Real Pickles

Northeast Grown, 100% organic, fermented & raw pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, kvass, and hot sauce

Real Pickles

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Supporting a Regional Food System: An Interview with Myers Produce

As you may know, here at Real Pickles we are deeply committed to buying our vegetables only from Northeast family farms and selling our products only within the Northeast. One way in which we are able to achieve this, and in turn help to build a strong, organic and regional food system, is by working with small independently-owned regional distributors who bring Real Pickles to our Northeast neighbors.

Annie Myers

With this in mind, we began partnering with Myers Produce in 2016 as a way to bring our ferments deeper into the urban areas of the Northeast, and we’ve been thrilled with the results!

Myers Produce has been in operation since 2013. As a regional distributor based in Vermont, they buy vegetables and value added foods primarily from small, mostly organic farms in Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. They then truck and sell to stores and restaurants in the New York City and Boston areas. Everything they offer has been produced in the Northeast. It’s a beautifully closed loop!

I recently chatted with Annie Myers, owner and founder of Myers Produce, about her experience delivering delicious regionally-grown food to cities in the Northeast. Read about it here, and let us know your thoughts on how regional food fits into your life.

How did you decide to start a food distribution business?

AM: I had been working on a farm in Northern Vermont for about three years at the time, and it had become clear that the farms in my area were struggling to reach markets outside the state. After the local wholesale market was maxed out, our farm considered major supermarket chains to be the best option for increased sales, and the demands of those large supermarket chains were not well-suited to the structure and diversity of our vegetable farm. Although I had been living in Vermont, I am originally from Brooklyn, and had spent some time working in the food industry in New York. I had friends in the city who I knew were looking for a better way to source food grown in our region, and who could afford to pay reasonable prices for that food. After a few years of seeing the disconnect between Vermont farms and high-end urban wholesale customers, I decided to start a business that might connect the supply in Vermont with the demand in the city.

Who are your main customers?

AM: Our produce goes to retail stores and restaurants throughout NYC and the Boston area. Our largest customers are a food co-op, an online retailer, and a fast casual restaurant chain, all in NYC.

Myers Produce NYC deliveryHow many truckloads of regionally-produced food do you deliver to New York City & Boston each year?

AM: We deliver in NYC four times per week throughout the summer and three times per week throughout the year. We deliver to the Boston area five times per week through the summer and twice per week throughout the year. All told this is about 330 truck loads per year!

How has Myers Produce changed over the years since you started?

AM: When we started, the business consisted of me, a van, and a computer, and I was delivering exclusively to NYC customers once a week. We have grown a lot since then! We are now a team of ten employees operating four box trucks. Our mission has remained the same since the beginning – we work to increase Northeast farmers’ access to regional urban wholesale customers, in order to support the strength of agriculture and the regional food system in the Northeast.

How does the seasonality of our Northeast agriculture impact your business?

AM: We have a much less diverse list in the winter than we do in the summertime. We don’t source any products from outside the region, so as soon as a product goes out of season in the Northeast, it is no longer offered on our list. That said, many of our farmers do an amazing job of season extension, and our winter offerings are probably more diverse than you might expect! We have greenhouse-grown spinach, tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes year-round, and we generally have kale, fennel and leeks well into January. And we have added value goods made with locally-grown produce available as well, like products from Real Pickles!

In a relatively short period of time, you have built up a great reputation as a regional distributor. What are the integral aspects to your success?

AM: We don’t know the answer to this entirely, but I think we have prioritized efficient systems, clear communication, and good customer service from the very beginning. I know these things mean a lot to our farmers and producers, and to our urban customers.

Myers ProduceWith all the farms and food producers in Vermont and the Pioneer Valley, how do you choose your offerings?

AM: We don’t have an exact formula, but we try to keep our list diverse and to offer a consistent high quality. We try to source the products that we consider to match growers’ strengths, while also balancing location, price point, seasonality, and scale.

What do we need to be thinking about as consumers and shoppers, in terms of building a strong regional food system?

AM: I know that all of our customers are constantly competing with huge corporate sources of food (Amazon/Whole Foods in particular), and that they are challenged to differentiate themselves in the eyes of consumers. I think the most important thing is for shoppers to be intentional about where they spend their money, and think about who they are supporting by where they buy their food. If we want to support local growers in the Northeast, we need to make sure to spend money where it will stay in regional circulation.

What is the most interesting behind-the-scenes aspect of Myers?

AM: We really only have one physical warehouse space. But, to cover the distances we cover while adhering to regulations – and also create jobs that we think are sustainable – we have drivers based in NYC, Western MA, and VT. All of these drivers start and end their days in the same locations, but they drive from VT to Western MA and back, from Western MA to NJ and back, from Western MA to VT and back, and from Western MA to Boston and back.

What has been your favorite aspect of your job over the years?

AM: I have always loved puzzles, and I’ve grown to enjoy creating systems that are physical, flexible, efficient, and full of moving parts. I love it when an opportunity or inquiry comes up on a given morning, and I get to think about how that opportunity fits into our current operation, send a few emails, make a few phone calls, and be able to take advantage of that opportunity (often by the next day) in a way that makes sense for all parties involved. It keeps me on my toes, and it helps me feel that Myers Produce is providing a real service that can adapt to the needs of the folks that we are trying to serve.

Annie Myers

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Calculating Food Miles at Real Pickles

In the course of preparing our latest annual report, we learned some interesting things about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork!

Annual Report – Fiscal Year 2015

Since Real Pickles’ beginnings in 2001, one of our key social commitments has been to source our vegetables only from Northeast farms and to sell our products only within the Northeast.  We do this because we want to promote the development of strong local and regional food systems.  There are so many good reasons to be getting our food from closer to home – freshness and nutritional value, food security, strong agricultural economies, climate change, and more.  And, as I’ve written about here, it’s not just local that’s important but regional, too.

We’ve always had some sense about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork, but we’d never before really tried to figure it out.  For our most recent annual report, we decided to go for it.  We posed the question, “What can a business do to build a strong local & regional food system?”  We offered up our answer: “source locally & regionally…sell locally & regionally!”.  And, then we got to work with the calculator and spreadsheets to ascertain just how far – on average – our vegetables traveled from farm to fermentation last year, and how far our products then traveled from fermentation to fork.

Upon delving into the project, it quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to come up with precise numbers.  The reality of food transport involves all kinds of complexities that we could never fully sort through.  But, we could arrive at some useful estimates that would illustrate the difference it makes when a business commits to sourcing and selling within a region.

Farm to Fermentation

Determining the average distance that our vegetables traveled last year from farm to Real Pickles was the more straightforward of the two calculations.  We received a total of 128 vegetable deliveries from ten farms – beginning with the first load of cucumbers from Atlas Farm in late June, ending with our last drop-off of storage beets from Red Fire Farm in February.  For the purposes of the calculation, we assumed that all vegetables traveled straight from the farm to Real Pickles, with no other deliveries along the way.

Organic. Local. Cabbage. Ready to ferment!

The result?  The 285,000 pounds of vegetables used to make Real Pickles products from the 2014 harvest traveled an average of 17 miles from farm to fermentation!!  We’re very excited by this number.  Of course, it’s also what we’d expect given our commitment to working with suppliers like Riverland Farm (13 miles away), Atlas Farm (7 miles away), and Old Friends Farm (22 miles away).

What if we made no commitment to sourcing from Northeast farms?  Real Pickles would likely be buying vegetables from much farther away.  Most of our cabbage, for example, would be coming from major cabbage-producing areas like California, Texas, and Mexico.  In that case, our cabbage would be traveling thousands of miles from farm to fermentation.

Fermentation to Fork

CJ loads the Real Pickles van for local deliveries!

Figuring out the average distance from fermentation to fork was a more challenging task.  Nearly 20,000 cases of Real Pickles products traveled to over 400 stores last year.  Retailers here in the Pioneer Valley – like River Valley Co-op and Foster’s Supermarket – receive their pickle orders via the Real Pickles delivery van.  While those further afield – such as the Park Slope Food Coop and Martindale’s Natural Market – get their Real Pickles products through our distributors or via UPS.  We couldn’t possibly know exactly what route each jar of kimchi or sauerkraut took to get to each store last year, nor can we know the route each jar traveled to get to our customers’ plates!

We do, however, have good data on how many cases of Real Pickles product were sold to each store last year.  So, we mapped the driving mileage from Real Pickles direct to each of our top 50 retailers – which together sold about half of our product last year.  (We made the assumption that doing the calculation based on this group of stores would yield a reasonably accurate result, while saving quite a bit of time.)  Then, we used our sales data to calculate an overall weighted average for distance traveled.  Based on this approach, the final result was pushed higher by fast-selling stores in places like New York City (~175 miles away), while kept lower by nearby stores selling lots of our pickles in such towns as Northampton, MA, and Brattleboro, VT (~20 miles away).

When all the math was done, we learned that Real Pickles products traveled an average of 131 miles last year from fermentation to fork!

We’re pretty excited by this number, too.  As a growing business producing an ever more popular food (fermented vegetables), we know we could easily be shipping our Real Pickles products thousands of miles all around the country.  But, we also know there are so many important reasons to be sourcing and selling regionally.  When we consider that our 20,000 cases last year traveled an average of 131 miles – rather than 1,000 or 2,000 miles – we know we’re making a difference.

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Behind the Scenes at Real Pickles: An Interview with Heather Wernimont, Fermentation Manager

At Real Pickles, we’ve been fermenting Northeast-grown vegetables for well over a decade.  When Real Pickles got started in 2001, there were only a small handful of commercial vegetable fermenters anywhere in the country.  We’ve learned a lot over the years!

I recently talked with Heather Wernimont, our Fermentation Manager and newest worker-owner of the Real Pickles co-op, to get the latest on fermentation at Real Pickles.  Among other things, we chatted about the 2014 production season, what it’s like to get paid to taste pickles, and the similarities between cucumbers and baby goats.

Heather organizes jars for new product tasting!

KH: What do you do as Fermentation Manager?

HW: I work in a team of three production managers. My role is to oversee the making of Real Pickles products from start to finish. This includes planning for all of the vegetables that we buy from area farms, figuring out when we want them delivered, and processing the vegetables. I monitor the barrels during fermentation, tasting them to determine when the product is done fermenting and making sure we are consistent in the way we pack them into jars. I’m also responsible for maintaining our organic certification and working on new product development.

 

KH: Real Pickles fermented 300,000 pounds of vegetables in the 2014 production season. How do you go about doing that?

HW: Our season usually starts in late June when the local cucumber harvest starts and ends in January or February with our last batches of beets and carrots. So we have seven or eight months to do all of our processing of fresh vegetables. We have a production staff of eight or nine people each day who do the work of prepping vegetables, from washing and peeling to coring and shredding. We have a processing machine that we use to shred cabbage, slice onions, grate carrots and that sort of thing. We wash a lot of vegetables and cut all of our cucumbers by hand! We mix the vegetables with salt and spices and pack them into barrels to ferment. All of this work is very labor-intensive. Our kitchen crew is pretty amazing!

 

KH: Was there anything unusual about this past growing season that impacted Real Pickles?

Delivery! Bins of fresh cabbage waiting to be sliced and spiced.

HW: Every growing season looks a little different so we know ahead of time that we’ll need to be flexible and not get stressed out when the days don’t go as planned. This past summer started off nice and warm with lots of cucumbers coming in at the end of June. Somewhere around the last part of July, temperatures at night became very cool and caused the cucumbers to slow down significantly. Once we start getting into August, downy mildew is a threat so we really need to make as many cucumber pickles as we can as early in the season as possible. We were pretty nervous going into August but ended up being able to source the cucumbers we needed from a grower in the middle of the month.We try to stay a step ahead and have some backup work for staff in case there are gaps in our vegetable deliveries. We sometimes fill days peeling and prepping garlic, or we’ll get some summer cabbage for an early batch of sauerkraut. We can also pack finished pickles into jars, which is the work we typically save for winter and spring when we don’t have fresh vegetables coming in.Sometimes, we have the opposite problem. At the start of the season this past summer we were expecting a delivery of around 800 pounds of cucumbers from Atlas Farm. Instead, Gideon called in the beginning of the week and said, “I have 3,000 pounds. Can I bring them over?” We said yes — and it was intense!

 

KH: Do you ever have to change production plans in the middle of the season?

