Eating for Beginners Read online

  Every Tuesday, Angello's checks in with the farms it sells for, about fifteen to twenty of them, to get a list of what they'll have available for pickup on Wednesday, then faxes that list to its roughly fifty buyers throughout the Northeast. The clients look at the list and call in their orders, then the farms harvest accordingly, as I had helped to do at Lucky Dog.

  When I entered the office, a full-blown lettuce emergency was in progress. One of the farms that was supposed to supply green lettuce that day had reported that they had no Boston lettuce and no green leaf, only red leaf.

  Wondering where the boss was, I tried to get out of the way as the guy who had driven me from the train sat down at his desk and began making frantic phone calls.

  There was a thumping of boots on the carpeted stairs.

  "This lettuce thing is going down fast," said an amused voice. "And the red leaf is looking kind of sketchy."

  There he was: Joe Angello, a youthful-looking forty-six, tall and rail thin with a curly red ponytail, dressed in carpenter jeans and a yellow-and-green plaid shirt under a black fleece vest. So much for my vision of a rotund Santa.

  Joe, a Californian by birth with a degree in economics from Berkeley, has been involved with organic food for his entire professional life. He founded Angello's out of his house in 2003 after the only existing local organic distributor succumbed to competition from bigger traditional companies that had observed the growing demand for organic products and responded accordingly. Though he had seen it fail firsthand, to Joe, the need for such a company remained uncomplicated. "I simply felt that a distributor who focused on locally produced goods had a place in the market," he told me. Whether they're selling to small stores, supermarket chains, or restaurants, "the big national distributors function much better with national-type brands. I knew that excellent locally produced organic products existed, but that retailers couldn't get many of them from the big distributors."

  He's more than willing to admit that at the beginning his approach was a bit naive. "My business plan came into being about two years after starting my business," he said wryly. "Not recommended, by the way." But, after all, there are legions of stories about successful companies started on nothing but ideals and sleepless nights, of which there were many in those early years at Angello's.

  For the first three years, in fact, Joe did everything himself, from picking up food from the farms to packing the trucks to driving all night to deliver the food on time the next morning. He slept on the couch in his office for about three or four hours a night, and he often took his son, who was seven when Joe started the company, in the truck with him. "He played this little horn to keep me from falling asleep," Joe recalled, shaking his head at the memory.

  This was the moment when I first began to understand why people thought of Joe as unusual. Only someone with an insane amount of drive and vision, and an insane amount of optimism to match, would do what he did to get his business up and running. But he did it because he thought it needed to be done, and even six years later, with the company on relatively firm footing, there were sacrifices being made daily. "Survival is success on some level in this business," he said. "Year five was profitable, but our labor cost is still well below the market, especially in terms of benefits. My salary is still very low, and we still operate without health insurance or retirement benefits. Profit is the point. Without profit, our mission is meaningless." (Profit, in this case, meant earning enough to pay decent wages and expand the company, rather than getting rich.)

  In spite of this dose of reality, Joe hadn't lost sight of either what made his business work or why he started it. As he put it, "It really comes down to the level of commitment of our customers, and the customers of our customers." Joe depends on people like David and Laura, and David and Laura depend on people like me and Noah, who eat at applewood regularly, all of us in agreement with the sentiment that inspired Joe to start Angello's in the first place. "I thought it was nuts buying lettuce from California when it was growing down the street," he told me, settling into his desk chair. "I still think it's nuts."

  Like David, Joe recognized that living in the northeastern part of the United States, as opposed to, say, in Southern California, requires making certain compromises regarding both eating and business. Everything sold by Angello's has to be organic at a minimum, and much of it is biodynamic (meaning it comes from a farm that is essentially a closed circle, providing everything it needs to run, like food and fertilizer, from its own land and animals), but not everything is local. Different times of year call for different parameters when it comes to how far food travels. "We have to go outside the area during our off-season because we have overhead that continues year-round, so we're trying to make ends meet during the winter months," Joe told me. The local growing season runs from about June through October and is really the driving force behind the business, with local produce making up about sixty percent of total sales during those months. Joe relies on local items like breads and dairy products all year, but he also distributes things like apples from the Northwest and avocados from Mexico to make up slack in the slow season.

  Though Joe agreed that mass distribution of organic products was better than mass distribution of non-organic products, he was also certain that a company like his, which is committed to supporting local communities and sells their products as much as a means to that end as for any other reason, has a place. "We're not here because of any kind of consumer fad," he told me. "Our goal has always been to keep organic agriculture viable in our local and regional area. And to help protect the farmscape, which is something that people value, I believe, in many ways, but they don't really know how to [help] because they're so far removed from the farm." This struck me as the most apt description yet of me standing in that supermarket produce section a year or so before.

