While “thought leaders” gather around the world to predict the future of food, Italians are hosting this year’s world’s fair, the Milan Expo 2015. The Italians are using the Expo to burnish its brand as the preeminent leader of food innovation. The Italians came up with the Maserati and the Moka pot, so why not edible packaging and digital delivery of food?

But wait, what happened to French leadership in all things food-related? If you attend the Milan Expo, you’ll  be hard pressed to see where France fits in. Of course, since Italy is the host of the fair, the affair has an effusive Italian feel. Eataly has a large footprint, as does espresso, gelato, and pasta. And in almost every detail, from the kiosks to the drinking fountains, you can see the fingerprints of Italian designers.

Nations have used these fairs as a platform for nation-branding, so it’s no surprise that Italy emerges as the new leader of food design, taste, and innovation. No telling what the French will need to do to regain their preeminent position as the arbiter of food. Although a group of young chefs in Paris is rallying the new generation of French chefs, they will have to imagine how to regain the crown for leadership of all things food-related now that chefs in other countries have moved ahead without being tied to a stubborn French narcissism. And, in addition to the new generation of French chefs, French entrepreneurs are finding opportunities to regain their high regard for a blend of art and science in food. This summer, 33entrepreneurs, a French startup accelerator in Bordeaux, France, will be traveling throughout the US with its tour of food startup contests in the areas of food, beverages, wine, and travel. (The organization’s use of “33” comes from its goal of “disrupting the way 33% of the world’s GDP.”) Perhaps these young startups will put France back in the game.

After all, the French launched the world’s first industrial exposition in 1798, in Paris, and established France, in particular Paris, as the leader in food and fashion. Everyone, including the English, attended these events, enjoying food created by French chefs and delighting the French flair for fashion. The French expositions were really a display of how technology and art merged to make useful innovations. In 1885, Jules Burlat described the 1844 fair, noting how industrial art and fine art shared the stage. Almost 4,000 exhibitors crowded the pavilions during the 1844 world’s fair in Paris, displaying the latest inventions in industry and agriculture. Steam was the biggest game changer, giving inventors a new source of power. One exhibitor showed how he used steam to power a seawater-to-freshwater conversion system.

These French fairs launched a succession of world’s fairs, including the famous London Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations London Great Exhibition in 1851. The famous French chef Alexis Soyer set up a restaurant in the midst of the British fair, parading preeminent French gastronomy to the six million attendees.

But the Italians have the stage now and the Milan Expo is well worth attending.
Most of the exhibits are breathtaking. In Europe, where the distances are shorter and the challenges are bite-sized, food innovations are stunning and at the Expo you can see what our food world might look like in 2050. For example, the Coop Market of Italy built a digital supermarket on the fairgrounds. If you want some apples for a snack, you can go to the market, and while you put them into your basket, you can read all about your apples and see who grew them, how they grew them, how the apples traveled to the market, the size of their carbon footprint, their full nutritional analysis, and suggested uses. All this data is stunningly displayed in real-time overhead as you move through the wide aisles. If ever you could imagine how big data might be merged and displayed to create a new transparency of the food system, this moment is telling.

The implications of a convergence of Big Data and Big Food are just beginning to emerge. At the Institute for Food Technologists conference this month futurist Mike Walsh said, “The era of big data will impact not just the production, processing, and distribution of food, but the way that business leaders make decisions.” Seems that your Instagram photos, tweets, healthy metrics, and POS data will shape the our future food system. The data/food mashup will give a digital expression to Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s infamous statement in 1826, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

Other examples of how Big Data will shape an emerging personalized food system is at the McDonald’s exhibit. The new order entry kiosks make the fast food industry minimum wage debate somehow irrelevant. You can watch families crowd around the kiosks while they personalize their hamburgers, adding lettuce and gluten free options as they enter their own orders. A lone McDonald’s staff member stood by a checkout register, the last man standing in the world of mobile payment systems.

A mobile warehouse will deliver your bottle of water that you can sip while watching a mockup of a smart kitchen. The multiple displays and kitchen robots show how your future kitchen may integrate data gathered from your biometric tracking device to design personal food. Your smart kitchen will enable you a comfortable amount of work for you to do with your owns hands with ingredients taken from your pantry inventory that is connected to an online ordering system, connected to the local grocery delivery warehouse. Lots of imagination went into this display. The Expo has a number of displays that take the discussions at the growing number of food-related conferences into the prototyping stage.

The Milan Expo 2015, the international worlds fair with a food theme, brings home the importance of seeing our work in a global context. Innovation outside of the US is alive, fast-moving, and in some ways, ahead of our food innovators. Since countries outside the US, particularly those in Africa and Europe, operate within smaller jurisdictions, they are able to operate without the complexities of multi-state landscapes. That said, the exhibits in Milan are provocative and suggest an integrated, technology-based food system. The Expo was a reminded to think of our work in a global context. Startups and stories need connections to the rest of the world. The next fair, Expo 2017, will be held in Astana, Kazakhstan. Energy is the theme, food served at the fair will be all organic, they say.

Most food in Argentina comes from somewhere else, at least in its earliest forms. Like wheat. Sure, there’s asado, an ubiquitous dish on Argentinian menus that is mostly a mound of barbequed meat.  But in Argentina, the mishmash of culinary traditions that exists today reflects a long history of immigrants who left very little of anything that can be called truly Argentinian.

The view that the Argentinian national cuisine is actually a mix of British, Italian, and French food can be galling to some cultural purists. The Scots made significant cultural contributions, such as the introduction of football. The British brought tea drinking to Argentina while the native plants added the local flavors of yerba mate. And the British sailed to the Falkland Islands and the Argentinian mainland during the 19^th century, hauling their sheep and cattle along as they established ranches (estancias) that survive today, even if only as useful buildings for a remote resort.

Estancia Christina, where our family spent the Christmas holidays, is one such compound, located in Glacier National Park. Visitors can wander through a museum on the ranch that exhibits shearing and branding equipment hauled to the estancia by John Percival Masters in the early 1900s. He and his family had almost 30,000 sheep and shipped wool to Buenos Aires on railroads built by British engineers. Asado was made possible by those decades of cattle, sheep, and pig importations during those years of British ranching.

Argentina is known for its football world championships, not for its bread. Football fans consume thousands of choripàns at their local stadiums. So choripàn bread, closely resembling French baguettes in taste and flavor, brings Argentina and France together if not for the duration of a rowdy football match, at least for the time it takes to consume a chorizo the sandwich.

Wheat flour, used to make chorizo sandwiches, came from wheat brought by the Spaniards to South America during the sixteenth century. The bread in Argentina is almost exclusively white, a lingering imprint left by Europeans that saw white bread as the signature of upper class cuisine.  In January, at the Central Market outside Buenos Aires, dozens of customers waited in line to buy freshly baked French baguettes for one kilo of baguettes for seven pesos. (The Argentinian government has set bread prices at ten pesos per kilo, so wonder the line for one kilo of bread at seven pesos wound around and around the bakery stall that day.)

Argentina got serious about growing wheat after the new nation (established in 1852) built a School of Agronomy in 1875. Soon Argentina exported grain for the first time and began to industrialize the country’s grain production system.  Bad weather and crop failures in the early 1900s combined with a lack of demand for grains, a commodity not considered important to those waging World War I. When the war was over and the economic depression ended and workers began to demand protection from those who appeared to profit by the resurgence of grain production.

Today’s wheat market is in turmoil as Kirchner’s government restricts wheat exports, causing wheat farmers to lower production and in some cases move their fields into the more lucrative production of soybeans, which have no limits even though sales are taxed at thirty-five percent. Since farmers want to reap the benefits from the more liberal policy concerning soybeans, they are depleting the soil with the nutrient hungry soybeans.

The wheat farmers that remain in their field soldier on, producing grain for choripàn bread. One mill outside Buenos Aires, Melino Chacabuco, receives shipments of grain around the clock. Chacabuco is a sleepy semi-industrial town of just over 35,000 inhabitants located on the Saluda River, now the Laguna Rocha. The presence of a river must have been the attraction for building a mill, a winding conduit for grain to the mills. Tall smoke stacks, grain storage silos, and cylindrical billboards advertise Chacabuco both as a town and as a mill.

I visited the mill, driving three hours to Chacabubo on a long, flat highway through dusty agricultural towns. At the mill, a long queue of bright red trucks transferred grain from their bellies into the metal grates built into the flooring of the mill delivery courtyard. To show how all these shipments of grain become the refined, enriched white flour used in choripàn sandwich bread, two mill employees met me in the mill conference room. With a display more suited to a foreign dignitary, production manager Juan Rafael Errasti and food engineer Gabriela Benavidez sat at a long wooden conference table, slide projector perched at one end, American and Argentinian flags flanking each other, and a basket of sweet, sticky, shiny Argentinian pastries slowly circumnavigating the table.

Both Rafael and Gabriela explained how their mill made flour, and oh, pet food, a byproduct of milling flour. Molino Chacabuco S.A. was founded by Crespo & Rodriguez, a firm in the early 1900s. Don Tomás Crespo and Don Jose Maria Rodríguez acquired the milling equipment in Chacabuco in 1918.

Inside the old Chacabuco Mill, Rafael and Gabriel talk about their jobs. Rafael revealed that his recent promotion as a manager made him uncomfortable. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he confessed that he knows how milling equipment works, not people. He’s tall with silver hair and is wearing a short-sleeved shirt to keep cool in on this mid-summer day. The warm, damp air smells of ground flour.

Gabriela appears to thrive in her job as a food scientist, a position she has had for the last twenty-nine years.  Slowly stirring her tea as she empties a series of sugar packets into her cup, she explained how flour continues to hold her interest. A simple loaf of bread, she says, is not easy to make. Not all grains of wheat are created equal, according to Gabriela, who described all the variances that can occur and all the adaptations and challenges that arise as a result of differences caused by different growing practices and weather changes.

Adding to the complexities of her flour world, she believes that bakers today are not as skilled as in the past, sometimes blundering through the making of bread, inconsistently, often tossing in ingredients without regard for precision or, she suggests, any concern for quality. As a result, Gabriela is in constant contact with her customers, advising, sometimes training them so they can create a stable, consistent loaf. After all, she wants them to stay in business and it’s the flour that will get a bad rap if a customer feels the bread doesn’t taste good.

