Enter to win a year of dining out

Raffle tickets for the Year of Dining Out go on sale tomorrow. Ten dollars enter you to win 12 meals for two at some of the Bay Area's most delicious restaurants. Each ticket offers you four chances to win. Tickets will be sold every market day between now and October 3rd. They're also available in the CUESA office in the Ferry Building Monday-Friday. Winners are selected the night of the Sunday Supper, but need not be present to win. Participating restaurants include: Hayes Street Grill, Manresa, NOPA, Chez Panisse, Cyrus, and Perbacco. See a complete list here >

Preservation classes

2009 has been the year for do-it-yourself (DIY) food projects. As fall approaches and Bay Area produce reaches its peak, food lovers are brushing up on the skills they need to make the bounty of local food last well into the long months of winter. CUESA is joining this DIY movement by offering a series of classes as part of our Preservation Celebration.

Sauerkraut Made Simple ~ September 9
Kathryn Lukas, founder and kraut maker at Farmhouse Culture, will lead a two hour hands-on kraut class that will include history, science, health benefits, and a jar of kraut to take home. This evening class runs from 5:30-7:30 pm and costs $30. Buy tickets >

Cheese, Please! Making Mozzarella and Ricotta ~ September 10
Travis Flood, chef at Piccolo Teatro, will lead a class in making mozzarella and ricotta using curd sourced from vendors at the Ferry Plaza. Participants will take home the cheese they make, as well as some curd to practice their new skills at home. This class, co-hosted by Urban Kitchen San Francisco, runs from 5:30-7:30 pm. Register >

Panel: The Fruits of Their Labor ~ September 10

Truly sustainable food is not only healthy, humane, and environmentally sound, but also socially just. In honor of Labor Day, CUESA is sponsoring a panel to highlight the workers who feed us. Four experts will tell success stories of advancing working conditions in the fields and discuss how concerned eaters can stand up for fair food. Panelists include: Sandy Brown, co-owner of Swanton Berry Farm; Alida Cantor of California Institute for Rural Studies; Alegría De La Cruz, staff attorney for Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment; and Maisie Greenawalt of Bon Appétit Management Company. The panel is free, open to the public, and will be followed by a short reception with farmers’ market snacks. Learn more >

Central Coast Organic Farm Tour ~ September 27

Take in the abundance at two organic farms that sell at the new Thursday market on this visit to Thomas Farm and Dirty Girl Produce in Santa Cruz County. Jerry Thomas will show us around the farm he started in 1971, which remains one of the most diverse the county. We’ll see their flower field, orchard, and vegetables, and meet the family’s animals: a pig, chickens, and peacocks. At Dirty Girl in Watsonville, Joel Schirmer will take us to two locations where he grows beans, basil, strawberries, and more. He’ll also describe his methods for producing the dry-farmed tomatoes shoppers clamor for. The tour costs $25, including lunch made with farmers' market ingredients, and runs form 9 am to 6 pm. Buy tickets >

Introduction to Rooftop Gardening with Graze the Roof ~ Sept 12

Rooftop gardens are an attractive and effective response to urban challenges that provide many environmental and health benefits. In this workshop Graze the Roof will showcase inspiring roof gardens from around the world, introduce various methods, and demonstrate how to build your own self-watering container so you can be a part of the roofscape transformation in the Bay Area. More info >

Saturday, September 5 ~ Market to Table

11:00 am - Seasonal cooking demonstration
CUESA's market chef Sarah Henkin will prepare a dish using seasonal ingredients.

Tuesday, September 8 ~ Food Wise Booth

12:00 - 1:00 pm - CUESA's market chef Sarah Henkin will be giving out recipe cards and samples of a simple meal made with market ingredients.

Saturday, September 12 ~ Preservation Celebration

10:15 am - Seasonal canning demonstration
Todd Champagne, Happy Girl Kitchen

11:00 am - Seasonal cooking demonstration
Karen Solomon, author of Jam it, Pickle it, Cure it

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students' health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.” 

Jenkins and his colleagues at Slow Food USA have spent the summer organizing Time for Lunch, Slow Food’s first nationwide grassroots advocacy campaign focused on getting real meals in front of the 30 million children who eat in today’s cafeterias. At the core of the effort is the Child Nutrition Act, a bundle of legislation including the National School Lunch Program that is up for reauthorization by Congress at the end of this year.

To draw attention to the issue, Slow Food chapters in 49 states have planned a national Day of Action by staging 295 Eat-Ins — or potluck gatherings in parks, civic centers and backyards — as a way to engage communities, build bridges, and show Congress that school lunch is a priority.