HW: Around the beginning of September, we realized we were going to need to make much, much more kimchi than we had originally planned to keep from running out in the spring. We had made all of our contracts with vegetable farmers in March. Then all of a sudden customers couldn’t seem to get enough kimchi, and we needed to make more.Sauerkraut would be easy — you find some cabbage, salt and spices and figure out the staff schedule and you’re done. Kimchi is complicated – it takes two days to make one batch and there are lots of ingredients to source from multiple farms. We have to look for napa cabbage, carrots, leeks, garlic, ginger, habaneros. Luckily, this year the leek and carrots harvests were good so those were easy. Finding enough napa and garlic was harder but we found what we needed and made an extra 20 barrels — that’s about 800 gallons of extra kimchi!

 

KH: What are the biggest challenges in your job?

HW: At our peak production, we may have about 425 barrels fermenting at once. I need to stay on top of all of them, tasting them when I think they might be done fermenting. Right now, we have two fermentation rooms and we can control the temperatures in both of them. So if we have a lot of barrels that might be ready all at once, we can move some of them into a cooler room to slow down the fermentation a bit. That way we spread out when the different batches are ready. We don’t have a lot of extra space at our facility and have to manage space carefully. We have to make sure we get batches out of barrels and into jars to sell so we can use that barrel again. My job requires a lot of planning, flexibility and creative problem solving all at once.  I love the challenge.

 

KH: How do you figure out whether a batch has finished fermenting and is ready to pack into jars?

HW: I’m looking for taste and texture. We want the flavors to have melded properly so they don’t taste like raw vegetables, I make sure whatever spices we’ve used have blended in with the vegetables. The level of sourness needs to be right. The sugar levels in the vegetable vary over the season and this contributes to how quickly the vegetables ferment so each batch is different. I can’t just assume that it will be ready in a certain number of months.Taste and texture is most important, but lately we’ve done some testing of acid levels and remaining vegetable sugars to deepen our understanding. We also pH test every batch as an extra step to make sure the finished product is safe.

 

KH: Do you ever experiment with different vegetables?

Superchiles awaiting placement in Spicy Dill Pickle jars…

HW: Yes! We canceled production a couple of days because of snow storms this past winter. I used the time to make 28 different experiments! I focused on some different kimchi recipes and tried some vegetables fermented with hakurei turnips and radishes. We have some great orchards here in western Massachusetts so I also made some recipes with apples and pears, which can add some sweetness to fermented vegetables. I wanted to try some new flavors while also staying in line with the simplicity of our current product line.

KH: You did all of the vegetable purchasing for Real Pickles this past year. How did that go?

HW: I really enjoy working with the growers. We have some amazing long term relationships that Dan and Addie Rose started over a decade ago. All of the farms we buy from are small to mid-size family farms, but the growers’ operations are quite different. For example, I do most of my planning directly with Casey at Old Friends Farm over email. Dave Chamutka, on the other hand, is hard to catch by phone but I know he’ll be making the delivery himself so we always talk in person. With Red Fire Farm, I make arrangements early in the season with Ryan, one of the owners, and then later work with the wholesale manager. We are lucky to have such great people to work with.

 

KH: Before you started at Real Pickles you worked as the Education Program Manager at Sprout Creek Farm, an agricultural educational center and maker of award-winning cheese, in the Hudson Valley. Do you see any similarities between these two jobs?

HW: Kidding season and cucumber season are remarkably similar! You can know that fifteen goats are going to give birth but you can’t control when the kids are going to come; it’s the same with cucumbers. You may know cucumber season will be starting soon but everything changes when the first truck pulls up with bins of cucumbers!

 

KH: What’s been your favorite aspect of the job?

HW: Here in the Pioneer Valley, we have access to so many high quality organic vegetables that ferment in such amazing ways. I’ve loved learning about the subtleties of fermentation and working with a live product. There may be differences in how the vegetables ferment as a result of the amount of rain a farm received, the time of year the carrots were harvested, the variety of the cabbage, or the soil profile of a particular farm. We aim for consistency, but due to the nature of a wild fermentation, some variations between batches occur. I like to think that these differences are what make our products so interesting and delicious!

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Beyond Local: The Case for Regional Food

Where should we get our food from?  How far need it travel?

These are essential questions for anyone who wants a better food system – one that is ecologically sound and socially just.  After all, a big impetus for the rapidly growing movement to transform the food system is the modern-day reality that places like New England – quite capable of raising such crops as apples or tomatoes – will instead import them from thousands of miles away and burn up large quantities of climate-changing fossil fuels in the process.

Long-distance food transport brings other drawbacks, too.  By getting our food from California or New Zealand, we’re often giving up on flavor and nutrition because those distant farms are growing crops that were bred, first and foremost, to be shipped.  Farms supplying national or global markets also tend to become big and concentrated, and thus are more likely (organic or not) to be engaged in industrial, monoculture practices, rather than the kind of agriculture that supports healthy soil, healthy crops, and healthy ecosystems.  And, of course, eaters in this kind of food system are left hopelessly disconnected from the source of their food, which brings all sorts of unintended consequences.

As local as possible

Buy local! This has been a primary response to the crazy, unhealthy, industrial food system we have in this country.  Leave behind that bad supermarket food shipped in from who knows where, and go get to know your neighborhood farmer.  The push to buy local is taking the burgeoning new food system far.  Countless farmers markets and community supported agriculture farms have come into being.  More and more restaurant chefs are buying ingredients from local farms.  Local food has even begun to make its way into schools and hospitals.

The idea of buying local makes sense in many ways.  If our food system is broken and a central problem is that we’re sourcing from thousands of miles away, the obvious response is to switch to getting our food from as close to home as possible.  And if the disconnect between farmers and eaters is a serious problem, we should start buying our food from a farmer who we can actually meet face to face.  There’s a logic to it, and this indeed is an important part of the solution to building a new and better food system.

Is “buy local”, however, the end of the story?  Is the right way to create the food system we need to buy as local as possible every time?  It’s an increasingly popular idea.  These days it serves as the basis for commissioned studies and marketing slogans suggesting that single small states – even single towns – might feed themselves almost entirely.  But, I think the real answer is more complicated.

Urban and rural

A trip to a pickle festival in New York City a couple of years ago got me thinking about the issue in a new way.  Addie Rose and I traveled to the Lower East Side to set up the Real Pickles booth at the Peck Slip Pickle Fest, a special one-day event at a public food market called New Amsterdam Market.  During a short break between pickle sales, I got a chance to walk the market, and was struck by how different it was than the farmers markets back home in western Massachusetts.  In rural western Massachusetts, farmers and other food producers typically travel ten or twenty miles to get to a farmers market.  Here at New Amsterdam Market, I noticed that the vendors – vegetable farmers, cheesemakers, maple syrup producers – were coming from a much greater distance.  Some had driven 100 miles or more from various points in the Hudson Valley.  Others had traveled even further, coming down from the Finger Lakes or Northern Vermont.  There were a few vendors with products made in Brooklyn, but few if any were using agricultural ingredients produced local to the city.

None of this came to me as a real surprise.  A place like New York City – with its urban development stretching for many miles – obviously can’t support many real farms anywhere close to its borders.  But, it got me thinking about all the talk about being a “locavore” and switching to a “100-mile diet”.

For those of us living in rural places like Vermont or the Berkshires or Maine, it’s remarkably easy to become convinced that solving our food system’s problems can be wholly accomplished by the act of buying as local as possible – and organic – in an effort to create a multitude of insulated, local food systems.  And, yet the point of changing the food system is not to create an elitist alternative for a limited subset of the population.  The point is to bring about a transformation that gives everyone the opportunity to participate in and benefit from a healthy, just, and sustainable food system.

If everyone is to be part of the new food system, then I think we need to keep this fact in mind: the majority of the U.S. population lives in concentrated urban areas whose local agricultural resources are entirely inadequate to support the food needs of their populations.  For those in and around cities, then, the task of sourcing food from much closer to home means re-building the food system on a regional level.  Instead of local food systems with a 100-mile radius (as many choose to define “local”), this means focusing on regional food systems with, perhaps, a 250- or 500-mile radius.

Those of us in rural areas – rich in agricultural resources – thus have an inescapable responsibility.  As we do the necessary work of helping to overhaul the food system, we must consider what part we can play in feeding the populations of places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.  While it is surely tempting (and so much simpler) to focus inwardly and exclusively on how to feed merely ourselves, that is not, in the end, the way to build a better food system.  It is essential to be actively promoting and supporting our local farm economies – and, at the same, we need to be thinking more broadly.

Resiliency

There’s another strong reason why we need to think regionally as well as locally, one that undermines the notion that it would even be possible for any one town or small state to securely depend on its own agricultural resources.  It has to do with things like weather and pests – those unavoidable factors that make farming inevitably risky and unpredictable.  Factors which also threaten to make farming even more unpredictable as a result of climate change.

The changing pattern of cucumber growing here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts helps to illustrate the issue.  Dave from Chamutka Farm in Whately has been growing pickling cucumbers (among other crops) since 1980.  Before that, as a kid, he helped out his parents and other local growers raise them for the old Oxford pickle plant in nearby Deerfield.  Dave, who was Real Pickles’ first cucumber supplier, has witnessed the harvest season for local pickling cucumbers shrink dramatically in recent years.  When he first started growing, he could harvest cucumbers all summer long, typically going into mid to late September.  By the time Dave started supplying cucumbers to Real Pickles in 2001, cucumber harvests would last at least until early September.  Over the last decade, however, it has come to be a crapshoot to expect a harvest beyond mid-August.  For Real Pickles, that means pickling all of our cucumbers for the entire year (60,000 pounds in 2013) within a single six-week period.

What’s steadily squeezing out our local cucumber season?  It’s a disease called cucurbit downy mildew, which blows in from the southern states each summer and, just about overnight, wipes out the cucumber crop.  These days it’s showing up much earlier than it used to, a trend that is likely to continue as the climate warms.  As UMass Extension vegetable specialist, Ruth Hazzard, explained to me recently, human attempts to breed cucumber plants resistant to it have been failing to keep up with downy mildew’s rapid evolution via genetic mutation and natural selection.  In the future, cucumbers could become a much less reliable local crop.  And yet, as downy mildew does not typically reach all parts of the Northeast (check out these maps illustrating its recent impact), it may still be a reliable regional crop.

Differences in weather (and its effects) from one locale to another point us in a similar direction.  Tropical Storm Irene barreled through the Northeast in August 2011 and brought epic amounts of rainfall.  Small rivers flooded immediately, and within a few days, major rivers started overflowing their banks – leading to crops losses for numerous farms located along riverbanks (where the best soil is).  Three of the six farms that regularly supply Real Pickles had flooded fields and ruined vegetable crops.  It was a disastrous event for many farmers – though not for all farmers in the region.  For one thing, Pioneer Valley farms located on higher ground tended to fare better during Irene.  Looking regionally, the storm was a disaster for farms in such places as Vermont, the Hudson River Valley, and western Massachusetts.  But, farms in many other parts of the Northeast – further from the track of the storm – emerged relatively unscathed.

Last season, farms in our area had to contend with one of the rainiest months of June in memory.  About ten inches of rain fell here in the Pioneer Valley that month, adversely affecting our local food system in a variety of ways.  The direct effect on Real Pickles was that 20,000 pounds of summer cabbage that we had planned to buy from one of our local farms rotted in the sopping fields.  While our local farms had all experienced similar weather, farms in some other parts of the Northeast had not.  The same week that we got the local cabbage news, we received a call from our friends at a farmers co-op in Pennsylvania and learned that organic farmers down there had produced a bumper crop of summer cabbage.  We bought enough to fill up a tractor trailer – making the transport as energy efficient as possible – and were able to make the batches of sauerkraut and kimchi that we needed.

These examples all drive home the same point:  While a global industrialized food system is clearly not a resilient one, neither is an entirely local one.  If we are to build a better food system, resiliency must be among its central features.  The inevitable conclusion, then, is that we need to make a shift toward regional scale.  We must move away from the hopelessly unhealthy, inefficient, and insecure reality offered by our current global food system.  And we also need to properly account for the impacts of weather, pests, and climate change – and do our best to ensure that everyone can be reliably fed.

Local and Regional

The work of building the new food system that we need involves a wide array of priorities – like reducing corporate dominance, expanding organic production, and shifting to healthy, minimally processed foods.  Cutting back dramatically on long-distance food transport is another top priority.  Here, we need to engage in food system development on two scales: local and regional.

