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Co-Authored with Lee Glenn
Every Saturday of the year, the San Francisco Ferry Building is alive with a magnificent farmers’ market. Camped in with the veggie, fruit, meat, fish, bread, flowers, food and coffee vendors is CUESA, the organization that manages the market. At their tent with seating for 100, CUESA produces and leads a weekly educational outreach focusing on sustainable foods allowing farmers to showcase their products and chefs to conduct cooking classes using the products of the market.
One gorgeous San Francisco summer day, I’m at the market as usual and find myself captivated by Janet Brown’s CUESA presentation on hydrosols and essential oils. Janet is demonstrating how herbs and flowers grown on her farm, AllStar Organics, are made into value added products that have positive impacts on personal wellbeing.
Learning more about this process requires a full day visit to Janet and partner, Marty Jacobson’s farm locations in Petaluma and Nicasio, plus their workshop and field in Lagunitas…all three north across the Golden Gate Bridge. For the past 20 years, they have poured over seed catalogs to find unique, commercially viable, heirloom varieties of specialty produce.
“20 years ago, we were just starting out. We began growing heirloom tomatoes at a time when nobody heard of heirlooms and we hadn’t seen any before. It was a great experiment. We ordered seed from around the world. As the different varieties matured, we weren’t sure if they were going to stay green or if the yellow ones were going to turn red or stay yellow.”
Recalling the stress of that first year, Marty added: “When we went to introduce our product to the local grocery store, they weren’t familiar with heirlooms so they passed.”
Janet was and is, a die-hard Martha Stewart fan because of Martha’s focus on gardens, the home made and the hand crafted. That same month, Martha Stewart’s magazine showcased heirloom tomatoes on the cover.
“We went back to the grocer and showed him the cover and he purchased our crazy tomatoes and pinned the magazine cover up next to the display. We’ve been refining our business to stay ahead of the market ever since.”
Today, they’re known for providing unique and delicious organic vegetables to local grocery stores including Good Earth in Fairfax, Whole Foods/Blythdale in Mill Valley and Woodlands Market in Kentfield. They grow a mix of delicious heirloom tomatoes including Red and Yellow Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Cherokee Purple, and Big Rainbow.
Their research on the most delectable varieties of Asian Kabocha (Japanese for squash) led them to heirlooms Hokkaido and Tetsukabuto. They always sell out of squash. They also produce yellow snow peas, rainbow chard and shishito peppers, exclusively for the famous Slanted Door. Other well known Bay Area restaurants they supply include Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak, Seven Hills, Marla Bakery, Market Bar Cafe, Marin County’s Picco, and Oakland’s Bocanova.
In their quest to discover hard-to-find produce, onions are their latest love, including the coveted Calcot onion. Calcot is considered a delicacy in Spain. Thousands flock to enjoy the tender and sweet, blanched onion stems at annual festivals called Calcotada. Streets are blocked off for grills and long communal tables seat those trying the charred Calcot. Grilled and rolled to steam in newspaper, then served on a red clay roof tile, the Calcot’s high sugar content ensures a fragrant, caramelized treasure…succulent, sweet, not biting.
Janet believes:
“There is a natural alliance between independent, local or regional grocers and small-scale, organic, local farms. This connection provides an important edge for the grocers by offering customers exceptional produce that is fresher and organically grown, heirloom varieties that are unique and nutritious, and foods that are connected, culturally, economically and geographically, to the land and communities around them.”
“…and when a grocery chain like Whole Foods dedicates stores to purchasing local rather than importing food that undercuts the local farm economy, it’s a serious change….a quantum leap for a farm like us.”
The second half of our day was spent in Janet’s workshop where her failure to sell rose bouquets to the upscale floral market, gave birth to producing hydrosols and essential oils. A friend suggested she could distill rose water from her organic rose petals so she commissioned a custom still and began distilling…
Rose water is soothing, calming and sublimely scented.
After rose water, Janet started experimenting with other plants growing on the farm, studying their medicinal benefits through history. This led to producing five different essential oils and eight hydrosols, the vapors captured while making essential oils. Instead of discarding these precious droplets, Janet bottles them to be sold along with the essential oils.
One would think that growing unique produce for the local markets, coupled with producing medicinal, natural products, would be enough…but apparently not for Janet and Marty. A couple of years ago, they started another experiment: drying herbs and formulating herb blends for the value-added market.
In true Janet style, dried herb production grew out of a harvesting mistake that resulted in 22 pounds of Thai basil instead of the two pounds she had intended. Determined not to waste 20 pounds of Thai basil, she initially developed a primitive, improvised process for drying the herb. After 10 years and multiple changes to the process, today they have a professional dehydration room complete with a digitally controlled propane ceiling furnace and industrial dehumidifiers.
