Underground Diner Supports Local Farmers

  • Breakfast volunteers: Lisa Gottlieb, Shana Kimball, Bridgette Carr, Jeff McCabe, and Maria Bonn. (Photo by Myra Klarman)

So what would you think about opening up your home to 120 people every week? Letting them come in with their shoes on, sit anywhere they wanted… oh and by the way they’ll be expecting a full breakfast.

Selma Cafe

Underground Eats on Selma

Myra Klarman blogs about Selma Cafe

Transcript

That’s what happens at Jeff McCabe and Lisa Gottlieb’s house in Ann Arbor. From 6:30 to 10am every Friday, their house is transformed. It’s kind of weird… you walk in and you know you’re in someone’s home, but it feels like you’re suddenly in a little diner.

“We call it a breakfast salon… because we’re not a restaurant. We’re making food for family and friends, people who are interested in supporting the local food economy, who want to come and have a good time on Friday morning before they go to work!”

The idea is, it’s locally grown food, cooked for you by local chefs, with all the proceeds going to support Michigan farmers.

Selma Café is on Ann Arbor’s west side. You can’t miss it. Their whole front yard is a giant garden, with onions and sweet potatoes and beets.

(sound of café)

And in case you’re thinking it’s just toast and eggs… here’s my server, Amy Moss.

“We have braised pork with polenta napoleon, rhubarb chutney with poached egg and we also have a strawberry bread pudding, so that’s on the menu today.”

(sound of kitchen: “Order up!” plates clanking)

There’s a hunk of prosciutto on the counter… and a guy with a little blow torch caramelizing the top of the bread pudding. Claire Rice is here for breakfast… and she also sometimes volunteers to wait tables.

“The food is fabulous, if the food was crap no one would ever come back!”

When you’re done, you pay for your meal by putting a donation into one of the jars on your table. In the winter, local fresh fruits and veggies just don’t happen in Michigan. With the money from the jars, Jeff and Lisa are trying to change that.

“We got a little crazy and decided to just start doing something regularly that we could do to try to change the food system here, create more four-season farming.”

Lisa and Jeff have raised 90-thousand dollars. A third of the money goes to buy the food from local farmers for the breakfasts… and the rest goes to build hoop houses. Those are lightweight greenhouses that allow a farmer to grow food year-round.

These hoop houses don’t have to be on farms. A couple have even been built in downtown Detroit. Kate Devlin is the master gardener at the Spirit of Hope church. Most of the food she grows goes to the church’s food pantry. She’s hoping her new hoop house will help get more fresh food to people in Detroit.

“There are no major grocery chains in Detroit anymore and even where there were, they were so spread out, people couldn’t get to them. Sounds crazy, but in the Motor City, 40% of the people do not have cars.”

Devlin built her hoop house with a loan from the money raised at Selma Café. Her hoop house, like all the others, was built in one day by volunteers recruited at the Café.
And some of the food grown in the hoop houses comes back to the Café. You might see greens on your plate in February.

Lisa and Jeff are both pretty unphased by the hundreds of diners who come into their house every week.

“It does open up its unique challenges of where does public and private begin and end (laughs) so we’ve had people kind of wander in at any time of day and say, is this the place? But in general, I think it’s been a really nice fit.”

And they say they’re happy to have even more people come over for breakfast.

Rebecca Williams, The Environment Report.

How Many Calories Is That?

  • The study showed that in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:

Transcript

Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:

18% – a new study says that’s the average amount that restaurants underreport the calories in their dishes.

Researchers at Tufts University analyzed the calorie content of meals from chain restaurants. Then they compared those numbers to the calorie counts posted publicly by restaurants on websites and menus.

Susan Roberts is the senior author of the study. She says in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to.

“You just assume that the numbers are right, you don’t really think about, well, is this number only half what it really is? To have the calories on the web or in the restaurant, that would be a great thing. But they do have to be accurate.”

Roberts says the biggest culprit is portion size – restaurants serve larger amounts of food than advertised. She says the researchers also found that many restaurants served extra side dishes that weren’t included in posted calorie counts.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Food Going to Waste

  • On average, Americans weigh 20 pounds more than they did back in 1974. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Americans’ waistlines have been
expanding for decades. But new
research suggests at the same time,
more and more food is going to waste.
Shawn Allee reports:

Transcript

Americans’ waistlines have been
expanding for decades. But new
research suggests at the same time,
more and more food is going to waste.
Shawn Allee reports:

On average, Americans weigh 20 pounds more than they did back in 1974.