How do we do this?  CISA recently put out a fantastic guide, Eat Up and Take Action for Local Food, outlining all the many ways one can help build up our local food economies.  Buy locally-grown food, support access to it for low-income folks, become a local foods entrepreneur, invest in a local foods business.  There is plenty of important work to be done.

On the regional level, a key task is to build up the regional connections between farms, processors, distributors, retailers, and eaters.  At Real Pickles, we enjoy working with and supporting three family-owned distributors – Angello’s, Regional Access, and Associated Buyers – all of whom do a great and efficient job of connecting Northeast family farms and producers with retailers throughout the region.  (I mention “efficient” because regional food distribution can, in many cases, outcompete local food distribution when it comes to minimizing energy consumption, a key consideration.)  We also make a point of keeping in touch with Northeast farms outside the Connecticut River Valley, so that we are prepared whenever those inevitable weather challenges arise.  We primarily buy our vegetables from local farms, but we can turn to Pete’s Greens in Vermont or Tuscarora Organic Growers in Pennsylvania if we need to.

Encouraging retailers and eaters to support local and regional products is important, too.  For years now, “buy local” marketing campaigns have been successfully raising awareness about the benefits of supporting local farms.  It may be time for “buy regional” campaigns, as well.  At Real Pickles, we honor our original commitments to buy our vegetables only from Northeast family farms and sell our products only within the Northeast.  This is our way of publicly promoting the idea of regional food systems.  We would love to see many more food businesses making similar commitments!

If we want a better food system, then we must be sourcing our food much closer to home.  The food system is complex, however, and simple prescriptions will only take us so far.  Responding to the reality of global food transport with the call to “buy local” is extremely important.  If, however, we are to truly to change the food system – the whole system, not just the margins of it – we must also develop a regional perspective.  By doing so, we will help to ensure that our food system can be healthy, secure, and sustainable.  And that it can be so for everyone!

NOTE:  If you’re interested in learning more about regional food systems, I recommend checking out the work of Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG).  In particular, you’ll find excellent in-depth papers on the topic here and here.  For a number of years now, NESAWG has also been helping to build a Northeast regional food system through their annual conference, It Takes a Region.

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Why 8 hours of pickle tasting rocked my world…

Some of the delicious pickle entries for GFA 2014

Last weekend, Dan and I participated in the fourth annual Good Food Awards‘ judging event – in the pickle category.  We were psyched for this!  Not only did we get to travel to San Francisco and taste LOTS of incredible pickles – we also got to meet new pickle people and connect with pickle friends we’ve made at previous GFA events.  It was a fantastic experience.

The event was much larger than we expected, almost as big as the GFA ceremony itself.  For each of the 10 categories (pickles, preserves, cheese, beer, chocolate, coffee, spirits, confections, oils, charcuterie) there were 20 or so judges ready to taste the nearly 1,500 total GFA entries for 2014, including ~120 pickle entries.  In the morning, the pickle judges split into small groups focused on regions (I was South; Dan was West), and each group selected 10 pickles to recommend to the larger group based on flavor, balance, texture, and appearance, among other criteria.  After lunch, the pickle judges tasted the 50 pickles selected in the morning and gave them numerical scores.  We won’t know until the awards ceremony which pickles won, but I have my guesses…

Dan’s group took pickle tasting very seriously

I loved tasting SO many different kinds of pickles – vinegar, fermented, krauts, fruit, onions, beets, and relishes.  The fermented black bean and garlic paste was a highlight for me – its spicy kick was significant and enduring!  I also loved the turmeric-yellow kraut packed with ginger, yum.  Dan’s day was made by the vinegar pickled sea beans (the what?) – an aquatic plant neither of us had heard of, harvested from salt marshes.  And those pickled cherries – nicely flavored with a little cinnamon and clove – came in handy immediately following the jar of cucumber pickles full of halved habanero peppers.

Chilly Dilly

Among the judges were experienced pickle-tasters, pickle-writers, and pickle-makers, and it was fun to talk details of sugar-sour balance, degree of fermentation, slicing techniques, and vegetable texture.  The selection of entries were beautifully displayed – it was lovely to see the variety of veggies, colors, textures, and jars.

The pickle category was expertly coordinated by Chris Forbes from Sour Puss Pickles in Brooklyn, NY and Todd Champagne from Happy Girl Kitchen Co in Monterey, CA.   While Chris masterminded the organization of all those pickles, Todd kept up our spirits by making an appearance as “Chilly Dilly”, a cucurbit that is “…kind of a Big Dill”.  They kept us in pickles all day long, PLUS a parade of palate cleansers to keep our taste buds primed – the highlights included some very special GFA entries from the chocolate and cheese categories once their judges were done tasting from them.  Oh, and some nice selections left over from the spirits and beer categories, too.

Fermentation crocks from Counter Culture Pottery

It was a wonderful place to meet and re-connect with a variety of pickle folks.  It put us in a reminiscent mood, too.  When we started Real Pickles in 2001, there were only a handful of businesses around the country making fermented pickles and sauerkraut.  Now there are companies sprouting up all over the place!!  Dan and I really appreciate meeting new companies who are perfecting the art of the pickle, and to talk techniques, recipes, and business models. We had a great time connecting with Mara from Zuké and learning about her new-ish pickle business in Boulder, CO.  We also got to meet Jennifer Harris who organizes Sonoma County’s wildly popular Farm to Fermentation Festival, and Sarah Kersten of Counter Culture Pottery, who makes elegant fermentation crocks.

Dan and Linda Z.

When Real Pickles was getting its start, there were also only a handful of books about fermented pickles, or role models in the world of fermentation (think: pre-Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation!).  Two of those early authors were Sally Fallon (Nourishing Traditions) and Linda Ziedrich (Joy of Pickling).  We count ourselves very lucky that, this past weekend, we were able to meet and judge pickles alongside one of our early inspirations and teachers, Linda Ziedrich.

When Real Pickles was getting its start (is there an echo in here?), fermented vegetables were a food of the past, a fringe-hippie-food, only found in backwoods natural foods stores and in the pantries of homesteaders.  A mere dozen years later, it is at the height of food-trendiness, the focus of many festivals (see this, this, and this), and the mark of the hippest hipster (any hipster worth his or her hand-harvested unrefined sea salt, anyway).

The timing of this trend is uncanny (pun intended), as this food revival is gaining recognition from the science community, as well.  In just the last few years, scientists have been recognizing the amazing benefits of fermented foods to our overall health – benefits that our ancestors enjoyed and came to depend on for thousands of years, but that we have unwittingly excluded in our transition to more processed and industrialized foods.  In his newest book, Cooked, Michael Pollan enumerates dozens of recent scientific articles relating the importance of beneficial bacteria in protecting our intestinal health, promoting our immune defense, and maintaining our mental well-being.  Scientists are also recognizing that our recent deficiency in fermented foods teeming with live cultures may be part of the reason for some of our generation’s most serious health problems, such as allergies, obesity, seasonal colds and flus, and some cancers.  Pickle, anyone?

But back to the Good Food Awards… needless to say, there was plenty of enthusiasm among the pickle judges and aficionados we spent the weekend with. One of the best things about the Good Food Awards is that it is not just a contest, where your product is pitted against those of your peers and competitors.  So much of it is about connecting food producers, inspiring conversation, trading ideas and methods, and giving each other a pat on the back.  Being a food producer can be isolating, especially when regionally-focused, so it can be SO inspiring to talk to other people with similar experiences.  Really, in the world of fermented pickling, we are not competitors.  The more producers there are, the more we are recognized as a legitimate food category.  Participating in the Good Food Awards has given us a real sense for our larger community of fermenters and fellow picklers, and we are so happy to be a part of it!

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Real Pickles and the Path to a Co-operative Economy

We are excited to share a few words written by Erbin Crowell, Executive Director of the Neighboring Food Co-op Association (NFCA) and local expert on cooperative business.  Erbin was a huge help to the Real Pickles Co-op founding group as we forged ahead with our transition to a cooperative structure.  He earned his Master of Management: Co-op & Credit Unions from St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia and serves on the boards of the National Co-operative Business Association and the New England Farmers Union. He lives in Buckland, MA, with his partner Kristin Howard and their son Elias, and may be contacted at erbin@nfca.coop.

By Erbin Crowell, Executive Director, Neighboring Food Co-op Association

The United Nations International Year of Cooperatives was celebrated in 2012

 

It’s been about five years since I first sat down with Real Pickles’ cofounder Dan Rosenberg at his home in Montague, MA.  As he considered the future of his company, Dan was interested in knowing more about the co-operative business model and its potential for preserving Real Pickles’ unique mission over time.  For my part, I wanted to better understand the perspectives of entrepreneurs like Dan who were uncomfortable with the traditional paths of business succession.  Could co-ops offer a viable alternative for business owners who see success as defined more broadly than just the bottom line?

My partner Kristin Howard – now Real Pickles’ sales manager and a founding worker-owner – and I had recently left Equal Exchange, a worker co-op and pioneer in fairly traded products, where we had been member-owners for a combined two decades.  My experience developing new initiatives within a rapidly growing co-op had been profound on a personal level.  It had also demonstrated to me how co-ops could have a dramatic impact on the economy by working together across the food system.  I wanted to be part of making the experience available to more people, and growing the wider co-operative economy.  This path had led me to studies in co-operative management and work with organizations including the Co-operative Fund of New England, the Valley Alliance of Worker Co-ops, and finally the Neighboring Food Co-op Association.

A basic challenge for the co-operative movement is that it has been largely overlooked by universities, economic development organizations, and local governments. It is easy to go through one’s academic career without learning anything about this business model, despite the global impact of co-ops. When young entrepreneurs seek out support for starting or growing a business, the co-operative model is rarely offered as an option.  Basic legal and financial support is weak at best.

And yet, co-operatives have succeeded.  For example, more than a billion people around the world are co-op members — more than directly own stock in publicly traded corporations.  Co-ops also employ more people than multinationals.  And in the quest for food security, co-operatives have been recognized as lifeline for small farmers and consumers in the developing world.

In recent years, co-ops have been recognized for their performance during the global recession that began in 2008 and continues to cause massive unemployment, dramatic shifts in wealth and austerity.  Co-ops have proven extraordinarily resilient during this period, preserving jobs, wealth and community infrastructure. And their global contribution to human development, poverty reduction and sustainability led the United Nations to declare 2012 the International Year of Co-ops.

In addition to being driven by a distinct set of values and principles, the co-operative legal structure prioritizes social needs and goals above the accumulation of profit.  Based on the principle of one member, one vote, co-ops are very real examples of the kind of economic democracy that people are clamoring for in the wake of this global recession.

Food co-ops in our region are an illustration of the potential of this model.  For the past three years, I have served as executive director of the Neighboring Food Co-op Association (NFCA), a network of over 35 food co-ops and start-ups across New England.  These are community businesses, locally owned by more than 80,000 people.  Success is not measured by investor dividends, but by factors such as environmental impact, benefits to members, and employment. Because they are not focused on maximization of profit, co-ops have been innovators in the food system and pioneers in healthy foods, organic products and Fair Trade.

Food co-ops have also been leaders in the re-localization of economies, illustrated by the fact that the members of the NFCA purchase over $30 million in local products each year.  In communities across our region, food co-ops serve as anchors for local producers and as places to experiment with new products.

However, a central challenge for food co-ops, and for the “buy local” movement in general, is that the purchasing power we invest in the local economy does not always stay in the community.  For example, our members and customers have invested millions of their consumer dollars in socially responsible businesses, only to see them bought out by large multinational corporations.  In this sense, local economies often serve as a testing ground for the investor-driven economy. Entrepreneurs create new products and services and those businesses that demonstrate sufficient potential to generate profits for investors are absorbed into this market economy through investor buy-outs, initial public offerings (IPOs) or purchase by a larger corporation.  As a result, the capital, creativity and infrastructure created by local entrepreneurs are extracted from local communities, and the stakeholders who helped create that market value are left behind.

Another challenge for the local movement is business succession.  What happens when an entrepreneur decides to retire or simply move on to something new?  As we invest our consumer dollars in local businesses, are there ways to ensure that those businesses don’t fade away or get sold to corporate interests?  Is there a way to engage other stakeholders — workers, producers, consumers and the wider community — in the mission and long-term success of local enterprises so that they are more sustainable and accountable to the people who depend on them?

