The Importance of Words

Yesterday Kyle Glanville, co-owner of G&B Coffee in LA, former Intelligentsia rainmaker, and all around well regarded figure within specialty coffee, made the following statement:

                : Specificity > Vague Adjectives – Sustainable, artisanal, traceable, specialty, fresh, seasonal mean nothing now. :

This has been a longstanding complaint across the food spectrum – the adoption by marketers of half these terms, the cynical appropriation of expanding these terms to industrial practices, the ever-so-twee application of the heirloom cupcake. The dilution and back-and-forth over the terminology of organic certification. Pumping out “artisan” bread at one loaf every 6 seconds from a machine. And in specialty coffee, the use of direct trade to mean everything from breaking bread with the farmer who you see twice a year, to talking with your importer and ordering your coffees through your importer the way you have for the last 20 years. And in many circles there are, from farmers to small scale value-added food producers to coffee folk, frustrations with terms and a total willingness to throw everything out, or otherwise mock/demean/cast out anyone who uses the terms as hollow hacks or naïve schills.

Three things about these complaints:

1)      There is a kernel of truth in them. Whether government regulated definitions or voluntary, non-trademarked adjectives, there are very many misappropriations and misuses of these terms. These dilute and destabilize the efforts of people who do produce agricultural products in a truly sustainable matter (and there is such a definition, see 3), or source their materials in a way respectful to producers or of high qualifications of craftsmanship (see 3).

2)      If there is anger over this, at least in specialty coffee, people seem more content to whine and emote about it than actually call people out on it. Playing nice within the industry matters more than attempting to make firm definitions and parameters for some of these terms through trade associations, professional firms, or other outlets. Sustainable ag has done this for a while with regards to organic certification, decrying certifiers with loose standards, farms electing to sign on with certifiers who have standards above and beyond the stringency of the NOSB parameters, and advocating/lobbying for more stringent organic rules and norms in law. We need to constructively critical of businesses and individuals who view this strictly as a marketing thing and understand there are systems and values that need to guide businesses, not aesthetic niceties and soundbites, and this is something specialty coffee writ large is really unwilling to do.

3)      The complaints about terms shows the exceptional lack of knowledge about these terms by people in specialty coffee, which is my key frustration. Having kept one foot in food justice and sustainability politics as long as I’ve been involved in specialty coffee (almost a decade now), and consistently amazing to me is the lack of interest in examining or involving oneself with sustainable agriculture or craft industries (with craft beer or cocktails being perhaps the one exception, and sometimes, not even that). There’s no awesome definition of sustainability? I’d lead you to the triple-bottom line definition and promoted by Cradle to Cradle, or the host of Food Policy Council definitions all of which take into consideration elements of ecology, financial, and social demographics and outcomes. Artisanal? The terms and definitions given to vendors by The Good Food Merchants Guild. California Certified Organic Farms, the Soil Association of the United Kingdom, and Oregon Tilth have the most strident, systemic definitions of what constitute organic and certified organic; if that doesn’t seem enough, look to Demeters biodynamic definitions and practices. Fairtrade, for all its failings on quality assurance, at least takes a serious task in democratic norms and workers rights into consideration for its certification. And no one at this point can touch the transparency of Counter Culture has produced in their Direct Trade program (and note – not every bag of theirs has it on them). Not sure what makes your “local” economy? Look at Localism 101, an organization who defines it in terms of inter-generational wealth building within community-based businesses.

These frustrations can be summed up in a recent (also-twitter based) interaction. I interacted with James Hoffman via twitter a few months ago, wherein I was critical of an exercise he held with some associates seeing if they could differentiate in taste between organic and non-organic produce that was procured from a grocery. I asked whether or not this exercise wasn’t faultily constructed – cultivar, degree of organic certification & growing practices, and geographic provenance have an impact on flavor, and with the host of non-taste-derived benefits of organics, is it fair to assess these two as equivalent (especially when, as the outcome proved inconclusive, the walk-away is that there is no major distinction between organic and non-organic, so why support it)? The response was it was just a fun exercise. Half-snarkily, I asked if they could taste the soil degradation or smell the pesticide residue in workers lungs.

As an industry we need to be thoughtful, engaged, and proactive about both words and systems. Words like “sustainable” or “artisan” are only as useful as the systems that prop them up, and only those systems can provide a model alternative for businesses who may only know those words as a marketing ploy or a half-assed definition of the term. Traceability can mean something if companies are willing to put groundwork for it. Expertise can be qualified by other experts. And craftsmanship can be delivered through the end product; hospitality isn’t just about greeting and expediting – it’s culture making. We do not need to scream from the rafters about the values of our work – our cafes, our product, our employees can do that without having to utter a word. And we as an industry need to be willing to commit ourselves and our energies to promoting, upholding, and advocating for these definitions not just for our own companies but companies of our grade and parameter. We need to be the builders, the warriors, the weavers of our craft, and start making those connections between words and systems, starting now.  

