Chicago; January 17, 2010

I am the busiest un(der)employed person I know.

Soup and Bread is up and running again. We continue to sell cookbooks and expand our empire, and people are saying nice things about it — and me — on the internet. We are even going to New York in a few weeks, which should be super fun.

Day to day, I’m working constantly: wrangling recipes, posting photos to the blog, lining up cooks, taking meetings, shipping cookbooks, writing press releases, Facebooking, Twittering, picking up bread, dropping off donations.

And yet, I feel I’ve crossed some sort of recessionary line.

Last year was marked by some of the most personally fulfilling work of my life. Today I’ve got just barely enough cash to cover February’s rent.

I spend most of my mornings pecking away at the laptop from a sofa cushion that shares a corner with the cat scratcher. Little bits of catnip and shredded cardboard fluff invade my keyboard. I have wrangled a few part-time gigs here and there: consulting on marketing local foods, teaching a workshop on the food system to some eighth graders, writing copy for an online education firm.

I still have bartending, g-d love it. But the first week of Soup and Bread I gave half my tips to the bar back because I felt so bad about all the dishes she was stuck washing. That’s not a exactly a sustainable solution.

So this month I interviewed for a full-time job at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I applied for a short-term contract position with a local food policy group. I tried to spin my volunteer work into a paying gig.

So far, nothin’.

Friday I spent hours at the unemployment office trying, unsuccessfully, to reinstate my claim. After I gave up I congratulated myself on not crying till I got to the car.

One of my best friends, who has been un(der)employed for 2+ years, lost his apartment in November and has been living with me since Christmas. We sleep in shifts, like flight attendants, or members of a large immigrant family. Luckily he’s a night owl. When I wake up at 8 he moves from the sofa to the one bedroom.

People think this is crazy. The people I have told, that is. I haven’t told many because, see previous re: “crazy.”

But, it’s not so bad. In fact, most of the time it’s nice to have company. It is dark and warm and quiet in my tiny apartment, and we cook dinner and listen to music and insulate ourselves against the deep freeze and the images of devastation and horror that flicker across the muted TV. Watching disaster unfold on CNN being itself an obscene luxury for which I am grateful.

And, of course, it’s my birthday today. I am 42. For which I am also grateful, but how did THAT happen?

We’re not supposed to talk about all this. Being poor, and scared, and 42. The formula for underdog success runs towards the scrappy and ambitious and 25, right?

But it’s scary. Being broke and not-young messes with your head. It shoots static through the once-clear belief that you are a competent adult, able to navigate the world of work and commerce with only a socially acceptable dose of anxiety — enough to keep you wired but not so overwhelming it can’t be washed away by a good bitch session or a couple of pints. Lately, though, the disconnect can get so loud the dial tone drowns out the music, chills the warmth, blocks the light.

Maybe that’s why I’m posting this here, on a blog with all of 27 devoted readers, and not over on the soup blog, whose relentlessly positive  tone and practical content ensure a much wider audience.

Maybe if I put it out there, it will go away?

I did this little interview with Nance Klehm as a companion piece to an exhibit she participated in earlier this year called AgriART: Companion Planting for Social and Biological Systems.

Although the premise seems at first quite straightforward — “An array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption” — I confess I never quite understood what the curators here were getting at. I made a good faith effort, I swear, but the art-world language in which their exhibit is wrapped seems at once overdetermined and frustratingly opaque.The interview is perhaps rather free-associative as a result, but this bit here gets close to some more complicated truth:

M: It makes me thing that maybe the reason talking about this is so hard is that people (or, me….) are hardwired to interpret the natural world in terms of human experience. We are (I am) always unconsciously looking for metaphors and analogies. … but nature is just nature. The soil isn’t there to articulate life lessons! It’s just THERE….

N: Metabolising like the rest of us …

And, speaking of which, Nance has a new piece in Arthur in which she talks a bit about her “skeptical” relationship with interpreting what she does as art.

But, mostly she talks about chicken care. It’s inspiring.

[artwork by Alana Bailey]

But over on my other blog you’ll find more than you ever possibly knew you wanted to know about the very exciting, very lovely Soup and Bread Cookbook. Go there. You won’t be sorry. For real.

Bye.

Some months ago, my former colleague Mike Sula captured the attention of answer-man Cecil Adams with an admiring account of the bounty to to be found at Cleveland’s West Side Market and a plaintive query. “Even in this economy,” he wrote, “if a midsize rust-belt city can support a place like that, there’s no reason Chicago can’t. I’ve said it before: Chicago can never seriously consider itself a world-class food city until it builds a market like this. Why can’t we have a public market like Cleveland’s?”