But Kevin Hall found there’s more to the story. He studies nutrition at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Hall’s research revealed we produce more food to keep up with our bigger appetites, but he also found we’re wasting more.

“We were kinda shocked to see that the rate of increase of food supply was greater than the rate of increase of food consumption we calculated. Somewhere along the supply chain from the farm to the dinner table, that food was wasted.”

Kevin Hall estimates well more than one third of our food production goes to waste.

He says it’s not clear who’s to blame, but someone should find out because food production uses a lot of water and fuel.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Interview: The End of Overeating

  • Dr. Kessler's new book describes the three components in food that keep us addicted: sugar, salt, and fat. (Photo courtesy of the National Canter Institute)

On average, people in the US
are much fatter than just 30
years ago. Obesity is an epidemic.
The Environment Report’s Lester
Graham talked with the author
of the book ‘The End of Overeating,’
which argues the American diet
is to blame:

Transcript

On average, people in the US
are much fatter than just 30
years ago. Obesity is an epidemic.
The Environment Report’s Lester
Graham talked with the author
of the book ‘The End of Overeating,’
which argues the American diet
is to blame:

Lester Graham: This is The Environment Report. People in the US are much fatter than just 30 years ago. Obesity has become an epidemic. The author of the book, “The End of Overeating” argues, “It’s the American diet.” David Kessler is a pediatrician and served as commissioner of the US Food and Drug administration under George Bush I and Bill Clinton. Dr. Kessler, give me the short answer, why has obesity become so rampant in the US?

David Kessler: We’ve taken fat, sugar, and salt, put it on every corner in America, made it available 24/7, made it socially acceptable to eat any time. We’ve added the emotional gloss of advertising—you’ll love it, you’ll want it. We’ve made food into entertainment. In fact, we’re living in a food carnival.

LG: I’ve been watching restaurant commercials, especially since reading your book, and I see a lot of, “It’s a fun time, it’s a good time, bring your friends, it’s a family gathering.” There is a lot of that emotional appeal, but it doesn’t talk about nutrition.

DK: Exactly. Sometimes about the economic value of food, but always it’s the emotional gloss that’s added. And food’s very reinforcing. Fat, sugar, and salt stimulate us, we come back more. But when you add that emotional gloss: “You’ll want it, you need it, you’ll have a good time.” That amplifies the reward value of food.

LG: Now your book spends a lot of time looking at the science of why we respond to sugar, salt, and fat and how the food industry has taken advantage of our response to sugar, salt, and fat. Why do we like those things in our food, why do we always crave more?

DK: That was the question that got me started 7 years ago. I wanted to understand why it was so hard for me to resist my favorite foods. I was watching Oprah one night, there was a woman on the show who said, “I eat when my husband leaves for work in the morning, I eat before he comes home at night, I eat when I’m happy, I eat when I’m sad, I eat when I’m hungry, I eat when I’m not hungry.” And then she said, “I don’t like myself.” And it was that behavior, I could relate to that. I have suits in every size. That’s what I wanted to understand, I wanted to understand the science and we finally do have the science to explain to that woman that it’s not her fault. In fact, her brain is becoming excessively activated by all the food cues in our environment—she’s being bombarded, she’s being constantly stimulated.

LG: You infer the food processors and the chain restaurants, are using some of the same techniques the tobacco companies used to get people hooked on cigarettes. In what ways?

DK: They certainly understand the inputs. They understand that sugar, fat and salt stimulate. They understand the outputs, that you come back for more. Have they understand the neuroscience? I doubt it. But they learned experientially what works, and they optimized food, they constructed food to stimulate us to come back for more. Let me explain how it works, let me give you analogy with tobacco. We have to be careful, there are similarities but there are also differences. Nicotine: nicotine is a moderately reinforcing chemical. But add to that the smoke, the throat scratch, the cellophane crinkling of the pack, the color of the pack, the image of the cowboy, the glamour, the sexiness, the sense that it was cool, the imagery from 20, 30, 40 years ago. What did we end up with? A highly addictive product. If I give you a packet of sugar and say, go have a good time, you’ll look at me and say, “What are you talking about?” Add to that sugar fat, add texture, add mouth-feel, add color, add temperature, put it on every corner, make it into entertainment, and what do we end up with? One of the great public health crises of our times.