This question has been at the root of the co-operative movement since its beginnings.  In response to the concentration of wealth and control that characterized the Industrial Revolution, community activists created a democratic business model, rooted in social values, and oriented toward the meeting of human needs rather than accumulation of profit.  For the first food co-ops, the goal was food security and rooting a source of healthy, affordable food in the community.  For farmers, it was pooling resources to invest in the shared infrastructure needed to compete with larger growers and corporations.  And for workers, it was gaining more control over our work-lives so that a company couldn’t just up and leave in search of higher profits.

Certainly, these goals speak to many entrepreneurs today for whom the ideals of economic democracy, sustainability and human fulfillment are integral to their vision of success.  What has been missing is a roadmap for succession that provides an alternative to the traditional corporate buyout.  Real Pickles founders, Dan and Addie Rose, may have part of the answer.  Five years after we sat down to talk co-ops, their company is on the cutting edge of a trend toward a new way of thinking about the basic purpose and priorities of local business.  For an emerging group of entrepreneurs, conversion to a co-operative structure may be driven by the desire to root their business in the community, to safeguard their mission, or simply to share ownership, risk and reward with their co-workers.  For others, “co-operation” was always what they had in mind – they just needed a formal business structure for it.

This is not to say that there is not an important role for outside investors in this effort.  What is needed is a new way of thinking about this role.  Some have used the term “social investor,” and “slow” or “patient” capital.  Tom Webb, former manager of the Master of Management, Co-operatives and Credit Unions Program at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, has called for something a little more specific: “co-operative capital.”  For Webb, the financial crisis of 2008 and the accompanying global recession has demonstrated the problems of an economic system built on maximization of profit.  “We need capital that is socially constructive rather than destructive and more stabilizing rather than destabilizing,” he writes.  “We need capital that is restrained, limited and controlled and directed to meeting human need rather than human greed.”

In fact, some of the most successful contemporary co-ops have relied on this kind of capital to grow their businesses.  Equal Exchange and Organic Valley, for example, offer investment opportunities for non-member individuals and organizations.  This capital is constructive in that it is driven by social and environmental impacts as opposed to maximization of return; it is restrained because investment shares are non-voting, with control remaining with the membership; and it is stabilizing in that share value is based on cash value rather than the theoretical market valuation employed by the stock market and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), rooting wealth in the community.  Over time, many have insisted that investors would not accept these limitations on their influence and returns.  And yet, year after year these co-ops have had little trouble attracting sufficient capital to support their growth.

What is particularly exciting about Real Pickles is that they have demonstrated a model in which people can invest in the conversion of a privately held business into a co-operative enterprise.  Essentially, investors are using their financial resources to secure a business within the local co-operative economy, as opposed to the market economy.  This represents a compelling shift in our conception of what is possible.

Over the years, food co-ops across the Northeast have invested substantial purchasing power in the success of local businesses like Real Pickles.  And I am proud that the Neighboring Food Co-op Association has been able to play a small part in the transition of the company, becoming an investor in Real Pickles as part of our vision of “a more healthy, just and sustainable food system, and a vibrant community of co-operative enterprise.”

On a personal level, it has been inspiring to work with the member-owners of this new co-op in this process.  In my role as the first staff person for the Valley Alliance of Worker Co-ops, I began to see the importance of co-op led development and the potential of peer-to-peer collaboration in supporting the success of co-operative enterprises.  While my primary work is now with the NFCA, there is a clear overlap in the vision of our food co-ops and that of companies like Real Pickles.  Moving forward, my hope is that co-ops and local entrepreneurs will be able to see the potential in this kind of collaboration in growing the co-operative movement in our region.

Dan Rosenberg and Addie Rose Holland have not only chosen an inspiring path for Real Pickles.  They, along with the other founding member-owners of the Real Pickles Co-op, have laid a path for local business succession and the transformation of individual entrepreneurship into what would be more accurately described as co-opreneurship: creative economic development with the goal of strengthening economic democracy, sustainability, and community wealth.

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A Community Perspective: Investing in a Better Food System!

We are honored to feature this guest post from the leadership team of the Pioneer Valley Slow Money chapter.  The burgeoning Slow Money movement is about “investing as if food, farms and fertility mattered.”  We at Real Pickles are excited to be offering a local investment opportunity of this kind as we work to transition our business to a worker-owned co-operative.  And, we are thankful to our local Slow Money chapter for its support!

 

by Paul DiLeo, Joe Grafton, Kyra Kristof, Spirit Joseph, Jeff Rosen, Sam Stegeman, and Tom Willits

 

“As long as money accelerates around the planet, divorced from where we live, our
befuddlement will continue. As long as the way we invest is divorced from how we
live and how we consume, our befuddlement will worsen. As long as the way we invest
uproots companies, putting them in the hands of a broad, shallow pool of absentee
shareholders whose primary goal is the endless growth of their financial capital, our
befuddlement at the depletion of our social and natural capital will only deepen.”
 -Woody Tasch, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money

The leadership team of the Pioneer Valley Slow Money Chapter has been working diligently to support Real Pickles in its efforts to raise capital through its community investment campaign.  When Dan and Addie asked us to share our reasoning behind these efforts, we responded with equal zeal.  So, here goes:

Photo credit: Paul Wagtouicz

 

Living where we do, in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, nestled within the regional community of New England, we are participants in an exciting movement.  Over the past several decades, we have seen an increase in the number of farms and farmers in the region, reversing decades of decline.  Many of us have ample opportunity to join a local CSA and to shop at one of the many new farmer’s markets that are now part of our daily economic life.  Both producers and consumers are driving positive changes in the food system, as more producers build businesses with a deep commitment to their local food system and more consumers shift their buying patterns in support of local food.

And, while we are all pleased with the positive trends, few, if any of us, feel satisfied with that pace, or the current scale of the local food economy in our region.  So, what’s slowing us down?

As Woody Tasch suggests above, there is a missing piece to this economic equation.  We are missing the investors in our local food system.  Slow Money, as a movement, is growing alongside of the local food movement, designed to help that movement obtain the type of investment capital it needs.  Many of us have been engaged in heated conversations, where we decry our inability to move a portion of IRAs or other investments out of the traditional investment world and into our local economy.  There is a lag, a logjam of intent, when it comes to finding a way to match our consumer commitment to local food with an equally straightforward investor commitment.

But, as people who have been engaged in this space have learned, it’s not easy to match our mission zeal up to investment opportunities.  For one thing, there are not many opportunities.  For another, as movement leaders, we are asking for our businesses to be mission-focused in a way that supports a local (food) economy.  We want them to treat their suppliers and employees well, use best ecological practices, and maintain a long-term commitment to local ownership and place.  Yet, such mission requirements do not typically provide investors with the kinds of returns they seek, or a quick way to get their money back.

Slow Money seeks to provide patient investment dollars that can finance businesses.  These dollars would not pressure them to sell out on their mission commitment.  The Slow Money movement rests on a thesis that there are good, viable businesses that can scale up to the size of the local economy which houses them.  The movement seeks businesses who can demonstrate the principles we all seek, who really need this new kind of patient, or “nurture” capital.

The Pioneer Valley Slow Money Chapter – operating as a working group within the PVGrows network – is pleased to be working with Real Pickles to assist them in meeting their finance challenge.  Real Pickles has demonstrated commitment and business competence in light of the mission elements we all seek.  They buy from local/regional family farmers, paying them fair prices.  Their transition to a worker co-operative continues a tradition of fair and equitable treatment for its employees.  Real Pickles is committed to organic agriculture in the field, and energy efficiency and solar power at its facility.  And long-term commitment to local ownership and place is what their co-op transition deal is all about.

The team at Slow Money is excited to support Real Pickles because they are the real deal.  Their commitment to principled business makes it hard for them to offer investors the kind of return they are accustomed to seeing in the world of Fast Money.  But, they embody the change we seek, and offer supporters of local food an opportunity to invest in a way that is consistent with their consumer commitment.  Real Pickles has worked hard to make this offer viable and available.  We are proud to help them get the word out.

For more information about Real Pickles’ co-op investment campaign, visit www.realpickles.com/invest. 
 

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A Community Perspective: Keeping It Local!

Margaret Christie is a rock star.  Especially when it comes to our local food system here in western Massachusetts.  As executive director of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) in the late 1990s, she oversaw the launch of the hugely successful “Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown” marketing campaign.  In her on-going work as CISA’s special projects director, Margaret plays an essential role as researcher, thinker, and organizer in the effort to build a better food system – locally and beyond.  Here, Margaret offers her perspective on the social benefit of Real Pickles’ decision to go co-op.  Thanks, Margaret, for your kind and insightful words!  

by Margaret Christie, Special Projects Director, CISA

Why is Real Pickles’ decision to go worker co-op good for the rest of us?  If they keep making good dill pickles, ginger carrots, and sauerkraut, do we care who owns them and how that ownership is structured?  Yes, we do—not only because of the impact this business will have, but because the folks at Real Pickles are showing us how we can be involved in building a better food system.

The change in Real Pickles’ ownership provides a number of collateral
community benefits, but most important may be the model of business success they offer.  As we work together to create a network of farm and food businesses that provide more of the food we eat every day here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts (and the surrounding region), we often focus on business start-ups, not on what follows success.  But what happens to a business that starts with a commitment to sourcing regionally or sustainably grown ingredients as the business matures?  When the owners are ready to do something else—or just to shoulder a little bit less of the burden of keeping the business going—how can their commitment to regional sourcing be maintained?  Real Pickles’ decision to form a worker co-op models one answer to this important question.

Every month, I attend meetings of the PVGrows Loan Fund as CISA’s representative.  When local farm and food businesses apply to us for financing, we review a list of criteria that represent our mission of “enhancing the ecological and economic sustainability and vitality of the Pioneer Valley food system.”  Among our concerns is long-term commitment to the Pioneer Valley.  If we finance a new business, will they continue to source from local farmers in the long run, or will they decide that it’s less expensive to find their ingredients in the global marketplace?  Or might they move altogether, finding both cheaper ingredients and cheaper labor?  When evaluating loan applicants, we often have no way to assess the owners’ long-term commitment to our region.

Real Pickles’ new ownership structure, in contrast, provides two clear answers to this question.  First, the business will now have multiple owners, all relying on its success for their employment, and unlikely to choose to ship their jobs someplace else.  Second, they’ve codified their commitment to regional sourcing and regional sales in their bylaws, and made those bylaws very difficult to change.  Rather than getting big and getting bought out by a larger corporation with, perhaps, a stronger commitment to their shareholders’ profits than to our local economy, Real Pickles has strengthened their commitment to our region while restructuring their ownership.

Real Pickles’ action reminds me of a courageous step taken by another Franklin County business more than a decade ago.  In 1998, a group of Franklin County dairy farmers decided to form a co-op and market their own milk to local consumers, becoming Our Family Farms.  They introduced the milk by giving out lots of free samples, explaining that it came from their own farms, right down the road.  There wasn’t much fanfare then about locally grown food, but the response was clear: the milk was delicious, and local residents understood that supporting businesses in their own communities benefitted the local economy.  Many farmers and farm advocates in the region took notice.  At CISA, when we started the Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown campaign the following year, Our Family Farms’ success gave us confidence that the campaign would resonate here in the Pioneer Valley.  CISA is now celebrating our 20th anniversary, and the founding of Our Family Farms was a critical milestone on the road to the Local Hero campaign and the explosion of interest in local food and farms.

I expect that Real Pickles’ decision to form a worker co-op—and the campaign for investors which will finance the shift in ownership—will play a similarly important role in the growth of our local food system.  Growth and success can lead to a renewed commitment to our region and the health of its farms, workers, and local economy.  And as residents of this region, some of us can do more than applaud and eat pickles:  we can finance this growth from within our own community.

For more information about Real Pickles’ co-op investment campaign, visit www.realpickles.com/invest.

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“We don’t want no climate drama!”

Who does?  Dan and I traveled down to Washington D.C. this past weekend to be part of Forward on Climate, the biggest climate rally in U.S. history.  We joined over 40,000 people on the Mall near the Washington Monument, and then marched to the White House to make sure that our message was heard.  Our message was serious, but we had a great time conveying it.

