Why Farm to Table is Dying and We Are Glad To See It Go.

The more that I learn about the farm to table movement and the more that it evolves the more we can see that the bubble is about to burst.  That is a good thing.

Let's be clear, I am not talking about "artisanal" produce and products.  There are some very skilled people out there doing amazing and innovative things.  Even they are going to have to up their game as the sun sets on the basic movement.

See the basic movement was about getting the chemicals out of our food.  The basic movement was about making our food more local and encouraging those local growers to expand their outreach to the people in their local neighborhoods and also encouraging others to get to know them.  The basic movement was about creating a link to our food.  Mission accomplished...kinda.

Whatever else we may believe, we are at the mercy of economics. The result of scarcity is expense and as the movement worked it became more popular and thus less scarce.  Lack of scarcity, lack of expense for the buy means lack of profit and thus those who were out to make a buck are out of line.

What we have ended up doing is promoting something that is so simple and
powerful that it cannot and should not be controlled by a few.  Is Whole Foods going out of business?  Probably not.  Trader Joe's is growing and there are a number of other similar groceries growing also; places where "organic" and "local"

Not to mention the fact that farmers are getting more and more savvy about
what they grow and how to market themselves.  People are growing their own more and they are growing more exotic things, challenging their pallets and their skills, right in their own backyard.

What used to be on the fringe has now become mainstream but unlike Myspace and the pet rock, the movement is not a fad.  It is not like people are getting tired of it and that it is going away.  As is becomes more the norm, it is picking up steam and like any commodity is becoming more accessible and more available to the masses.

We have a long way to go, for sure, but there is a lot of creativity out there.  There are people commandeering abandoned lots and rooftops for gardens and that is a good thing.  There are people who are fighting the system, and who are making it their actual job to advocate for good and healthy food.  It is no longer in the realm of $100 a plate dinners but often in the cost of a seed and healthy soil.

On the other side of this, the pretenders are getting out of the way.  Those who were motivated by profit and fame (such as it is) have to make way for the mother of two who tore up her driveway to make it a garden so that she can feed her children.  Secret underground dining clubs are becoming a thing of the past, in that they are no longer secret.  They are no longer underground.  They are becoming interesting things where people are coming together and expanding their circles; long tables that have water bottles, paper plates and paper cups instead of Spieglau wine glasses and fine china.

When people ask me about farm to table, they speak with a fear. They talk about it like it is something outlandish and in the same vein as driving a Maserati.  Or as if it is something just for the "hipsters" among us.  It just is not the case any more.  Good food is good food and the field is ever widening. So we are seeing the death of "Farm to Table" and the rebirth of farm to table.

The First Ton is the Hardest.

Getting started is the hardest part of any project.

Phase I.  We had to find a place to start the piles.  As a society, we have more
and more dense communities and the places to so something like the project as we have envisioned it have to be close by.  Residential areas are populated with diverse groups of people.  There are those who believe in what we do and those who are not so so interested in it.

We have been fighting a number of battles slowly and quietly and the acronym NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) has come up quite a few times.  People like the idea as a whole but we have encountered a number of people who do not like where we are planning to locate these sites for various reasons most of which are easily solved with a little time and education.

Smell:  People are concerned that the piles will bring strong odors to their area.  The smell is very easily taken care of with our base "ingredient" which is coffee grounds.  Coffee grounds keep heat in the pile, add large amounts of nitrogen to the mix and best of all cover any smells.

Pests:  People are concerned that the piles will bring pests like deer and raccoons and rats. A well managed pile will not bring pests.  Daily attendance to get the heat up and keep the piles aerated will drive out any pests that may appear.  As well, coffee grounds again, go a long way towards deterring as well.
Most animals do not like the strong smell of coffee grounds.

Feedstock:  Feedstock is the "mass" that goes into the pile.  Whether it be coffee

grounds, lettuce bottoms, whatever, we are establishing a method of gathering it.  The methodology, in order for this to be successful, has to be consistent. People are going to seek routine service to make this work in the form of daily pickups. There are people who are running businesses and need to be able to rely on this being picked up on a regular basis.  This is why we are keeping our collection to a minimum so that we can develop a more consistent system.

Structure:  The key components of the venture is the accumulation of coffee grounds so this is going to constitute the majority of the feedstock.  Also, buckets are going to be another key component.  Businesses throw out  a great deal of useful things simply for lack of any other place to dispose of them.  We rescue this stuff and put it to a very specific purpose and give pickle buckets and mayonnaise containers a second life.

To date, we have collected nearly 1500 lbs of matter, but the first ton is the hardest.  We are moving a lot faster now.