Gabriela reports to Rafael, who towered over her with his wiry six-feet. Her hair is short and dark brown, drawn back over her face by her reading glasses. Wearing a white lab coat with the company logo on one side, she conveyed the competence of a scientist betrayed, in some moments, by an occasional twinkle and smile. During our tour through the factory, we caught each other’s attention when we approached a large area where the highly-polished wooden floor begged for a tango dancer, or two. Spontaneously, we both mimicked the motions of tango dancing, sliding across the floor for a few minutes undetected by the oblivious males in our group.

Rafael and Gabriela led us into the factory, a collection of buildings adjoining their offices. Winding our way in between the tall silos of grain awaiting the capacious maw inside the largest of the buildings, we began our trek up and down the five floors of 1950s style milling equipment.

The mill was impeccable. The machinery was either emitting soft grinding sounds or energetically quivering and rumbling as flour coursed throughout the different factory floors. Every machine seemed to be either grinding or sifting. In a quiet room shut off from these sounds and vibrations, Raphael and Christina presented a series of trays, each with tiny piles of ground grains in various stages of milling. Trays appeared and were whisked away in a performance designed by a team of millers who displayed the same sort of geeky-ness that you find in a chemistry lab. Christina and Raphael showed, with their small piles illustrating the progressive stages of milling how the grains became 00 or 000 flour, two specifications indicating fineness. (The Argentinians use the Italian system for grading flour according to fineness. The more zeros, the finer the grind.)

And the reveal of small piles of flour didn’t end in the small room filled with flour samples. On each floor, Raphael and Gabriela went from machine to machine, pulling out samples of flour to demonstrate how many times the wheat grains passed through the mill, up and down, back and forth, streaming through Plexiglas tubes, rustling and shaking their way towards some degree of 000s.

The floors, supported by the old columns from the mill’s early years, gleamed. While the columns appeared of recent vintage, the capitols were the old cast iron ones, black and decorative. Great care had been taken by someone in charge of the mill’s history to only patch small areas of the flooring, in an effort to keep as much of the early 19^th century underfoot. In spite of the effort to keep the mill’s past intact, modern milling practices and the use of computers to manage every step of the process were evident at every turn. One turn took us to a room where bags of additives awaited someone who would measure out desired amounts of niacin and riboflavin to create “enriched” flour. (Seems like the flour industry spends its time stripping off the outer shell of a grain, removing protein and nutrients, and then replacing nutrients through the “enrichment” process. Must be a reason for this, and it might have something to do with the cultural preference for white bread, like the bread used in choripàn.)

Wheat is one of those crops brought to South America by the same Europeans that Niall Ferguson lauds in his book, Empire.  Ferguson argues that the colonizers during the 19^th century added to the conquered countries, adding such commodities such as grain, railroads, and cattle. Whether you agreed with Ferguson or not, you see the effects of foreign cultures in every choripàn. Argentinian wheat makes a significant contribution to the global economy and governments are wary of any shortage or distruption to the wheat supply chain. As Socrates said in one of his discussions with Plato, “No man qualifies as a statesman who is entirely ignorant on the problems of wheat.”

And Argentina has been having its wheat problems.  How the choripàn will fare is unclear. But just ask any Argentinian if whole wheat or any other bread other than that white wheat bread would be worthy of their chorizo and you’ll get a grimace and denial, all in one motion. And the mill in Chocobuco may suffer if Argentina’s government doesn’t release its protectionist grip on production to allow agricultural industries to adapt to weather and market demand on their own.

On the way back from the mill, I passed through several highway tollbooths where police officers waved cars through, allowing cars to pass without paying any toll. My guide explained that the government passed a law making it illegal for tollbooths to detain drivers for longer than three minutes during peak traffic hours. This seemed to indicate that the government was alarmed that such delays could incite riots or other forms of social unrest. If a few minutes delay at the tollbooth could cause such a reaction, imagine what might ensue if choripàn bread became prohibitively expensive or even unavailable due to a wheat shortage.  Beware any government that goes too far, threatening all those football fans with the loss of their beloved choripàn.

OK, it’s just a knish, but a recent factory fire in New York put the kibosh on knishes. While the loss of knish production, 15 million a year from this one factory, is a raw deal for a food producer, the interruption in the knish supply chain illustrates how events such as a factory fire impact our food system.

The factory owners say that they will be making their famous square Coney Island knishes again by Thanksgiving. They will now be in the thick of adaptations that will stress every aspect of their business. The company must find ways to adapt the flow of raw materials that would have been on their way to the factory, dispose and replace perishable ingredients, find, purchase, and install the machine that makes the square knishes, and manage their labor force to minimize the impact of work loss. The impact of the fire is also absorbed by the retail stores that sell the square knishes. Those stores will turn away their own customers or find alternate suppliers, which mostly sell round knishes, a shape shunned by the fans of square knishes.

In spite of this local disruption, centered on one machine, the knish food system will manage to emerge in phoenix-like fashion to deliver delicious knishes to customers who consider the square knish an essential part of their food culture.  Gabila, the factory in Copiague, New York, will undoubtedly recover, enabling the owners to plan their long-awaited 100-year anniversary of Gabila knishes.

Trust matters. As we study what makes our food system work, we find that enduring human relationships are the sinews that flex when the system is disrupted. Social media may be our new tool for building relationships, but speed may not replace our old, slow method of building trust.

Transactions based on trust make the food world go ’round. Food producers, processors, and distributors depend upon relationships built over time that result in trusted transactions and confidence in credit, quality, and consistency.

Long-term human networks that took much longer to build might be on the verge of being replaced or at least marginalized by our modern digital social networks. Our tweets and Facebook postings tend towards one-way communication, not two-way exchanges. Would you trust a new banker if the only way you could build trust with her was to receive her Tweets instead of meeting her for coffee?

Tom Standage, the author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, and The Victorian Internet, just completed his latest historical hack of social media, Writing on the Wall: Social Media, the First 2,000 Years. It’s about time. Social media has been pleading for a historical accounting.

Standage posits that digital social media is similar to the old social networks in many ways. Short, informal messages have circulated for centuries, delivered via papyrus, paper, and in social settings such as coffee houses. Social exchanges became the underpinnings of business relationships and often led to trading practices that have endured until recent times.

Those concerned about the future of our food system are building mobile apps and big data assets with the intent to solve food supply problems through the Cloud. And they may be right. And in fact, we can see the benefits of digital farming already with improvements in precision agriculture and the improvements in resource sharing. But how will Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn build the trust so essential to trade and transactions? Will the speed and one-dimensionality of our modern social media provide enough depth to anchor the system during disruptions such as war and economic downturns? I’d guess that repeated handshakes that bring humans together in the same physical space matter more than repeated shout outs to your favorite supplier.

The Radio Lab recently featured a podcast called “Poop Train.” Guaranteed to grab your attention, the title referred to a system used by cities to eliminate human waste water. Surprisingly, we learn from the podcast that it wasn’t until the 1980s that New York City stopped dumping treated human waste into the ocean. Gradually, the treatment facilities improved and the resulting sludge was transported to farmers around the U.S. to dress their fields. Because the costs were so high to transport the stuff, sludge is now being kept nearer New York City, awaiting someone to innovate an inexpensive way to transform human waste to agricultural manure on a scale that makes economic sense.

The idea of spreading human waste on fields that produce food for human consumption, although elegantly circular, if off-putting to some. To others, manure is manure. Entrepreneurs in London during the nineteenth century felt the same.

When the London Embankment project was underway, men known as Gong Farmers, transported human waste to farmers outside London for use on agricultural land. When the railroads came to London, Joseph Balzalgette, the engineer who designed the Embankment sewerage system in the mid-1800s, suggested transporting waste on trains to farmers outside London. The history of this enterprise is told in a book by Stephen Halliday called The Great Stink(http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stink-London-Bazalgette/dp/0750925809/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381715168&sr=8-1&keywords=great+stink+of+london). Maybe it’s time to get the topic back on the agenda for urban planners, big stink or not.

The Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, is now showing Sam Taylor-Wood’s 2001“Still Life,” a three-minute video of fruit on a plate, rotting. The time-lapse images are transfixing, engaging your senses as you watch fruit decompose, moment by moment. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJQYSPFo7hk)

Food and art have enjoyed each other’s company for centuries. Rudolf Arcimboldo’s 16th century painting, “A Feast for the Eyes,” is an classic art/food mashup. (http://media.smithsonianmag.com/images/Arcimboldo-Rudolf-II-631.jpg.)

Food is also fodder for contemporary performance artists and designers. Marti Guimé’s book Food Designing and Marije Vogelzang’s Eat Love portray food in tantalizing, subversive contexts, turning food as material culture into multimedia, multisensory experiences.

At first Taylor-Wood’s plate of pears, grapes, and apples appears static and your eyes search for meaning, observing the stems and small, brown defects of the pears’ skin. And then, as though taking its last breath, the fruit seems to slightly inflate, inhaling one last time before disintegrating, spoiling, rotting, into a final scene where the fruit, consumed by insects, now white, hoary with rot and spumes of gauzy mold becomes a nauseous disgorgement of putrefaction, amoebic shapes insinuating their original form.

How does a video that includes moving images of rotting fruit acquire the title “still life” in the first place? It’s hardly still or a celebration of life. Or is it?  “”Still-Life” is part of a Blanton exhibit that describes ordinary objects that are “beguiling, loaded with narrative and metaphor,” which is another way of saying that the works of art aren’t what they seem to be.

A few years ago I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. The museum had just moved into an audacious building at the edge of the waterfront and was drawing crowds eager to see new exhibits.

One room included an example of “performance art,” a pile of clothing pushed into a corner. Seemed like the emperor indeed had no clothes, at least at the ICA. By the time I returned home from the exhibit I felt compelled to react to what seemed at the time a display of an artist’s complete lack of creativity. But, for a week, I tossed down my clothes each night and took a photograph. By the third night, I was rearranging the clothing, observing where colors and textures overlapped or where the composition seemed out of balance, overwhelmed by a pant leg or disconnected from an orphaned sock.

The surprise came at the end of the week when I posted the gallery of photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/90414796@N05/sets/72157635382777662/

Aha, I had become the perfect participant in the performance of art at the ICA, provoked to react, pushed to think more about the meaning of art. The pile of clothes wasn’t just a pile of clothes. The exhibit beguiled me, like the rotting fruit, just as the fresh apple beguiled Eve, into believing that clothing had other stories to tell.

Seems the convergence of art, science, and food is underway. Meanwhile, I can never look at a pile of clothes or a plate of fruit in the same way, can you?

