Citrus festivities at the market  ~ Tomorrow

Come celebrate the California fruits that bring sweetness, tang, and a little bit of sunshine to the winter table. Get your dose of C with CUESA as we kick off another year of culinary education at the farmers' market.

Winter Farmers' Market Cocktail Night ~ February 18

For just $25, guests will imbibe 2 full-sized signature drinks, taste 12 seasonally inspired cocktails, and nibble on bites from local restaurants including Beretta, Conduit, Globe, Michael Mina and Zuppa. Guests are eligible to win bartending and farmers' market prizes by casting a vote for their favorite drink. Bartenders include H. Joseph Ehrman of Elixir, Sierra Zimmei of Seasons Bar at The Four Seasons San Francisco, Greg Lindgren & Jon Gasparini of Rye and Rosewood Bar, and others. Event takes place in CUESA's kitchen, under the arches of the Ferry Building. Buy tickets or learn more here >

Hands-on Artisanal Cocktail class ~ February 21

Join author Scott Beattie and distiller Marko Karakasevic in CUESA's Dacor kitchen from 2 to 4 pm. Participants will make three citrus-based drinks (Meyer Beautiful, Pelo del Perro or "Hair of the Dog," and Bleeding Orange) and learn about small-batch distilling. Instruction also includes side recipes, garnish how-to, foams, and rim sugars/salts. Drinks will feature Charbay spirits and fresh fruit from the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Signed copied of Beattie's book, Artisanal Cocktails: Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus, will also be for sale.  The class is $25 per person, and all proceeds benefit CUESA. Learn more or buy tickets here >

Fresh Food from Small Spaces talk ~ March 4

How local can you grow? Perfect for urban residents who don’t have a big yard, RJ Ruppenthal’s new book Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting reveals how to harvest something delicious from any patio, balcony, rooftop, windowsill, or cabinet. No space is too small or too dark! In this interactive talk, Ruppenthal will share ideas from his book and show examples of gardens in compact urban locations. A surprising variety of food can be grown in even the most cramped and paved of quarters—sprouts, mushrooms, ferments and cultures, vegetables, even berries and fruit trees! Reception to follow with some locally grown snacks. Admission is free. Event cosponsored by SFGRO, Garden for the Environment and Book Passage.

This is the second in a series of articles reporting on the 2009 Eco-Farm Conference. Read the first, about carbon sequestration, here >

 

We all want food free of mercury, salmonella, and E. coli. But is food safety just about the absence of contaminants?

For Jo Ann Baumgartner of the Wild Farm Alliance, true food safety starts with biodiversity, or the cultivation of a wide variety of life forms in every farm ecosystem.

A safe food system requires attention to every level, from production to food service. Whereas the current crisis around salmonella in peanut butter is drawing attention to the importance of sanitation at food processing facilities, the 2006 outbreak of E. coli in bagged spinach pointed a finger at raw produce and the farms that grow it. And while cleaning up large-scale food processing may improve safety, sterilizing farmland — or removing it of all life but the food crop — has in fact caused a great deal of controversy. Baumgartner's organization has been documenting the fallout of this strategy and its impact on farms. Unfortunately, she says, measures to make California agriculture safe in the short term could mean much less actual safety in the long run.   

“Farmers are being forced to implement misguided requirements,” says Baumgartner. “It’s not based on science and it is really harming wildlife and the environment,” she adds.

In response to the spinach contamination, farms that want to sell salad greens on a medium or large scale are being asked to comply with standards established by handlers and shippers. These standards require measures such as creating bare ground buffers at the edge of fields, the removal of hedgerows, and the addition of fences that block established wildlife corridors. In addition to removing habitat, many farmers are also trapping and poisoning wildlife. Baumgartner points to a 2007 grower survey conducted by the Monterey Country Resource Conservation District; 89% of the farmers who responded said they were taking some kind of measure to remove or fence out wildlife. Wild Farm Alliance also recently flew over the Central Valley with the help of volunteer pilots through LightHawk and found that over a mile of riparian trees had been cut down, among other things.

Biodiversity on the farm can actually help improve safety in a number of ways. Hedgerows and native grasses are home to beneficial insects, which can significantly reduce problem pests in crops and do away with the need for pesticides, and thus keep chemical residue out of our food. Native pollinators also make their home in hedgerows and wild areas. But that’s not where it ends; grasses and wetlands also act as filters, removing pathogens that may appear on farms near industrial scale livestock operations, where the cows are the most significant carrier of E. coli. According to a recent Wild Farm Alliance report, “just one meter of grass can filter E. coli from cow feces during a rainstorm.”

Baumgartner thinks the focus on eliminating vegetation and wildlife from farms not only removes an important safeguard, it also ignores what she believes is the source of the contamination: confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

Oddly, not much has been reported in the media about the potential links between CAFOs and E. coli. The extreme concentration in these facilities and the practice of feeding cows sub-therapeutic antibiotics make CAFOs a significant risk. Meanwhile, attention has instead been focused on animals such as deer, which, Baumgartner says, have only been shown to be carriers of the bacteria 1-2% of the time.

What can the average eater do? Buying salad mix directly from farmers — and bypassing the need for middle men like handlers and shippers — is an important start. That way, says Baumgartner, “you know your greens haven’t gone to a huge processing plant where they've been washed with a million other pounds of salad mix.” What's more, this choice also means the freshest produce.  
 
It might be equally important, however, for sustainability-minded eaters to help shift the idea that a dichotomy must exist between our wilderness and farmlands. Just thinking and talking about the link between biodiversity and food safety can make an impact.

“Do we want to confine diversity to pristine national park areas and sterilize our farm land?” Baumgartner asks. “I would say no. Instead, farms can be a buffer between developed areas and rural wild areas and benefit from the diversity that creates.”

See a Wild Farm Alliance PDF about biodiversity on the farm here >

This is the most up-to-date information about which sellers will be attending the market as of Friday. If there are no changes to a seller's status, they will not be listed. You'll find a list of which farmers regularly attend each market here. Please understand that there are often last-minute changes—it's the nature of farming!

Saturday, February 7

In: Apple Farm, Bernard Ranches, Bruins Farm, Knoll Farms, Mountain Ranch Organics (new)

Tuesday, February 10

No changes

Returning, plentiful and/or at their peak this month:
Asparagus, avocados, hot house tomatoes, ranunculus, plant starts, root vegetables, green garlic, cippolini onions, nettles, braising greens, chicories, broccoli, carrots, tulips, narcissus, mushrooms, Meyer lemons, fresh herbs, leeks, grapefruit, kumquats, fennel, flowering branches, Brussels sprouts, oranges

Winding down/limited supply:
Apples and pears (only available from cold storage), some citrus varieties including pomelos and clementines, winter squash, kiwis, persimmons

Vendor and value-added farm products not to be missed (weather willing): Meyer lemon and rosemary campagne from Della Fattoria, coastal sage soap from Juniper Ridge, dried Thai basil from Allstar Organics, quark from Spring Hill Cheese

Featured recipes for February:

Leek and Rapini Fritters from Angelo Garro with Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson, The Kitchen Sisters, authors of Hidden Kitchens.

Grilled Radicchio Salad with Pink Grapefruit, Pink Peppercorns and Garlic-Tarragon “Ranch” Dressing from Eric Tucker of Millennium Restaurant.

Nettle Gnocchi from Christophe Hille, formerly of A16 Restaurant

Hearty Brown Rice, Butternut Squash, and Kale Soup from CUESA's market chef, Sarah Henkin (prepared for the Food Wise Booth on Jan 20, 2009).