From Planting to Plating

Photo by Anne Fishbein

At the Santa Monica Farmers Market, early on a fog-cooled morning in late June, See Canyon apricots are making their first appearance of the year. Fragile, blushing and intensely flavored — at once meaty, tangy and bursting with juice — Blenheims are an older variety that have been pushed out of the commercial market because of a stubborn propensity for green shoulders. Today, in the muted seaside light, they mostly just glow. Their grower and seller, Michael Cirone, explains that this week’s boxes are samplers to get everyone re-acquainted with the fruit. There are too few, he says, to sell by the box. But when Spago pastry chef Sherry Yard shows up right at 8 a.m. — she had a hunch he’d be here this week — it takes only a minimal amount of pleading on her part before Cirone sets two boxes aside.

Yard knows her fruit. These ’cots are destined to become pies, tarts, sorbet and her downright mythic dumplings. Cirone, meanwhile, knows his supporters. Such a relationship is replicated throughout this market ever more frequently — lately, exponentially — as more chefs avail themselves of the produce in these stalls. The Santa Monica Farmers Market alone has been slowly and steadily raising chefs’ consciousness about eating seasonally, regionally, and often organically, and that, in turn, is slowly and steadily changing the way we eat.

Twenty-five years ago in Los Angeles, there was minimal consciousness in restaurant kitchens about where produce came from, when it was in season and how it was grown. Produce came through the door from suppliers. Chefs were not shoppers. Nobody knew from heirloom then. Eating organically was something people practiced in the privacy of their own homes. At restaurants, crates and sacks of vegetables and fruit arrived, and the contents were prized for apparent freshness, beauty and, most of all, uniformity — which facilitated portion and price control. Flavor was important, of course, but often optional — nobody expected tomatoes in January to taste like anything, and yet they stayed on the menu year-round. Sauces and dressings — the gifts of Continental cuisine — compensated for the dearth of intrinsic flavor. You had to look long and hard in coffee shops, and in many restaurants, for a vegetable other than iceberg lettuce and potatoes.

All of that changed in 1978. Certain underground currents, slow streams of a new awareness, had been gathering force for years and began rising to the surface. Because by then, baby boomers had already been hippies, revolutionaries, health-food nuts. Moving away from home in the ’60s and early ’70s, many had dipped, at least briefly, into the counterculture. They’d traded Cheerios for granola, Roman Meal for whole grains; a good number had agrarian interludes during which they lived communally and planted organic gardens and sometimes entire farms; they shared the cooking, hung big hanks of fresh herbs from their rafters to dry; they swapped crops with other communes, formed co-ops; and it was all part of a world-changing plan.

Boomers also took grand tours of Europe, taste buds dilated by Amsterdam pot or Marrakesh hash, and noted that Europeans shopped daily in open-air markets, and that Continental heads were not turned by just a pretty peach . . . it needed to be tasty, too. They learned that tomatoes could taste like a summer day, and lettuce didn’t have to be water in a spherical green cellular form, and wine varied by region thanks to soil, sunshine and grape variety. A great number of young adults knew all this, and yet when they went out to eat, the flavors of quality, seasonal produce and artisanal products were not, as yet, widely found in the restaurants of American cities.

Except, of course, in Berkeley — that bastion of the counterculture — where a prescient French major named Alice Waters returned from a stay in France and ignited an American food revolution in 1971 by opening Chez Panisse. Waters insisted on the seasonal, the regional, the organic. She found small-scale farmers — gardeners, some of them — to grow delicious, often fragile varietals. She established committed, interdependent relationships with these purveyors and single-handedly made boutique farming in Northern California a possible vocation. L’Ermitage’s Jean Bertranou established similar local sources here in Los Angeles when he started his own duck farm and grew his own herbs out of frustration — he couldn’t find the kind of ingredients he was used to cooking with in France. Waters and Bertranou selected produce and other comestibles with a chef’s concerns — a European chef, that is; they not only looked for eye appeal but also selected for taste, texture, seasonality, healthfulness, whatever lent itself to a peak dining experience. Meanwhile, California’s large-scale agribusiness machine continued to grow and develop produce that had been designed with itsconcerns in mind: ease in handling — shippability, long storage and shelf life — uniformity and a limited, standardized concept of acceptable appearance.

In 1978, when Governor Jerry Brown signed the Direct Marketing Act, he was not thinking about peak dining experiences, but about the food that was being wasted while people in the inner cities were going hungry. Agricultural policy, dating from the 1930s, was and is one of the most heavily regulated sectors of the economy. The Tree Fruit Agreement, as one example, was especially perfectionistic, demanding that fruit either conform to a certain strict size and color standard or be destroyed. Tons of perfectly edible fruit — some of it simply too ripe — never made it to any market, and the farmers who grew it lost their shirts.