LG: Now I don’t think the food industry sees this as necessarily trying to build addiction or using these chemicals as a way to re-wire our brain. I think any good chef will tell you, I want to cook things that will please you, that make you happy. It just so happens that sugar, salt, and fat make us happy. So, what’s wrong with it, if that’s what we want?

DK: The argument that the food companies will use is that all their giving consumers is what they want. But we now know, we have the science to show, that these chemicals are activating the brains of millions of Americans and what happens is that we keep on coming back for more. Look at modern American food, pick any appetizer from any major American restaurant chain. What is it? It’s layered and loaded with fat, sugar, and salt.

LG: Well, let’s pick one you highlighted in your book, because I happen to like it, it’s the Southwest Egg Roll at Chilis. It’s tasty!

DK: The Washington Post outed me because I had to go dumpster diving in order to find out what was in restaurant foods. We worked for a decade at the FDA putting nutrition facts labeling on all foods in the Supermarket, but not so in the restaurant foods. If you look at the ingredients, some fifty ingredients: the sugars, the fat, the fat loaded on fat, the salt in that eggroll. One industry insider just called it the equivalent of a fat bomb.

LG: You spend a little bit of time in the book on how food is labeled. How, for example, cereal manufacturers hide just how much sugar is really in that box. How do they hide it?

DK: Different names on the label, not just sugar, they’ll use honey, they’ll use molasses, they’ll use other terms so its not the first ingredient listed on cereals. But, understand, its not just any one ingredient. We have made food highly stimulating. The multi-sensory nature of food, it’s a rollercoaster in the mouth. 30 years ago, we used to chew on the average of 30 times per bite. Now it’s less than half of that. Food goes down in a whoosh, it stimulates, it rarely lingers. In fact, most of what we are eating is so pre-digested. Chicken: I went in and ordered a margarita grilled chicken dish, I thought it was healthy. Little did I know it was bathed, it was mixed in these cement mixers with sugar and fat, our meat is injected with these needles, solutions are added, sure it tastes good. But in some ways it keeps us in this cycle of consumption. And understand the cycle of consumption based on past learning, past memory, we get cued. Our brains get activated. The cue can be as simple as a sight, a smell, a location, my car can be a cue! Because where I’ve gone before, I get in the car and start having these thoughts of wanting. I was walking down Powell street and I started thinking about chocolate covered pretzels. Why? Because I had been, six months earlier, a place on Powell street. I had forgotten entirely about it, we’re such effective learners—just walking down that street will create thoughts of wanting. Thoughts of wanting arouse me, they capture my attention, they pre-occupy me, I eat for that momentary pleasure. Next time I get cued, I do it again, and every time I engage in this cycle, I just strengthen the neural circuits. What am I in search of? I’m in search of this ephemeral pleasure, is there any real satisfaction? Rarely.

LG: Your book is called “The End of Overeating.” How do we stop overeating, when much of the food at the grocery store and the restaurants is prepared the way it is, we have all these visual cues, these reminders of how food is a reward in our lives. How do we stop that cycle, how do we break or rewire our brain back to a more healthy style of eating?

DK: First, we have to come to the understanding that our behavior is becoming conditioned and driven. And it’s not just our behavior, it’s the behavior of our children. And once we understand that, once we understand that food in fact has become hot stimuli, and preoccupy us and capture our brains, and hijack our brain circuits, and we can see this on the neural imaging. What we have to do is cool down the stimulus. How do you cool down a stimulus? First, you can just get rid of the cues. That sounds easy, you create a safe environment in your home, but you end up walking down the street so that’s not very practical. The other effective way is to eat with some structure. What do we do in The United States? By putting fat, sugar, and salt on every corner, eating 24/7, eating in our cars, eating all the time, we’ve taken down any boundaries. So eating with some structure—knowing what you’re going to eat, when you’re going to eat it, and if it’s food that you want, it helps protect you from being bombarded by cues, because if you know what you’re going to be eating in several of hours, the cues in the intervening time that you get hit with just don’t have the same power. In the end, what’s the best way to reduce and take the power out of a stimulus? How do you change what you want? Want something else more. What we have to do, and I think this is essential as a country, because social norms effect us, they really effect our behavior, they effect our neural circuitry. If I look at that huge plate of fries and say, “That’s my friend, that’s gonna make me feel better,” my brain’s going to get activated and then there’s nothing I can do to stop myself from finishing that plate of fries. If however, we change how we view food, psychologists call it a critical perceptual shift. How did we win, well, we haven’t quite won it but how did we succeed in the perceptual shift against tobacco? 30, 40 years ago we used to view the product as something that was cool, something that was socially acceptable, something that we wanted. We changed that perception. Now we look at it for what it is, a deadly, disgusting, addictive product. Tobacco is easy because we can live without tobacco. Food is much harder. But, all the processed foods, foods that stimulate us, that are just fat and sugar, fat and salt, fat and sugar and salt, getting us to come back for more and more, I think we have to change how we view food back, perhaps it’s very simple in the end, ho w much real food are we eating?