Dan & Addie Rose

The Sierra Club, 350.org, and 160+ other organizations sponsored theevent, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip-Hop Caucus emceed the show.  We heard from author and activist Bill McKibben, tribal leaders from British Columbia, Alberta, and Oklahoma, and even a member of the 1% (a billionaire investor) who came out to let us know that he saw the Keystone XL pipeline as a very bad investment.  All spoke out strongly against the pipeline that is proposed for transporting oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast for refining and exporting.  The quantity of oil estimated to be locked up in the tar sands is equal to all the oil that humanity has ever yet used – and if burned would raise the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from an already dangerous 400 ppm to a frightening 600 ppm.

“You are the antibodies kicking in as the planet starts to fight its fever,” Bill McKibben told the crowd as we gathered on the Mall.  Many people referenced Dr. Martin Luther King’s visit to the Mall 50 years ago and the crowds of people who came to fight for human equality.  The difference, Rev. Yearwood noted, is that now “we are fighting for existence.”  Indeed, climate change is already picking up steam – as recent extreme weather events keep reminding us – and the stakes are high.  The opportunity to convince President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline is an opportunity to impede the burning of that dirty Alberta oil – and to give us time to get on track reducing our energy consumption and switching to renewables.  Dr. King’s famous words ring true today: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

Climate change is a big deal to us at Real Pickles.  Our work here is to strive to create a business that is sustainable and energy efficient, one that helps to build a strong and healthy community.  Many of the principles on which we base our decisions are principles that also define the climate movement.  Climate change is also central to the work I do outside of Real Pickles: managing communications and outreach for the Northeast Climate Science Center (NE CSC) based at UMass Amherst.  The center is a federal-academic partnership that works to provide tools to natural resource managers as they plan for a future of changing climate.  My two workplaces – Real Pickles and the NE CSC – span a broad spectrum between big picture and community scale action.  In both, I think about the issues surrounding climate change on a daily basis and hope that our government will take action to prevent the worst, even as many citizens prepare for it.  For these reasons, I was thrilled to join the 40,000+ protesters in Washington on Sunday.

The march begins

“Hey Obama! We don’t want no climate drama!” – chant from the crowd

We felt very inspired by the attendance and the vibe at the rally.  People traveled from all over the country to participate and show their support for a low-carbon future.  Together, we shouted and we shook our fists.  We danced to the drum line and the brass band.  And we danced extra hard to keep warm – did I mention that it was a crisp 25 degrees with a brisk wind?

There were signs declaring that “fossil fuels are SO last century” and stickers against hydrofracking (“No fracking way!”).  The tribal leaders spoke of the incredible pollution risk posed by the Keystone XL pipeline: “Oil always spills.  It is not a question of if, but a question of when.”  And there were numerous chants in favor of solar and wind power, with Dan and I occasionally adding in a good word for conservation as priority #1.

Turnout for the event far exceeded expectations, and we left feeling particularly proud of the Western Mass contingent: we heard that 5 or 6 full buses traveled to the rally from the Pioneer Valley, yeah!  We took a bus down from Greenfield and were serenaded in the parking lot by activists unable to join us – with songs like CSN’s “Long Time Comin'” – before we boarded the bus and set on our way.  Amidst the enormous crowd, we didn’t run into many Western Mass folks but did see our neighbor Alden, owner of the People’s Pint, toward the end of the rally.  We were hoping he would have 2 pints of his Farmer Brown and a couple of pulled pork sandwiches to offer us, but alas – we’ll have to wait until we get back to Greenfield.

We’re including a few photos from our trip – we hope that you enjoy!

Addie tells Obama that she “don’t want no climate drama”.
Dr. King’s words ring true today, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

 

 

 

The polar bears show up to the rally to advocate for their future existence.

 

A brilliant policy solution that could make a profound difference. (Carbon Tax Center is a good clearinghouse for info on a revenue-neutral carbon fee.)

 

The Occupy movement lives on!

 

It’s time, indeed…
Gotta put the brakes on.
The final word.

 

 

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Why I Want to be a Worker-Owner…Again

When I first starting working with Dan and Addie at Real Pickles four years ago, I was impressed by their delicious fermented vegetables and commitment to family farms here in the Pioneer Valley.  I was also intrigued by how they thoughtfully rejected the conventional wisdom that success for a natural foods business means getting national distribution, scaling up and selling out.  What kind of organic food business would limit sales to the northeastern US when there was clear demand across the country?  Who would decline sales to big food distributors in favor of local companies and direct deliveries?

This approach has been very successful for Real Pickles over the past eleven years. And these unconventional ideas about how to run a business are not just ideological.  They are sound decisions for owners whose concern is not maximizing profit, but creating a stable business that contributes to a vibrant regional, organic, and values-based food system.

Based on these priorities, Dan and Addie have decided that the best path for them is to convert their business to a co-op.  As member-owned enterprises, co-operatives are designed to meet human needs and aspirations before maximizing profit.  Because of this, co-ops tend to focus on long-term goals beyond the quarterly balance sheet. Dating back to the 1800s, the co-operative movement offers a democratic economic alternative that roots wealth in local communities. When the United Nations declared 2012 the International Year of Co-ops, the goal was to shine a light on a business model that now includes over a billion members worldwide –  more people than directly own stock in publicly traded corporations.

For me personally, Real Pickles’ transition to a co-op is an exciting opportunity.  Before joining the business, I spent a decade as a member of Equal Exchange, a Fair Trade Organization committed to working with small farmer co-ops throughout the world.  Through this work, I was able to see how co-operatives enable people to change their lives and communities — often in the context of geographical isolation, governmental neglect and poverty — and meet their needs, together.

In Darjeeling, India, I visited a community living on an abandoned tea plantation that had formed a co-op and were slowly bringing the tea bushes back into production so that they could diversify their incomes beyond local cash crops. In Chiapas, Mexico, I saw how coffee co-ops are essential tools for the independence of Zapatista Autonomous Communities, where indigenous communities provide themselves with essential services.

Kristin having morning coffee with the Castellon family, Miraflor Co-op, Nicaragua, 2002

Most meaningful to me were the co-operative communities I met in Nicaragua.  Like many coffee-growing countries, Nicaragua is a stunningly beautiful place.  But the beauty of the countryside contrasts with the lack of opportunity faced by much of the population, a result of decades of dictatorship starting in 1937, an earthquake that devastated the capital in 1972 and a brutal civil war in the 1980s.  Coffee co-ops, however, are a bright spot in rural Nicaragua.  During my visits to these communities, I met teenagers from farming communities who give passionate tours of the local rainforest as part of eco-tourism programs created by their co-op, women who run co-op-sponsored outreach programs on domestic violence, and young co-op staff people who are trained experts in coffee quality.  Through their co-ops, thousands of coffee farmers in Nicaragua have shared ownership of highly efficient coffee processing and export facilities.  The farmers, co-op staff people, and community activists I met in Nicaragua during my time at Equal Exchange have persisted through political conflict and open warfare, and inspired me to continue to work for justice and community ownership in the food system.

To me, it is important that Equal Exchange is itself organized as a co-operative, living the values of democracy that it values in its suppliers.  As a former worker-owner, I – along with my fellow members – elected the board of directors and participated in core business decisions. It was the worker-owners who decided to expand beyond coffee into tea and chocolate, to create a policy that limited our highest salary to four times the lowest, to buy a building, and to set up our own roasting facility. These weren’t always easy decisions and we did not always agree.  But democratic ownership means that we are accountable for own work lives and the success of the business that we share.

During my time at Equal Exchange, I watched a series of socially responsible businesses in the northeast transition from small, committed companies to “brands” purchased and managed by multinational corporations: Stonyfield Farm (Danone), Fresh Samantha Juice (Odwalla and later Coca-Cola), Organic Cow of Vermont (Dean Foods) and Tom’s Toothpaste (Colgate).  While some of these businesses have been able to keep some portion of their mission intact, their bottom line is to generate profit for the parent company and enhance its reputation.  Over time, commitment to the values that drew consumers to these companies seems, inevitably, to fade.

I admire Dan and Addie’s commitment to their vision.  Real Pickles as a co-operative is a logical extension of this commitment and I am impressed by their decision to follow this path. Looking forward, my day-to-day job at Real Pickles Co-operative will look about the same — I’ll still work on new product ideas, make sales calls, and, in a pinch, forklift cases of sauerkraut and kimchi onto delivery trucks.  But becoming part of the co-op will provide a deeper sense of ownership of the business and commitment to sustaining our mission. Together with my fellow co-op members, I am looking forward to being a worker-owner… again.

We are excited to announce the latest step in our plan to go co-op: An opportunity to invest in Real Pickles!  Offered to MA & VT residents, this is an excellent way to support our transition to a co-operative structure as well as our continuing work in helping to build a vibrant, regional, organic food system.  Read more:  www.realpickles.com/invest

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We’re Going Co-op!

by Dan and Addie

We have big news to share:  Real Pickles is becoming a worker co-operative!

Along with Real Pickles staff, we have been laying the groundwork for a co-op transition for a number of months now, and earlier this summer – during the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives – we officially decided to make the switch!  Everyone here is excited about the plan to convert Real Pickles to a worker co-op, and we will be working to make it happen over the next few months.  While the two of us will no longer be the sole owners of the business, we will continue to be part of Real Pickles as worker-owners and managers.  We think a worker co-op structure will be an outstanding way to help ensure that Real Pickles will succeed far into the future – producing delicious and healthy food for people and making a lasting contribution to building a new and better food system!

Why co-op?

We have worked hard over the last decade to build up our business: creating and scaling up our recipes, developing markets for our products, and educating folks about fermented pickles.  We have figured out how to manage the challenges posed by our commitment to sourcing locally – purchasing and processing our year’s supply of vegetables all within the short span of the New England growing season.  And three years ago, when we had completely outgrown the community kitchen we were using, we made the big leap to our own organic food facility.

Now, after eleven years in business, it is quite gratifying to be able to say that Real Pickles has achieved a certain level of success as an organic food business.  We are not making big bucks, but things are financially solid.  We have a fantastic staff of twelve.  We operate out of a 100% solar-powered, energy-efficient facility.  We are supplying over 300 stores around the Northeast with delicious, nourishing food.  And, we are supporting local farms with annual purchases nearing 200,000 pounds of certified organic vegetables.  Yes!

Where does one go from here?  These days, the typical path for a business like ours involves continued rapid growth followed by selling out to a large industrial food corporation.  Entrepreneurs who have gone this route will offer a variety of rationalizations for why such a move can be socially beneficial.  As we see it, leaving it to big corporations to run the world leads to very bad social outcomes.  As far as Real Pickles goes, our deeply socially-responsible approach to doing business doesn’t fit with big corporations’ drive for monetary profit.  We are committed to keeping Real Pickles a small business working to truly change the food system, and so we clearly must choose a different direction.

We have decided, then, to try to help re-write the standard storyline for a successful organic food business.  We are interested in creating a new structure for the business which will support both its continued financial success and success in contributing to a better world.  And, while neither of us have any plans to leave Real Pickles anytime soon, we want this structure to help ensure that Real Pickles can be viable in the long run by eventually coming to be able to thrive without dependence on its founders.

As we see it, a worker co-operative is the most promising structure for Real Pickles.  As a worker co-op, Real Pickles’ social mission and guiding principles will be inscribed in its articles of organization and bylaws, and be made difficult to change.  The business will stay rooted in the community.  Its owners will continue to be local residents who are directly involved in the day-to-day operations, and they will be highly unlikely to re-locate the business out of the area.  A worker co-op structure will also give members of our staff the opportunity to share in the decision-making and profits.  We expect this opportunity will serve as an important contributor to Real Pickles’ future success as it incentivizes our excellent staff to remain at Real Pickles on a long-term basis.

How will it work?

Five of us here at Real Pickles have made the commitment to sign on as founding worker-owners of the co-operative: Brendan Flannelly-King, Annie Winkler, Kristin Howard, and us (Dan & Addie).  Our hope is that additional staff members will join us following the transition.  According to our plan, staff will become eligible for worker-ownership following a year of employment at Real Pickles.  Once approved by the existing membership, a staff member will purchase one share of common stock in the co-operative, entitling him or her to a single vote in co-op affairs and to a share of the profits through annual patronage dividends.

As a co-operative, Real Pickles will be governed by the worker-owners via a board of directors.  On a day-to-day level, our current management structure will remain in place.  The business will continue to be managed in as participatory and inclusive a manner as possible, an approach which has been greatly successful in contributing to a satisfying and productive Real Pickles workplace.

