondered why cloning was necessary, although to read the FDA report, it appears to be a cost- and labor-saving device. Cloned cow offspring, for example, can be designed to produce vast quantities of milk without the time and attention spent in traditional agriculture.

“In the kitchen, that’s what we call cutting corners,” said Daniel Bojorquez, chef de cuisine of Sel de la Terre in Natick, Massachusetts. “There are long-term consequences,” said Bojorquez, reflecting on how pure-bred animals often exhibit erratic behavior and vulnerabilities to disease. “I don’t know why they don’t just do it the natural way.” Vitaly Paley of Paley’s Place in Portland, Oregon also expressed serious doubt. He felt that labeling was imperative, so that customers could make a clear decision about what they were eating.

Aidan Davin of Stillman’s Farm in Hardwick, Massachusetts, echoed Bojorquez’s concerns. He had just delivered pigs to Sel de la Terre the day before we spoke. “I don’t know about the whole idea. Pigs reproduce pretty easily. I just let them do what they do. They’re more than happy to!”

Davin remembered the big hog breeders he knew, mostly in the South, who kept the hogs enclosed because they were not disease-resistant. “There’s no hybrid vigor,” he explained. “It’s a weaker strain in the end. If you introduce different blood lines, you get a better animal.” Paley wondered what would happen when cloned animals “intermingled” with regular animals. To some farmers, it seems that cloning might take that pure-bred vulnerability one step further, even while disease resistance appears be a reason for cloning in the first place.

Annie Cuggino of Veritable Quandary in Portland, Oregon wanted the government to help small farmers, whose competitive edge might be hurt by the FDA decision. Cuggino also acknowledged the current strong consumer awareness about food. Customers practically interrogate her about the specific origins of what Veritable Quandary serves, as do those at Paley’s Place. “People are really sophisticated about food’s origins now,” she said, admitting that the FDA report seemed out of step with the active farm-to-table movement.

Industrial farming is powerful, she acknowledges, “but something positive must be happening, because if Costco and Burgerville are including local and seasonal items, that tells you something.”

In light of the FDA’s decision, and a voluntary ban on clones in the food supply that the USDA requested farmers to continue, the relationship of trust between farmers, restaurants and consumers is of vital importance.

The chefs and farmers I spoke to agreed that the risks of cloning were potentially devastating, and the benefit unclear. Said Cuggino: “I wish that we would keep our eye on the ball, promote the farmers’ markets, help the small farmers to be competitive, and help the farmers do it right. Given the choice, I hope that people will choose a [sustainable] alternative,” even if it costs more. “That’s where our voice is, how we spend our money. Where we put our money speaks volumes, and that’s empowering.”

This week’s 60 Minutes report on the ecological, social, and economic impacts of the growing global demand for sushi showed how a natural resource like bluefin tuna can go from being sustainably caught and managed for centuries to being overfished, its population put at risk of extinction, within decades–all because it’s something people like to eat. As correspondent Bob Simon reports, industrial fishing boats work with spotter planes that fly above the Mediterranean looking for schools of migratory bluefin. The boats, using a type of gear called purse seines, can catch up to 3,000 fish with each cast of the net. These fish are typically frozen at sea and held in deep freeze until they’re sold and shipped all over the world, winding up in grocery store sushi or casual sushi joints. Watch the video when you visit the CBS site.

On his blog, Blue Ocean Institute founder Carl Safina writes that “archeological evidence shows that people have been fishing bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean for 9,000 years.” Within the past 40 years, bluefin stocks have collapsed all over the world, and according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, populations of Atlantic tuna have declined by 90% since the 1970’s. And they’re taking fishermen’s livelihoods with them. While the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas works to figure out the best policy for restoring and managing the bluefin populations, concerned chefs can continue educating their customers, asking questions of their purveyors, and diversifying demand for underutilized seafood species, like this.

It was a wild way to break in the New Year, sharing local game and fish with hunters who donated their venison, pronghorn antelope backstrap and javelina “pork roasts” to their friends at the Cattle Baron in Flagstaff, Arizona. As we were sitting waiting for the first meat to come out of the roasting pit, I began to daydream about whether such an event would have even been “on my screen” some twenty years ago, as the local foods movement was first taking root.

