That was the terse comment of another underground food maker, who emailed me the link to this post on the Chicago Tribune’s food blog, entitled “Health Department destroys thousands of dollars of local fruit.”

The author of this excellent post, Monica Eng, happened to be on hand for the Health Department inspection because of a story she is writing “on how well the city is adapting to Chicago’s evolving culinary scene full of niche caterers, small batch food artisans, specialty pastry chefs and supperclubs.”  As she notes, “Many of these businesses are in the incubation stage and rely on rented kitchen space in communal kitchens.”

Based on what she saw and recorded last Thursday night, the response of the authorities seems to be to do what they can to kill such small businesses in the womb, as the Health inspectors seized one business’s inventory of frozen fruit purées (all made from fruit purchased from Green City Market farmers), slashed the bags open, dumped them in a trash can, and poured bleach on them to ensure no one could eat them.

What was so wrong with this food?  Was it unsafe to eat?  The Health Inspectors had absolutely no reason to suspect that.  In fact, all the fruit purées had been prepared in this communal kitchen, which is certified by the Health Department, and prepared by the owner of this small business, Flora Lazar, who is certified by the state of Illinois as a food sanitation manager.  So what warranted such drastic action?

The problem was that she had prepared all this food while she spent months wrestling with the city bureaucracy to issue her a business license.  Because the city had already issued a license to the owner of the communal kitchen, she was repeatedly told that she could not be licensed to operate a business at the same address (even though this is directly contrary to the stated policy of the Department of Business Affairs).  Trying to do everything by the book, Lazar persisted, enlisted the help of her city Alderwoman, finally got permission to apply for a separate license, paid her $600 fee, and scheduled the inspection by the Health Department as the final step in the arduous process of getting approved to operate her business. Because all this fruit had been prepared before she had the piece of paper licensing her to do so, it had to go.

But it wasn’t enough just to ban this fruit from the kitchen.  When Flora was told that all this fruit (puréed without a license!) could not be used in the food prepared by her business, she tried to give it to her son to take home for their private use at least.  The response of the Health inspectors was to call the cops to forcibly take back the fruit from him so that they could destroy it. When the food makers pleaded with inspectors to donate the food to the Greater Chicago Food Depository instead of just wasting it, their request was denied.  (Get real!  We can’t have people in hunger eating safe food, prepared by someone to whom we gave the runaround instead of a license!)  Finally, as Flora’s son Harry lays out in the Comments section, they put the Health inspector in direct contact with Flora’s Alderwoman, who “was frantically trying to reach the city health commissioner” to see if a less drastic resolution could be reached.  Since the inspectors were planning to revisit the kitchen anyway, they all pleaded with them to leave the food in the freezer and not to do anything irreversible until these appeals and other options had been considered.  The response of the inspector in charge was that he must destroy the food immediately.

Now that Flora’s had her “inspection,” she can probably get her license and go into business, except that – oh, right – the process of getting approval resulted in the destruction of her entire inventory of “irreplaceable” local fruits, worth more than $6000.  As “a despondent Lazar” is quoted as saying, “This puts me out of business for six months.”  As Monica Eng points out, if Flora had simply kept this food out of the kitchen until after the inspection, no one would have been the wiser.  But because she was open about what she had done and tried to play by everyone’s rules, she now finds herself completely screwed.  Welcome to the “the city that works!”

As if all this weren’t enough, the owner of the communal kitchen was recently told by a representative of the Department of Business Affairs that any violation by one business using the kitchen would result in fines for everyone using the facility.  As the owner said, “That’s like giving everyone in the car their own ticket when a driver is stopped by the police.”  Such a ruling – that sharing a kitchen entails shared liability – if it holds up, would probably be enough to kill the whole communal kitchen enterprise.  Who’s going to shell out money to rent space in a kitchen, if they can be fined for the practices of people they don’t even interact with or if they might suddenly find all their food confiscated and destroyed because of what someone else has done?  And if communal kitchens are put out of business by such action, then micro- or nano-businesses like Flora’s, trying to use local foods, will either never start up or will be forced underground.

