Why I Am Opening My Own Place...

Reason 1...My Mother Didn't Tell Me Not To

It really came all of the sudden for me, though my mother said that she could see it coming a mile away.  It was the way I would tell her that I was working on a plan to help others with their restaurants.

She said, "mmmm hmmm."

I told her about how simple the plan was and how cool it was going to be work with a bunch of different restaurant owners and industry people.

She said. "Sure dear."

When I found out I was having a baby, I told her about how I was going to work on food systems and health care for people in the industry as well.

She said, "Sounds great, Booba."

I can hear her voice in my head all day, as I am going about my business.  It has been that way since I was a toddler and now, well into my thirties the voice has gotten louder and louder but it is more what she does not say than what she does say.  Her comments leave a lot of things out, a lot of words not said, a void of commentary.

My mother is a font of patience.  She knows that I am going to go headlong into whatever I am going to go into and that when I come out the other side, she will in the nicest and least condescending tone possible tell me what I should have done and what I should do next.  So, when I tell her these things, I wait to hear what she has to say.  It is when she is not forthcoming with information that I tend to worry.

So when I told my mother about the troubles that I was having doing all of the things that I wanted to do and how I thought the best thing to do was open my own place I expected her to say, "Sounds great, Booba." and proceed to ask me about the baby or my fiance.

It was heartening to me that I could not shut her up when I told her.  Her tone seemed to indicate that it was about time that I stopped screwing around and that she had wanted to tell me to do that in the beginning.  When I told her my plan, such as it is, she did not stop offering advice.  She had been running her own place since before I was born and so I gladly took it.  My mother always felt that experience is the best teacher and loves to watch me make my own mistakes with the idea that I will learn much more from the experience than I will from her simply telling me what to do.

Reason 2...Because The Idiots Are Taking Over

We had been leaning towards the idea for some time but with a baby on the way, our feet got colder every minute.  Anger, however warmed them right up.  See, there is a chef, who shall go unnamed mainly because I do not know him personally, who is leading the charge in fucking it up for the rest of us.

Months ago, we had heard about this chef out of Chicago who was doing amazing things.  He was going to start a small restaurant not in the middle of nowhere, but on the cusp of farmland in the Chicago area.  We followed his progress and made attempts to contact him as he worked on his vision with no response.  When he opened, he was promptly closed.  Now a couple of weeks later, he is selling off what he can and making a run for it.

From what we understood he did not even have a business license when he opened.  Months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment later, the owner is left looking for new tenants and everyone is able to throw their hands in the air and walk away.  No harm, no foul, right?  Wrong.

I was irate at the idea that a movement is taken and turned into catch phrases and profit centers.  There is a scramble nowadays to make the idea of sustainability and environmental responsibility a  money maker and nothing more. Ventures like his, giant flops that are conceived with very little forethought and backed by people with faith in the figurehead person taking the lead, rather than the idea itself are black marks on the rest of our ledgers.  Meanwhile, this particular chef gets to trot off into the sunset.  He may or may not return to the spotlight again, but I don't doubt that he will get hired somewhere and someone will pay him to do whatever it is that he does.  He is one of the Lindsay Lohans of the culinary world and he will be fine.

On some level, we are happy to have people like him around so that we can see the mistakes before hand.  We can see what people are doing wrong, learn from it, and do it correctly the first time.  The trick is going to be doing it right before so many people do it wrong that it ruins it for everyone.

There are many reasons why I am opening my own place, these are just a couple.  A lot of the things I am going to post in the coming weeks and months are going to piss some people off and I think that is a good thing.  There is a lot that needs to be said and much of it, will not be comfortable to hear or read.

We are going to open a place that is the direct result of problems that I have witnessed.

The Passing of Dorothy Pavolka and the Fate of the Farm

Pavolka Fruit Farm is located at the very northern tip of Indiana and was founded in 1920, growing old variety apples with names like transparent, snow, and northern spy.  Now, with the farm just six years shy of a century,  Dorothy Pavolka the lady who has run the farm for so many years, has passed away.

Let me start by saying that I never met the woman.  We had only heard about her and this farm from a friend.  We are looking for farmland and when we were asking around about on place in particular, we were gently nudged in the direction of Pavolka Fruit Farm.

The research that we have, if it can be called that, is very simple.  There were two obituaries written about her in the local papers.  It seems she ran the family farm all of her life.  She had three brothers and two sisters but she alone ran the farm. She has plenty of nieces and nephews. Visitors to the farm said that she knew the place like the back of her hand and she knew everything there was to know about each variety of fruit on the property.

Pavolka Fruit Farm was started at a time when and in
a place where there was not much recorded, written history.  1920 in that area in that time was a place where you were likely to find stills and moonshine runners in and amongst the fruit trees.  There is even a story about the previous owner's family cemetery being located behind one of the barns.  When someone passed back then, they laid them to rest where the family felt best.