  Joe decided to take me along to make produce pickups at nearby farms. While waiting by the front door for him to deal with a pumpkin emergency—"Yes, pie pumpkins," I heard him say on the phone; then, in another conversation, "When you talk to Sean, tell him his jack-o'-lanterns are in"—I scanned the posters and bumper stickers pinned up around the door.

  "Think locally, act neighborly."

  "Be a local hero. Buy locally grown."

  And then, somewhat incongruously, "Skate and destroy," which made sense now that I had met Joe, who had the mellow cool of a California skater rather than the stodginess I associated with a northeastern organic food distributor.

  Outside, we climbed into a white refrigerated truck, and I wondered if there were other companies like Angello's, founded on "two beat-up old trucks," as Joe put it, and a lot of hard work. "I don't know the other companies that do what we do," he said, putting the key in the ignition, "but I'm quite sure they exist in different regions with varying levels of success. The farmers' job is hard enough. The prices they get are not as good when they sell to Angello's [as they would be selling directly to consumers], but it's a lot easier and we give them the ability to focus more on good agriculture, efficiency, and productivity, rather than marketing and distribution." Just by being part of Angello's, farmers have their products advertised to chefs and retail outlets every week on the order sheet he sends around. Farms that a chef might never have heard of can quickly become regular suppliers because everyone who orders from Joe trusts his judgment.

  As we wound our way around from farm to farm on small roads lined with trees whose leaves were every color of tutti-frutti, I couldn't help mentally calculating all the miles between produce pickups. On the one hand, we were driving a lot. On the other, we were using less fuel than if every farmer had driven his or her own product to New York, something Richard had pointed out to me when we were talking about how many heads of lettuce he could drive to New York versus how many a huge truck, traveling more miles but with more lettuce, could carry either across the country or just down the East Coast, as Joe did. "If it costs more in diesel fuel to get a head of my lettuce to Whole Foods than it costs t
o get a head of Salinas Valley lettuce there, then I shouldn't be supplying them," he'd said.

  "Do you worry about that?" I asked Joe. "Food miles and everything?"

  "The reality of it is that food is trucked," he replied. "And it's shipped. There's economies of scale, of putting massive numbers of containers on a big ship and running it from Chile to New York. There was a study done measuring the amount of diesel fuel used per unit of apples and it found that the fuel used trucking it from Washington State was a lot more than the fuel used shipping it from Argentina and Chile. So I don't think anything's really all that cut and dried." Of course, I could hardly expect the head of a trucking company, however small, to tell me he thought he shouldn't be doing it, but Joe did have a point. Food is going to be moved regardless of what anyone argues, so isn't the goal to do it as efficiently as possible? It seemed like another case of there being no either/or choice. Buying local produce to support small nearby farms didn't mean there could be no fuel costs associated with it, just lower ones.

  But there are a lot of other reasons to consider food miles, beyond fuel efficiency. (Several studies have shown that other actions, such as eating less meat, can do more to combat climate change than buying all your food locally.) For one thing, as I learned over and over on my nights at applewood, food that has traveled a shorter distance is fresher and thus more nutritious and better tasting. Also, buying food is about more than just what you put into your body. Purchasing from small nearby producers helps keep the local economy strong—as Richard said, an economy "based on the dirt"—and helps keep it diverse, too. I could do that, and as long as I did, buying things that had been shipped in no manner diminished my support for local farms. As Joe pointed out, if he didn't sell some food from far away during his slow season, he wouldn't have enough money to do what he does during the local produce season.

  On a personal level, Joe had worked out a system that incorporated all of these issues. "I don't eat salad in winter," he told me, "unless it's made from grated carrots, apples, beets, celeriac"—ingredients he could get locally. "But some things, like citrus and avocados, just don't grow here, and I don't think it's healthy to totally deprive myself of some of life's wonderful foods and beverages like tropical fruits, coffee, tea, whole cane sugar." Like David ordering his strawberries from California and Richard with his Florida oranges on cold winter mornings, Joe had found the balance, and it seemed like the same one I was reaching myself. As the cold weather came around, I knew, I was going to be eating more beet salads and fewer greens than last winter, this time not out of guilt but understanding.

  We drove on, and seeing so many small farms made me want to take Jules along on these visits so that he could see them, too. Otherwise his only knowledge of farms would come from "Old MacDonald" and Richard Scarry books. I suddenly found it peculiar that parents like Noah and me spend so much time reading our kids books like these and emphasizing their importance when many of us have so little experience with their subject matter. "Farm animals and that small farm sort of thing, which is so inherent in us as a culture, I think is dangerously close to being lost," Joe said wistfully. (In fact, the number of small farms in America rose from 2002 to 2007, though most of them, like Cato Corner in the old days, are run by people who have other jobs to support themselves and their crops or animals. Almost half of America's farms make less than twenty-five hundred dollars a year in sales, while five percent of them—the huge ones—account for seventy-five percent of what we eat.)

