Maker's Table

Edible

This afternoon I stopped in at the King Arthur Flour Baker's Store in Norwich, Vermont, to buy a cranberry scone. On my way out the door I noticed a slim stack of magazines offered gratis to visitors. It was the grape cluster on the cover that caught my eye, and its title, Edible Green Mountains, promising "the culinary heritage of Vermont—season by season."

I perused my copy this evening, noting with interest an article on Vermont wines with a mention of Snow Farm Vineyard, whose Léon Millot we recently reviewed. Visiting the website of the magazine's parent organization, Edible Communities, I learned there are twenty-seven other "edible" publications, for regions as diverse as Allegheny, Toronto, Manhattan, Phoenix, and the Twin Cities. The website seems designed mostly to promote these sister sites, but one site section, Guest Writers, really shines. The stories are first-person, personal and informative, with a strong voice. If I were the site editor, I'd build this out, giving it a central role. It's that good.

Slow Food Nation... And My Nation

Slow Food Nation just wrapped. Held in San Franscisco this past week, the event was designed to "celebrate the birth of a broad and inclusive food movement to build an American food system that is sustainable, just, and delicious."

I applaud the Slow Food movement. I'm an advocate of real food, raised well. But how inclusive is the movement, really? Grist offers a skeptical review. I have to admit, I share some of the Grist author's reserve. Having lived on a farm for three years, raising about 25% of the calories for our household, I can say with some authority that slow food is not glamorous: it's arduous. It's real, it's genuine, it's humbling, it's awe-inspiring. But it's also a whole lot of work.

As an over-educated suburbanite raised on frozen broccoli, I was delighted and amazed at my ability to learn agriculture, to learn to wield a hoe and to discriminate pigweed from spinach. Gardening is fickle, weather-dependent, bug-intensive, sweat-breaking, curse-producing. It's also one of the most rewarding human enterprises imaginable. When you make your own cornbread from dent corn you grew and ground yourself, using eggs from chickens you raised and named, it's beyond gratifying.

But gardening is also anxiety producing. Because for that cornbread, you've used two eggs, and you won't have more until tomorrow. You've used a cup of corn, and you won't have more until next year. You revere, you appreciate—but you still have to eat. There's only so much. Though we were lucky. We weren't making a lot of money, but we had enough to buy cornmeal if we ran out of home-grown. Most of the world isn't so lucky. When they run out of corn, they go to bed hungry.

Which is my main argument with the Slow Food movement, per se. Its advocates seem to be folks who can choose: home grown / locally grown versus store bought. For most of the world's people, it's home grown / locally grown versus nothing.

One Fish, Two Fish

A couple of high school students have just demonstrated that we may not be getting the fish we think. Using genetic fingerprinting, they showed that about a quarter of the sushi they purchased in New York markets was actually another—usually cheaper—species.

Read the New York Times article.

Hat tip: cboone

How Dare They?

In conservative New Hampshire we have no income tax. Instead, the state pays for its services with lottery tickets, cigarette taxes, highway tolls, exorbitant property taxes, and myriad other (mostly regressive) levies. Here, the state runs and manages all liquor and wine sales, and we're infamous nationwide for having state liquor stores at highway rest areas. Go figure.

Independent wine merchants have always been at the mercy of the state, having to buy all goods through the state warehouse (which, we understand, is not climate controlled despite seasonal lows in the -30s and highs in the 90s). Smaller independent merchants pay 80% of the retail price for wine, yielding them a respectable (and sustainable) margin of 20%.

In recent weeks, to address an anticipated $180 million state budget shortfall, the governor has decided to slash this 20% independent wine merchant discount. Starting in the summer of 2008, merchants would receive a discount at the discretion of the state liquor commissioner, head of this monopoly enterprise. Most will get only a 10% discount. State liquor stores, of course, will not be affected by this new policy. Read about this issue in the Nashua Telegraph.

The net effect will be devastating for independent wine merchants and even chain grocery stores. They will now have to mark up their wines 10% over the price that the local state store will charge for the same bottle of wine.

At our local food coop, wine manager Dan King is justifiably outraged, and has written to local legislators to no effect. New Hampshire runs a State Liquor Store right next door to our coop in the same shopping plaza, and Dan anticipates huge backlash when customers start noticing his wines are priced higher. His only hope is to continue to offer the value-added of expert advice, better selection, and grocery-store convenience. It's something Dan's always done well. But I'm a member of that coop. I own it. I worry.