The farm is as close as possible to organic without being certified as such.  This was not by some grand organic design based on marketing.  Mainly this is because she did things the
way they had always been done with improvements and modifications made only as she could no longer do them by hand and avoiding pesticides and chemicals where ever possible.  A lot of things were done by hand around the farm for as long as they could be done.  There are no websites, there are no Facebook pages or other social media accounts.  Signs were hand made and advertisements were word of mouth.

From what we understand there are no provisions for her passing.  It was not something that was taken into consideration even though she was 86 at the time of her passing.  At a time when the average age of the average farmer is 59 years old and rising and the family farm is giving way to the massive corporate farms, a lot of owners are seeing that they have no one to follow in their footsteps while simultaneously, it is beginning to make more economic sense for them to sell to or work for a major conglomerate.

On our plate are some rather large issues.  First, how do we encourage youth to get into farming?  Land and equipment are almost prohibitively expensive.  There are number of ideas on the table from providing more scholarships to work on farms to youth, to tenant farmer scenarios to encourage batches of youth to work land that is owned by someone else.  Though the sharecropper term has earned a bad reputation in the Jim Crow south, fairly done, it seems like a viable option for young farmers of today.

Secondly, is it possible to get corporate farms to act more responsibly and in a more environmentally and customer oriented fashion?  Monsanto draws a lot of heat for genetically modified foods, but there are many that would make the argument that they fill a void that is rather large in the world.  There are 7 billion people on the planet and they have to be fed.  Monsanto grows in mass amounts that keep food costs low for many and in their search for a lower bottom line, they have created food as a commodity regardless of its effect on the community.  It's a corporation.  It is doing what corporations do, which is act in in own interests for the sake of the stakeholders.  It does it well.

Third, making food affordable for many is a key and what part does the average person have in that equation?  We throw out, by some estimates, half of what we produce in this country.  Many would say the reason is that we are a wasteful society.  What personal choices should we be making to curb these losses.  Growing our own food and dealing with the political ramifications thereof is another subset of this problem.  A lot of local communities are battling with the idea of whether it is even legal to grow your own food (strange, I know).

Finally, we should return to Dorothy Pavolka.  Like I said at the beginning, I have never met the woman and our condolences go out to her family.  We are talking about a farm though that has been around for nearly 100 years owned by the same same family and meticulously worked mainly by one woman.  She has shown her commitment to the community and to the craft by dedicating her life to it, but what do WE owe HER?  How much of this farm does the community own? (with all due respect to the family we do realize that it is legally and emotionally zero.) Maybe not "ownership", but a responsibility to support it.

So this is not just about the state of the Pavolka Fruit Farm, but the state of the American farm in general. In the coming weeks we are going to explore this topic and what can be done.  How do we bring a farm into the 21st century?

Carol Jordan can be reached at 9of9productions@gmail.com
or on twitter at @9t9knives

We Are Hearing Voices...and you should too!

By my standards, it has been a while since I have written anything to this blog.  That is good thing.  I have been working on the cookbook and we are just at the picture taking stage and it comes out right around Christmas time, so that is not to say that I have not been writing.  I have completed my move to Southern California and my fiance and I are looking at farmland while I have been worrying over the baby that is on the way.  We did not want to give up on the Food and Farm tour, so others have been bouncing all over the country, meeting people, and getting their perspectives on the state of our food systems and more.  To that end, we have been working very hard on the podcast that will be coming out soon, The Corner Booth.  So, though we have been busy and not very conversant, that is not to say that we have not been listening there really is just so much being said.

I think that it goes without saying that there has been a lot of talking but very little of it is by the people whose voices we want to hear.  One of the things that has kept me from posting for so long is the personal aspect of it.  When I am done typing these up, I tend to post them in several places, send them out on e-mail and Twitter.  Very often, I post them on Facebook with the primary goal of seeing the feedback.

I do not consider myself a journalist in the least.  Journalists report and if their report helps someone else  to solve a problem then great.  I want to be part of the solution, though and that is what a lot of this blog and other things I say are about.  I not only want to suss out the true nature of the problem but figure out a solution as well.  The irritation came when someone suggested that I read the comments after my posts and I made the mistake of listening to that person.

I did so cautiously and knowing that I would not be happy but the goal was to begin a conversation and that goes two ways.  Good or bad, I began to read and much like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, I got sucked into something that I did not completely understand.

Two weeks ago, we posted a blog post about the rise in the minimum wage in Seattle and the battle over it that was going to come from other states.  I tried to do so in a way that brought attention to the issue and not whether it was right or wrong but more about the fact that this is going to be an issue for many moons to come.  Oh, how I wished that I had do what so many actual journalists do and not wade into it, but I did.  First because I believe in justice and second because I wanted to teach my unborn child the value of a good argument if eventually a problem is solved.

I believe in the raising on the minimum wage.  I think that the middle class is disappearing slowly but surely and we need to do things that bolster the middle class to bring it back.  Being able to afford a gallon of milk should be the top of that list.  I understand that others may not see it that way and I always invite interaction and intelligent debate.  I got neither.