In today’s noisy, scrappy conversation about food, a pitch-perfect note once in a while bubbles to the top. Bee Wilson, a food historian and author, recently brought us one of those sparkling notes in her review of William Sitwell’s new book, A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Wilson writes reviews in The New Yorker and sometimes her own books, such as Consider The Fork, published by Basic Books in 2012.

While offering her thoughts on Sitwell’s attempt to extract historical narratives from ancient recipes, Wilson slips in a short riff about storytelling and the idea that a recipe is a story.  As a fictional story, a recipe hints at the possibility of a resolution. A recipe invites a reader to follow a narrative, a set of instructions, with ingredients that have their own character traits along a story arc that evokes both drama and denouement. The setting of the story belies the writer’s own attitude, place, and culture. Recipes can be stories within stories.

But so can other readable texts, such as those pesky stickers that adhere to the fruit we buy from grocery stores. For a week this summer, I began peeling off PLU stickers from the fruit that I purchased from two grocery stores. PLU stands for “Price-Look Up” and are codes that tell us where our fruit comes from and how it was produced. The codes first appeared in 1990 and are now sometimes accompanied with bar codes. They lubricate the trade of produce around the world.

The codes are easy to decipher: Four digits indicate the probable use of pesticides, five digits beginning with a eight mean that genetically modified organisms were used during production, and five digits beginning with an nine mean that the fruit was produced using organic methods.

I randomly chose the fruit, not intending to buy local or organic or non-organic, but buying what I needed at the time and looked fresh. The stories of these fruits emerged and included the following: None of the fruits were genetically modified. Out of twelve fruits, only two were organically produced, which was surprising since at least half of the fruit came from a Whole Foods Market in Maine. The rest were non-organic and came from California, Mexico, Guatemala, New Jersey, New Zealand, Chile, Washington state, and Peru. Here is my PLU Map.

Yes, just spent a week logging miles upward and downward. After a week in Paris, I joined my family for a week-long adventure in Bohemia, in Grainau, where the alps gather around the border between Germany and Austria. Three of us competed in the Zugspitz Ultratrail Race set in the shadow of the tallest alp in Germany. I ran 25 miles and my two children each ran 42. But the kicker was the 9,000 feet up and 9,000 down for the kids and 6,000 feet up/down for my distance. In the rain, and fog, and over rocky, slippery trails. I finished in 7 hours 21 minutes, Julia in 12 hours, 10 minutes and Max in 10 hours 49 minutes. A long day, but exhilarating in every sense, wet, rough, fragrant pine trees, and icy snow. It was one of our toughest trail races, mostly due to the wet, steep conditions. The event, known as a mountain trail run, was all about the elevation, not so much the distance. But the mountain came with new friends, stories, and a sense of awe at the group of 1,000 runners that shared the event with us. Most were German, but because of the proximity of the Marshall Center for Security Studies in Garmish Partenkirchen, Americans competed supported by their families waving American flags along the finish line.  For our compatriots and the local German runners, the race brought us into sky-piercing mountains, fields of wildflowers, tinkling cowbells, and alpine streams, not to mention crusty, salty pretzels and endless amounts of hot, juicy German sausage. All good, now onward.

June 13th – Day One

Am setting off to track the ingredients of food items made in cities around the world. The purpose is to better understand how cities are fed, mapping out the movements of ingredients from the origin of raw materials to the plate of the consumer. So, starting in Paris, with a simple ham and cheese baguette.

Slept all the way through the 10+hour flight to Munich and then on to Paris, arriving during a one-day taxi strike on a rainy day. Am staying in a small hotel, Hotel Verneuil, located on a quiet street on the Left Bank St. Germain des Pré district. After a quick shower, a strong espresso from the cozy, wood-paneled lobby, I headed off to meet Lauren Shields, my researcher who has been soldiering on through her list of contacts to set up appointments for me during my visit.

Lauren is an American, born in Montana, studying international food policy at a French university. She graduated a few weeks ago and is now on the hunt for a job somewhere in the European food policy universe. She met me for tea at the Comptoir des Pères, where we talked about our plans for the next few days as I sipped a tisane and she a “noisette,” an espresso with a small pitcher of hot milk on the side.  We talked for two hours, and developed a list of ideas, places to visit, and some questions. Such as, “Why don’t Parisians talk about locally food? Perhaps it’s because they think of all of France as their backyard, and thus all food produced in France as local.

June 14th – Market Day

Tumbled out of the hotel at 4:30am for a tour of Rungis Market, one of the largest wholesale food markets in the world located southwest of Paris. As the sun rose, we entered the Fish Hall, lights glaring, floor shimmering wet, and white Styrofoam boxes for the length of the icy-cool space. A display market, meaning that buyers and sellers see the fish, touch the merchandise, and settle on prices rather than purchase catches through an online auction system such as buyers in Boston. During the 1960s, Rungis replaced the famous and historic Les Halles market in central Paris, the site of Emile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris.

The only way to officially see the market is to join tour or be a buyer. I joined a tour and was stunned (difficult at 4:30am) to find a large tour bus packed with tourists from all over the world who rallied early and paid to see a wholesale food market. Would anyone in New York get up at 5am and get in a tour bus to visit Hunters Point?  Doubt it, but that might change.

We spent five hours walking through buildings that contained fish, beef, chickens, offal, vegetables, fruit, cheese, and more, much of which was contained in 40-degree Fahrenheit temperatures.  The market is so big that the tour buses drive from one building to another, winding through trucks and forklifts that are trying to get business done before the market closes.  And our group, like all the other touring groups, wandered wearing the required hairnet and white coats, making us look like clueless inspectors, pointing and asking questions that the vendors had answered at least a dozen times that morning.

The professionals in the market did not seemed annoyed with us, as we blocked traffic, got in the way of carts moving produce out onto waiting delivery trucks, and pointed cameras into the boxes of fish, meat, and chickens. The star attractions included the chickens with their heads looped around their carcasses, large bloodied beef hanging along with a photo of the animals when they were alive, tranquilly grazing in their home pasture, cases of foie gras, and piles of detached pigs feet, stomachs, and calves brains. Pretty tough going for a pre-breakfast visit.

In spite of all the fresh and glory food, the halls were amazingly clean, stainless steel gleaming, and floors immaculate with the exception of a few drops of blood left by those animals hanging unsold by the end of the market day.

More details of the market will be forthcoming, but to give you a flavor of the morning visit, here are some samples of what awaits you should you decide to become a wholesale market tourist in Paris.

June 15th – Say Cheese

Sounds simple, yet Parisians just can’t tell us what kind of cheese they use to make their traditional “jambon/fromage,” or baguette with ham and cheese sandwich. I’ve been asking Parisians now for almost a week and each person declares with absolute conviction that the cheese is Emmanthal. No, actually, it’s Gruyere. Oh, wait. It’s Comte cheese.

The ham is another story, but one that exacts almost a sense of apathy, which for a Parisian seems out of character.  The ham used for the sandwich is sometimes call Jambon de Paris, or Parisian ham, but is really just a simple boiled ham, not tied to any location or terrior, which in other cases is the Parisian claim to culinary authenticity.

Same for the bread. The baguette has no geographical identity, other than all of France, and comes in various combinations of flours. The only exactitude required is the government regulation for the combination of ingredients: flour, water, salt. The French state has had its hands in bread at least since Louis XV (1710-1774).

The temperamental French view of the cheese in their iconic sandwich led me down some blind alleys. Such as one at the end of a trip to the Jura, Comte region south of Paris to investigate the source of Comte cheese. The tour guide of the Comte cheese center proclaimed the excellence the forty-pound rounds of gruyere-like cheese, including the astounding fact that only one breed of dairy cow is allowed to make the cheese, the Montbéliarde. The cheese, while creamy and, depending upon its age, nutty, turns out not to be the cheese of choice for the “jambon/fromage.”

June 17th

The Sandwich: Jambon/Fromage

Tracking down a sandwich is my mission, this one in Paris, and made by the Martin family in the 10^th arrondissement.  By tracking down the ingredients for one sandwich, made by one shop, makes the task of understanding how Paris gets fed manageable, although still confusing and complicated. Ingredients for one food item at one location often change from one day to another; bakers buy their yeast from the best supplier at the most reasonable cost, for example.

The vagaries of supply chain dynamics means that you can’t track down all ingredients for all sandwiches made by one baker, but simply one made at one time on one day. Thus the challenge. And the opportunity.

So the tracking began today and thankfully, our bakers were all in, happy to share their shop, ovens, and interest in the adventure.  They hauled out flour sacks, tubs of salt and yeast, and labels from packaged ham and cheese. Yes, Emmental. Next step: find those supply chain delivery trucks, the ham processor, cheesemaker, and yes, the cows and pigs.

My last post about the early years of food on TV brought back memories of those days of easy pleasures created by the mere presence of a TV in your home. In our house, the small black and white television sat near the kitchen and after school we gathered round to watch Engineer Bill drink milk in between cartoons that he ran with his program, Cartoon Express.

William Stulla, AKA, Engineer Bill, began his program in 1954 and rolled into living rooms at 6:30 in Southern California, when I was six years old.  Our family wouldn’t miss a night.

For a few minutes every evening, around the dinner hour, he would appear in his railroad engineer garb clutching a glass of milk and challenge us to gather around the TV with our own full glasses of milk. He would announce the start of his game, Red Light, Green Light, a game that entailed drinking milk whenever “Freight Train” (his off-set announcer producer) shouted “green light.” Every few seconds he’d shout Red Light or Green Pants or some other feinting ploy to fool us into drinking at the wrong time.

Families like ours were gathered around our small sets, giggling and gulping all the while in an effort to finish our glasses of milk before we mistakenly drank at the wrong time. This required us to be riveted to the TV. Engineer Bill played with us and for those of us who succeeded in downing all of our milk, he’d ring a bright bell and for those of us who stood grasping a glass still full of milk, he rang the “lead bell.”

This was a time of cleaning one’s plate, drinking your milk, “building bodies 12 ways”, as the bag of Wonder Bread claimed.

The game was fun and apparently we must of gulped down gallons of milk over the years of our early childhood, me and my two brothers.

But wait, what if we replicated this program today, gathering around the TV, clutching bags of freshly picked green kale or a probiotic yogurt smoothie. Would the tactic work? Would this be our modern gamification of good eating habits? Could we engineer a new generation of vegetarians or even vegans? Or, would our children see through the thin veneer of good intentions? Would adults accuse the milk lobby of victimizing our children?  Or would the competitive nature of the game put off those who are revolted by the ideas of winners and losers?

