a big difference.
Kate in the revamped kitchen that allowed their community-supported kitchen to expand to fifty customers.
Beyond being more in tune with their ethics and long-term financial well-being (because it was cheaper and improved the value of their home), it turns out the decision to stay underground meant success rather than financial ruin for Ben and Kate in the short term too. A month into the kitchen remodel in late summer 2008, the economy went into a nosedive. America’s obsession with flimsy housing built in sprawled-out suburbs and its addiction to easy credit and cheap oil had finally collided with reality, bringing our country to the precipice of financial collapse. The stock market bit the dust and foreclosures went through the roof. Subscriptions to Ben and Kate’s community-supported kitchen fell in half. Their hearts skipped beats whenever a new customer would cancel or, increasingly rarely, sign up. If they had been saddled with a $100,000 loan and rent on a separate space, bankruptcy would have been all but assured. They sat tight, concentrating on the quality of their meals, finishing the revamped kitchen, strengthening ties to local farms and trying not to freak out. It worked. By the next fall subscriptions started to pick up again, and by the spring of 2010 they had achieved their goal of 50 customers. The business was a success.
Here was an enterprise that was bringing healthy, fresh, delicious, local food to customers who needed the extra time to take kids to music lessons, stay late at work or just have some free time puttering around. It supported local farms and provided meaningful work to a couple who loved food, and allowed them to take care of their children at home. Yet it was impossible to accomplish this within the existing structure of the county’s health codes and zoning laws. Their community-supported kitchen was an untested model, and starting an untested business doesn’t make sense if you have to plunk down 100 G’s before you can see if it works. Ben and Kate would love for their business to be legit, not least of all so that they can show others that it’s a working, replicable model. But supporting a compliant kitchen away from home would require substantially more than fifty customers. First of all, it wasn’t clear how many additional customers there would be in their small town, but it would also require additional employees, and Ben and Kate had no desire to manage anyone.
So here is an example of regulation, originally required to ensure that larger food businesses do not sell unsafe products, ending up prohibiting the formation of smaller food businesses. To sum up the history: food businesses got too large and started making people sick. Governments required inspections and health codes. Political influence by these large businesses then tweaked the health laws to prevent smaller competitors from entering the market. Less competition made for bigger food companies, resulting in more food poisoning and necessitating even more regulation.
This all played out according to script with the Food Safety Modernization Act of late 2010. Massive agribusiness concerns mix different types of food inputs from all over the country, using waste from concentrated feed lots and slaughterhouses for growing fruits and vegetables. On a small scale and with proper composting, livestock waste is beneficial to farming, and the limited distances food from smaller farms travels makes spreading diseases and pathogens unlikely. But just like everything else in life, what is good in small doses quickly becomes poisonous in larger ones. Industrial farming’s callous production techniques and enormous waste creation, combined with the relentless transportation of inputs around the country, has led in recent years to contamination of a wide variety of once “safe” crops such as strawberries and spinach with potentially life-threatening–pathogens like e. coli and salmonella. The events of the past decade played out in the media, and some kind of political action finally became unavoidable. Tracking food from Big Agriculture became necessary, because of its nationwide and even international distribution. Being able to trace food to its source on such a large scale requires tracking equipment such as bar codes and computer recording equipment, and more frequent (or, I should say, less infrequent) inspections. There are a lot of fixed costs involved in this, and as with all fixed costs, the larger the operation, the easier it is to spread out those costs. The original intent of the law was to apply it to all farms, no matter their size, even though tracking food that is only sold in nearby markets and groceries is much easier, to say nothing of the fact that local food is much less likely to be contaminated. Big Ag was initially in favor of the law, because they knew it would pretty much wipe out their smaller competition, and at least give the appearance of a safer food distribution system. Most small farms would not be able to cope with the increased costs, and Big Ag knew it. Fortunately, agitation from those concerned with the health of their local food networks resulted in the Tester-Hagan amendment. Although far from perfect, it does exempt many smaller farms (less than $500,000 in revenue) from the law’s provisions. Big Ag did an immediate about-face once the amendment was introduced and tried to kill the law, but it went through anyway. Without the vigilance of local food activists, most small farms nationwide would have been driven underground.
Of course Big Ag screamed unfair. What’s fair about a marketplace that applies different rules to different entities, based solely on their size? It’s interesting to consider the alternative: a regulation-free environment where “the invisible hand,” so supposedly beloved by big business types, was allowed to operate. In this scenario, Big Ag would of course continue its race to the bottom. It would use the cheapest inputs possible, treat workers as callously as possible and try to make up for poor quality with expensive advertising and marketing. Since large outbreaks of disease have happened frequently even with some regulation, the likely result would be even more contamination. With such a complex chain of operations, it would be impossible to pinpoint where these large outbreaks of disease might have originated. The reputation of cheap food from Big Ag would be under constant bombardment. You would literally be risking the lives of yourself and your family every time you ate their food.
Unlike with such large-scale operations, Ben and Kate’s –community-supported kitchen, like small-scale food producers everywhere, is directly responsible to their consumers. To quote Ben: “As a business grows, quality declines. In food at least, this relationship between size and quality is absolute and immediate. Given that this relationship exists, scale-appropriate regulation acknowledges the relationship between growth and responsibility. A business should not be rewarded for unlimited growth without oversight, nor should it be penalized for investing in quality preservation and artisanal scale.”
An outbreak of sickness among Ben and Kate’s customers would likely be catastrophic for their business. In addition, they know and care about the people they are serving. They are their neighbors. Their kids play together. They live in the same neighborhood. They run into each other at the co-op. Direct human-to-human interactions between producer and consumer are the most effective form of regulation there can ever be.
I know nothing about running any kind of professional kitchen. I love to garden and cook, so I understand seasonality, but my meals are always cooked slowly, in small volumes, generally done with a cold beer or glass of wine in hand, and served immediately. My only restaurant experience was working at a Pizza Hut for two months when I was eighteen. I was unable to eat pizza for years afterwards. Talking with Ben made the stories I’d heard from friends who worked at or owned restaurants hit home. It takes a tremendous amount of work to get delicious local food to waiting customers.
The foundation of Ben and Kate’s community-supported kitchen is the local farms where they get the lion’s share of their vegetables, dairy and meat. Deep midwestern soils, ample rainfall and plenty of summer sun ensures foods of the highest quality can be grown. Of course, these amazing inputs are mostly used to grow cheap #2 corn by the silo-full, much of it used to feed our starving automobiles or make cows sick before they’re slaughtered. But fortunately the surrounding land, the farmers market and the co-op in their little burg support a great variety of dedicated farmers growing yummy veggies, raising pasture-raised pork, beef and chicken, and crafting artisanal cheeses. Deepening the relationship between their kitchen and the local farms is predicated on a respectful relationship, primarily with three local farms, one of which Ben used to manage. The farms know they are committed to buying their products, they give the farms as much lead time as possible for orders, there’s no haggling