What did come from that was a two day screed in which I was called poor for having worked at Denny's (which I did not really get nor have I seen that being called "poor" is an insult.) to being rich and letting my parents buy me restaurants.   I found myself calling this person a moron and a drunk but in the name of whatever professionalism I had left, I left it at that.

At one point my mother even told me that I should just let it go, but having fashioned myself as some sort of modern day Joan of Arc, I thought that this was the time to draw a line in the sand and say, "This far and no further!"

My hope was that this was going to be the time when all of this was put to an end.  That this would be a time when two great oratorical kings would lock in spirited debate peppered with some small amount of witty banter but none came.

Artist rendering of the post responder

I heroically threw numbers and research at this person, and this person said that I didn't know because I did not own a business.  I told her I do.  She said that my parents bought it for me and that (even though raw numbers and data were splayed before her) minimum wage doesn't work.  To which I responded that it has been at work for nearly 80 years.  She went on to say that my parents pay for everything,  that I had no clue what I was talking about and that I was likely going to get knocked up (to her credit, I am nearly six months pregnant), and again that my parents pay for everything.

All in all the whole thing was very disappointing. I felt I could not be as insulting as I wanted to be because in my defense, I really did think she was drunk and if not that then seriously just a very unintelligent person and had the thought it would have been a bit like kicking a puppy or arguing with a toddler.

Secondly but most importantly, I was unnerved at the idea that this was the best that I could hope for as far as discourse.  This is what passes for debate in these days.  The one thing that I acknowledge is that I do not know enough to speak for each of millions of people in this country who are seeking to say something and I certainly know that this other person was not the voice of the opposition.  So why were we the only people who are being heard?

In truth, when we started the Food and Farm tour idea, we thought it was going to be a lot of trekking across the country, eating in some restaurants, going to a farmers market or two and everything would be grand.  There are 7 billion people on this planet and each and every single one of them has their own story.  Who should be speaking for you?

Carol tweets at @9t9knives and you can write to complain at 9of9productions@gmail.com

Fighting dirty, the battle over $15 minimum wage in Seattle.

Make no mistake, several things are going to happen in the next few months.
First, we will have a deeper idea of what is happening in Seattle with the minimum wage battle.  We will know one way or the other whether they will support the $15 minimum wage or somehow defeat it, or just how much anyone cares.
We will also know how the country overall is going to feel about as word spreads.  People will begin to chime in from all over.
Third, the wheels will start turning for those in other states on how to start getting it done in their states. Conversely, others will start taking notes on how to stop it.

Seattle is beginning to unfold much as we thought it would.  The mayor and the city council launched the first volley by unanimously signing the law that would force a minimum wage to take effect on a gradually increasing scale beginning April 1 2015.  It will go from its current $9.32 to $10 or $11 based on the size of the employer.

Other organizations fired back by saying that the city council nor the mayor have the right to make a decision like that with a vote being taken on it.  An organization called Forward Seattle set up a website and a facebook page to gather signatures for a petition to take it to a vote and raise $75,000 to go towards efforts to repeal the effort.

Working Washington fired back with a vow and a call to boycott organizations and restaurants that are supporting the measure to force the vote in November.

Forward Seattle then was told that they could not force a referendum and they continued on their march to get 16, 510 signatures on the petition and the price tag they set went up another $10,000.

Many accused the organization of misleading people to get the required signatures, telling signers that they are in fact for the minimum wage increase and that the petition they were signing was just to make it official or pairing with another issue in a place that would seem to support the initiative that is already law.  Many contend that the signature gatherers are only in it for the money, telling people what they think they want to hear because they get paid by the signature at the end of the day.

Forward Seattle, as of this writing, is at about $43,000 and we are not sure how they stand with the gathering of signatures.  They had 30 days from June 3 so that leaves them with about 48
hours to get there and it does not look like it is going to get there.  It is is exhausting just to think about this roller coaster and who is doing what to whom.

There are a number of peripheral issues intertwined in the debate.   The measure only applies to Seattle but many point to the fact that SeaTac airport though in the town of Seatac, is controlled by the Port of Seattle so who has jurisdiction there is at issue.  Also, since there is a federally mandated minimum wage, many are pondering whether the mayor or city council are even able to make such a proclamation.  Should it be left to the state as a whole or to the nation as a whole to make that decision.

Though this measure effects all hourly employees, food service will likely be the hardest hit.  Some states do not even have a minimum wage  for tipped employees based on the assumption that their tips average to be at least if not more than minimum wages. Though he says that he and his restaurants should be able to handle the rise in wages, Seattle restaurateur  Tom Douglas believes that it may lead to as many as 25% of restaurants in Seattle to shut their doors and the proliferation of large chains who can readily afford the rise  Some would go even further to suggest that it would deter a lot of people from opening their own place.

This is one of the things that we are going to be keeping an eye on and talking about.  This is a battle that is going to be taking place over a number different fronts.