Still, maybe an opportunity to find a motivator for our younger generation to develop good eating habits. (Although gulping might not work.) Instead of wishing our children to eat kale because it’s “sustainable” and good for our planet, perhaps we could fast track their healthy diets by a new engineer, one that builds software, and introduce a game that counts towards building a generation of healthy kids.

Skip to minute seven in this video to catch a clip of the Red Light, Green Light game. https://youtu.be/GzvdlE45XEI

Just returned from a three-day feast of ideas in Monterey, California at the seventh EG Conference (http://www.the-eg.com/). The annual gathering brings together individuals from media, technology, entertainment — and his year, education. This was my second year attending the event, intrigued by the entirely eclectic group of presenters.

Magicians, musicians, jugglers, and acrobats, astronauts, nature photographers, pick pockets, and art forgers, gathered to explore new ways of thinking about education. With this gathering of intellectual explorers, we heard presentations that revealed a yearning to keep the human connection in sight while reaching to the outer edges of our digital experience. In one section called “Sustenance,” we heard about food as one of those connectors. “Red” (aka Hong Yi) an architect from Shanghai, plated art — literally created art using food on plates that represented “food painting” of maps and more.

Christopher Shi, a gastroenterologist and pianist, persuaded us that digestion of ideas through artistic expression such as music (which he demonstrated by eloquently playing the piano for us) bore similarities to biological digestion. Well, maybe. And Christopher Young, Nathan Myhrvold’s co-author for The Modernist Cuisine, explained life as a scientific chef, inventing experimental kitchens, food, and now his new website, ChefSteps (http://www.chefsteps.com/), where you can find Salmon 104, which describes cooking salmon at the temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

EG, impresario Mike Hawley’s conference, provoked us to think about the relationship between art and science. As more artists (and let’s include cooks as artists) connect with scientists, we’ll get a new food system that integrates bits with bites, allowing the human spirit to simmer along with the structures of programming and networks. Let’s hope that we hear more about this integration. Congratulations to Mr. Hawley and all the presenters at the 7^th EG Conference this year — A mighty meal with much to digest between now and the next EG gathering.

I recently visited the new exhibit at The American Museum of Natural History in New York called Our Global Kitchen, Food, Nature, Culture. As more and more Americans learn about their food, they can now feast on a museum exhibit that attempts to tell the whole story.

To tackle food as a broad subject is to launch upon a vast ocean in a small barque amidst thousands of hidden reefs. Topics such as genetic modification of foods lurk beneath the surface of most conversations about food. But this exhibit manages to stay afloat, informing visitors without sinking into political or cultural debates. You can wander through displays that explain how humans have shaped food through plant and animal breeding and how food is exchanged through complex trading networks. The exhibit employs statistics and charts, in excess at times, to provide enough information for visitors to come to their own conclusions about the state of our food system.

One display celebrates all the ways that food connects the human family while innovating different tools and cuisines. You can experiment with your own sense of taste by visiting the exhibit’s food science laboratory where you can learn how we sense taste and flavor. One room contains examples of what people ate during different time periods, such as Ancient Rome and Early America. The exhibit curators provided a creative way to tell those stories, using models of what cuisines looked like in their own cultural settings. In all, Our Global Kitchen, is well worth a visit. My only lament is that the exhibit doesn’t come with a printed catalog in addition to a website.

Our Global Kitchen (http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/our-global-kitchen-food-nature-culture), is open until August 11, 2013.

In.gredients, a new Austin food startup, promises to change the way we shop for food. When the company’s founders announced its plan to eliminate wasteful packaging, foodies and the media celebrated the merits of the new enterprise, hopeful that in.gredients customers would arrive at the new store with reusable and recycled bags and containers. The founders announced they would provide package-free food that would begin the march towards a zero-waste food system. Major media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN piled on with accolades for the company, long before the business opened its doors.

Now that the doors are wide open, the company’s big vision seems smaller than advertised. While the beautiful repurposed Austin cottage sells some of Austin’s finest artisanal and local food (bread from Easy Tiger, quiches from Cake & Spoon), the building only contains three rows of bulk bins, hardly half of the bulk bin space in Central Market. After purchasing half a dozen eggs (egg cartons provided) and some peanut butter (plastic tubs provide), I left the store wishing that the founders would begin negotiations with one of the empty warehouses on the fringes of East Austin. In.gredients should return to and embrace that original mission to think bigger and bolder.

If you want to disrupt the food system by building a zero-waste outlet, you need lots of bulk, in the sort of space occupied by Home Depot or Costo. Maybe a package-less Costco, filled with local, healthy bulk food items. Disruptions require boldness, audacity, and the willingness to go all-in with an idea that could overwhelm the package-intensive weak areas of our food system.

The founders of in.gredients are probably not in negotiations with the owners of a large warehouse but they could be inspired by some early examples of bulk food storage that defy the unattractive optics of industrial warehouses, such as the King’s Cross grain depot in London during the 19th century.

London’s grain supply entered the City through rail depots positioned around the periphery, bringing food in bulk from all directions outside London. The train from northern England delivered grain into the King’s Cross rail terminus where Lewis Cubitt built a wheat storage facility in 1851-2. Trains rumbled down from Lincolnshire after the annual wheat harvest, supplied the grain depot at the King’s Cross rail terminus, and departed for London bakeries aboard urban canal boats. Up to 60,000 sacks of grain moved from rail to canal and to the roads in London, lifted up and moved from one conveyance to another by an impressive hydraulic lifting system, a modern innovation of the Victorian period. Acting like our modern “food hubs,” these 19th century bulk food storage buildings appeared in other European cities.

(You can learn more about granaries here: http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/granaries/granaries.htm) Seems that the founders of in.gredients could find inspiring structures from these early granaries. Founders, Lane brothers, Christian, Joseph, Patrick, and Brian Nunnery, Christopher Pepe.

UPDATE: As of 2018, in.gredients is permanently closed. Read more about the closing here: https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/food/2018-04-25/damn-it-all-in-gredients-is-closing/

During my food history class last week, I showed a video of Martha Stewart visiting our farm in Maine. The students were learning about the Agricultural Revolution in Britain. Late 18^th century livestock improvers, such as Robert Bakewell, produced what we now call heritage breeds of livestock, such as Cotswold sheep and Gloucester Old Spots pigs. In 1994, I founded Kelmscott Rare Breeds Farm for the purpose of conserving these old-fashioned livestock breeds.  Apparently this endeavor piqued Martha’s interest.

As I watched the video with the class, I saw the students smile, beaming with bright, in-the-moment expressions of delight. Some were laughing at the rambunctious sheep and pigs; others were awestruck by our one-ton draft horse named Pete. Their faces reminded me of how magical time this farm experience had been for both my family and myself. We lived on top of a hill on a farm in mid-coast Maine surrounded by expansive views and pastures inhabited by sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and those indomitable draft horses. I had forgotten, but my students reminded me, of how those days were so full of beauty and intensity, of earthiness and excitement.

My students watched as I introduced Martha to the animals on the farm, chatting on camera about their histories and the importance of their continued presence on farms today. Visitors to the farm strolled through the barns, touched their first sheep, stood in awe as our border collie, Tess, scurried around the sheep to bring into the pasture. I also noticed how visitors, farm staff, and the students in this classroom now never lost their bright and curious smiles.  During the time it took to show the video, all of us in that room were in the fields and barns, smelling the sweet hay in the loft, feeling the energy of life on a thriving farm on the coast of Maine. Perhaps we owe Martha a word of thanks for bringing us back to those days in Maine, stunningly bright and full of hope.

You can see the video here: http://www.marthastewart.com/926681/endangered-farm-animals-kelmscott-farms

My students have just read about the bread riots in France leading to the French Revolution in 1789. My course is about the history of food in Europe and we explore the ways food connects with change over time. Lots of change begins with a revolution. While we were reading about the women who flung loaves of bread at the king in Versailles, the faces of angry men in Cairo were raging over the price of grain as the Arab Spring portended a new revolution.

Egypt, like other countries in its region, feels the effects of declining grain stocks all over the world. Since the Middle East and North Africa depend so much on imported food, drought and the use of grain for biofuels in places like the U.S. and Russia cause price spikes that ignite protest. Wheat and corn futures are up over 40 percent and the U.S. diverts about 40 percent to the production of fuel for cars.

The women in Versailles demanded that the king find a solution to crop failures and the high taxes placed on bread. The men in Cairo see their governments as unable to feed their countrymen. The connection between food and political stability has been apparent for centuries. But now, the options for governments are not quite as simple as sending the king to the guillotine.

The new exhibit at The New York Public Library, “ Lunch Hour,” is chock-full of artifacts, stories, and memories that will feed your curiosity about meals quickly consumed and forgotten. One enlightening tidbit is the definition of lunch during the 18^th century. Samuel Johnson defined lunch “as much food as one’s hand can hold.” (From the “lunch” entry in Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, 1755.)

Exploring  New York City “lunch hour”, the rich displays reveal a complicated tale of time, culinary fashion, and social meanings. Anthropologists and school children will be amused by the wall display of metal lunchboxes irresistible.  The entire exhibit covers the evolution of the luncheonette, cafeterias, school lunches, and the power lunch, just for starters. The limited time available for eating the midday meal put pressure on entrepreneurs and customers as industrialization put a premium on productivity at the office and factory.

By the mid-1800s, New Yorkers were finding new ways to eat that took less time out of their workday.  The density of New York neighborhoods made it easy to capitalize on the proximity of “luncheonettes” and cafeterias. Old menus from some of these quick-lunch places reveal the expediency and inventiveness required by café owners in order to provide speedy and convenient ways to dine. Restaurant and luncheonette owners used rubber stamps to print the names of new dishes and prices on their printed menus, telegraphing a just-in-time adjustment to the availability of food and the desire to please their pressured clientele.

The displays about the New York Automat, the invention of two German immigrants, Joe Horn and Frank Hardart, tell how they launched a factory-like food dispensary that lasted until 1991. Walls of the windowed little boxes, containing such lunchtime fare as macaroni and cheese and fresh doughnuts, are reconstructed in the exhibit, providing a sense of what it must have been like to spin into one of these places with your handful of nickels, the amount required to unlock one of those little doors. Video displays show clips from movies  shot on locations that featured Horn and Hardart Automats, including a film that portrayed a budding romance that blossomed between a beautiful woman and her nickel on one side of the boxes and a handsome man on the other side, who whispered his desires through the small portal.

The evolution of the sandwich, including the soft bouncy slices of Wonder Bread, and the invention of peanut butter (invented for children and at first made spreadable by the addition of chile sauce and mayonnaise), add meaning to a lunchtime standby that has recently reinvented itself into a burrito or a wrap.

