California Culinary Academy Farmer Series ~ August 12

Thanks to a recent collaboration with CUESA, the California Culinary Academy (CCA) is hosting a series of farmer lunches and dinners in the student restaurant, Carême 350. The prix fixe meals mark the culmination of each class' culinary education. The next event — lunch from 11:30 am to 1 pm or dinner from 6 to 8 pm — will feature fruit and vegetables from Dirty Girl Produce. Tickets available through Open Table.

Taste Catering Benefit for CUESA ~ August 11

Taste Catering is celebrating the unveiling of its own "Taste" tomato with a dinner benefiting CUESA and Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE). This flavorful new tomato, grown by Baia Nicchia Farm and Nursery at the Sunol AgPark, is a combination of the Maglia Rosa and Zucchero varieties and will be served as part of a three-course meal at Macy's Cellar on Wednesday, August 11. See the menu.

Help Build a Community Kitchen for Brentwood Farmers

Farmer Kristie Knoll of Knoll Farm is involved in an effort to get a nonprofit community kitchen built though a Pepsi Refresh grant. The kitchen would help farmers like Kristie "add value" to their produce. By creating value-added products, farmers can extend their market season and generate extra revenue to keep them in business. What makes this kitchen different from typical commercial kitchens is that it is nonprofit, and it provides a chef to help the farmers develop their own unique recipes for pies, pastries, sauces, jams, jellies and other food items. Vote.

Shopping with the Chef: Melissa Perello

Every week CUESA's market manager Lulu Meyer gets an in-person peek at what the Bay Area's top chefs are buying from Ferry Plaza farmers and writes about it for the 7x7 Magazine website. This week she traversed the market with Melissa Perello, executive chef at Frances.

Chewing on Food Justice - Fruits of our Labor ~ August 10

The first in a series of related conversations, this first event will examine the food system from a labor perspective, featuring business owners' and workers’ points of view. Learn more.

 

Paul Greenberg, Author of Four Fish at Book Passage ~ Tonight

Award-winning journalist Paul Greenberg presents Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey from Norwegian mega fish farms to the South Pacific, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus—salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna—and examines where each stands at this critical moment in time. The reading takes place at Book Passage in the Ferry Building at begins at 6:00 pm.

CUESA at SF Chefs ~ August 13

CUESA will be participating in the opening night of SF Chefs with the "Hog in the Fog" reception in Union Square on Friday, August 13. If you are planning to attend, stop by our table to enjoy farmers market salumi, cheeses, and an assortment of locally grown stone fruit, grapes and figs. Learn more about the event.

Get 10% off Admission to the Bioneers Conference

Bioneers—a leading source of breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet—presents its 21st annual conference on October 15-17, 2010. This premiere environmental conference features social and scientific innovators who share new ideas and tools that enable people to catalyze positive change in their own communities. This year's conference will feature farmer and author Michael Ableman, filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia, and Stonyfield Farms "CE-Yo" Gary Hirshberg, among others. To save 10% off of nonmember prices, just use coupon code CUESA10 while registering. (Offer is valid on theater tickets for one, two, or three days and expires August 31.

Saturday, August 7 ~ Market to Table

11:00 am - Seasonal cooking demonstration and book signing
Nan Chase, author of Eat Your Yard: Edible Trees, Shrubs, Vines, Herbs, and Flowers For Your Landscape

Tuesday, August 10 ~ Food Wise Booth

12:30 - 'til whenever the food runs out - Market chef Sarah Henkin will give out recipe cards and samples of a simple meal made with market ingredients. She'll also be on hand to offer advice for all your seasonal meal planning.

Saturday, August 14 ~ Market to Table

11:00 am - Seasonal cooking demonstration
Elizabeth Binder, Bar Bambino

11:45 am - Seasonal cooking demonstration and book signing
Andrew Swallow, author of Mixt Salads: A Chef's Bold Creations

All programs take place in CUESA's Dacor teaching kitchen, in front of the Ferry Building on the north side.

Urban farming is on the tip of everyone’s tongues these days. But what about peri-urban farming, or growing food at the urban edge? For Sibella Kraus, director of the nonprofit organization Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE) and founder of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, this approach is a promising piece of the food system puzzle. Not only do nearby farms provide fresh produce for city residents, but they allow interested farmers to grow food without having to commit to living in rural areas.   

“Some folks are ready to move to places like Watsonville or the Capay Valley and really build up a good sized farm,” says Kraus. “In other cases, you may have a couple and one person wants to farm and the other person wants to have a job in the city…I think there are lots of different kinds of circumstances where this edge really makes sense.” And while farmers with small plots just outside cities can make a living off five or ten acres, getting a hold of the land is another story. “Small plots are really straws in the wind when it comes to the politics and economics of urban edge land use,” she adds.

A few years back, Kraus and her colleagues at SAGE devised a possible solution in the form of an agricultural park, a piece of land that could not only be leased to a number of small-scale farmers, but could also serve as an educational space and a model of natural resource stewardship.

In 2006 — after a few years of research and planning and an in-depth feasibility study —  SAGE began a collaboration with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which owns several pieces of land outside the city for the purpose of transporting water from the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The result is the 18-acre Sunol Agriculture Park, which currently houses four small organic farms: Iu-Mien Village Farms, Terra Bella Family Farm, Baia Nicchia Farm and Nursery, and Fico, a specialty fig operation. (People’s Grocery was also farming several acres until recently).  Each farm leases the land, while SAGE has provided useful infrastructure, such as a farm manager, fences, roads and a flexible irrigation system that allows multiple farms to access water at once. On the land stewardship side of things, SAGE has also developed and maintains hedgerows and filter strips that help protect the watershed and ensure that all farms provide enhanced habitat for pollinators and beneficial insects.

Iu-Mien Village Farm is a great example of the type of incubation the AgPark has made possible. The farm is leased by the East Bay Asian Youth Center, which received a multi-year grant to support Mien families (an indigenous ethnic population from Laos) interested in farming. For the last three years, five families have been able to grow food for themselves and for barter, selling just enough to pay for gas.

“These were families that wanted to farm in Oakland, but didn’t have land,” explains Lew Chien Saelee, who coordinates the program for EBAYC. She says that while a location closer to Oakland would have been ideal, “it was very good they got the land. For some of these families, all their experience before now was in farming.” The climate in Sunol is perfect for growing many of the same vegetables that grow in Laos, like long beans, squash and onions. On the other hand, says Saelee, farming in rural Laos is chemical free and rain is common year-round, so the need to follow certified organic standards and irrigate the fields did present a learning curve for these farmers during the first year of the project.

One Mien family had grander goals to farm on a commercial scale. They were given the use of more land to produce organic strawberries (a crop that is generally more lucrative than vegetables) to s to both Berkeley’s Monterey Market and Whole Foods.

Currently around a dozen schools visit the AgPark every year, but — now that the farms on the land have become somewhat established — SAGE has plans to build a permanent interpretive center that would provide learning opportunities for thousands of school kids on a regular basis.  SAGE is also consulting on several other potential agricultural parks in the area, including one in San Jose.

While the goal with the Sunol park was not to mandate that farmers work as a collective, Kraus says the shared acreage has helped foster a spirit of cooperation. “The farmers have helped each other out — swapped services or supplemented each other’s CSA boxes,” she says. “That’s all been really great to watch.”

Market Update

Seasonality Synopsis for August