Most Recent Posts

Rising consumer demand for local foods has changed the job description for ranchers like Doniga Markegard.

Markegard, co-owner of Markegard Family Grass-Fed in San Gregorio, Calif., loves working with cattle, but she's not fond of the hours of phone calls and emails it can take to sell directly to a customer.

"What I want to be doing is the part I love — working with the animals and raising my kids on the ranch," says Markegard. "But I also need to be marketing our product, going to markets and talking with customers. There are a lot of administrative aspects to running a small family ranch, and they are time consuming."

Now a San Francisco startup is looking to act as the middleman, handling the logistics of gathering and delivering local goods to consumers' doorsteps so small farmers like Markegard don't have to.

Good Eggs began a year ago as a place where local food producers could sell their foods directly to consumers online, says CEO Rob Spiro. But producers needed more.

"We kept hearing the same thing from the producers," Spiro tells The Salt. "'This is great,' they told us, 'but as I become more successful, I'm becoming a full-time distributor.' "

So Spiro and his business partners decided to step in. "What we need is a last-mile delivery system for our producers," says Spiro.

The problem is that whether you live in San Francisco or Des Moines, Dallas or Wichita, the modern food system is based on economies of scale: To keep food inexpensive and delivered predictably, regardless of the season, you need mass production and the mass movement of goods from large-scale farm to national distributor to superstore.

But similar networks for moving locally produced foods to market are sorely lacking, according to a 2010 report from the USDA's Economic Research Service.

To that end, Good Eggs acquired three trucks and a warehouse and, as of last Thursday, it will now deliver fresh local fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood and prepared foods right to consumers' doors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. It plans to create a similar food hub in Brooklyn this spring.

The Good Eggs system works like this: Consumers order from a wide variety of locally made, artisanal products online — from baby food to cheese, oranges to muffins. Items are then baked or harvested fresh to order and sent to the Good Eggs' warehouse, where each individual order is put together manually.

The idea is to keep costs down by using an Amazon warehouse model of efficient distribution — except nothing is stored there. The warehouse is used instead for aggregating goods on delivery days. By bringing all the products together in one location and distributing them together, Good Eggs hopes to relieve producers of the logistical headache of direct sales, while earning them higher profit margins than they get from grocery stores.

Enlarge image i

Get recipes for Whole-Wheat Fettuccine With Savoy Cabbage, Cream And Caraway Seeds, Heartland Brisket and James Beard's Seed Cake.

It wasn't the fish heads poking out of the Stargazy Pie that stopped more than a few of our readers cold. It was the eyeballs.

"Not a lot of food nowadays has eyes; what's up with that?" one reader asked in commenting on a recent Salt post that featured a photo of the historic dish, which involves whole fish (eyes and all) poking out of a pie.

Turns out, quite a lot of cuisine features eyeballs. But there's no question that in many cultures, eating eyes is a food taboo.

I first ran afoul of this when I cooked up ukha, a famous Russian fish soup, for a group of friends. The fish heads make for a beautiful clear broth, and my husband, who grew up in Kamchatka, wanted to make sure those big old heads swam in his bowl.

Alas, when the bowls were laid out, the one with fish eyes staring balefully upward landed in front of the most fastidious eater in the room. He has never dined at my house again.

So I called James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and asked why eyes creep people out.

"Eyes represent faces," he said, "and it's through the face that we learn to recognize and empathize with others. So it's not entirely surprising that we find eyeballs disconcerting."

Enlarge image i

"There is no such thing as humane meat." This conclusion was drawn by Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA, in an opinion piece published last week in The Huffington Post.

Newkirk's point of view is not new (Farm Sanctuary's Bruce Friedrich has called humane meat "a contradiction in terms"). Still, it's a position that sounds extreme to many people.

Now a challenge: stop here, go back to Newkirk's post, and (if you haven't already) read the whole thing. Suspend any desire to argue back emotionally. Just read and think.

OK. How did you do? Did you make it through to the end — calmly?

Newkirk, herself, isn't always calm. Some of the rhetoric is incendiary ("animal slavery") or overgeneralized (people who stop eating animals "truly won't miss a thing except ill health"). I can tell you that I, for one, am occasionally overwhelmed by cravings for chicken pot pie!

More seriously, Newkirk aims her manifesto at the horrors of factory farming. Yet she sweeps up in her absolutist's net a lot of good people, including those who make their living on small farms.

On some small farms, chickens, pigs and other animals live largely in the fresh air, surrounded by the "family and friends" that Newkirk mentions in her piece. Yes, most of them are then slaughtered for the table. But isn't there humane practice on these farms, including the method of slaughter?

I asked Newkirk why she didn't distinguish between factory farms and small farms. On Monday, she told me in an email message that yes, "small farms are much better," but continued:

Invariably they are still inhumane at some level. Even on the smallest of farms (I grew up on one for some years) there will be mistreatment with animals seen as commodities, separation from others, frightening transport, the smells of slaughter before them, and definitely some horrible procedures, such as castration without even a painkiller.