Charity lunches occupy one room of the exhibit, introduced by urban reformers like Jacob Riis who saw the city fail to provide food for its poorer inhabitants. During the Depression, New York City attempted to solve unemployment by acquiring mountains of apples for the jobless to sell, filling street corners with apple vendors, but only solving the employment crisis until New Yorkers became fed up with apples.

The exhibit concludes with menus and photos from the heady years of the 1980’s “power lunch.” Iconic restaurants such as Sardis, The Algonquin Club and Delmonico’s provided a visible space to conclude business deals and to engage in the art of networking.  Restaurant entrepreneurs worked to attract their celebrity clientele, creating lunchtime legends such as Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross.

“Lunch Hour” is a well-designed exhibit and reveals the many layers of New York’s food culture, including names such as Schrafft’s and Chock-full-of Nuts. You will leave with a new appetite for understanding the implications of our digital world. The only notable exception to an otherwise comprehensive display is the food truck. Mobile food, now so popular in today’s urban food scene, began decades ago and its story would complete the telling of “The Lunch Hour. Check out this exhibit here http://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/lunch-hour-nyc-0. Lunch Hour continues  until February 2013.

Austin is bursting with enthusiasm for food. Even better, our city fosters innovative startups that add to the richness and experience of the food scene.

Foodies, food trucks, and fans of food in general have thrived and grown over the last twenty years, driven by the mix of musicians, college students, and artists seeking cheap and delicious food. Thus the food truck phenomena hit Austin first, giving our city a reputation for being a scrappy player in the food scene.

The recent surge of interest in startups and entrepreneurship has encountered the food movement here, creating the ideal climate for food-related incubators fostering the birth of new food companies. One new innovator entering the market is Molly Lindner with her company, Choxolat.

Lindner’s description of the creation of Choxolat offers a glimpse into how her process might provide a model to other innovators who seek access to Austin’s unique and vibrant food culture. Her process includes methodical due diligence, careful gathering and curating of knowledge from experienced mentors, and experimentation with new ideas. Successful entrepreneurs build their companies by paying attention to this process, gathering first-hand knowledge that offers entrepreneurs entry into the business world in ways that give their startups a fighting chance to survive and thrive.

But what is noticeable and a bit unsettling is the number of young startup teams that want instant access to a food scene that is complicated and still emerging here. What these new teams lack is a sense of the importance of process.

While living in Mexico City and working for USAID, she became interested in the coffee business. With connections in Austin, she took a few research trips to explore the local coffee scene. She noticed that Austin’s baristas were doing just fine without her, a potentially disappointing discovery. Except she also observed that these coffee geeks infuse their chocolate flavored drinks with unexceptional syrups. This paradox inspired a different business concept: Lindner’s Choxolat would provide baristas with an equally exceptional and consistent drinking chocolate, called Sip,  to match the quality of their coffee.

The process continued and included trips to the San Francisco Fancy Food Show where she found a food business coach. With a coach knowledgeable about launching a food business in tow, Lindner then assembled the rest of her “A” team of specialists: a chocolatier and a public relations and marketing company. These three individuals brought skills that compliment Lindner’s persistent discovery and education.

Why do many startups fail? They fail because they are in a hurry. Many new entrepreneurs are in a rush and forget the importance of not only meeting those in the food scene but of listening to them. Because many entrepreneurs are impatient, they are often motivated more by “running a company” than finding an opportunity for solving a problem. They often startup a business that is long on enthusiasm and short on knowledge.

A blend of three high-end chocolates finely ground into a powder quickly combines with milk to produce a rich dark chocolate drink that combines well with coffee or thrives on its own. Her powdered blend of Belgian chocolate is 60% cocoa with the addition of sugar and Himalayan pink sea salt, her signature Sip drink that is called Dark with Sea Salt.

Lindner and her family are moving to Austin as her drinking chocolate is hitting the stores. She is actually selling more to the local retail market, which has discovered that her blended, powdered drinking chocolate stands on its own. Spicy Spice, Peppermint, and Dark Cherry are some of the other flavors in her line of chocolate powders. And just for fun, her customers, baristas and chocolate-sippers alike, sell her marshmallows, which she describes as like “clouds on a sunny day.” Sip’s chocolate beverages are available at Austin’s farmers’ markets and Austin retail stores such as Whip In and Thom’s Market.

Sip is a product of Choxolat Concepts, Lindner’s company in Austin. Following in the tradition of 17^th century European coffee houses, baristas in Austin will now be able to provide their customers with fine chocolate along with their artisanal coffee beans.

Back on their feet after weeks of having their reputation besmirched by tales of pink slime, cattle are drawing attention to the complexities and uncertainties of our food system.  Chinese dairies, mad cows, and powdered milk illustrate how the milk and meat industry adapts, pivots, and innovates in a dynamic and rapidly changing global market.

While remotely connected, the occurrence of one mad cow in Tulare, California, powdered milk producers in the US and 25 shiploads of cattle moving from South America to China all point to an intricately connected food system. The production of meat and milk is linked not only to the emotions and ethics of consumers but also to food security crises and global restructuring of supply chains.

Consider the recent finding in California of a cow with mad cow disease (BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). A consequence of eating meat from cattle fed animal byproducts, the disease causes brain degeneration in humans. BSE first appeared in North American in 1989. Since then, hundreds of thousands of cases have been detected and animals destroyed both in the US and UK. This recent case only puts cattle and consumers on tenterhooks, awaiting news about further outbreaks. Found on a farm in Tulare County, the cow raised concerns about the possibility that entire herds may be tainted, threatening human health. While the USDA continues its investigations, producers and consumers are left hanging about the impact of this incident. Having just recovered from the pink slime media hysteria, when the meat industry had to retool and pivot around concerns over meat processing, producers worried that this one cow will disrupt their business again.

While this fear lingers, China is concerned about scaling up its own dairy producing industry. More and more Chinese are drinking milk and enjoying ice cream, increasing China’s need for productive dairy herds. Seeing this as an opportunity, farmers outside of China are shipping cattle to China. According to The Wall Street Journal, 100,000 heifers arrived this year from New Zealand, Argentina, and Uruguay in response to a drive to produce a new generation of productive dairy cows in China. Chinese cows don’t produce much milk compared to cows in other countries.  Lacking the spirit of innovation inspired by capitalism, Chinese farmers have cows that annually produce four tons of milk compared to nine in the U.S. Imparting years of experimentation and improvement of breeding knowledge, American farmers and others outside China, are sending their intellectual property (cattle) to China, seeing the short term advantage of new markets. In the long term, American farmers should consider the effects of exporting their best breeding stock.

American farmers are responding to this new demand by exporting cows, investing in the modernization of Chinese dairies and developing new products. Chinese producers are turning to the U.S. model of industrial dairy farming and are accepting financial support from such preeminent U.S. investment firms as Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts.

In addition to shipping cattle to China, American milk producers have found another opportunity in China.  U.S. powdered milk producers are retooling in order to satisfy a growing demand in China for milk. With rising incomes and a move towards Western food, the thirsty Chinese cannot quench their desires with Chinese milk and so purchase large amounts of powdered milk. U.S. farmers are changing their own production process in order to make powdered milk with a long shelf life, a requirement for Chinese milk consumers. Since many Chinese families lack refrigerators, the long shelf life is critical. Dairy companies such as California Dairies, a cooperative in Central California, have taken notice and have invested in new technology in order to produce this longer-lasting dry milk.

What these stories tell us is that American farmers are adapting and innovating to constant change and crises in the global food system. And these adaptations surfaced during just one week. One week since these news stories, U.S. cattle futures were already beginning to rebound, responding to the upcoming grilling season and low inventories due to herd reductions from lack year’s drought.

Imagine these adjustments and innovations for hundreds of thousands other subsystems and supply chains within the global food system. How can we connect all the cultural, economic, political and environmental changes that affect our food supply? I suggest we begin by digging deeper into our understanding of the system. Let’s explore those connections during the upcoming months.  Want to join me? Add your ideas for who ought to be considered part of our global food system. Farmers, yes. That’s obvious. But what about the producers of ice? Or cookie sheet manufacturers? How far are you willing to go?

You don’t have to listen to Jim and Mike Richardson talk about their farm for very long before you know they are improvers. Their farm is a laboratory for experimentation with forage varieties, poultry houses, pig feeders, and grass-fed beef. Building upon the experience of Jim’s long career as a veterinarian and Mike’s enthusiasm and curiosity about farming, the two of them are well equipped to improve food production in Central Texas.

The Richardson’s innovations join a long tradition of agricultural innovators. During the 18th century, British farmers were also improvers, experimenting with what has been called “scientific agriculture.” The raising of crops and animals drew upon the principles of the Enlightenment, rationalizing what was once only left in the hands of nature, the weather, the whim of the animals left outside to breed. Farmers like Jethro Tull came up with the seed drill; Robert Bakewell came up with a systematic way of breeding livestock. Agriculture moved away from common pastures that were dependent upon human labor to highly productive, enclosed pastures, feeding a rapidly growing British Empire by the 19th century. These new “scientific” farmers were innovators, creating new ways of looking at old knowledge.

Improvement requires innovation. The Richardsons, 21st century improvers, bring grassfed/finished beef, pastured pork, and poultry to farmers markets and local grocery stores. Captivated by the possibilities of improving the forage chain and exploring ways of growing crops in a drought, they want to balance the use of technology with their desire to remain connected to the land and their customers. (A forage chain is a sequence of grasses and other forage that become ready to use at different times of the year, providing a steady supply of feed for livestock.)

The animals on their pastures are benefiting from the Richardson’s penchant for improvement. Their poultry lives in movable chicken houses, which are frequently moved in order to manage forage and provide grass to the ducks, chickens, and turkeys. Jim and Mike are learning about grading of eggs so that they can improve their farming practices. Instead of moving poultry houses by hand, they use the latest model John Deere farm equipment. And they are well-versed with social media. By talking to other farmers, agronomists, and university extension services, these two improvers are listening for ideas that they could use to make their farm more productive, enhance the quality of their animals and crops while addressing the requirements of the soil and climate of Central Texas.

Mike is intensely aware of the challenge they face with diminishing water supplies and increasing demand from their loyal customers. While he wants to use progressive ideas to improve his farm, he is alert to the potential for moving ahead while leaving his customers behind. The Richardson family thrives on their relationships with customers. They aren’t willing, it seems, to make any changes that would risk these relationships. Balancing the social and financial sides of farming certainly complicates life for these modern day improvers. But they aren’t the first improvers to feel this tension.