As quiet and undramatic as this video footage is, it captures nothing less than a holocaust of local food.

From more of my recent reading: In The End of Food, Paul Roberts analyzes what the “relentless downward price pressure” exerted by mega-retailers like Walmart (who gets almost a quarter out of every dollar Americans spend on food) has meant for the producers and processors who supply them. As he describes it, “meat processors were the earliest victims of the Great Retail Squeeze,” which required them to resort to “high-output, low-cost tactics.”  “Smaller, less efficient pork slaughterhouses were swept away by massive new facilities: the largest in the world, built by Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, North Carolina, processes two thousand pigs an hour” (57-81).  As with farming, it has become a matter of “Get big or get out!”

Except, of course, that there’s no end to this insanity.  Farms and facilities get bigger and bigger, investing in ever bigger, more expensive, and more efficient machinery, only to find themselves leapfrogged by someone, somewhere in the world, who has gotten even bigger, priced them out of the market, and made all their facilities redundant.

Walter Jeffries, a small, independent, pastured-pork producer in Vermont, has found a way to restore some sanity to the system of food production by turning this formula on its head.  “Stay small and stay in!” could be his mantra or battle cry.

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First, for the past several weeks, I’ve been trying to get a deeper understanding of the global food system and how it works (or doesn’t), and the one issue I keep coming back to is that of responsibility.  The global food system (responsible for almost all the items on your supermarket shelf) is dominated by corporations, and corporations, by definition, are responsible only to their stockholders.  And their responsibility to stockholders is to maximize profits.  They are not responsible to consumers; like tobacco companies (some of which are also food companies), they actually develop and market products that are simultaneously bad for our health and addictive.  They are not responsible to producers, many of whom, around the world, are paid less than a living wage and would rather commit suicide than continue to accept a situation called “bioserfdom.”  And they are not required to take into account the “external costs” that we are offloading onto future generations: the loss of biodiversity, the erosion of topsoil, the collapse of fishing stocks …

Second, I was having dinner with a friend last night, and somehow we got on the subject of how wealthy the Waltons (of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club fame) are.  Looking them up on the list of the world’s billionaires, my friend was surprised to learn that they lagged behind the owners of the Aldi discount supermarket chain, who are German.  This was a poignant discovery for him, because he’s been shopping at Aldi’s more since he got laid off, but he got laid off because the local business he worked for got acquired by a German corporation who issued the order to eliminate contract workers.  “Holy cow!  I got canned by the Germans, and, as a result, I’m shopping at Aldi’s and the Germans are getting more of my money!”  Now of course my friend realizes that the two corporations have nothing to do with each other and that lumping them together as some common, abstract enemy (“the Germans”) is ridiculous and unfair, but it brought home just how difficult (if not impossible) it is to be responsible when shopping at the supermarket.  We have no control and very little knowledge about where our money goes, and we find ourselves investing our “food dollars” in things that we would consider completely unacceptable if we knew about them.

Then, just this morning, I picked up a book that another friend had lent me, called Shop Class As Soulcraft.  In the Introduction, I read, “We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it.  This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home.  Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.”  I think that about sums up why I do what I do, why I believe it is so important to do what I can to help re-establish a more local food system.  When we can know the people who produce our food, when we can see their farms and facilities, see how their animals are treated, etc, it makes responsibility possible.  We can choose to invest our money close to home, in real “goods.”

Food we can say “yes” to, with a full understanding of where it comes from and what it costs.  Is that too much to ask for?

Mike Sula has written another, great, meaty article for the Chicago Reader, this one on the “charcuterie underground” or the “growing” “charcuterie resistance” movement. This Little Piggy gets a mention, but the focus of the article is on the guys behind the pig’s head, Erik and Ehran, who run a similar kind of private charcuterie club on Chicago’s north side.