Now, with the impending debut of the Metra Market, the question’s still got traction. Last month Art Shel Jackson [sheesh -- how did I do that?] published this thoughtful analysis on his blog, and over at the Local Beet Rob Gardner’s pulled together a useful roundup of  links to recent writings on the subject. All this local press (understandably) holds up markets in midwestern Milwaukee, Cleveland, Kansas City, and  even Toronto as points of comparison. But back in February Cecil also mentioned the market forever wrapped tight around my heart: Seattle’s Pike Place Market.

Smack in the middle of downtown Seattle at the foot of Pike Street, overlooking Elliott Bay, the market — whose name is frequently mangled by out-of-towners as “Pike’s Place” — celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2007. I spent a lot of time there in the 1980s, loitering at the newsstand that stocked exotic magazines like Harper’s and Interview, poking around in the anarchist bookstore, and smoking clove cigarettes in Victor Steinbrueck Park — and it hasn’t changed all that much in the intervening 20 years. It can be frustratingly clogged with tourists, especially on a nice weekend, but it’s also still full of weird little shops selling off-brand Asian tchochkes, dusty magic tricks, vintage postcards, Birkenstocks, bongs … you name it. I shot the following photos in late September, when I was home visiting my family for my father’s 70th birthday.

Fishmongers clad in chest waders and sturdy aprons take the place of honor at the Pike Street entrance. I didn’t get a photo of the famous flying fishes at Pike Place Fish (a practice that has come in for some heat of late) but this guy here, at a less flashy rival stall, is an appropriate cute-guy stand-in for the fish dude my friend K unsuccessfully wooed one summer in the late 80s.

If I have the timeline correct, she and I were living together in the U-District at the time. We ate a lot of fish that year.

After the fish zone come rows of stalls stocked to the gills (sorry!) with fresh produce.

Followed by a stretch of flower stalls run by Hmong farmers, who grow a blinding array of blooms west of the city in the Snoqualmie Valley. In late September it was apparently zinnia season.

At the north end of the market the trade shifts from fruits and flowers to handicrafts. Here, vintage Northwest hippies hawk silver jewelry and batik flags across from Native American artists selling woodwork and leather goods. I didn’t get a picture of this scene, but it’s up here in the northern zone that the market becomes less clogged with tourists and more the market I remember from my childhood. Beyond the retail corridors the market is also home to about 500 low-income residents, who live in property managed by the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority. I’m no authority, but I’d hazard that this residential population gives the market a certain stability. Though Seattle has changed radically since I was a kid — thanks to the double whammy of the grunge and dot.com booms — I can’t imagine the market will never get truly slick as long as there are still knots of crusty punks panhandling and still clutches of craggy-faced men, too loaded to be truly menacing, hanging out by the totem pole in the park. I find this comforting.

The market itself is also a bit of a museum of Seattle’s commercial history. Above, for example, is the sign outside the Original Starbucks — once upon a time the only place in town for aspirational yuppies to buy an espresso maker and a pound of dark-roast beans.

And just up the hill a bit is the original Sur La Table, which is still crammed to the ceiling with pots, pans, gadgets, linens, and Le Creuset cookware in just about any imaginable shape and color.

But, again, the heart of the market — for me — can be found in the dusty little places I’ve been hitting for years. Tenzing Momo, in a little atrium off the south market’s south wing, is an “herbal apothecary” stocked with everything from acacia flower to yohimbe bark. The smell of nag champa is sort of overwhelming, but if you can get past that you can get lost in the array of tarot decks and essential oils in every scent known to man and animal. (My current olfactory indulgence is a homemade blend of “white tea” and civet — which I’m sure will horrify my more perfume-savvy friends.)

More memories: For one long summer in 1987 I worked the breakfast shift at a cafe in Pioneer Square. I was living in a grotty little north-end apartment with too many people, and if I wasn’t quite the only one who had a job, I was definitely the only one getting up at 6 in the morning. I’d get off the bus at the market, where at that hour the only signs of life came from a few bakeries and delivery trucks, and stop in here for a pint of of carrot-apple-ginger juice. Then I’d drink my juice and walk the dozen blocks down First Avenue to work, where the early morning guy would make me a fine espresso. At the end of the summer, I slept with him.

Sometimes on my way home from working and flirting with the morning guy I’d stop here for a snack — delicious steamed buns stuffed with just a spoonful of meat (or veggies, or … mayonnaise). To this day, though, I remain scared of the “ham and corn” bao.