LG: You did the research, started 7 years ago, you wrote the book, now you’re talking about food on interviews like this. How has it changed your life?

DK: What’s very interesting, being trained as a physician, I thought I would go into the world and understand the metabolism, the endocrinology, the bariatrics, the physiology. What I actually gained in understanding was that we’re all wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment. That’s what makes us so successful as a species. It could be alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, it could be gambling, but for many of us, food has become the most salient stimuli, and what about that food? It’s the fat, sugar, and salt. I look at that food and I say, I need it, it’s going to make me feel better, and I’ve come over time to understand that I can feel just fine, eat about half as much as I was eating but feel just as satisfied.

LG: David Kessler is the author of “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.” Thanks very much for speaking with us.

DK: Thank you.

Related Links

State Seeks Ban on Styrofoam Carry-Out Cartons

  • California is seeking to ban Styrofoam carry-out containers (Photo by Renee Comet, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

This week, one state is voting on a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants to serve takeout food in Styrofoam. Rebecca Williams has more:

Transcript

This week, one state is voting on a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants to serve takeout food in styrofoam. Rebecca Williams has more:


A number of cities have banned Styrofoam food containers – including San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. And now California lawmakers are deciding whether to ban the containers.


The bill says styrofoam is a big litter problem. And animals can choke on pieces of it.


The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency says styrene is a possible human carcinogen. Styrene is the stuff styrofoam’s made out of.


Jerry Hill is the Assembly member who introduced the bill in California. He says the American Chemistry Council and other groups are making it hard for him to get the votes he needs.


“You would think the world was going to come to an end if we were to prohibit and ban Styrofoam. It’s an industry that whether you look at the chemical industry, the restaurant industry that’s opposing it, and they are very vocal and very powerful.”


The opponents say there’s no reason for the ban, and they say it would be bad for the economy.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

City Turns Mucky Grease Into Fuel

  • San Francisco expects to process 10,000 gallons of the grease every day (Photo by Rainer Zenz, source: Wikimedia Commons)

One city’s new program is taking the mucky sink-clogging grease from restaurants and converting it into fuel for its fleet of vehicles. As David Gorn reports, it’s the first effort of its kind in the nation:

Transcript

One city’s new program is taking the mucky sink-clogging grease from restaurants and converting it into fuel for its fleet of vehicles. As David Gorn reports, it’s the first effort of its kind in the nation:

It’s 6 in the morning, and a San Francisco sewage treatment plant is already in full gear.

(sound of a truck motor)

Workers are unloading a tankful of used cooking oil from local restaurants.

(sound of a man shouting)

But soon they’ll also be picking up something a little nastier from restaurants.

“Brown grease is culled out, pumped out by grease haulers and taken out of the city, often to landfills.”

That’s Karri Ving, biofuels coordinator for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. She says, instead of carting that grease off to a garbage dump, it will now be converted into biofuel.

“That material, that food material, is what we’re going to condense into a putty that gets converted into road-worthy biodiesel.”

Ving says San Francisco expects to process about 10,000 gallons of the
stuff every day.

For The Environment Report, I’m David Gorn.

Related Links

Global Trade in Frog Legs Bad for Frogs

  • At least 200 million, but maybe as many as one billion frogs are eaten every year (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Frog legs are showing up on more menus all over Europe and North America. Biologists say this is just more bad news for frogs. Frogs are already in serious trouble from habitat loss and a fatal disease caused by a fungus. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

Frog legs are showing up on more menus all over Europe and North America. Biologists say… this is just more bad news for frogs. Frogs are already in serious trouble from habitat loss and a fatal disease caused by a fungus. Rebecca Williams reports:

It’s hard to know exactly how many frogs we eat. Only a fraction is reported in global trade numbers. So, at least 200 million but maybe as many as one billion frogs are eaten every year.