This fall, we will be working through the remaining steps necessary to making our co-op transition happen.  A key task will be to raise additional funds so that the worker-owners can purchase the business.  As plans develop we will keep you updated, so stay tuned!  It’s an exciting time here at Real Pickles.  We are hopeful that at the end of this process – and the beginning of a new chapter – Real Pickles will be in an excellent position to be producing delicious and healthy food for people, providing meaningful and satisfying work for its staff, and making positive social change in the food system for many decades to come!

We are excited to announce the latest step in our plan to go co-op: An opportunity to invest in Real Pickles!  Offered to MA & VT residents, this is an excellent way to support our transition to a co-operative structure as well as our continuing work in helping to build a vibrant, regional, organic food system.  Read more:  www.realpickles.com/invest

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Fermentation is hot (off the presses)!

Apparently we at Real Pickles are in on a hip, hot, and exciting trend.  Judging by the release of TWO excellent (and beautiful) pickle books in recent months, there is no shortage of things to say about pickling of all kinds, fermented or otherwise.  We are also proud to report that Real Pickles is recognized in both!  The Art of Fermentation (Chelsea Green Publishing) is the 9-year follow up to Sandor Ellix Katz’s wildly popular Wild Fermentation.  Many ferments and workshops later, Katz offers this incredibly articulate and comprehensive volume on fermentation of food.  Andrea Chesman’s The Pickled Pantry: From Apples to Zucchini, 150 recipes for Pickles, Relishes, Chutney & More (Storey Publishing) is a fantastically thorough reference for making pickles of all kinds, with recipes for making the pickles themselves as well as recipes for using finished pickles in other dishes.

Both of these resources are essential additions to the available literature on pickle-making and fermentation.  We have always enjoyed – and refer frequently to – the standard volumes on lacto-fermentation of vegetables, such as Katz’s Wild Fermentation (2003, Chelsea Green), Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions (1999, New Trends), Making Sauerkraut & Pickled Vegetables at Home by Klaus Kaufman and Annelies Shoneck (1997, Alive Books), and Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning (1999, Chelsea Green).   The new treasuries not only add to the existing authorities, but spring far ahead in depth and breadth.  Here at Real Pickles, both copies are under constant perusal during lunch and break times and are beginning to show loving dog-ears and signs of use.

The Art of Fermentation provides an excellent account of the history of fermentation as well as its prevalence and pervasiveness in our modern diet.  As in his previous Wild Fermentation, Katz’s new book also seeks to engage and encourage each reader to set down their bacterial fears and embark on a cultural adventure.  As Michael Pollan remarks in the foreword, “To ferment your own food is to lodge an eloquent protest—of the senses—against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe.”  In addition to the book’s breadth of information, the photos will delight even the casual peruser, from scanning electron microscopy images to the latest in kombucha fiber fashion.  But for fermentation enthusiasts, as we consider ourselves here at Real Pickles, the book is an excellent reference for putting up a broad array of fermented products.  Our fermentation manager, Katie, was so excited about The Art that she slept with the book under her pillow for the first week to maximize osmotic potential.  She just couldn’t put it down.  She says, “I love that it doesn’t read like a cookbook…that it is history, stories, science and just so much amazing information!”  Katz’s new compendium also boasts a one-of-a-kind chapter on commercial enterprises, well representing our end of Wells Street here in Greenfield, MA with input from both Dan at Real Pickles and Will from Katalyst Kombucha.  Dan is consulted for his expertise on scaling up, marketing, and consumer education.

The Pickled Pantry: From Apples to Zucchini, 150 recipes for Pickles, Relishes, Chutney & More  is a comprehensive new cookbook on pickles of all kinds.  Chesman starts with the fundamentals, necessary equipment, basic ingredients, and delves into pickle recipes both common and surprising.  Her section on fermented pickles is particularly good.  Along the way, she peppers the read with anecdotes and profiles of other picklers.  Real Pickles is the subject of one of the featured profiles, telling the story of our first decade in business.  Chesman also includes many delicious-sounding recipes in which to enjoy your finished pickles.  Personally, I am very excited by the recipes in the back of Pickled Pantry.  As soon as the pickle season slows down a bit, I will be cooking up such tasty dishes as Roasted and Braised Duck with Sauerkraut and Root Vegetables, Kimchi Rice Salad with Tofu, and may even try the intriguing German Chocolate Sauerkraut Cake(!).  Clearly, Chesman has a lifetime of experimentation and successful meals behind her – and I am so looking forward to benefiting!

For those interested in DIY pickle-making and home ferments, these books will fascinate and educate, no matter your pickle proficiency.  But these publications also represent a growing focus on – and resurgence of – pickles and fermented foods.  Now that we have industrial food and refrigerated trucks, pickles and ferments could be viewed as a relict of a simpler time, replaced by a year-round supply of food imported from anywhere.  Except that, as both Katz and Chesman emphasize over and over, ferments and pickles expand the range of our palate, creating the strong flavors that we both crave and despise.  Often, the fermented product is tastier and more nutritious than the original fresh ingredients.

Some fermented foods already command the attention of foodies across the globe:  Encyclopedic tomes are written on the wide-ranging flavors and terroir of wine and cheese – and other ferments are gaining the recognition they deserve.  We’ll know that pickles have earned their rightful place when soils known for growing great cabbage increase property values or when the local grocery starts hosting successful weekly pickle tastings.

Growing pickle popularity also makes us a happier population because pickles make us laugh.  I’m serious!  Try inserting the word “pickle” into any sentence and you are guaranteed a chuckle.  But no joke: People are excited about fermented foods, and the momentum is growing.  Creating ferments brings us face to face with the chemistry and microbiology of what we eat, which can be simultaneously unnerving and compelling.  When a mason jar is popping and fizzing and whining on your kitchen counter, you know that you are not the only living thing in the room.

Fermentation is surprising, creative, exotic, fun, scientific, and delicious.  I invite you to embark on a sour journey, use these books as your guide, open your mind and your mouth, and dig into the vast and growing world of pickles.  Send us a postcard!

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Regional Distribution: An Interview with Joe Angello

At Real Pickles, we have always had an unconventional approach to distributing our fermented vegetables, choosing to work with small independently-owned regional distributors rather than large national ones.  Angello’s Distributing, based in upstate New York, was the first distributor to carry our products.  I recently talked with Joe Angello, its founder and owner, about his experiences in the natural food industry and what it’s like running a regional distribution business.

KH: Why did you decide to start a food distribution business?

JA: It was a reaction to the consolidation of natural food distribution.  Northeast Cooperatives had just been purchased by UNFI [United Natural Foods] and a clear monopoly was being established.  We were recognizing that good local producers had no access to the market.  The only way was through UNFI and they were more focused on national brands.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on a business plan.  If I did, Angello’s might not have happened.  I’m more of a jump in and do it kind of guy.  I borrowed a truck and was working out of the cooler at Hawthorne Valley Farm.  Later I found space at Clermont Fruit Processors in a building that had been in agricultural use for over eighty years.

KH: What does Angello’s look like now?

JA: We have fifteen staff people, both full and part time.  We run two to four trucks.  Produce wasn’t our original intention but we started the business at the height of the season and within a month it became obvious that people were interested in fresh, local produce.  I came from fifteen or twenty years in the fish business.  Fish is expensive and perishable and the intensity level and competition is high.  Produce can be hard but it’s easier than fish and we really worked on how to make it as fresh as possible.

Produce accounts for about 40% of our sales now.  We also distribute dairy, grass-feed beef, baked goods, fermented foods and some beverages.

Our core customers are independent natural food stores and co-ops in the Hudson Valley, North Jersey and the Berkshires.  What we do resonates with the end user customer.  Shoppers really look for and appreciate good quality organic foods.

KH: Angello’s has been distributing Real Pickles since 2004 – before my time at Real Pickles.  How did Real Pickles and Angello’s first start working together?

JA: One day in the early days of Angello’s I ran into a guy I knew doing a delivery.  He had been the Northeast Cooperatives delivery guy when I had worked at the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store.  He was grumbling about the UNFI purchase and I said, “Come on over. We could use some help”.  It was a rough time in our business.  I think he might have introduced us to Real Pickles.  He definitely introduced us to Paul Harlow at Westminster Organics.  Real Pickles and Angello’s stand for the same thing on different parts of the food chain.  It’s one of the brands we’ve had from the beginning that keeps carrying on, and the relationship keeps get stronger.

KH: What do you see as the biggest challenges for independent and regional food producers and distributors?

JA: Marketing is one of our biggest challenges, both for producers and distributors.  We go head to head with major corporations like General Mills and Kraft Foods, who have an unlimited amount of marketing money.  Most all of these companies are giant publicly traded stock companies.  Is that really where we want our food dollar to go?  Those of us who work in regional food all need to be looking at ways to pool our interests so that we can better promote the independent brands that get passed over by the big guys.

KH: What do we need to be thinking about as consumers and shoppers?

JA: We need more public scrutiny about what’s inside the package.  People like Michael Pollan have been doing that and Vandana Shiva has been doing it on a global level.  We need to make high quality food a priority – for the health of our environment, the health of ourselves, the health of the economy.  The idea that cheaper food is better food is deep in our psyche. That has got to get thrown out the window.

If you spend an extra twenty cents on a six ounce yogurt to buy yogurt from a dairy in your region rather than from a multi-national brand, where is that money circulating?  How is it impacting our society, the environment and where we live? What’s really happening?  These are important questions to ask.

KH: Is there anything else interesting about Angello’s that we might not know?

JA: We care about these issues at the international level too.  We’ve been importing chocolate from the Grenada Chocolate Company.  The chocolate bars are actually made by a cooperative in Grenada.  Extreme things like child labor and slave labor happen in the chocolate industry, particularly in the Ivory Coast which produces 40% of the world’s cocoa supply.  There’s a great documentary called Nothing Like Chocolate that looks at these issues and features the positive things being done by the Grenada Chocolate Company.

KH: What has changed in the industry since you started the business?

JA: When we got started there was not much of a consciousness or awareness of local food.  We didn’t recognize it as a trend. It’s not why we started. For us it was more common sense.  All this stuff is here and you can’t buy it in the stores.  It didn’t make any sense. 

We were in the right place at the right time.  There was more awareness starting around 2005.  Banks still had money so we were able to buy our building.  We couldn’t do that now. People started to be really interested in local.  Have you been into a Walmart recently?  Everything says “local”. Banks and insurance companies talk about being local.  It’s like the word “natural”. It gets to be ridiculous.

KH: What should we know about food distribution that we probably don’t know?

JA: What appears at face value to be a simple task of getting a jar of pickles from Greenfield, MA to Clermont, NY to getting to a retail shelf in New York City is extremely complicated.  There are so many ways for that not to happen.  We’ve been doing it well and doing it continuously.

Giant companies have done a good job of keeping their costs at a level that is hard to maintain at a smaller scale like ours.  It’s more difficult than I think people realize.

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Good Food, Good Times

As honored as we are to be two-time winners of the Good Food Awards, the best part of the experience was in the details (as is usually the case). In our line of work, this is as close as we come to a professional meeting or academic conference. When else have we been able to meet a bunch of fantastic pickle makers and other food producers and talk geeky pickle-talk?? Not very often. If only for that, we thank the Good Food Awards (GFA) for creating the opportunity.

The big event. (Photo credit: Marc Fiorito)

The ceremony was a terrific event, and organizers did a great job of making GFA feel like a truly special honor. We gathered at the historic and impressive Ferry Building, a bona fide shrine to local food. Downstairs, the Ferry Building food shops and restaurants bustled with hungry activity while the gigantic upstairs hall filled with food producers dressed in their best. What exactly does “Black Tie Optional” mean to a food producer? The range of interpretations was fully featured at this event. From tuxes to trousers – foodies and members of the press turned out to witness the announcement of the 2012 winners. Alice Waters again hosted – this time acting as the medal-distributor – along with keynote speaker, Ruth Reichl. Both stood to the side of the stage and greeted each winner with a medal and a handshake before guiding them to the stage to stand with their fellow category winners to accept their award. Amidst the clinking of mason jars full of local hard cider and the excited chatter of nutriment networking, a speaker selected from each category (voted by the category winners) gave the acceptance speech. Many spoke of changing times, the ability to source quality ingredients that were not available a decade ago, and the increasing consumer demand for tasty and responsible food. Over such a wide variety of categories (coffee, chocolate, beer, preserves, charcuterie, pickles, cheese, spirits), there were many interesting points that could have served as keynotes in themselves – but in the interest of getting to the tasting tables, talks were limited to 3 minutes each.