And then there’s this little shop — tucked into a corner of the Sanitary Market mall. The name may tout its collection of woks and bowls, but throughout high school this was the go-to spot for footwear. My friends and I all had extensive collections of their rubber-soled cotton espadrilles, which came in a rainbow of colors and sold for something like $12 a pair. If you were daring you could also pick up a pair of what we came to term “suicide shoes” — stretchy vinyl slippers with pointy toes, some rhinestone ornamentation, and the slipperiest soles ever created. They were predictably lethal when worn by a crew of drunk 16-year-old girls.

It’s these odd little outfits — and the dubious fish and chip stands, the head shop in the basement, the multiple vintage/rocker clothing stores, and the smell of fresh fish and diesel early in the morning — that I miss. I hate to get all nostalgic about “authenticity,” but with a CVS as its anchor I have a hard time imagining there’s this room for this kind of weirdness in the plans for Metra Market.

EDITED TO ADD: I just found this nice, comprehensive essay on the market’s history. I now really want to change the title of this post to “an honest place in a phony time.”

“Some greenhouses grow vegetables. Some grow flowers. What grows at the two gleaming 2,500-square-foot greenhouses rising from a gray industrial district at South Canal Street and 14th Place is a bit more complex.”

Really great story on the Greenhouses of Hope at PGM in this weekend’s Sunday Tribune Magazine. Though it does remind me how bummed I was I wasn’t around when the former resident — unnamed in the story, but who dropped out after eight months in the program and whose reappearance provided the Tribune reporter with a sweet lede — turned up unexpectedly to say “hi.”  Dude — come back and visit again!

Soup and Bread: The Cookbook

When I went to the Forgotten Fruits workshop up in Madison earlier this  year, one thing seemed sort of off. All the trees looked like this one.

March = not exactly peak apple season.

Next week, tho, RAFT brings its apple program to Chicago just as the Pippins are starting to fall from the trees. I’m looking forward to Thursday’s workshop at the Botanic Garden, which is led by RAFT majordomo Gary Nabhan in conjunction with gregarious cider expert Ben Watson. It looks like it  will revisit much of the information from the spring, with perhaps more of a focus on increasing accessibility to and availability of heirloom apple varieties in urban markets.

I was both inspired and utterly overwhelmed by the wealth of information presented in Madison, in particular the collective knowledge of the apple old-timers, who came from orchards across the country to put their heads together and figure out how to keep the American Summer Pearmain, the Pomme Royal Dyer, the Transcendent Crab, and a host of other gloriously named fruits alive. Sadly these men — many of them lifelong apple growers, and many of them in their 70s and 80s — will not be at the Chicago workshop. But, on the plus side perhaps this time my head will not explode.

Two public events bookend the workshop: On Wednesday at 2 PM Nabhan and Wisconsin orchard-keeper and apple historian Dan Bussey host a field trip to historic Kline Creek Farm. And on Thursday at 6 PM Nabhan and Watson get down to business with an heritage apple and cider tasting at Southport Grocery;  proceeds benefit the excellent Chicago Rarities Orchard Project (or “CROP”), a fledgling orchard project spearheaded by a handful of Chicago’s own fruit freaks. (One of them is also a soup freak.) For more info on all this see the Slow Food Chicago site.

All the apple action is happening in conjunction with next week’s Chef’s Collaborative National Summit, which is convening in Chicago on Tuesday at Kendall Collge to rally the culinary troops around the theme “Bringing Sustainability to the Table.” Now, locally grown produce, snout-to-tail eating, and on-site compost may all seem like no-brainers in Chicago, where you can’t throw a fork without hitting a plate of rooftop-grown microgreens, but get outside the Mado-North Pond-Publican axis and there are still a whole lot of Sysco cans on the shelf out there. (Though I shouldn’t dis Sysco. The committment with which this industry giant — for so long the easy fall guy for all that’s wrong with the food service business — has thrown its considerable weight behind the cause is both fascinating and heartening.) Restaurants notoriously operate on razor-thin margins, and the current economic climate is making things particularly rough and bulk buying particularly seductive. So, IMHO, any effort to bring together professionals to try and hash out a way to run a sustainable business and stay in business is vital, now more than ever.

With speakers ranging from Rick Bayless to Fred Kirschenmann, president of Dan Barber’s Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and a longtime force behind the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State (ground zero for much critical research underpinning those long lines at the Green City Market — this white paper on the disappearing “agriculture of the middle” is particularly good, if nerdy, reading) the summit looks to be a rich day and a half. There’s even a panel on local beer, wine, and spirits, a subject ever-near and dear to my heart.

