of Christ’s Last Supper, the breaking of bread after a day of fasting during Ramadan, or a Passover Seder. By sharing meals with one another we create bonds that are enduring and magical.
The food we don’t have the time, energy or space to grow and cook ourselves can also be an excellent opportunity for expanding our roots in the community. Shopping at farmers markets, actually getting to know the people who grow your food and supporting their vast efforts, buying your victuals from community-owned cooperative groceries and eating at local restaurants that patronize nearby farms help bring that community-building magic to life.
Much of this was in evidence when I stopped for a few days in a small midwestern college town on the advice of Brett Bloom, a virtual acquaintance who has spearheaded an amazing variety of grassroots projects. Among a dozen other goings-on, Brett and his wife were moving to Denmark just before I arrived. How he had the time to correspond with a meandering writer and give me not just platterfuls of mind-bogglingly cool leads all across the country, but also set me up with a place to stay and home-cooked meals from the director of the farmers market, Lisa BK and her husband Jim, I’ll never understand. In the front yard garden of the quaint bungalow where he arranged for me to stay was a testament to his last project, a bat box on a 12-foot pole. Bringing nature into urban environments through DIY community-led projects is one of Brett’s modus operandi, more of which can be found at temporaryservices.org, and I know that small college town is worse off for their departure.
One of Brett Bloom’s DIY urban bat boxes, in the front yard of the lovely home he set me up in.
Unfortunately, the first news I received in this idyllic burg, trapped though it is on all sides by a never-ending industrial corn desert, was grim. The self-described “underground chocolatier” that I had been intent on meeting had died the day before. We had traded a few e-mails and already set up a lunch date for me to hear his story. This depressing news sucked the wind from my sails and my first inclination was to lock myself up in the house and recover for a few days from the intense heat wave that had just broke.
But the little college town, and especially farmers market director Lisa BK, had too much pulsating energy to allow me to sit still for long. Much of what was on offer in the form of the local food movement was aboveboard, as should be expected. The thriving farmers market and a newly expanded cooperative grocery were testament to the community’s love of food, all the more poignant for it being not just stuck in the midst of vast fields of genetically modified corn, but also home to the state’s Ag university, a sprawling complex of labs and experimental fields where probably only the devil himself knows what heinous crimes were being perpetrated against mother nature.
The co-op was very interesting to me, mostly because I was on the board of a start-up cooperative grocery, Durham Central Market, back home. I interviewed Jacqueline, the general manager, getting great advice on fundraising ideas, but then as we starting talking about my book project, an interesting little gem popped out. Jacqueline told me about a clandestine community-supported kitchen run out of their home by a local couple, Ben and Kate, who did a lot of their shopping at the co-op. With a quick phone introduction from Jacqueline, I was in.
I jumped on my borrowed bike and pedaled over to their home, just a few blocks from where I was staying. Ben and Kate were at home waiting on a delivery from a local farm. As we chatted about their enterprise for an hour or so, I was struck by how thoroughly sincere and respectable this couple was. They were both obviously motivated by a deep passion for food and their neighbors, and imbued with a stellar work ethic. Their two young boys frolicked on the patterned rug in their cozy living room as we spoke. Bonnie and Clyde they were not. Here were wholesome outlaws making delicious food for their community, in contrast to the legalized crimes being perpetrated by many of the farms just outside of town, whose excess fertilizers and pesticides flow down the Mississippi to poison the Gulf of Mexico, and whose third-rate product is force fed to sick cows in concentrated feed lots a few states to the west, making vast swaths of our country reek of shit and death.
So how did the idea of a community-supported kitchen come about? And what makes it illegal? In many municipalities, exchanging prepared food for money is illegal, unless it comes from an inspected kitchen such as a restaurant or catering business, or is done at the client’s home by a personal chef. But Ben and Kate had come across a demand for something in the middle that was neither a restaurant, catering or being a personal chef, and they did so quite by accident. A friend who had done some underground catering gave Ben a call, to see if he would be interested in preparing two to four meals a week for an acquaintance named Nancy, something the friend himself wasn’t interested in. The idea of being a personal chef didn’t appeal to Ben, but he and Kate sat down one Sunday at a cafe and gave the idea a thorough going over. While preparing meals for one family would require a huge expense to make it feasible, it didn’t take long to figure out that it wouldn’t add that many more hours of work to radically increase the number of meals prepared, and hence the potential number of customers. The idea of community-supported agriculture, where shares of veggies grown on a farm are allotted to customers and are paid for in advance, quickly sprung to mind. Why not do the same thing with prepared meals? Customers could pay in advance and then receive a few dinners a week, all prepared from fresh, local ingredients. Ben was getting burned out as a manager on a local farm, and had plenty of chef experience. Working at home would allow both he and Kate to work together and take care of their expanding family. The idea of the community-supported kitchen was born.
Ben and Kate’s little boy does a little quality control with the shiitakes before they go on the stove.
Ben and Kate told Nancy about their willingness to cook for her, but only if she could help round up a few more customers to see if the model would work. In early October of 2007, they had the customers and were ready to try it out. They made stir-fried vegetables with garlic sauce and sweet potato noodles for one meal, and a second of eggplant dumplings with roasted red pepper sauce and couscous. They were a hit. More shares came in, a few more each month, and the business started to take off. Starting a business is never easy, and Ben and Kate had their work cut out for them. Kate was working full time during the day, Ben was waiting tables three or four nights a week, and their nine-month-old boy needed constant attention. Being a local food outlaw was no walk in the park.
Edamame and red peppers on noodles, one of the delicious meals coming out of Ben and Kate’s community-supported kitchen.
But the strain of preparing more and more meals (they had a target of 50 customers) in a cramped kitchen with seven-foot ceilings, a leaky roof, no exhaust, little room for racks to put food coming out of the oven, crappy lighting and old appliances quickly made the project seem untenable in the existing circumstances. It was crunch time. Do they look to rent a place, outfit it with all the required but not always necessary equipment to become health code compliant, or do they risk a remodel of their existing kitchen — against zoning regulations that prohibit mixed commercial and residential uses — for a third of the cost so they can continue to take care of their boy, with another infant on the way, and greatly increase the value of their home? The latter, of course, was against the law, but other than that, all logic pointed towards it. Their customers did not care if their food was coming out of an inspected kitchen. They knew Ben and Kate personally and trusted them implicitly to not only prepare their food using as many local and organic ingredients as possible, but to also keep their kitchen clean. There were other financial and ecological costs to consider as well between the two options. An inspected kitchen likely meant using one-time disposable containers for delivery, and having to “sanitize” all their kitchen equipment using chlorine bleach. Harmful bacteria levels are pretty much equivalent whether kitchen equipment is washed using bleach, a vinegar/water solution, or hot, soapy water. Yet health code regulations require bleach. Chlorine is a toxic substance, proven to cause bladder, rectal and breast cancers. Vinegar is not toxic — it is food. When you personally know