Political Battles and Big and Medium Sized Businesses.

We are out to start asking some pretty big questions.  South Carolina currently recycles and sustainably manages only 29 percent of its waste.  At this point, Washington state is at 59% and California has set a goal of   That means that there is a lot of hard work to do to get South Carolina to this level or for that matter, even in contention.

Moncks Corner versus Genearth Bioenergy
Trash is beginning to build up in Charleston and with this crisis also comes an
opportunity.  The nation's landfills do not have a lot of life in them.  They are getting too full too quickly  and we are beginning to see the errors that come from putting garbage in one spot, building on top of that plot of land.  Thus the issue becomes how to better manage the MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) of a growing population with all of the landfills filling.

A lot of the same objections of the small scale that we noted above became a factor in the large scale.  Managing smell, pests, and more began to make people think.  Add to that an increased price to manage, the decision of who would manage it and this made for a stressful transition.

The people of Moncks Corner were not to happy to have Genearth building a new facility when they did not believe the previous one was managed well and that they would have to foot the bill at least in part, to bring that facility about. A website even sprung up that was not too kind to Genearth.

This strikes at the very core of the issue that we are seeing.  People are not paying attention to their garbage.  Local government made very little effort to inform the people how their money is being spent.  Genearth made very little effort to explain what they were planning on doing, and a lot of the people in the town did not want to know where their waste was going.

The Lowcountry area of South Carolina is growing but the main thing that people are not thinking about that they should is where their waste is going.  For a lot of civilizations, that should be the first thought.  Not only where it is going but how long that method will be viable.  Will it last 10 years?  100 years?

This is where our primary focus is going to take us.  How do you convince people who have not had to take this stuff seriously for a generation or three to start thinking about new ways and to believe in the mission of doing so such that it doesn't leave future generations in a lurch and a state or even a town behind the times in comparison to the rest of the country or even the world?

Moncks Corner is only one of many towns, large and small, in South Carolina.  Education is the key and the first ton is the hardest.

We Can All Be Bees!

I found this a while ago and thought it was a really great idea.  It was a really great way of summing things up.  It is a post written a while ago by a man who wanted to do something very broad and who had a vision for cross discipline, cross culture, and interconnectivity that is similar to what we are striving for.  Creating a community.

I remember when I was starting my short-lived mechanical engineering career at Clemson, we engaged in a conversation about whether or not bumble bees should fly. Theoretically, they should not, especially if you look at the structure of the bee based on initial perception rather than in-depth analysis. There is a big, fuzzy thing, that has these small wings and defies all gravity and slips the surly bonds of gravity to go aloft. Based on cursory glance, a bumble bee should not be able to fly, but it does.

I was asked earlier to form a plan for what I was doing with Winnie Mae's. I was told to define, delineate, and quantify so that we could put out a plan to others. I was told that things needed to be in black and white so that we could convince others of what we are doing, yet Winnie Mae's is lifting off the ground.

Since beginning this, there has been meeting, after meeting, after meeting with other groups and I see the same people in each of those meetings, no matter what they are for. With Winnie Mae's our meetings are growing. I sit in rooms now with people who have gone to church together, worked in the same building together, and who have lived in the same community for years and only knew each other by sight and not by name UNTIL they got involved with Winnie Mae's. We are getting bigger, yet there is a lightness and our feet are leaving the ground.

Winnie Mae's is now a room, a house where people who otherwise would not be caught dead in a room with someone else are now gathering together. There IS more that unites us than divides us. We are more the same than we care to recognize sometimes, but we are. Our members are hunters and hippies, black and white, well off and poor, but they all sit in the same room and they all make us fly.

A bumble bee is able to fly because its wings vibrate rather than act in direct reaction to muscle movement, like plucking the strings of a guitar. It is about movement. Other companies, organizations, and groups work on direct muscle. The throw money at things and through sheer force, conquer the force of gravity at the expense or whatever they need that weighs too much; that holds them back and often, it is those things they jettison that have great value.

I have been met with very few tasks that I think are impossible, but this is a problem I cannot solve so easily. Explain what Winnie Mae's is. Explain why it works and why it is able to fly and I cannot; at least not easily. It works because it works and it flies because it does. Each person adds their strength, but that strength is exponentially greater than its input.

The engineers in the room took some convincing, but the poet in me understood immediately and I changed my major to English.

I find myself looking at the ashes of this undertaking and the resilience of its creator and I am motivated.  Ready to go.  I could have written something similar, but I think this about sums it up.