It should be a busy week.

Stringing together even two interesting words has seemed a challenge of late. Late-summer lethargy? Age-related brain cell loss? Allergies? Who knows. Who cares?

Here, instead, are are some pretty pictures, shot this morning in the greenhouse and gardens behind the Pacific Garden Mission. PGM is a Chicago institution; originally founded in 1877, the shelter stood at 646 S. State for 84 years. Its huge neon cross, declaring “Jesus Saves,” was an icon of the South Loop.

The mission relocated to a spiffy new “green” building in 2007, following an eminent domain claim by the city, which wanted to expand the adjacent Jones College Prep. The new, Stanley Tigerman-designed facility, in a nameless nowhereland somewhere between the South Loop, Chinatown, and Pilsen, features a green roof of native plants, solar-thermal panels, low-flow water fixtures, and a host of other ecoconscious amenties. Running along the south wall of the building, just across a chain-link fence from the UPS parking lot, are the greenhouses.

I’ve been volunteering here since January, but haven’t written much about it because a) I wanted to respect the privacy of the residents who work with us in the greenhouse program and b) you try writing about working with the homeless without sounding like some smug, self-righteous jerk. Everytime I tried I hated myself.

Anyway. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve been getting some nice press lately, the gardens have hit a stage of full-on late-summer blowsiness, and today I finally remembered to bring my camera. Above, Saad and Sayre discuss how to make a dill pickle glow. (Seriously.) Above them is a view of the west greenhouse, and above that are a few shots of the beautiful butterfly garden.

Before we got our hands on it, it looked something like this.

But now: butterflies!

Actually, I’m fudging the facts. There *are* butterflies everywhere — along with all sorts of other flying bugs — but this monarch is actually hanging out in the vegetable garden, which occupies a long, narrow strip of land outside the greenhouses. 

Here, some kale is tucked into a bed of marigolds.

While here, fennel is going — gloriously — to seed.

Here’s the long view.

And here are some golden tomatoes. I don’t know the varietal — we started a lot of mystery seeds this winter. But it’s possible — or, really, probable — that Nance does.

Here’s Jose, examining the largest praying mantis I have EVER FREAKING SEEN. It crawled out of the greenhouse and onto Sayre’s T-shirt before making for the basil.

What? You can’t see it?

There you go. Too bad I didn’t get a picture of last week’s pair of hornworms. Now I can’t find them anywhere, which is a little freaky.

Inside are caladium ….

…. figs ….

… succulents …

… and fish. Someday, once we’ve figured out how to not kill these guys, we may upgrade to tilapia.

This above may be my favorite area of all. It’s an experiment in laissez-faire horticulture, a riot of botany gone wild, where dill and fennel and brussels sprouts have bolted long ago and now reach their crazy feathery fronds to the ceiling. It’s a weirdly prehistoric landscape in miniature that, honestly, defies description. Above, in the foreground, are some volunteer cherry tomatoes. I don’t know where they came from, but I guess tomato seeds must be quite mobile, and hardy, as we are constantly weeding out tiny tomato sprouts from the containers in the greenhouse. By all appearances I’d guess this set just landed on this little pile of miscellaneous soil, found it hospitable, and, against all odds, started to thrive.

My story on anarchist coffeepreneur David Meyers and the nascent Chicago Coffee Confederation is up/out now at/in the Reader.

What didn’t make it into the story so much is the larger picture of the Chicory Center philosophy. Meyers’s On-the-Fly Farm is sort of operating at a low simmer right now, but the idea was (and remains) that a percentage of all the produce he harvests gets directed to low-income communities; for a while he had a table at the Humboldt Park farmers’ market and last year he donated it to Sarah’s Circle, a women’s shelter in Uptown. David describes himself, wryly, as an “advanced beginner” at all this food and farming stuff, but the larger quote, from which the lede was extracted, speaks to some deeply held ideals — and, it should be noted, was delivered punctuated by many self-deprecating giggles.

“Right now the farm is a placeholder. Pretty much everything I do comes out of anarchist activism, rather than an end in itself. It’s a way to build community and further these social goals, while getting to know people over a long period of time. I think we’re experimenting in an organic way and not a theoretical way, to create a new kind of village. I just realized that coffee was easier than farming and I should concentrate on that for the time being. But I do not love roasting coffee!”

Also, at some point during all this I wrote down a Wes Jackson line he quoted. It seemed pertinent. 

To wit:  ”Farmers are the only people I know who wear the hats of their oppressor on their heads.” 

Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel kicks off the new soup season at Hull-House on August 25. More, here.