Real Pickles’ Dan was selected to speak for the pickle category (you can read his speech here). He was a little (very) nervous but found out when he sat down with his fellow winner-speakers that he wasn’t alone. He really appreciated the opportunity to talk in the ceremony about the idea of building regional food systems, since that’s a big part of why Real Pickles got started, and it’s an effort that many other winners are involved in, as well.

The tasting.

After the ceremony, we headed downstairs for tasting!!! The Ferry Building continues its history as a terminal for ferries bound for points across the bay. But now, it is a gathering place for all who love good food (and have some spending money). During the week, food purveyors vend their victuals to ferry passengers, financial district lunchers, and tourists alike – from locally-roasted Blue Bottle Coffee to regional Cowgirl Creamery cheeses to raw Hog Island oysters (my favorite, anytime of day). You can even browse the shelves of an oversized armoire full of amazing jams and pickles, which serves as a mini-shop for Happy Girl Kitchen. For the GFA tasting party, the Ferry Building shops were closed, but tasting tables for each region were set up in the hallway by region. Each region’s table was lined with plates containing a bite-sized portion of each winning product. For the East region, we enjoyed marvelous mouthfuls from Sour Puss Pickles and Sweet Deliverance in NYC, Formaggio Kitchen in Boston, Cellars at Jasper Hill in Vermont, and Rogue Chocolatiers – new neighbors in Western Massachusetts! Washing the regional mixture down with gulps of winning beer from familiar Smuttynose and faraway Alaskan Brewing Company, we proceeded to the next table for pleasurable provincial provisions.

The sandwich. (Photo credit: Lisa Scott Owen.)

Real Pickles’ Garlic Dills were one of a handful of products chosen by San Francisco chefs to be showcased in special dishes specifically for the event. Evan and Leo, who we got a chance to meet at last year’s awards, are opening up a Jewish deli in San Francisco called Wise Sons Deli. They’ve been hard at work perfecting their fermented pickle and cured pastrami recipes for the new place. Meanwhile, they prepared and served a very special dish at the reception: Brisket braised in Smuttynose Robust Porter with slaw and Real Pickles’ Garlic Dills on a sea salt challah bun. Quite a tasty little sandwich, though half of mine ended up on the floor by way of my dress … figures.

The next morning, we headed back to the Ferry Building for the GFA Marketplace and the regular Saturday farmers market. The Marketplace was a great chance to taste some of the winning products we’d missed the night before and meet some more winning producers. We got a chance to try a yogurt cheese from Sonoma County, which was wondrous. Someone in the Northeast needs to study with Saint Benoit and get some tips. We also enjoyed meeting some folks from Colorado and tasting their Avalanche goat cheese – yum. Moving on to the regular SF farmers market, we were heartily impressed. Talk about a regional food system! This endless farmers market is brimming with regional foods. Clearly, California has a certain climate advantage over 4-season New England for produce – but there was still plenty to be inspired by in terms of implications for our own food system back home: veggies, dairy, seafood, charcuterie… and a proud showing of lacto-ferments! We got to taste astonishing horseradish-leek kraut from Farmhouse Culture, as well as pick up a bottle of refreshing kimchi juice from Happy Girl Kitchen. It was great to see a farmers market supporting two bustling pickle booths (both GFA winners, I might add).

The kraut section at Rainbow Grocery!

We witnessed West Coast support of lacto-ferment beyond just the Ferry Building. Later on, we stopped in at Rainbow Grocery, a very impressive food coop in the Mission District, and found our jaws dropping at the sight of the raw kraut section. So many producers … so much shelf space. One employee noticed our reaction and said, “Yup, we like our kraut!” Some say that California leads the way, predicting the market, harbinger of the next big societal trend. Well, New England, are you ready for more raw kraut?!?

The pickle posse.

Before the GFA weekend came to an end, we also experienced what was perhaps the biggest highlight for us: A pickle posse party! As pickle-makers working in a rural area and only selling our products regionally, we only get so many opportunities to meet other people involved in our craft. The GFA weekend is a great way to get a bunch of us together. Many of us from this year’s group spent an evening embracing our inner pickle nerd by waxing eloquent about preferred cabbage slicing equipment, debating the fundamentals of fermentation chemistry, and deliberating about the challenges of buying local vegetables and managing a small business.  (Pictured here: Ann’s Raspberry Farm, Sour Puss Pickles, Emmy’s Pickles and Jams, Real Pickles, and Firefly Kitchens. Olykraut joined us later in the evening.)  In what can sometimes be solitary work, it feels good to be connected to such a great group of talented food makers, creative entrepreneurs, and all-around fun and interesting people. We’re excited for the next opportunity (fingers crossed for next year)!

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Good Food Awards speech: “Pickles Are Not Obsolete!”

Addie and I are just back from the Good Food Awards in San Francisco, where we were honored for the 2nd year in a row for our Organic Garlic Dill Pickles.  While our first experience at the Good Food Awards in 2011 was quite special, this time around we were fortunate enough to receive an additional honor:  Real Pickles was selected by our 10 fellow pickle winners from around the country to deliver the acceptance speech for the group!  (Thanks, picklers!)

At the ceremony, each pickle winner was called up to the stage and received a Good Food Awards medal from renowned chef and food activist Alice Waters.  And, then I delivered the speech:

Thanks very much. My partner Addie and I are thrilled to be back at the Good Food Awards for a 2nd time as part of what is again a fantastic pickle posse!

I think pickles are a really great fit with the Good Food Awards, with its focus on helping to bring good food back into the American diet, promoting both taste and social responsibility.  Pickle-makers in the United States have much to offer on both counts, and I would say the winners here tonight are clear illustrations of that.

Those engaged in the craft today are drawing on pickling traditions from around the world to produce tasty pickles, as three of tonight’s winners did – Farmhouse Culture, Spirit Creek Farm, and Firefly Kitchens – in creating a version of the Salvadoran classic, curtido.  And we are drawing on the American pickling tradition, as Cuisine En Locale did to produce their winning pickled peaches (which I’m very excited to try).

Some of us here (like Olykraut) are using the traditional fermentation process to make our pickles, while others (like Miss Jenny’s and Let’s Be Frank) are using the modern vinegar approach.  Both are great ways to preserve the wonderful flavors of organically-grown produce and indeed to enhance those flavors along the way.

Pickle-makers are also making major contributions in the realm of social responsibility.  Our special tool of course, our not-so-secret weapon, is our ability to take perishable fruits and vegetables and make them non-perishable, and yet still tasty and nutritious.

In an industrial food system – with monoculture farming and long-distance food transport (both made possible by cheap fossil fuels) – one might be tempted to wonder if pickles are obsolete.  I mean, why bother with making dill pickles for winter when we can just buy in cucumbers from Mexico, right?  Part of the answer, of course, is:  Who really could live without pickles?  (I know, I might be a little bit biased.)

But, as it turns out: pickles are not obsolete anyway.  Because, as more and more Americans are coming to realize, our industrial food system is broken.  It doesn’t work.  It’s causing or exacerbating a huge list of ecological and social ills, from climate change and soil erosion to human disease epidemics and the decline of our rural economies.  What we need instead is a regionally-based organic food system where everyone (not just the privileged few) has access to healthy food from small producers located (whenever possible) within their own region.

And in such a food system, pickles are an essential food:  one that can keep people eating nutritious fruits and vegetables from regional sources all year long, regardless of how cold the weather gets.

Our contribution to building a regional, organic food system is an important part of what we pickle-makers are being honored for tonight.  So many of the winning producers here have developed close relationships with their local farmers to source their ingredients, as we have done in Massachusetts at Real Pickles, Sour Puss Pickles has done in New York, and Emmy’s has done here in California; while others are growing ingredients themselves, like Ann’s Raspberry Farm.

And, thus, just as practitioners of each craft being honored here tonight are contributing to the task of making “good food” the norm in America, so too are those of the pickling craft.  And, I think I can safely speak for all of my fellow pickle winners when I express sincere gratitude to the organizers of the Good Food Awards for doing your part to help promote our work and achieve wider recognition for it.  So, thank you very much.

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Tips From Pickle Fanatics


While Winter tends to be a quiet time of year for making pickles, it is undeniably a great time for eating them. Fresh local produce is harder to come by and the tangy flavor of fermented foods is a perfect accompaniment to hearty cold weather fare. When it comes to fermented vegetables, the Real Pickles staff are, as you may have guessed, enthusiastic and creative users of the stuff. I talked with some other members of our staff recently to get a sense of how they are incorporating Real Pickles into their meals.

Katie, our fermentation specialist, has been on a tempeh reuben kick.  Known to us all as an excellent cook, she melts some Swiss cheese on rye bread, adds some slices of Rhapsody’s tasty tempeh, and tops it with Organic Garlic Kraut and Thousand Island dressing (she makes her own by combining ketchup, mayo and a chopped pickle).  “It’s an easy sandwich that you can make in a frying pan or a toaster oven,” she notes.

Apples and sauerkraut are a popular combination among staff, especially in these colder months. Some thinly sliced raw cabbage, Organic Sauerkraut, chopped apple, feta and toasted walnuts tossed in a creamy dressing is a perfect crunchy winter salad. Another inspired example of this combination is the pizza that Dan and Addie have been making, topped with ricotta, gruyere, shallots, thinly sliced apple and Organic Garlic Kraut. Dan and Addie particularly like using the sourdough crusts from our friends at Berkshire Mountain Bakery. We are always impressed by the beautiful caramelized shallots when they bring in leftovers for lunch.

In my own home, we make a version of the Real Pickles vegetable fried rice recipe at least a couple of times a month. We start by sautéeing lots of garlic, add some leftover rice, crack in an egg or two and then add whatever cooked vegetables we have around (carrots, kale and broccoli are always good). Sometimes we’ll throw in some frozen peas or green beans from our summer garden. We top it all with a big serving of Organic Asian-style Cabbage and some sesame oil. A handful of chopped salted peanuts tossed on top are an added bonus.

Brendan, who works in the kitchen and is our source of outstanding homemade goat cheese, also makes a lot of stir fries and likes to add in some Organic Ginger Carrots at the very end, heating just enough to warm it all through. He also suggests mixing the carrots into green salads.

Fermented foods are popular with staff for breakfast, especially as an accompaniment to eggs. A slug or two of Organic Tomatillo Hot Sauce on scrambled eggs has long been our favorite use for it. Annie, our lead production manager, likes to cover an over-medium egg with melted cheddar cheese and Organic Red Cabbage. Hannah also likes to precede her day in the Real Pickles kitchen with fried eggs for breakfast, topping hers with Organic Asian-style Cabbage.

If you’ve had a busy week and are looking for a simple and satisfying meal, you can always take a cue from the Real Pickles lunch table: unwrap a wedge of cheese, get some crusty bread or crackers and top it off with whatever Real Pickles vegetables you have open. Joe, our facility manager, takes this simplicity approach a step further. He traveled back home to Louisville over the holidays and his stash of Organic Dill Pickles intended for family and friends became the road trip snack of choice. “We easily went through an entire jar of pickles in one sitting and drank the brine when they were gone.”

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Lessons from a Muddy Season

Dave Chamutka of Chamutka Farm recently harvested the last of his 2011 cabbage crop and delivered it to our door.  By the next day, those cabbages were all peeled, cored, shredded, salted, and fermenting in barrels.  It was the final batch of vegetables for the year for us.  We’re now stocked up until next season – the cooler is full of packed cucumber pickles, the warehouse extra-full of barrels of fermenting cabbage, beets, and ginger carrots.

This particular November, it’s a bit of a relief walking through our warehouse and seeing all those barrels full of locally-grown vegetables on their way to becoming pickles. Given how heavily we depend here at Real Pickles on the success of the local farm harvest, there was a lot of uncertainty this season about how things were going to go.

The first concrete indication that 2011 might be a little different came in June when Gideon Porth from Atlas Farm called up to say that he was re-seeding his entire main crop of pickling cucumbers, and so we should expect a delay in the harvest this year.  Many of the cucumber seeds had just rotted in the mud, as spring had been so cool and wet.  As we got further into the season, we learned that the spring weather had affected many of the other crops we were waiting on, as well.