Ian Warkentin has been looking at our appetite for frog legs. He’s the lead author of a new study in the journal Conservation Biology.

He says some frogs are raised for food. But most of the frogs are taken from the wild.

“There was a harvest in North America and a harvest in Europe that depleted those stocks. The source then became India and Bangladesh and now we’re moving to Indonesia and Southeast Asia. And our concern is, well, we’re just going to harvest them to the point where there no longer is a viable harvest any more.”

He’d like to see better oversight on wild frog harvests, and more commercial frog farming. But, until that happens, he says you might want to take a pass on the frog leg platter.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Sushi Sustainability Guide

  • blueocean.org has created a guide that ranks sushi on how sustainable it is (Source: Hatago at Wikimedia Commons)

Some ocean conservation groups have
teamed up to make a color-coded guide that
ranks popular sushi. Lester Graham reports
the rankings are based on whether the fish
are caught or raised in sustainable ways:

Transcript

Some ocean conservation groups have
teamed up to make a color-coded guide that
ranks popular sushi. Lester Graham reports
the rankings are based on whether the fish
are caught or raised in sustainable ways:

You can download this sushi guide, print it out and carry it around with you if you
want, but Kate McLaughlin with the Blue Ocean Institute’s Seafood Program says
you could just look at it on your mobile device next time you go to a sushi bar.

“You can download a PDA formatted copy of the guide to your mobile device. Or
text the word ‘fish’ and then the name of the fish in question. Pretty much
immediately you get a response with the ranking.”

And it will tell you things like popular sushi such as bluefin tuna and farmed salmon
are on the “red” list, which means they’re either over-fished or farmed with
aquaculture methods that pollute the ocean.

You can get the guide at blueocean.org.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Deep-Fried Road Trip

  • Devin Smith and Matthew Rolen Stucky use waste oil from deep fryers to power their diesel car (Photo by Katie Carey)

For many people, the summer road
trip includes trips to the beach, and of
course, frequent stops to the gas station.
Two college students are driving across the
country in a car that runs on used vegetable
oil. So when most people pull in to the gas
station this summer, they pull up to the
grease traps. They say it’s a way to raise
awareness about alternative fuels, and save
a bit of money. Katie Carey brings us this
audio postcard:

Transcript

For many people, the summer road
trip includes trips to the beach, and of
course, frequent stops to the gas station.
Two college students are driving across the
country in a car that runs on used vegetable
oil. So when most people pull in to the gas
station this summer, they pull up to the
grease traps. They say it’s a way to raise
awareness about alternative fuels, and save
a bit of money. Katie Carey brings us this
audio postcard:

MATT: My name is Matthew Rolen Stucky. I am taking this ’85 Mercedes Benz Diesel
with a grease car kit, putting old vegetable oil that we find from restaurants along the way
and sticking it in and making it go.

DEVIN: Hi, I’m Devin and we’re getting our fuel for the car from mainly restaurants
from the deep fryer. They dispose of the grease and we just take that and filter it a couple
times.

MATT: Well I pre-filter it – it’s basically a water filter. I have a couple mesh filters that
it goes through and then it goes through a second gas tank where it heats up and runs
through the car and then has one more engine filter that it goes through secondary. You
can drive this around everyday nearly in every situation and it doesn’t slow down your
gas mileage you have the same top speeds, the same acceleration, literally you will not be
able to tell the difference, until you realize you’re not buying the gas, and then you are
happy about it.

DEVIN: We have a journal in the car and we have a tally of how many hummers we’ve
seen on the road trip so far and I think the tally is to sixteen, and we kind of do a little
‘ha-ha’ every time we see one. Just because we know how much they are spending on
gas.

MATT: The reactions range from people saying, “Oh yeah, you are putting it in your car,
great, yeah here take it.” To people going “You do what? What does it do in your car?”
And they don’t believe it and they want to go see it sometimes.

DEVIN: Some people this is the first grease car they have ever seen and they just think it
is awesome that someone is out there doing it. It’s not a solution for everyone, again,
there’s not going to be waste vegetable oil for every single person that wants to drive in
the car around the country, so it definitely is not a solution to the fuel crisis. It’s just us
trying to do our part to raise awareness.