“Lunch” might be a stretch

The biggest myth about school lunch, says Deborah Lehmann of the school food policy blog School Lunch Talk, is that kids are eating square meals in the middle of the day. Lehmann has spent the last 8 months visiting school cafeterias around the U.S. and interviewing the people who work there. In addition to kids who bring lunch from home and those who opt for the official lunch option, many of the students she observes piece together a mid-day meal entirely of snacks and so called "a la carte" foods. In one school she visited recently in the Santa Cruz area, Lehmann sat down with an administrator to look through records of what the students were eating and the results were astounding. “There were a number of kids eating a lunch of corn nuts, hot chocolate, Gatorade, and baked Cheetos.”

Because school cafeterias essentially function as stand-alone businesses that get no funding from school districts, they rely solely on the reimbursements they receive for free and reduced meals and the income they generate when students buy what they serve. It’s not hard to see why many have resorted to serving what students will buy. And the drive to create novel, kid-friendly products like bubble gum flavored apples and rootbeer flavored milk means kids don't have much reason to make healthy choices.

“School lunches have always been a reflection of what people are eating in America," says Lehmann. “Back when we served casseroles and spaghetti with meat sauce, that’s what kids were eating at home. Today they’re used to eating fast food and frozen food and processed food and restaurant food. So that’s what gets served.”

Fast School Food Nation

Of course, it’s the same forces that have shaped children’s diets outside schools that shape what they eat between classes. The problem dates back to the 1980s, when Congress opened the doors to private food service companies. 

When schools are given commodities from the USDA, most send them straight to companies to be processed. Over the years it has become much more cost-effective for schools to send their chicken, for example, to Tyson and to get it back in the form of chicken nuggets, than to prepare it in their own, often under-funded, low-function facilities.

Many of these companies, says Jenkins, have been perfectly happy to sell highly processed foods back to schools “at a below-market price because it meant that they were going to get their brands and products into the lunch room and potentially get customers for life.”

The solution? For starters, Slow Food is asking for one dollar more per student –- an increase that may seem large in light of the current $2.68 the government currently pays for school lunch reimbursements. But because students who pay for lunch would continue doing so, the total increase for reimbursements for free and reduced meals would only be around 18 million dollars, says Jenkins. It's a modest request that would “give nutrition directors and food service directors the baseline level of support they need to start bringing healthier options into the lunch room.” More funding, combined with education about growing and cooking food, could as Slow Food President Josh Veirtel wrote in a recent letter to the New York Times, represent a "turning point in the food movement" and "signal the rise of a national movement driven by the passion of ordinary citizens.”

Want to show your support for healthy school lunches? Attend an Eat-In this Labor Day. There are around 20 gatherings planned in the greater Bay Area, including these ones in: San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and Walnut Creek. Find one in your neighborhood >

Can't make it to an Eat-In? Visit the Slow Food USA site to sign the petition.

Are you San Francisco parent interested in joining the SFUSD school lunch advocacy group? Join SFUSDFoodFuture list serve.

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, September 5

Out: Bariani Olive Oil, Core Elations, Critical Edge Knife Sharpening, Knoll Farms, June Taylor Company, Massa Organics, Rancho Gordo, Shortnight Farms

 

Tuesday, September 8

Out: Critical Edge Knife Sharpening

Thursday, September 10

No changes

Returning and plentiful this month (weather willing):
Asian pears, dates, apples, summer squash and early winter squash varieties, French prunes, artichokes, bok choy, pomegranates, carrots in many colors, frisee, brown rice, Valencia oranges, basil, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, grapes, eggplant, peppers, wheat, persimmons, corn, onions, lettuces, okra, grass-fed beef, tomatoes, melons, potatoes, wax beans, shelling beans, and Romano beans, jujubes, jicama, radicchio, sweet potatoes, greens, long beans, radishes

Winding down/limited supply:
Pawpaws, prickly pears, peas, nectarines, peaches, pluots, figs, Gravenstein apples, lemon cucumbers, dill

Farms/Vendors that may be returning this month (weather willing):
Flying Disc Ranch

Value Added and Vendor items not to be missed:
French herb salt from Allstar, Tres perros dried chili mix from Tierra, Southern style cornbread mix from Ridegcut Gristmill

Featured Recipes for September

Pear and Spinach Salad from Trish Tracey, Ramblas Tapas Bar

"Drowned" Broccoli Rabe with Tomatoes & Pancetta from cookbook author Joyce Goldstein

Sausages & Plums Braised in Red Wine from cookbook author Molly Stevens

Apple Baby Galette from Kathleen Stewart Downtown Bakery & Creamery (September 27, 2008)

Cocktail ~ Apples to Oranges from Lou Bustamante, Hangar One Vodka (September 30, 2007)