Another element of Allstar’s diverse program has been its relationship with award-winning, local, artisan cheese-maker, Cowgirl Creamery. Allstar grows and dries proprietary blends of herbs for two of their seasonal cheeses. A blend of dried sweet and hot pepper flakes for their Devil’s Gulch winter cheese and a blend of Thai Basil, Chamomile, and field flowers, for their Pierce Point spring cheese, are unique ingredients coating the outside of these delicious products.
Creatively combining what’s at hand with what’s possible in the vein of Martha Stewart, Allstar then began importing coarse, light grey French sea salt to blend with their dried, hand-finished herbs…but first, the inherent moisture in the salt had to be eliminated. Cowgirl Creamery gifted Allstar with a grand, old, brick-lined pizza oven and a unique line of herb-infused salts and herbal sugars was born.
Tasting these delights capped the day. I could taste the rich herb freshness in each blend…a result of the loving craft put into its creation.
As Marty puts it: “Passion combined with dogged tenacity is our recipe for success.”
Of course continual research and sharp instincts for the market contribute….and as Marty adds: “We have been very lucky.”
To view additional photography for this story, click here.
Photography © Julie Ann Fineman
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans are making a final push this month to give schools a temporary break from healthier school meal standards.
The school meal rules, phased in since 2012 and championed by first lady Michelle Obama, require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains in the lunch line. The standards also limit sodium, sugar and fat. Some school nutrition directors have lobbied for a break, saying the rules have proven to be costly and restrictive. House Republicans have said they are an overreach, and have pushed a one-year waiver that would allow schools to opt out of the standards if they lost money on meal programs over a six-month period.
The waiver language stalled this summer after the first lady lobbied aggressively against it and the White House issued a veto threat. The food and farm spending bill that contained the provision was pulled from the House floor, a move House Republicans attributed to scheduling issues.
But the waiver has new life this month as lawmakers are expected to pass a catchall spending bill to keep government programs running. Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama, the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the school meal spending, has been pushing to include the waiver in the wide-ranging bill.
Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota both said Thursday that there are ongoing negotiations between the House and the Senate over the waiver. A Senate bill approved by a spending committee in May did not include the waiver, but called for further study on sodium and whole grains requirements.
At the time, Hoeven said there was not enough support for the House’s one-year waiver in the Senate, even though he was supportive of it himself. But he said this week that could change as lawmakers negotiate the massive year-end spending bill.
“All of these things are part of a negotiation,” Hoeven said. “I think we’ll get something, but we’ll have to see where it ends up.”
On Friday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., listed “lowering standards for school lunches for our children” as one of a few “very destructive riders” that would be unacceptable to Democrats in the spending bill.
White House nutrition policy adviser Sam Kass said the White House is “deeply engaged” on the school meals policy, which has become one of the first lady’s signature issues. He said the policy is a top priority for the administration.
“We’ll always look to be flexible where appropriate, but what we’re not going to do is undermine science and the health of kids in any way,” Kass said.
This summer, Mrs. Obama said she would fight “until the bitter end” to make sure kids have good nutrition in schools.
While many schools have implemented the new standards successfully, others have said it’s not working for them. The schools pushing for changes say limits on sodium and requirements for more whole grains are particularly challenging, while some school officials say kids are throwing away fruits and vegetables they are required to take.
The changes have been pushed by the School Nutrition Association, a group that counts both school nutrition directors and the food companies that produce many of the school foods among its members. The group said this week that a survey it conducted of more than 1,100 school lunch operators showed that more than half predict program expenses will exceed revenue this year.
Advocates for the healthier meal standards say the changes will take time. They predict there will be fewer problems as kids get used to the new foods and the food industry creates more tasty products that follow the standards, like whole grain pastas and tortillas that are now required to be served.
As schools have complained, USDA has shown some flexibility in tweaking the standards. In 2012, just a few months after the first rules went into effect, the department scrapped maximums on proteins and grains after students complained they were hungry. And USDA said earlier this year that schools can put off for two years a requirement that all pastas in schools be whole-grain rich, or more than half whole grain, if they can demonstrate that they have had “significant challenges” in preparing the pasta.
The year-end spending bill won’t be the last time Congress takes on the school meal standards, as the overall law governing child nutrition policy, including school lunches, expires next year. Both the House and the new Republican Senate are expected to consider changes to the meal standards as part of legislation renewing the law.
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