Joyce Chaplin, a history professor at Harvard University, wrote about Southern farmers in 18th century who were uncertain about modernizing their practices while at the same time enthusiastic about innovating and adapting to new, more scientific agricultural practices.

One of the reasons, as Chaplin points out, that the Southern farmers were uneasy about modernizing was that while they were moving towards more modern ideas and practices they were enmeshed with traditions, like slavery, for example. In some ways, they were somewhat selective about moving abandoning old ideas. Perhaps those farmers were worried that by moving too fast, rejecting the idea of slavery with too much abandon, they might be responsible for the unraveling of the fabric of southern society. So, they moved away from farming tobacco and began growing cotton, finding a crop that would grow in the depleted soils left behind from years of tobacco farming.

While it may seem like a stretch, to compare a slavery dependent 18th century farmer to a modern day family farmers like Richardson Farms, you can sense the same tension between farmers who want to improve in a complicated world. Those Southern farmers innovated with new crops even though they were slow to reject slave labor. The Richardsons are innovating with new forage systems while reluctant to use traditional practices such as grain-finishing cattle or drilling soil for seed planting.

The reluctance of these improvers might be a good sign, indicating thoughtful innovation that integrates social values, a slight handbrake to the rush to be new.

(For more about those Southern farmers, see Joyce Chaplin’s book An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, University of North Carolina Press.)

Lew Weil, a molecular biologist, grows seaweed for his company, Austin Sea Veggies. In his garage, Lew grows ogo, edible seaweed that looks a little like material for a gelatinous bird’s nest.  Where else but Austin, Texas, hundreds of miles away from any coastline, would you find a scientist hunched over an aquarium full of seaweed. Yes, Austin is weird.

But beware of weird. More often than not, an Austinian’s weirdness leads to innovation and an audacious capacity for leapfrogging the rest of us. Lew began his metamorphosis from lab scientist to aquaculturalist when he wondered if there was a more sustainable way to grow agar, the substrate used in Petri dishes for growing microorganisms. Agar comes from polysaccharides in red algae; Japanese and South Asian companies grow most of the algae in farms along their coastlines. Lew thought there might be a way to grow algae and seaweed without relying on coastlines. Since seaweed enters our food chain more often than you may think, like through ice cream and carrageenan-toting apple cider (even your toothpaste has it), Lew foresaw the time when the need for seaweed would outstrip the supply of coastlines. Maybe Lew isn’t that weird.

In 2003, the Food and Agriculture Organization reported that the annual value of seaweed produced for human consumption in the U.S. was $5 billion.[1] But the largest producers are in China and South Asia. After testing and retesting types of seaweed, Lew embraced ogo, from Hawaii and popular with Hawaiians, he moved beyond agar to producing seaweed for human consumption. Enter Austin Sea Veggies. Growing edible seaweed became an obsession for a mad microbiologist. With a degree in biology from Texas A & M, Lew approaches his quest for sustainable seaweed aquaculture using scientific methods with all the geekiness of an agar-ian scientist, now an agrarian scientist.

Lew’s experiments seek an understanding of the seaweed’s growing seasons, its ability to endure temperature oscillations, like the furnace-blast heat during a summer in Texas. Last summer he lost his entire crop and is just now beginning to recover with a new set of “mother” plants. His ogo grows from these plants, its delicate, lacy fronds emerging from the tips of the mother branches. His customers, many of them members of the Hawaiian community in Texas, are anxiously awaiting fresh deliveries of his new crop, typically five to six pounds per month. Restaurants and grocery stores such as Wheatsville, snatch up his “sea veggies” on a regular basis.

But scaling is the entrepreneurs’ vexation. Success brings customer demand, and in Lew’s case, an aquarium in his garage won’t begin to produce enough ogo to satisfy his hungry customers. So look has been talking with other entrepreneurs, including one who has a saltwater quarry in West Texas, an auspicious discovery when oil drillers penetrated the Permian Sea basin, which exists throughout much of the Texas landscape. Salt water gushed into a quarry and sits underutilized for aquaculture, but not lost on Lew. He has a vision for using the saltwater quarry for growing seaweed and shrimp. All he needs is the cooperation of the quarry’s owner, some capital, and a little time off from his day job as a biologist. The scaling bugaboo is the barrier that many food entrepreneurs encounter, some successfully, others not. To get Lew’s food science out of his lab and into sustainable production will take the graces of another entrepreneur, one that turn the Permian Sea into an ogo incubator.

How enterprises like seaweed companies in Austin fit into the global food system, or even more miraculously, into Austin’s food system? As a food entrepreneur, Lew easily fits into Austin’s vibrant food culture. But what about seaweed? And seaweed grown in garages? Steve Jobs began in a garage.

“No cakey-ass brownies here,” declares Miles Compton about his baked chocolate dessert. In a food culture that insists on knowing the farmer who grows its corn and the exact percentage of butterfat in a cookie, how is it that Miles is so successful with his somehow unknowable chocolate dessert?

Long-time Austin food columnist, the late Katie Crider said that Mile’s dessert is “anything you want it to be.” And she was right. Virginia Wood, another Austin food writer said the dessert was “a cross between a brownie and a melt-in-your-mouth chocolate truffle. And she was also right. Unable to endure the suspense, I followed Miles’ directions, ate his chocolate dessert cold, and found it almost fudgy, full of intense quality dark chocolate, and was surprised that the top crust could retain such a light, crisp texture. I was beginning to see why his customers come back for seconds.

For sale in Whole Foods or Central Market in Texas, his chocolate dessert looks like a brownie. But it’s not. But it’s also not a gooey fudge-like cake. Sitting in its clear plastic store container, Miles’ dessert begs for answers. Why does this mysterious dessert have such a loyal following in a food culture that expects to know the ingredients of everything else?

Miles is good at creating the mystique that follows his desserts to the table. No amount of subterfuge will divulge the source of his chocolate or his recipe. His website flaunts his main ingredients, butter, eggs, chocolate. But that’s all. Nothing about local eggs, exotic Valharona chocolate, or hand-made butter. His customers apparently give him a pass, consuming hundreds of pounds of Miles of Chocolate, as it’s called, over the past decades.

Miles of Chocolate, made by Miles, an ex-Marine, has what marketers call “stickiness.” Not to be confused with how his chocolate creation can feel in your hands, the stickiness of his dessert is more about how his customers remain loyal as culinary trends change and warning from health officials about the detrimental effects of eating butter. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell points out that some products will survive because of a particular quality. Miles has found the sweet spot that causes his customers to remain stuck on his desserts, in spite of his mysterious recipe and unimaginative packaging.

These nine-by-thirteen rectangles of chocolateness could be mistaken for large brownies. Brownies, so called because of their color (originally from molasses in the early recipes), made their appearance in the 1897 publication of the Sears Roebuck Catalog but were also consumed at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Somehow, Miles has transformed this enduring confection into “crack disguised as the best brownie you’ve ever had,” as one Yelp review exclaimed.

Two people run Miles of Chocolate, Miles and his business partner Ben, both in business for about eight years. Over two decades ago, Miles’ hairdresser/astrologist consulted the stars and announced that Miles should be a chef. Beginning as a dishwasher, Miles began baking after several years as a chef, working in Corpus Christi and then Austin. He soon discovered and tweaked his chocolate dessert recipe, now the star attraction of his business. Five stars glow from his logo, a self-assured declaration familiar to restaurant reviewers.

Not content to rest on his laurels as a recipient of the Austin Chronicle’s award for the best local chocolate for four years running, Miles fits into Austin’s food scene by displaying a familiar creative resistance and nonconformity the local culture. By refusing to admit his dessert is a brownie and concocting it with unimaginable amounts of eggs and butter, he plays to Austin’s creative audacity, the same audacity that evoked the “cakey-ass” comment. And there’s plenty of evidence that he knows what he’s doing: his customers eat up his culinary attitude, coming back year after year. Thank the stars for Miles of Chocolate.

While pondering the nature of our food system, I find parts of it in places that seem unrelated, at first. A bakery in Austin may seem connected to the system through the production of bread, the loaves and croissants traveling from the baker’s commercial kitchen into the hands and mouths of hungry Austinians every morning. But the system engages other less apparent components of the system, like dairy companies, flour manufacturers, and truck drivers. A recent visit to the bakery shed light on how these other companies contribute to the crusty loaves from one small bakeshop.

Derek Stilson, owner of Moonlight Bakery in Austin, Texas has been observing the moonlight for decades. A graduate from the University of Texas in Linguistics, he picked Moonlight for the name of his bakery with an eye towards descriptive meanings of words, connecting the moon, light, moonrise, and bread rising.  Derek comes to bread through years of training, first as Whole Foods first in-house baker, then through stints at local Austin restaurants and bakeries before attending the American Institute of Baking in Kansas and teaching culinary arts at an Austin high school for eight years. Since 2003, he and his wife, Norma, owned the Moonlight Bakery, a small bakery that produces classic breads and pastries.

While bakers adopt adjectives like “artisanal,” Derek simply bakes well-known and well-loved breads and pastries. During the week preceding Easter this year, his bakery case was bulging with Hot Cross buns, classic Easter treats, emblazoned with sugary crosses. The baked apple fritters revealed chunks of apples and cinnamon rolls could hardly contain the ribbons of melted sugar and spice within their creases. All sorts of classic breads filled the wicker baskets: whole wheat, multi-grain, Italian, sourdough, and focaccia breads and rye loaves. The ciabatta was perfect, a hard outside crust around a soft, chewy interior that filled the room with the aroma of caramel when toasted. It’s the kind of ciabatta that enveloped huge wells of butter and jam in pockets created by yeasty bubbles. A new restaurant, The Hillside Farmacy, in East Austin uses Moonlight ciabatta for a mushroom, caramelized onion, Brie sandwich.

Understandably, a visitor to the bakery could become transfixed by the scrumptious goods in the pastry case; but other sights in the small shop reveal other stories implicit in the provisioning of Austin with Derek’s admirable loaves. Piled high to one side, on pallets, were bags of flour awaiting entry to the back of the shop where the flour became bread. Two suppliers’ names identified the source of the bags: King Arthur Flour and Johnson Bros. Bakery Supply. Both purveyors provide histories that add texture to the bread supply chain. They also represent those many other players in the food system that are often over looked in the provision of some of our very basic food products. For the Stilsons, flour and baking pans are the bread and butter of their business.