Related Links

Farms Keeping Up With Chefs

  • Jesse Meerman is a 4th generation Dutch dairy farmer in West Michigan. He's the family cheesemaker. Here, he's cutting a big vat of curdled milk into cheese curds. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

Chefs are always dreaming up the next big dish. Lately, it’s been
trendy for restaurants to showcase locally-grown farm products and meat
from livestock that’s been raised on a pasture instead of in a feedlot.
But Rebecca Williams reports just because something’s hot in the
kitchen… it doesn’t always mean a better payoff for farmers:

Transcript

Chefs are always dreaming up the next big dish. Lately, it’s been
trendy for restaurants to showcase locally-grown farm products and meat
from livestock that’s been raised on a pasture instead of in a feedlot.
But Rebecca Williams reports just because something’s hot in the
kitchen… it doesn’t always mean a better payoff for farmers:


(Sound of water running, dishes clanking)


It’s 11 am at Sweet Lorraine’s Cafe. But it’s not too early for beer.


Chef Lorraine Platman is whipping up the first batch of her new fish
and chips. She’s using locally-milled flour and locally-brewed beer:


“I shouldn’t give you my whole recipe because it’s going to be an
absolutely fabulous beer batter. But it’s got a little baking
powder… the beer is what accelerates it and makes it nice and
crispy.”


(Sound of whisking)


Platman owns the three restaurants that bear her name, so naturally she
calls the shots. For her, this means getting ingredients close to home
and as close to nature as possible. Platman says fresher food tastes
better.


But it’s also about how a product performs when you cook with it. She
swears by the eggs she gets from local chickens that are raised without
antibiotics or hormones.


But Platman says it’s not easy getting local ingredients year round
especially during northern winters, so it means being flexible:


“I have a vivid imagination so I come up with some weird ideas but they
work and the guests really like them. They get very excited when they see
either Michigan grass-fed beef or chicken on the menu, they’re just enthused
by it and we’re buying from our neighbors so it makes us feel good I
think.”


Platman says the restaurant industry is competitive and always
changing. You have to serve food that excites people. She says chefs
pay a lot of attention to what their guests like.


The National Restaurant Association recently surveyed chefs around the
country. Locally-grown foods, organic produce and meats and cheeses
from grass-fed animals all made the top ten list. They’re expected to
stay trendy for at least the next year.


For the farmers who grow these products, all of this can look appealing
on paper. Smaller family farms are slowly disappearing in favor of
much bigger operations. Getting into new markets can mean staying in
business. But many small farmers say there’s a gap between the promise
of new markets in restaurants and the reality.


(Sound of cheese-making)


Jesse Meerman raises pastured dairy cows three hours west of Sweet
Lorraine’s Cafe. His farm supplies the Cafe with organic cheese.
Meerman is the family cheesemaker. He’s cutting a big vat of cheese
curd into millions of tiny pieces:


“Today we’re making Gouda cheese and a variety of it is Leyden, which has
caraway seeds in it.”


Meerman says they used to only sell their milk. But they wanted to
make more money by selling aged organic Dutch cheeses. They sell to
retail stores, farmers’ markets and restaurants. With the help of a
distributor they’re starting to get on menus in Chicago.


Meerman says restaurants are by far the toughest new markets to break
into:


“Being a farmer, it’s completely opposite of the way I am because we’re
connected to the land… this is our place, you know? We want to have our
business right here and we’re so stable and to a fault almost, because
farmers don’t change, that’s one of our biggest flaws. And chefs –
they’re opposite, they’re always changing. And it’s hard to keep up
with them.”


Chefs say they just want what they want when they want it. They’re not
always willing to wait for farmers to catch up.


Rich Pirog is with the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. He
says farmers need some help to adapt to chefs’ changing needs. He says
more investment in infrastructure at the state and local level would be
a start:


“We need to be able to make the case for investment in these types of
foods and if we can’t make that case then it’s likely we won’t see local
foods be able to scale up to the levels that I think people are wanting them to be
available in every store, at every restaurant.”


Pirog says farmers also need to have something solid to take to the
bank. They need to prove to their banker that these new restaurant
markets are real before they can get loans. They need loans to buy new
equipment that helps them produce more or different products for chefs
– and to keep quality high.


But mostly, whether or not restaurants can become sustainable markets for
farmers depends on the whims of chefs.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links