Back before the founding of Chefs Collaborative, there were only 60 CSAs in the entire country, and some 1755 farmers markets; today there are more than 1700 CSAs and nearly 4400 farmers markets blessing our cities, towns, and rural landscapes. Over the last few years, there has been a 22% annual increase in local food sales in or near the communities where it was produced. Local food sales in the U.S. now top $5 billion a year, up from $2 billion/year in 2000. The many “local food challenges” are tangibly helping family farmers stay on the land, and attracting others to take up farming. In Oregon alone, the number of farms has grown from 26,700 in 1974, to more than 40,000 today. Books like Joan Gussow’s This Organic Life; Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors; Brian Halweil’s Eat Here; Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Barbara Kingsolver and Steve Hopp’s Animal, Vegetable and Miracle; Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s Plenty; and my own Coming Home to Eat have certainly helped inspire more folks to eat locally. However, the real work has been done on the farm and in the kitchen.

When Chefs Collaborative was founded in the mid-90’s, it took on the tasks of getting Americans “to celebrate local foods” and to work for “a more sustainable food supply that supports local economies.” On both counts, I believe we can firmly conclude its chefs have played the pivotal role in seeing that both of these tasks have been accomplished. This last year, not only did local foods hit the cover of Time magazine, but “locavore” was honored as the new word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. There is still much to be done to deepen what it means to eat locally; to revive locally-unique heritage foods currently at risk; and to ensure “fair trade” among those unique products (such as wild salmon, maple syrup, wild rice, Buckeye chickens, heirloom apples and ramps) that move between regions. Chefs Collaborative’s involvement in the Renewing America’s Food Traditions initiative has also been essential to moving these efforts along as well.

2008 is no time to rest on our laurels, since Walmart and McDonalds, like rust, never sleep. But it is a fitting time to congratulate those who have played a role in bringing local foods back from a marginalized place in our society to a more secure and esteemed place. If we never stop to assess our progress and celebrate our successes, we may never see just how much can be done by dedicated individuals and communities taking modest but persistent steps toward our shared dreams.

In a recent article in the Washington Post, Chefs Collaborative member Barbara Damrosch attempts to digest the latest in a plethora of food news and information-including the recently released Food Systems poster developed by Chefs Collaborative and the Wild Farm Alliance.

Damrosch describes the poster as “admirably complex” and in some ways, she’s right. The poster was sent to Chefs Collaborative members in late November and includes specific details on wild farming, conservation techniques, and predator protection - topics that may be new to many Chefs Collaborative members. The poster and companion communique that are meant to help chefs feel more equipped to support Nature-friendly agriculture, complicate an already growing library of information.

The Chefs Collaborative message, like Damrosch’s, is simple. Know where your food comes from. Until this is second nature to every chef in America, we’ll keep the information coming.

Bill Buford’s cookbook review in the New Yorker looks at three new books that deal exclusively with meat. These authors–a food writer, a chef, and a butcher–know their subject intimately, and along with Buford, it seems, harbor a hope that the rest of us will one day follow suit.

But an intimate relationship with meat means confronting its source, which is difficult to do if the source is a factory farm in an undisclosed location. The more we hear about ground beef being recalled for e-coli contamination; the conditions in confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s); the dangerous work conditions and low pay in slaughterhouses; the energy resources needed to prop up industrial meat production, and so forth, the more we are drawn to locally raised livestock, purchased from producers we might meet at a weekly market.

But in many states, federal regulations are making small-scale meat production a large-scale hassle, like in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a couple of farmers were arrested and had their farm raided for selling uninspected pork at a farmers market.

While New York magazine , in its response to Buford’s article, doesn’t see the point of trying to “reconcile meat with virtue,” reconciling our relationship with meat might be better seen as a responsibility, virtuous or not. At Chefs Collaborative, we advocate for purchasing meat from sustainable sources. Through our work on the project to Renew America’s Food Traditions (RAFT), we raise awareness about at-risk livestock breeds that chefs have a role in bringing back from the brink of extinction–by connecting with producers, learning how to break down whole animals, and challenging their skills to transform as much of the animal as possible into good food that restaurant guests will want to eat.

While working this way might seem risky, the bigger risk is not bothering to try–and being left with an option that makes less and less sense as the argument against industrial meat production mounts. “Good meat comes only from a good animal,” writes Buford. And good animals are raised humanely. It’s a system that deserves support–even if the motivation is  gustatory.

‘The eaters have spoken,” writes Michael Pollan in his latest article about the 2007 Farm Bill. As eaters and professional feeders, chefs have as much of a stake in the Farm Bill currently being debated in the Senate as parents, foodies, environmentalists, and public health professionals. As Michael Grunwald wrote in a recent Time magazine story, “If you eat, drink, pay taxes–or care about the economy, the environment or our global reputation–U.S. agricultural policy is a big deal.”

Read the stories by Grunwald and Pollan to get a clear sense of the issues, or read this article by Cornell sociologist Emelie Peine to get a better sense of what all the language about subsidies and commodity crops means. Grist magazine adds a layer of perspective to the understanding of commodity subsidies here. The Boston Globe recently described the efforts of Senators Lugar and Lautenberg to amend the current bill; and you can read here for one perspective about another proposed amendment by Senators Dorgan and Grassley.