We are all bumblebees and we are not supposed to fly, but we do.

The Green Kitchen, pt 1

When I look back on a lot of my time in the kitchen, I could almost kick myself.  The sheer number of
hours I spent chopping away and swiping my cutting board into the trash is mind numbing to think about the amount of waste I created.  But let's be honest, it was the 90's and there was a lot that we knew but didn't really embrace.  The 80's were worse and don't even get me started on the 50's, 60's, 70's...We could have all have done better but we could not have done much worse.

The Green Kitchen now is a novel concept.  It is something that garners ooh's and ahh's from a lot of people now, but my mother is non-plussed. When she reads about a place like Sandwich Me In in Chicago she is very blase because she remembers a time.  There was a time when everything was not exactly zero waste, but a far sight greener than we see today.

She told me about the summer that she worked at a little bistro in Paris and the pig farmer up the road who would come to get their scraps for his pigs.  In return, they got the best of deals on pancetta and the freshest leanest cuts of pork.  She told me about the milk bottles that they had when she was a kid and how the idea of a plastic milk bottle today freaks her out a little now.  She lives alone now and feels a little better about cardboard cartons but upon hearing that there is a place in Pennsylvania that delivers milk in bottles by horse drawn cart, she wonders if they would be willing to deliver to Queens, NY.

She does things like that all the time.  I told her that California just banned plastic bags she said it was about time and wondered why anyone ever used those things anyway for fear of slicing their fingers.  Paper was not much better for her.  She prefers a blue and white NPR tote bag that she commandeered from my closet one day, and before that a pink and white Lindemann's bag that she has no idea where it has gone.  She things my dad might have used it the day before he passed away and secretly believes that he was shopping behind her back...but that is another story.

Her trash is always so light and airy when, even when I lived alone, I had big heavy sacks of dripping garbage that I had to haul to the gaping maw of the incinerator. And then where did it go?  She grows tomatoes and basil and spinach and onions and potatoes galore out on her patio and on the roof because she always has, she says and I have never seen her buy a seed.  So when someone posts something about how to grow celery or onions from cuttings, she scoffs.  My mom was green before it was cool and she could put most hippies to shame.

Now that I think about it, I could do more.  I called her the other day and told her that we are planning a massive initiative out at the farm and that we are going to try to compost or re-use everything that comes on the property.  Even though she is a few thousand miles away, I could feel myself lean forward ever so slightly as if expecting a pat on the head. None came.

Instead we began to talk about how she hoped that we could see the error of our ways.  She began to express a little regret that she had not done more, but still held to the belief that she had done her best.  She raised two girls in a busy restaurant and hey, she had to make things easier when she could.  For my mother making things easier often meant buying from the local vendor she didn't have the best relationship with because we were close to dinner service.  It NEVER meant buying a tomato from Argentina.  For a moment, I felt as if she thought I was guilting her about something. Still even on her worst day, she was greener than any restaurant that I ever worked in.

Now the pendulum swings back but there is an unspoken (or sometimes screamed?) fear that it might be too late.  We have spent so much time making things more convenient for the moment that we have forgotten about the future.

I remember her and my father once discussing what "organic" meant.  My father explained that it meant that it was grown without chemicals.  I heard her make mention that perhaps the organic should not be the oddity but the label should be on the thing grown WITH chemicals.  My father sighed his sigh and walked away as she reminded him very loudly that in their day EVERYTHING was organic!

Now as adults, my sister and I chat about organic x and y and GMO whatever and it is like another language to my mother.  It is a dead language almost as if we were speaking Aramaic or something.  We are trying but how far back will the pendulum swing?

Being a chef, I tend to think of things both in long term and short term and now I have to apply that to the farm.  Now being a mom as well, I am thinking about the long LONG term in terms of my child and (uggh!) grand kids, etc.

I like to think of my age group as an anomaly; the ones who did it wrong for a bit, about 50 years or so and then started getting it right.  If I am lucky, if we all are lucky, then both my daughter and my mother will think that this blip in time was a mistake and they will both look at me like I am nuts when I go to throw away something that could be easily recycled or composted.

I said all of that because we at 99Knives have made a new commitment.  On top of everything else that we are doing, we are incorporating composting into the construction of our new world and not just in California, but at each of our farm participant campuses.  Last night alone, we gathered over 300 pounds of compostable matter from restaurants and coffee shops in South Carolina and have made the commitment to doing over 100 tons nationwide in the next 365 days.  It's a start.  All of this matter will be saved from landfills and used either for sale or for use in community gardens all across the state.  Goodness knows that we need a lot of it on our land.