King Arthur Flour is the oldest flour company in the U.S. Founded in Boston, Massachusetts 1790 by Henry Wood, the company sold flour imported from England and unloaded from British ships as they docked in Boston. The company began milling its own flour and by the 1890s announced its American-grown flour at the Boston Food Fair. Now, after 222 years, King Arthur flour operates from its corporate headquarters in Vermont, ideally suited to the state’s culture of culinary traditions. You can buy industrial bags of flour, like Moonlight Bakery does, or peruse American-made cookie sheets in King Arthur’s catalog. Moonlight, old-school with its line of classic baked goods, seems perfectly aligned with its source of flour from a company named after classic myths with deep historical ties to New England.

Johnson Bros. Bakery Supply Inc. lacks the long historical roots of King Arthur Flour but instead comes to Moonlight with connections to Texas history.  Founded in 1994, a mere eighteen years ago, the company headquarters is in Houston. Two brothers raised by parents who ran bakeries in Minnesota and Texas, learned their trade by making doughnuts and decorating cakes. In the 1990s, they formed a company to supply the bakers, including the flour that sits in the front of Moonlight’s bakery shop. Twenty trucks deliver bakery supplies in Texas, operating in Texas and Oklahoma. The two brothers, Kevin and Blaine sell all kinds of bakery supplies, from flour to icing to chocolate for cake fillings.

These bags of flour, some from Vermont, some from Texas, convey an all-purpose, no frills approach to the Stilson’s bakery. They also represent two of dozens of other suppliers that bring paper bags, butter, eggs, cash register paper tape, and light bulbs. They all go into the loaf that Norma and Derek bake. Seems like to appreciate and understand how our food system works, we need to cast a wider net, think more broadly while we think deeply about the food we eat. Our findings may lead us to a much broader landscape that includes surprising participants in the business of feeding urban populations. Cookie sheet manufacturers, the fuel required to transport the sheets, the packing materials, labor, and metals used to produce the sheets, combine in our food networks. One inspired baker in Austin is only one location on the long road traveled by a grain of wheat to the breakfast table. Unraveling this network could be one of the most interesting and revealing projects yet.

Mary-Rose and Lefty Fisher’s farm, Rancho benedicion de Dios (translated Blessing of God Ranch), was awash in a much-needed rainstorm last week. Texan’s don’t mind the inconvenience of flooded streets when rain brings a break in the Texas drought. And on the day that I visited Mary-Rose in March, her pastures were green and the Black Angus cattle stood out, rivulets of water trickling down their big steamy bodies. As bovines are wont to do, they were ruminating after pulling at the green grass that would soon rebound after these spring rains.

But their black cattle were also looking afield, searching for their newborn calves, a common addition to their herd during March. Already this year they have five new calves, each cossetted behind thistles and other low-growing shrubs. The ranch raises about 20 cattle, all Black Angus. But these newborns represent a new initiative on the ranch. This year, the Fishers leased a Wagyu bull, a cattle breed, literally “Japanese cattle,” that has been associated with the Kobe region of Japan. Up to 25% of a Wagyu steak is unsaturated fat, marbled throughout the meat. The meat is extremely tender, flavorful, and possibly the “foie gras” of the beef world. By crossing the Wagyu bull with their Black Angus cattle, Mary-Rose and Lefty hope to produce an even more flavorful, tender meat product in the next few years.

Experimentation is nothing new for these ranchers who just started raising cattle in 2003. When the Fishers purchased their ranch, they had to reclaim the soil in preparation for organic certification. Today they produce organically raised grass finished cattle.  Their Wagyu-Angus project along with their organic practices, make their ranch a small and carefully managed enterprise. Their customers, individuals and a local resort scoop up their beef products, evidence that they’re on to a good thing. Both Mary-Rose and her husband are reassuring evidence that new ranchers don’t require a long pedigree to enter these niche markets. Both are not native Texans and have come from other careers. By reaching out to other ranchers, reading, and observing how ranches operate, they have been able to begin a small and innovative beef ranch. The Rancho benedicion de Dios, may just be the model for a new breed of farmers that wants to innovate, stay small, while selling to a market that is willing to be patient, pay higher prices, and appreciate locally raised, organic meat, called by Fishers, “Holy Organic Beef™”

Yoed Anis makes sake in Texas. Born in Israel, but a self-proclaimed Texan, Yoed began his enterprise, Texas Sake Company, in the fall of 2011, propelled by his love of brewing beer and an attraction to a natural connection between the historical tradition of rice growing in Texas and the potential of brewing sake. Immigrants such as Yoed and Texas rice, the medium-grain variety used to make sake, both have long histories in Texas foodways.

From the late 19^th century, Texas has been growing rice, a crop increasingly threatened by the recent Texas drought. During the 1880s and ‘90s, several entrepreneurs and companies saw an opportunity to develop rice farming in Texas and Louisiana, where water was plentiful and land was cheap. A group of Texas entrepreneurs met in 1879 in Houston to  build a railroad from New Orleans to Houston, connecting Louisiana, known for growing rice, with Texas. This extension of the transportation infrastructure brought immigrants from the Midwest and encouraged innovation. The railroad company promoted cheap land prices and better agricultural conditions for Midwestern wheat farmers who were suffering from a succession of crop failures and a drought. Encouraged by the railroad promoters, the farmers brought their knowledge of wheat crops to Louisiana where they bought land and learned how to grow rice from the Cajun community. Soon, the John Deere tractor company developed new equipment for rice farmers and the scientists at Texas A & M developed a new variety of rice, one that would not crack under the pressure created by new milling machines. The variety was a cross between long grain Cajun rice and a medium-grain Kyushu rice, a Japanese rice introduced by the Japanese who were hoping to find more land in Texas to expand its own rice growing capacity. The result was a medium-grained rice suited to the emerging rice industry in Southeastern Texas.

Soon the U.S. government joined these entrepreneurs and companies to support the growth of mills by adjusting freight rates to encourage entrepreneurs to build new rice mills. By the end of the 1890s, Texans joined the Louisiana rice farmers, led by entrepreneur Joe Broussard, who converted a grist mill and brought the tractors, canals, and rice to Beaumont, establishing a long tradition of rice growing in Southeast Texas, near ports where rice shipments could travel to other U.S. cities. By 1902, almost all the rice grown in the U.S. came from Texas and Louisiana.

This makes Yoed part of a very long tradition that originated in the 19^th century.  He is adding his own innovation by introducing sake brewing into a thriving micro-beer brewing culture in Texas, particularly in Austin where microbreweries abound. Reaching out to what remains of the tenacious rice growing community, Yoed buys organic, medium-grain rice from two Texas farmers and brews sake in a small warehouse in North Austin. Texas Sake Company produces two varieties, Whooping Crane (a clear, clean tasting sake), and Rising Star (a Nigori sake, sweet, country-style). Yoed and his brewers hand wash the rice before beginning a long cold fermentation process that uses sake bacteria. The company only produces 500 hundred bottles at a time, each bottle portraying the Texas whooping crane, an inhabitant of the Colorado River, a source of water for Texas rice farmers. One can only hope that entrepreneurs such as Yoed might find ways to continue growing rice in Texas, even under drought conditions. New technologies might emerge that could adapt rice to dry climates. And innovative ways to use rice, such as sake brewing, might encourage at least some of the remaining rice growers in Southeastern Texas. According to Yoed, sake is a perfect compliment to Texas BBQ. He is not only leading a sake revival in Texas, but by making a connection between Texas rice farmers, sake and BBQ, he might find a way to the hearts and bars of appreciative Austinians.

To encounter Clancy Rose, Cuvee’s coffee roaster, aside one of his burnished Samiac machine is like meeting the owner of a Ferrari or Maserati. Words like “first crack” and “carmelization” tumble into the room, creating a continuous riff of geeky adjectives familiar to aficionados of high tech and high design. Clancy is one of five employees at a small Austin roaster, one that telegraphs technology in so many ways, not to mention in Clancy’s language and style. He relies on the shiny stainless steel digital controllers athwart each roaster that tweak and time the machines, enabling Cuvee to roast the best beans consistently, predictably, and according to specifications developed since its founding in 1998.

Cuvee’s name comes from the term reserved for wine, a description for the highest quality grapes used the production of sparkling wine or champagne. The founders like to think of their business as similar to the wine business, seeking beans like reserves of grapes, roasting instead of fermenting, speaking in terms familiar to wine sommeliers when describing their beans to customers. The company spends a lot of time with its farmers in order to develop beans and roasts in much the same way as wine makers work with soils, climates, and grape varieties. Beans are an obsession to these coffee geeks.

Founders Rashelle and Mike McKim were early pioneers of the direct trade movement, a role that led them to work directly with farming communities in the countries where they purchase coffee beans. And the company’s affinity for technology began long before the founding of Cuvee. Mike’s uncle, Carl Staub is a food scientist who invented a technology for measuring the degree of roast. A machine called a spectrophotometer from Carl’s company, Agtron, supplies Clancy’s competitive edge, allowing him to nudge the beans towards a roast that he and his team believe draw out the best qualities of each bean from each harvest.

Mike started Cuvee after a job installing fiber optic cables, transforming his personal network away from digital geeks to roasting geeks. He and a friend started to experiment with coffee beans when they purchased a Samiac machine designed for professional roasters. They turned out large batches roasted beans, enough for them to supply their growing circle of fans. They moved from hobby roasters to professional roasters, following the growth of coffee culture from Seattle to Portland, from Starbucks to Stumptown, as they used the Agtron technology to roast predictably and often.

The company headquarters is in Spicewood and operates in a low-profile, unmarked building common in the world of low profile high technology companies. The tasting room has the feel of a Maseratishow room, but instead holds equipment from  La Marzocco an Italian espresso machine manufacturer. Polished steel and glass brighten the room full of small cups, dark beans and tiny spoons perched aside single shot glasses.

Cuvee’s roasters inhabit a large warehouse, with the owner’s speedboat at one end and pallets of beans at the other. In the middle are whirring machines that consume bucket loads of green beans into their heated cavities, each with a small glass window that reveals the beans as they turn slowly from light green to varying shades of brown. Cuvee’s trademark blue bags pile up on shelves, each marked with labels intensely designed with the logo of a customer or images that connote a particular coffee region, location or personality of their own Cuvee culture. One bag, marked Spicewood, contains beans that are Cuvee’s houseblend, named after the company’s hometown. Another Fazenda Pantano is for the Brazilian family Ferrero that produces a chocolaty, nutty, smooth bean using a method called “honey processing,” which Cuvee says gives the beans a “clean” taste.  Does this remind you of wine tasting terminology?