Once July hit, the weather got hot and quite dry for awhile.  But, the dry weather, of course, was not to remain.  In late August, Irene dumped epic amounts of rain on all the farm fields in the area.  Within a couple days, the Connecticut River was overflowing its banks and flooding fields at three of the six farms we work with (among many other area farms).  Harlow Farm, in Westminster, VT, was especially hard hit – a significant portion of the farm was underwater before the river finally receded.  The sky was blue within a day of Irene’s passing, but many more inches of rain came down in the weeks following.  By the time Dave Chamutka was ready to start harvesting his cabbage in late September, his fields were so muddy he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get in there to cut them.

In the end, though, we managed to fill all those barrels with top quality, delicious, locally-grown, organic vegetables.  Amazing!  Despite the odds, the area’s local farmers came through for us.  Gideon re-planted those seeds and went on to grow us plenty of beautiful pickling cukes.  Dave and his crew had to walk those first heavy crates of cabbage all the way out of the muddy field before being able to finally drive a truck in, but in the end managed to deliver to us what we needed to stock up on Organic Sauerkraut for the year.  The losses at Harlow Farm included carrots we were planning to buy.  But, we struck up a relationship with Joe Czajkowski, a third-generation farmer in Hadley, MA, who was able to fill in so that we could keep making our Organic Ginger Carrots.

We are always appreciative here of our local farmers, but in a year like this one we are especially thankful.  This season we were reminded of the challenges of committing to buying our ingredients only from local farms.  If we hadn’t been able to get enough cabbage, then come next spring we would be running out of several Real Pickles products.  But, even more, we were reminded of how resilient a well-developed local/regional food system can be.  After all, local farms still produced a tremendous amount of food this year, despite the adversity.

Resiliency is one reason why local/regional food systems make so much more sense than our dominant industrial one.  This has much to do with diversity and decentralization, as opposed to monoculture and centralization.  In our centralized industrial system, the majority of lettuce consumed in the United States is produced monoculture-style in Salinas, CA.  As a result, when the weather in Salinas is bad for lettuce, suddenly an important food can become scarce and expensive as far away as New England.  An even worse situation ensues when scary pathogens like E. coli 0157:H7 (whose appearance seems to be a direct result of industrial agricultural practices – see Michael Pollan for details) show up on a crop like lettuce.  With agricultural production so concentrated, such contamination quickly leads to widespread illness and nationwide recalls.

But, the diversity and decentralization that come with local/regional food systems promise to make us far less vulnerable than that.  On farms producing many different crops, rough conditions in a given year are likely to impact certain ones but are unlikely to impact everything.  In the huge October snowstorm we experienced recently, Atlas Farm’s two-acre lettuce crop got squashed by the snow, but their other autumn crops survived.  In a decentralized food system, a critical crop shortage experienced by a particular region in a given year could likely be rectified by sourcing from another region.  No one need starve.

A food system’s resiliency does not stem solely from diversity and decentralization, however.  As I think about all of those cucumbers the crew at Atlas Farm managed to harvest for us after such an inhospitable spring, and about all the heads of cabbage that were coaxed to maturity in the mud at Chamutka Farm, I am reminded that it is also the skill, tenacity, and creativity of the farmers that make a food system resilient.  Those farmers worked especially hard this season.  We at Real Pickles wish them a good winter’s rest!

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Occupy Wall Street: An Interview

As I noted last time, on the subject of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Real Pickles:  We are doing essentially the same work, even if employing different approaches to making change in the world, and from mostly different locales.  But, some actual connections are being made these days between the two efforts.  A couple weeks back, we shipped two gallons of sauerkraut as food donation to the protesters in NYC as a show of support.  And, recently some staff members from Real Pickles have made opportunities to drop in on the protests.  Joe Mirkin, Real Pickles’ stellar facility manager and co-production manager, joined in on the events in NYC for a weekend and came back with some thoughts to share.  Here are some excerpts from an interview I did with him:

DR:  What prompted you to travel down to NYC to join in with OWS?

JM:  After several weeks of reading news reports, it seemed the protests were gaining steam. What at first seemed like a flash in the pan quickly turned into the genesis of a popular uprising. Hey, who doesn’t want to be part of a popular uprising? So I got restless, grabbed a couple friends, some sleeping bags, and drove down to OWS. I also have friends in NYC who had participated in the OWS protests in the weeks prior to my visit. They all said the same thing, “You gotta get down here and see it for yourself!” Which is now what I tell everybody who is interested in the goings on of OWS: Go see it for yourself!

DR:  When you arrived, did you find what you were expecting?  How did things match your expectations?  What surprised you?

JM:  Heading down there, I figured I’d find just a bunch of young people having meetings and sleeping in the park. What I encountered was deeply surprising and, for the most part, encouraging and inspiring. Volunteer cleaning crews roaming the park 24/7 collecting trash and recyclables; a composting/gray water operation for recycling food scraps; a makeshift kitchen serving thousands of decent meals every day; an extraordinarily well-stocked, well-organized People’s Library fully staffed with friendly and competent librarians offering free reading material on all matter of subjects; people of all ages and various social classes; successfully facilitated General Assembly meetings with hundreds or thousands of participants; spontaneous classes and workshops organized and attended by interested people; clothing and bedding donations arriving by the carload, all sorted by volunteers and given away for free to anyone in need.
One of the things I did expect to find was a very significant amount of police present, and that was certainly the reality. The NYPD has these surveillance towers which can raise and lower from the ground to a height of almost 30′. The only other times I’ve seen anything like them were at Obama’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., and overlooking Beale St in Memphis, TN. The police apparently prepare for the worst when it comes to large gatherings of peaceful people, whether it be in protest, in celebration, or to hear blues music and eat barbecue.

DR:  How do you see OWS fitting into the work for social change that needs to happen?

JM:  Having untold numbers of people marching and demonstrating in the streets everyday allows for a whole slew of other social change to take place. The primary benefit I can see is that the protests allow all the groups that were already engaged in making change to expand their imaginations on what kind of progress is possible. They can demand more in their lists of goals, they can intensify and amplify their tactics for winning change, and they can build relationships and coalitions with other groups that may not have previously had specific overlapping issues. You’ve seen all sorts of labor unions come out in support of OWS, and now you’re seeing OWS link up with other movements for change around the city. The same dynamic is playing out at Occupy protests all over the country. I don’t think the camping out part alone is going to bring down corporate greed and all its associated ills, but it does seem to be a catalyst for a more networked and energized movement for justice.

DR:  What’s your assessment of the “message” coming out of OWS?  What do you think of the criticism that the movement doesn’t have a clear, coherent message?

JM:  The moment people at OWS begin pushing a single demand is the moment a lot of people will decide to stop participating. The real strength of the protest – the actual power that makes the city and the banks so bloody nervous  – is the broad base of support OWS has. Any action taken to weed out some issues in favor of others will only weaken this power, and so it is best to avoid any such thing, in my estimation. That certainly does not preclude OWS from issuing messages about the protest, which they have done. Nor should it keep individuals from teaching and talking to others about those issues close to them, which some people do. Keeping the message as broad as the 99% of people in this country is no easy task, least of all because of the pressure from media to present clear, concise demands. But it’s well worth the effort if OWS is to maintain the strength it has gained.

DR:  After posting my blog entry, “Occupy Wall Street and Organic Pickles”, we heard from a couple Real Pickles customers who were frustrated over our support for OWS.  They cited several reasons for opposing the protests.  One was that the protests were “disruptive”.  Any thoughts about that, having participated in them?

JM: My response to that criticism is:  Ask the millions of people losing their housing due to mortgage lending practices if they consider the protesters “disruptive”. Ask any farmer who’s been taken to court by Monsanto for intellectual property theft if they think OWS is “disruptive”. Ask any teacher or firefighter in Wisconsin if the word they would use to describe OWS protesters is “disruptive”. It goes on and on. Hard to imagine that a single protest in New York City can be even remotely close to being as disruptive as modern-day global neoliberal capitalism.

DR:  Another criticism we heard was that direct action (i.e.-street demonstrations) is not the way to go about changing the world.  Instead, it is best to follow Gandhi’s precept to “be the change you want to see in the world” and focus on, say, making organic pickles from locally-grown vegetables or buying locally-grown food.  What are your thoughts about the relative importance of these different approaches to making social change?

JM:  Changing the systems of food production and consumption in this country is of obvious importance to creating a better world. Sometimes in order to achieve your goal you need a diversity of tactics. Say you want to purchase food that was produced by workers who are paid fair wages. It may be as easy as going to a different store or market and maybe spending a little bit more money. But, sometimes one may have to do as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers down in Florida has done, and head out to the streets to demand that corporate grocery chains pay fair prices for hand-picked produce!

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Occupy Wall Street and Organic Pickles

In lower Manhattan and in cities and towns across the country, thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand change.  We are the 99%, they are saying, here to put an end to the societal injustices perpetuated by the 1%.  Those occupying Wall Street and elsewhere are speaking out against the concentration of corporate power and its negative impact on people and ecosystems, including problems ranging from joblessness and lack of access to health care to loss of biodiversity and accelerating climate change.

Meanwhile, in western Massachusetts, a small crew is hard at work inside a solar-powered food processing facility, peeling and shredding cabbages freshly harvested from an organic farm ten miles away.  The cabbage will ferment for several months, and then be sold as raw sauerkraut to stores around the Northeast.

Occupying the streets.  Making organic pickles.  Any connection here?  I would say so.

At first glance, what happens here at Real Pickles appears to be merely ordinary business activity.  Just a small enterprise trying to yield a reasonable profit by producing food for people.  An observer not so familiar with the workings of contemporary America might be tempted to think it normal, as well, that we source our vegetables from a small organic farm down the road, generate our own power, sell our pickles in raw and fermented form, and only distribute within our own region.  But of course, in 2011 here in the United States, there is nothing ordinary at all about such practices.  Nor is it typical these days for people to be eating food produced by a small business.

While the representatives of the 99% are seeking to occupy Wall Street, we should probably be thinking of the 1% as the real occupiers.  Climate activist Bill McKibben, in a recent address to the demonstrators in NYC, noted: “Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere.  That’s why we can never do anything about global warming.  Exxon gets in the way.  Goldman Sachs gets in the way.”  Indeed, Wall Street has long been occupying many realms of our lives.  And our food system is a prime example.

Local food production and distribution by small businesses certainly used to be the norm.  But these days, our food system is primarily national and international in scale.  It is dominated by huge corporations with massive influence over what we eat and how it is grown, processed, distributed, and sold.  These companies have spent significant sums of money to convince us that there is nothing wrong with this picture.  Monsanto’s public relations message is that we need them if we are to “feed the world”.  Kraft Foods assures us that they’re there for us, “fighting hunger and encouraging healthy lifestyles”.

Increasingly, however, people are starting to see through the slick PR campaigns.  They are starting to see connections between the corporate control of our food system and a wide variety of societal problems – the diabetes and obesity epidemics, the huge “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, just to name a few. Indeed, I think the evidence is robust and convincing enough to say quite clearly:  A global, corporate-dominated food system has profoundly negative consequences for people and ecosystems.  We are, without a doubt, in need of a new food system.

Here, then, lies the connection between Occupy Wall Street and a business such as Real Pickles.  Among the Wall Street protesters, some are more radical than others in their demands for change.  But there appears, by and large, to be a unified determination to alter the balance of power in our society away from the corporate elite and in favor of the 99%, and thereby begin to remedy a long list of social and ecological problems.

At Real Pickles, we are doing essentially the same work.  Having recognized that a corporate-dominated food system does not serve our society well, we have set about helping to build a new one.  Real Pickles is small, people-centered, ecologically-conscious, and local/regional in scale; and puts out food that is authentic and nourishing.  The aim is that this business will serve as a model as our new and better food system emerges.  Just like those protesting on Wall Street, we also recognize that the problems stemming from corporate control extend far beyond the food system, and hope that our work has impact as part of a broader re-shaping of our society, as well.

Occupy Wall Street and Real Pickles represent different approaches to the same effort.  Many approaches are needed, as there is much work to be done and no one simple path to an equitable and sustainable society.  So, it is with excitement that we witness the latest social ferment on the streets.  Here at Real Pickles we love fermentation!  We fully support the Occupy Wall Street protests and are delighted to be engaged together in the work for a better world.

 

Header photo: David Shankbone

Fermenting Since 2001