As Mike Sula stresses, small one- or two-man businesses like E & P Meats are just the tip of the charcuterie iceberg. Restaurants all over (real restaurants, I mean; you know, where people in the kitchen still cook, instead of just reheating frozen, prepared foods) are offering a selection of “house-cured” meats, and you can bet your Aunt Fanny that almost all of them are doing it without the knowledge or approval of their local health department, which would require them to invest the money and time in dedicated facilities and in getting a HACCP plan (Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Points, pronounced “hassip”) approved.

Of particular interest to me was the response that Mike got from a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health:

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If you’re a regular at Urbana’s Market in the Square, you know that one of the reasons for hauling your ass out of bed on a Saturday morning, regardless of how dark, cold, or wet it is, is to get some of Stewart’s sourdough breads. Typically, I leave for the market before breakfast, dreaming about Stewart’s poppy seed bagels, dunked in a tub of Prairie Fruits Farm fresh chevre from the next stall down. As I type this, I’m noshing on a slice of his Chipotle-Artichoke-dried Tomato bread, slathered with butter made from Amish Jersey cream…

But I’m not writing to tell you how good his bread is. Plenty of people have done that already. (By the time our local newspaper features somebody, you know you’ve missed the boat even to go see them get jumped by a shark.)

I’m writing to tell you that his bread is gone – or just about. Sure, you’ll still find him at the indoor market at Lincoln Square Mall for another few weeks, but that’s it. Don’t look for him in the spring. He’s not planning to return.

The main reason is our Health Department’s decision this past spring to require that all breads sold at farmers’ markets be baked at a certified kitchen. This new interpretation of the rules meant that Stewart could no longer work at home over the three-day period that his sourdough breads take for their risings. Working out of the certified kitchen at Prairie Fruits Farm turned his part-time retirement job into a full-time job that he’s ready to quit.

Almost. He’s returning home, back to his small-scale beginnings, and he’s planning instead to deliver his bread to anyone in the area who orders enough (three dozen bagels or the equivalent). If you don’t want to order that much bread at one time, I’m planning to make Stewart’s bread available to TLP club members. The idea is that you can order his bread at the same time that you place an order with me, and then pick both up, at the same time and place.

OK, so I exaggerated. Stewart is not really gone; he’s just going underground. In this situation, who better to team up with than your local underground deli?

(if you drive a car, car;) – I’ll tax the street;
(if you try to sit, sit;) – I’ll tax your seat;
(if you get too cold, cold;) – I’ll tax the heat;
(if you take a walk, walk;) – I’ll tax your feet.
Taxman!
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
O Yeah, I’m the taxman.
–The Beatles, Taxman

The “market nerds” (as the marketeer-in-chief dubbed us) were out in force yesterday to see what the first day of the Champaign farmers’ market brought.  (Sorry I missed you, Jason!)  Good thing we made it, because some of the farmers who were there yesterday say they’re not coming back.

The problem?  The food-phobes at the Champaign Urbana Public Health District were also out in force, doing their best to keep food out of the market.  The particular “biohazard” that caught their eye?  Eggs.  In order to sell eggs off the farm, you not only have to meet state requirements that the eggs be graded (to ensure a minimum weight for each size or grade) and candled (passed in front of a light to make sure they’re not fertilized), you also have to meet the requirements of the public health district in the locality where you want to sell them.

The guardian angels at our public health district not only require that eggs be kept cool (a reasonable precaution), but they insist that they must be “mechanically refrigerated,” which means buying a fridge that runs off electricity just to sell your eggs at the market.  Whoops!  No electricity available in the parking lot where the market is held?  Well, then you have to buy and run a gasoline generator to supply the electricity that you need to run the fridge that you have to have to hold your eggs.  As if all this weren’t enough of a burden, you have to fill out paperwork and pay the CUPHD $125 for the privilege of getting a permit and having them come by and inspect the temperature of your refrigeration unit.