Cuvee sells mostly to independent coffee shops such as Caffé Medici and Once Over Coffee, but its blue bags also appear in grocery shops such as Whole Foods Markets and restaurants such as La Condesa and Barley Swine. You can bet that the Agtron will be put to the test as Mike reaches his revenue goal of $12 million in five years. Those robin’s egg blue bags may become an Austin symbol far outside the city limits.

Oliver Strand wrote in a recent New York Times article that coffee can be either something you make or something you drink. One coffee roaster in Austin, Texas believes coffee can be both. Roster Joe Lozano and Manager Clay Roper combine the nuances and artistry of making coffee with the palate and gustatory delight of drinking coffee. Telling the story of how they accomplish this is one of their favorite pastimes.

Third Coast Coffee Roasting Company occupies an unpretentious space in a small office complex outside of the bustle of downtown Austin. Although the company has a small coffee bar and a wall of coffee mugs to entice coffee drinkers, the place appears to be all about the making of coffee. Pallets of green coffee beans arrive from Cooperative Coffees, a collective of 24 roasters who purchase coffee according to Fair Trade relationships with their farming communities. Stacks of jute bags display the Cooperative Coffees logo and a description of the beans inside each bag. The five employees of the company take care to select, taste, re-taste, and taste again samples of beans that come from their growers. This process of tasting is called cupping by those in the trade and transforms Third Coast Roasting Company into a producer of something you drink rather than make. Clearly, Mr. Strand failed to imagine that some roasters could be occupied with both the making and drinking of coffee.

Once beyond the small coffee counter, a large floor-to-ceiling world map belies their main passion, the connection between the drinking and the producing of their coffee. Bright red pushpins mark each grower, most huddled in Central America, then down to South America, and a few sprinkled in Africa and Indonesia. And as if a colossal map weren’t enough to make their point, the roasters link their website to each of their growers through the use of Google Earth. Know Your Grower (You’ll need Google Earth to view this.) For these roasters, the urge to connect people to their coffee is irresistible and everywhere you turn you’ll find traces that lead from cup to country … and a little red pushpin.

Linking drinking to making coffee, the roasters work several roasting machines in the back of their space. Plastic buckets of green beans marked with flags of their country of origin line up aside each roaster, waiting the approval of Joe, the master roaster, as he fiddles with his roasting “recipes” on his laptop computer perched aside the active roasting oven. Joe’s background in the food business shaped his approach to roasting. He thinks of beans as food, assessing his roasts according to a bean’s texture, greenness, and a multitude of other characteristics that coffee aficionados boast about during their cupping sessions. Self-taught and intensely engaged with his custom roasts, he says he appreciates the knowledge a roaster builds up and would like someday to spend more time with the growers, enabling more collaboration and education within the coffee bean community.

Admiring his completed lists of roasts on the day of my visit, Joe swung open the overhead door next to his ovens and stook in the sunshine that poured into his shop after three days of rain. His looked up, took in the fresh air, and returned to bagging the just-roasted beans for wholesale customers, restaurants and farmers markets. The combination of making and drinking coffee seems easy for these roasters.

If you want to find a happy man, look no further than David Pitre. His smile tells it all, the love and appreciation that he has for his work, the land, and even, yes, escarole. David and his wife Katie own Tecolote Farm, an organic farm located just outside Austin, Texas. Blue eyes sparkling as he describes their enterprise, David loves seeds, especially heirloom varieties that yield lettuce leaves brushed with burnt-umber that arrive on his farms with names like Marvel of Four Seasons. Lettuce and other vegetables grow at Tecolote Farm (named after the owls that live near their farm), the first farm to have offered a CSA in the Austin area in 1994.

Why are David and Katie so happy? It couldn’t be the Texas drought, the fickle behavior of his favorite seed companies, or the economic downturn that shortened their list of CSA customers. But it might be their view that they make their own decisions about what to grow, their customers, and how they want to live. Working farmer’s hours, adapting to the challenges of weather and persnickety seeds, David and Katie exert their freedom to select and perfect the vegetable varieties for the Texas landscape while experimenting with seeds with odd names and unusual pedigrees. Over 150 vegetable varieties overcome the Texas drought to appear in Austin’s restaurants and on the tables of food lovers in Central Texas.

One area outside of this world of free choice is their chicken yard, Katie’s space where her own preferences are sure to prevail. Tecolote raises a flock of chickens that include Barred Rocks and a rotating list of chickens that  suits Katie’s own tastes. David uses his background as an agronomy student during the 1980s to good use, growing oft-ignored crops like escarole, radicchio, chicory, and sorrel. Their CSA customers receive these and other more common vegetables in woven baskets every week, sometimes with recipes that use their Belgian endive or elephant garlic. You get the idea that Tecolote’s customers are more than just the paying kind; they are part of the farm’s urge to explore new ways of eating off the land in Texas.

David grew up in Mexico City with a father who was an artist; Katie comes from Orange County, California, and the two of them raise their three teenage children on the farm along with three canine members of their family. In between growing seasons, they raise cover crops to prepare their soil for the next crops. Using turkey litter and rice hulls, they keep their soil ready to receive the next round of seedlings that emerge from Tecolote’s greenhouse, small, displaying purples, greens, and surprising hues of blue and red. On the day that I visited Tecolote, we walked through the rain-soaked muddy road to a pasture that was filled with garlic and shallots.

If you think that bacon belongs with breakfast then you’d find Austin’s new source for ice cream a nightmare. Anthony Sobotik and his partner Chad Palmatier, owners of LICK, scoop Breakfast Bacon, any time of day, especially not at breakfast. An artisan of the artistic kind, Anthony dreams of new flavors, creating not only bacon flavored ice cream, but other equally inspired combinations, such as Thyme and Honey, Cilantro and Lime, and Caramelized Carrots and Tarragon. Flavors like these are made from the dreams of Anthony who has spent nights and days experimenting with his unusual combination of flavors, milk and cream.

From a family that include parents and grandparents making sausage, raising bees for honey, baking bread, Anthony was surrounded by food and cooking from an early age. By the time he was eight years old, he was in the family kitchen frying up a batch of pancakes and baking biscuits. The first book he ever purchased was a cookbook at an estate sale.

Picky about ingredients, he uses milk produced by small, Texan dairies, the kind that are rapidly disappearing. Anthony and Chad use milk from the few remaining small dairy farms in Texas, drawing upon fresh raw milk, locally pasteurized and regularly delivered to Lick for the next batch of ice cream. The Jersey cows at Texas Daily Harvest produce milk that Anthony combines with ingredients used to infuse his latest recipe with a balance of cream and milk. Chad, trained as an interior designer, and Anthony, a long-time baker, draw on their skills in a rare combination of artistry and taste. The flavors are not Austin-weird, but subtle, surprising, creating a flavor resonance between ingredients such as chocolate, cayenne, and chipotle.

But the pure pleasure of producing these rare, provocative flavors is not in itself enough for these two. The enjoyment of sharing their ice cream with families, the odd skeptic, and other visitors to their shop is part of their business. Using ice cream cones that they make in their shop, they scoop out their ice cream to their fans who are finding them through Facebook and word of mouth. Soon they will deliver their novel scoops to Austin’s farmers markets and a few local grocery stores. For now, they have their hands full of 16 flavors developed from seasonal fruits, vegetables, and other locally produced ingredients. Even the marshmallows used in their Ranch Road flavor are made in Austin.

Meanwhile, Anthony is experimenting with a dark chocolate, olive oil, sea salt flavor, which is refusing to yield just the right taste and texture. Back in his kitchen behind the ice cream counter, he is infusing, stirring, cooling, and applying his artistry, which will some day produce the new chocolate concoction. What will he dream up next?

Robyn Metcalfe, Winter 2012 Austin Food Warrior

Melissa Brinckmann runs her small pastry business, Cake and Spoon, behind an unmarked door on the outskirts of Austin. But her fragrant, handmade pies are remarkable in every sense. Upon entering her kitchen, your senses take in the smell of buttery pastry dough, subtle spices from savory quiches, and sugary halos atop her ginger scones. For the past two-and-a-half years, Melissa has made her mark not only in the local farmers markets but also with her followers, including one shy customer who depends upon two of her blackberry almond shortbread bars every week.

Cake and Spoon Bakery delivers hand-sized cakes, quiches, scones, and other sweet and savory pastries. Born and raised on a ranch in Texas, Melissa has never been far from the country. Her parents worked a ranch in near Bellville, Texas and her childhood memories include meat from the neighboring ranchers, milk from the local cows, fruit from her family orchard. As a child, she baked in her parents’ kitchen to please herself, especially with her own peanut butter cookies. She has lived local all her life.

Her pastries reflect her local grounding. Local honey, eggs, vegetables, and pork fill her quiches, brimming with her enthusiasm for quality products at a reasonable price. Because of her philosophy and the Texas drought, some of her creations combine cheeses and other ingredients produced elsewhere in order to provide her customers with reasonably priced food, a suiting compromise for a cook who loves her customers.

From a family of four girls, Melissa spent her years before founding Cake and Spoon learning how to bake as a professional. About twenty years ago, she left the oil and gas business to begin a long and varied education in the pastry world. She worked in small and large restaurants, catering businesses, and kitchen management before teaming up with another baker who introduced her to the small tarts and quiches that now make their mark in Austin.  The baker, Tracy Carlos of Sticky Toffee Pudding Company (also in Austin), turned over her spot in Austin’s downtown farmers market, enabling Melissa to grow her own presence in the market. With her business she built on her partnership with Stacy to develop her own style and flavors.

The fillings in her quiches reflect her roots and imagination: Fresh bacon with vintage white cheddar and spinach with fresh sheep’s feta and ricotta (which she makes in her kitchen). Her sweet tarts envelop their fillings with flaky, hand-wrought crust: Chocolate hazelnut, Texas pecan, and frangipan with seasonal fruit are some of her signature desserts. Flapjacks, double ginger scones, lemon and lavender shortbread, all using available local ingredients appear at the three farmers’ markets that she attends.

Her kitchen is small and so is her staff. She and one other baker, Jasmine, turn out hundreds of small confections for her customers, some of whom have come to rely on her simple and fresh pastries. “My style is rough, simple, and fresh,” she explains.  And her instincts are good. Seems that her style fits the tastes of Austinians who appreciate her answer to overworked and complicated food. Melissa has earned her following and wants to keep things uncomplicated and small, just like her quiches and tarts.

Robyn Metcalfe, Winter 2012, Austin Food Warrior