Farm Bill critics contend that if the bill passes the Senate as is, large farm consolidation will continue, as will the tendency towards monocrops, confined animal feeding operations (known as CAFO’s or factory farms), and cheap calories in the form of highly processed food.

What can chefs do? Learn more by checking out some of the organizations working hard on Farm Bill reform. They include the Community Food Security Coalition, the Environmental Working Group, Oxfam America and the American Farmland Trust. You can keep supporting local food producers and Buy Local campaigns, you can call your senator to voice your opinion, you can tell the media what you think, and you can join Chefs Collaborative as a pledge to keep the momentum for local and sustainable foods going until the next time the Farm Bill is up for reauthorization: 2012.

photo: Iowa State University

California is one of four U.S. states that allows the sale of raw milk in stores, but this January, consumers may have a difficult time finding it at their local grocery store. Earlier this month a bill was passed that would require dairy products to meet a strict limit of coliform bacteria before heading to store shelves. Local dairy farmers fear that this is the beginning of the end for the sale unpasturized milk in California.

There’s been a rising demand for raw milk in recent years due in part to an increasingly health conscious public. Proponents of raw milk argue that the live bacteria found in raw milk helps strengthen the immune system and reduce the effects of allergies, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration worries about pathogens sometimes found in unpasturized milk.

In the past year and a half, consumers have seen e-coli ridden bagged spinach, contaminated frozen seafood imported from Asia, and tainted mass produced beef patties, removed from supermarket shelves across the country. It’s understandable that food safety is on the minds of legislators across the country.

Click here to read our latest dairy related Communique. It’s udderly complex.

It was a big day at the Royal Plaza Hotel in Marlborough, where the Massachusetts Public Health Association held their annual meeting and the agenda included a focus on local and sustainable food. A clip was aired of King Corn, a new documentary about two guys who move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn and accompany it on its journey through the food processing world. One of the producers and stars of the film was there to talk about the impact of farm subsidies and the overproduction of starchy corn on our diets and health.

Frances Moore Lappe gave the keynote address and touched on many of the issues that concern both food lovers and public health advocates alike. For Lappe, our current industrial agricultural system is “reductive, extractive, and destructive.”The intensive use of resources like water and fossil fuels required to produce industrial meat are staggering; the public health implications from that misuse even more so.

But Lappe didn’t linger too long on meat production. It was a way of getting at her main point–that we can trace our social ills to what she calls “thin democracy;” that is, a democratic system that citizens are only peripherally engaged in. She urged us to work towards “living democracy,” where inclusion and fairness are valued and citizens have active, public lives and help to create the world we live in.

Sounds good to me. Chefs, grab your knives. Let’s start by poking more holes in the industrial food system. And while we’re at it, let’s team up with the public health community. The more, the merrier. And healthier.

On Friday September 28th, Chefs Collaborative, Edible Cape Cod, and the Zammer Hospitality Institute at Cape Cod Community College, and Dole & Bailey hosted an day long educational seminar for culinary students and local chefs as part of the Cape Land and Sea Harvest (CLASH). Chefs Collaborative executive director Melissa Kogut gave a keynote address and shared five tips for running a sustainable restaurant. See the Cape Cod Times for a feature article on the day’s events!

5 Tips for Running a Sustainable Restaurant

• Continuing Education: If you’ve struggled to choose whether or not to serve organic or local produce in your restaurant, tried to decipher the range of eco-labels on the market, or pondered the most sustainable fish to serve in your restaurant - you’re not alone. Information about sustainability changes constantly. “Learning about sustainability is an ongoing process,” says CC member chef Chris Blobaum of the Wilshire Restaurant. “You can’t do it all in one day. It’s an education.”
• Direct Relations: By developing direct relationships with farmers, food artisans, and purveyors, chefs can shorten the distance from farm to table. At Chefs Collaborative, we recently debuted an online searchable database that allows chefs and wholesale food producers to find each other, and lets consumers search for restaurants serving sustainable cuisine. It’s one way the Collaborative is helping to facilitate connections between farmers and chefs.
• Flexibility: If chefs educate themselves about what is available it is easier to plan menus, but they also must be willing to change specials or recipes when unforeseen things, such as changes in weather, crop up.
• Creativity: Developing sustainable cuisine is challenging because in a way, it limits your options. But when faced with limited options, many chefs find their creativity takes off.
• Seasonality: Cooking with the seasons has long been the mantra for those interested in sustainable cuisine and remains a central goal for our members. This can be a bonus for customers because local and seasonal food tastes better.