Since you’d have to sell a hell of a lot of eggs just to cover the fee for the annual permit, the effect of all this excessive regulation is to keep all but the largest producers from selling their eggs at farmers’ markets in our area.  That, of course, may well be the idea…

I’m sorry, but just where in the hell do the good folks at the CUPHD think that eggs come from?  Last time I checked, the butts of the chickens that produced my eggs were not “mechanically refrigerated,” and since the farmers are not standing out there in the chicken pens with a sterile, plastic glove on their hand, waiting for each egg to drop into it so that they can rush it straight to a blast chiller, eggs may be warm for the better part of a day before they ever see refrigeration.  So, as long as the eggs are fresh, what’s the harm or public health risk from holding them in a cooler for the four hours that the market is open?  None that I can see, or taste, or experience.

I’ve been buying my eggs from this particular farmer for 10 years now; sometimes I even pick them up from the farm on my bike, which means–gasp!–that they are not mechanically refrigerated during the trip home; I like my yolks soft and runny, so I don’t cook my eggs all the way through, the way the FDA recommends for supermarket eggs; and I have never, ever gotten sick from one single egg.  So, by keeping these eggs and these producers out of the local market, the authorities are not protecting “public health”; they are simply restricting access to locally-produced food, and that does indeed make me sick to my stomach.

At long last, Champaign may be getting a decent Farmers’ Market. If you live within earshot, you’ve had to put up with my rants about how Champaign’s markets have gotten worse and worse while Urbana’s market just keeps getting better and better. Not that I have any problem with Urbana having such a great market–not having grown up here, I really don’t suffer from the “twin city” rivalry that poisons so many efforts at cooperation. So, for the record: I don’t want to diminish the Urbana market in any way; on the contrary, I want to see more thriving markets like it in our area.

Until now, the Champaign markets have all been on private property and all been farmer-run. This is not necessarily a problem, but when the farmer in charge decides that he’s not going to let any other farmers into the market who might compete with him, everybody loses. (Yes, sad and bizarre as it might seem, the farmer in charge of the Country Fair market once called the cops on another farmer and threatened to have her arrested for trespassing because she was trying to sell pears when he had pears to sell.) Consumers lose out on competition and variety, and when they stop coming to the market, the farmers lose out too, as they end up competing in a shrinking market. So, while Urbana’s Saturday market has been steadily growing and now draws vendors from all over the center of the state, Champaign’s markets have actually been shrinking.

So it’s good to see that Champaign’s new farmers’ market is being held close to downtown and is being sponsored by an independent group, the North First Street Association. It will start this Thursday and will run from 3 to 7 pm in the city parking lot north of the police station.

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While visiting my mum in London, she introduced me to something pretty neat: a company sourcing and delivering food that is fresh, local (mostly British), and organic directly to her doorstep every week.

We have CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture programs), where you contract with a farmer to take a portion of their harvest during the 6-7 months of the growing season, and every week you get a bag or box of what that farmer is growing. But this scheme still leaves a lot to be desired: it only works for half the year, you usually can’t get meat and veg or even fruit and veg from the same farmer, you have little choice about what goes in the bag, you have to pick it up yourself, and, if you leave town during this time, too bad, you’re still out the money.

In contrast, Abel and Cole is more like a virtual supermarket that stocks only local, organic food. You type in your post code and they tell you what’s available in your area. You then place your order online, and it gets delivered to your door in a styrofoam container that they pick up the following week and reuse. You can sign up to get a weekly vegetable box, like a CSA, but even with that you can check online, see what’s in it this week, mark something as a “favorite” if you want extra, tell them to take out whatever you don’t need this week, or even tell them what you won’t ever eat. Then you can add other things to your box, chicken, pork, fish, sausages, milk, butter, cheese (more than a dozen kinds), eggs, baked goods, prepared foods, beer and wine. And if you want something they don’t sell, you can call them up, and they will try and get it for you. You only pay for what you order, and, amazingly, the prices are about the same as what I pay here, buying directly from local farmers.

Living in a small community, like Chambanoy, that has a weekly farmers’ market (during the growing season) and an actual, “bricks and mortar” grocery store (like the Common Ground Food Co-op) that’s stocked with local and organic food, such a scheme makes less sense. But in a big city like London, where just getting to the Borough Market and back can take up an entire morning, it’s wonderfully convenient. Plus, you don’t have to worry about getting your pocket picked!