Fauxtisanal: Or, Why You Can't Have it Both Ways (All the Time)

Recently, SF Magazine posted a 6-page interest piece on Pascal Rigo, previously the owner of the San Francisco Bay Area chain La Boulange. Several months ago, Rigo sold the company to Starbucks for a cool $100 million, which has spawned quite a bit of consternation in San Francisco, and a lot of speculation by business evaluators as to whether or not the attempted revamp of the national pastry program for Starbucks will be able to pump up this relatively nascent and stagnant part of the Starbucks bottom line. 

One of the more irritable things to come out of the SF Mag piece, besides its seemingly irrelevant and non sequitor of a title (nowhere is the analogy followed up in  the piece, nor does Rigo, to his credit, make the claim himself) is the quotation by Rigo regarding, in no small veil, the San Francisco bakery of Chad Robertson, Tartine. Money quote :: 

"[San Francisco] is the only place in the world where a bakery will make money by having bread at five o’clock in the afternoon. And it’s what—40 or 50 loaves, and each one costs seven bucks? It’s good, yes, but to call it a bakery ... it’s bull-sheet."

He continues on, talking about how a real bakery should have bread throughout the day, at a rate that is easily obtainable, and the article goes on to talk about how the La Boulange empire has done so -- along with providing wholesale bread to places like Olive Garden, Trader Joes, and other operations through a large-scale bread production facility that exists in San Mateo, south of San Francisco, one that will soon convey machinery able to pump out 6,000 baguettes an hour (that's 10 baguettes every 6 seconds, mind you).

Without getting into the qualitative issues regarding the bread itself -- something we cannot convey here beyond my own experience at having tasted much of La Boulanges roster as well as being an observer (and frequent buyer) of Tartine -- I do want to raise the question of whether or not Rigo can call this sort of work craft or artisan baking. Throughout the piece, Rigo makes the argument that by working the element of human error into his baking -- the irregularity of shape and cut, the slightly differed dimensions of doughs -- the work is made human, the quality high and the output increased substantially, this qualifying it for the title of artisan.  

There is something distracting in the arguments made though, calling this artisan yet accessible to "flyover country Middle Americans", the same Americans Rigo no doubt considers "will buy shit if you sell it to them well". This comes to a familiar crux in the argument over artisanal production/quality, which is that of cost and accessibility to the product itself. What qualifies a loaf of bread as affordable comes to an unspoken question, which is how well (or not) is the average person being paid, in conjunction with a number of factors. Namely, how much of this argument comes down to the rather typical issue that relative to wages, do people not pay for product because their wages don't allow for it? (And I say this knowing most other products, like Wonderbread, were very specifically designed to be as cheap as possible, and over time used to keep the overall cost of food purchases low. This, historically, has allowed for greater application of income to other consumption, and only recently has become an issue for American households attempting to shift their purchasing paradigms.) 

Part of this also comes to an issue about whether or not food products can be manufactured or scaled up in a way as to retain the integrity of the product with an updated capacity. This can and has happened in a number of capacities -- Heath Ceramics of California and Bodum of Denmark  represent two scales of that sort of success. Both marry good design precepts to larger scale production; Heath is a favorite insofar as it does so on a scale, thought to materials, and localized procurement and production that has kept it in operation for over 60 years, keeping well skilled labor and jobs in the Bay Area marketplace. Food, however, operates differently, with substitutions not really being able to reflect the same product (try making a pie with Red Delicious versus Pink Lady apples. They produce very different things, even if they both make "apple pie"). And as a friend of mine referenced in response to this article, especially in baking "process is product", with the methods very much affecting the actual outcome on the plate in a way that industrial manufacture does not have to contend with. 

In SF, Tartine limits the amount of bread it bakes off each day (closer to 60-80 loaves, including those produced for its sister restaurant) because of the time and oven space required for their production; in addition, the $7 price tag comes from not only the labor involved (a near 24-hour cycle) but also the space (being located smack dab in the middle of San Francisco) as well as ingredients (a fine tuned blend of flours produced by Central Milling Company of Idaho). They operate differently from La Boulange in that they have no wholesale clients, and operate as baking "in real time", baking off only what is needed at a given time, no major overlaps, and very little actual waste. This requires a skilled workforce, producing for orders and getting any number of different doughs and materials set up to be worked on and baked off at a moments notice. Whereas waste is built into a number of bakery schemes I have seen over the years in consulting, Tartine bakes in a way where waste is minimized through very flexible forecasting.

And this brings us back to the issue of Pascal Rigo and his quotes. What he does is not artisanal, and the more I dwell on it I get angry with the notion that he puts in anything into his work that the team at Tartine does. He isn't training anyone the skills to open their own bakery; he is not scaling his operation to minimize waste. Like La Brea Bakery (sold to an Irish holding company in the early 2000's), it is a shell of what an artisan bakery is (or should be) as it does little to the overall service of the people who work for it (besides providing them a wage). If process is the product, Rigo owns a company that is now as much akin to a maker of bolts than it does to a bakery.