  While buying Joe's products might not be the most direct way or the only way to help save farmland, it at least starts a chain reaction that can lead to change and preservation. "We need to create an economy for local organic agriculture in such a way that the children growing up on these farms want to continue farming," Joe explained. "And that's really what it's about for us. Because if they don't, who's going to do it? Where is that farm going to go?"

  It was lunchtime, so we pulled into the parking lot of a diner, the only option nearby. "I think what it boils down to is understanding the cost of paying nothing for our food," Joe finished up. "Not only personally, but socially and culturally. These are the questions I ask. Food is a very important part of who we are as human beings. Why is it that we think it should cost nothing? Something that's that important to us?" Of course, as Richard had told me, it doesn't cost nothing at all. We simply perceive that it does since it's much easier to focus on that extra dollar at the farm market or the price difference between organic and conventional milk than it is to grasp concepts like farm subsidies, the connection between rising health care costs and the food we eat, and other hidden expenses. Even families who can barely afford to buy food are paying in one way or another. As Pollan wrote in The Omnivore's Dilemma, "Cheap industrial food is heavily subsidized in many ways such that its price in the supermarket does not reflect its real cost. But until the rules that govern our food system change, organic or sustainable food is going to cost more at the register, more than some people can afford. Yet for the majority of us the story is not quite so simple. As a society, we Americans spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves—about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more if we chose to. After all, it isn't only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones or televisions."

  Inside the diner, which was decorated with innumerable plastic figurines and plants, I ate a grilled cheese sandwich that tasted more like plastic than anything else. Joe, after considering the menu at length, ordered fish and chips. The whole lunch cost fifteen dollars, far less than the organic apples and potatoes I had recently bought at the farmers' market.

  "This is like the anti-Angello's lunch," I told Joe, wiping the grease off my hands with a paper napkin. "I kind of can't believe you're eating it."

  Joe grinned. "Life is full of paradoxes," he said.

  ***

  It was late afternoon when we got back to the Angello's office, and two trucks of produce were being unpacked onto the loading dock of the refrigeration building. The third truck had gotten stuck in the mud at one of the Vermont farms and, after a long delay while the driver waited for a tow truck, was finally on its way back.

  Hanging on the office wall was a hand-drawn diagram of the three trucks that were going out to deliver that night. Each one had a picture of which orders went on which pallet, and where in each truck the pallets went, so that the right pallet would be accessible at each drop-off location. It was a highly efficient, if distinctly old-fashioned, system. Which, it turns out, is what you need when you're dealing with small farmers and the amazing variety of produce they grow. Nothing can be overly computerized or outsourced; there has to be someone at each stage—farmer, packer, destination—who knows what each product looks like and where it comes from. A company like Angello's can handle the variations, and similarly small companies can sell them. At chain stores, by contrast, even those interested in selling local produce, according to Joe, "there are real challenges to local growing, just because of the variety and the labeling. Labeling's a big issue in those stores because everything's computerized."

  Big stores are set up to receive large amounts of the same produce over and over again because they buy from large farms which grow enough to supply all their outlets. Small farms, as I'd seen during the lettuce emergency at Angello's when I first arrived, aren't always so consistent. The farmers try new things each year, and sometimes disaster strikes, as it did during the 2009 tomato blight. But even without disasters, the way small farms work doesn't fit very well with corporate structures. At a place like Lucky Dog, for example, sometimes the kale is green, sometimes it's Lacinato, sometimes it's rainbow, and sometimes what was ordered isn't what shows up. This is fine at a place like applewood, where dinner can be made out of whatever arrived, or at a local grocery store where the owner can just write a new sign by hand, but it creates what amou
nts to a culture clash at bigger firms. "Everything's computerized," Joe continued, "and the cashiers don't really know an apple from an orange. I mean, they do, but all they know is that it's got a [scannable] PLU number which has a code." I had already seen the incredible amount of work it took just to get the produce grown, picked, and delivered to the Angello's warehouse with some kind of label on it. "Now imagine you have to do different labels for different kinds of kale," Joe went on. "And the bar code tag. And then every tomato has to have stickers with the tomato PLU, and I'm also trying to promote the farm with labels. So..." His voice trailed off as the packing staff assembled on the dock.

  The crew members who loaded and unloaded the produce were all in their teens or early twenties. I met Randy, the warehouse manager, working a shift from ten A.M. to midnight; Heather, his fiancée, who was studying fashion in Manhattan and worked from eight-fifteen P.M. to midnight; Jim, Randy's brother, working from noon to midnight; and Steve, working from four to eleven. They had all been hired by word of mouth or an ad in the local paper.