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Civil Eats TV: Women Brewing Change at Sequoia Sake

Nancy Matsumoto — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 08:00:30 +0000

This story and video are a co-production of Civil Eats and Edible Communities.

Craft sake making—both in Japan and abroad—is still a very male-dominated world; for now, there are only three women brewers in the U.S., and two of them happen to work at Sequoia Sake in San Francisco.

Noriko Kamei, her husband, Jake Myrick, and their daughter Olivia Kamei Myrick, 26, make sake together by hand in the first New World brewery to produce a second-generation heir. Kamei and Myrick share head brewer duties, and Kamei Myrick has already produced several sakes of her own. Instead of feeling outnumbered that two-thirds of his business is made up of women, Myrick says, “I’m proud that both of the women in my life are making sake.”

Noriko Kamei, Jake Myrick, and Olivia Kamei Myrick at Sequioa Sake.

During the 10 years they lived in Japan as tech entrepreneurs, Myrick and Kamei discovered the unique appeal of nama, or unpasteurized sakes, which tend to be brighter and fresher tasting because of the living microbes they contain. Myrick was fascinated by sake brewers’ ability to produce a wide range of flavor profiles from just rice, water, and yeast. When they returned to the U.S., they missed those fresh sakes and decided to make sake brewing their next start-up business, launching Sequoia in 2014.

Sake is the more-than-2,000-year-old national drink of Japan, an agricultural product with roots in mythology and the Japanese Shinto religion.

From their 2,500-square-foot brewery in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, the three make 12 different kinds of sake, most of them unpasteurized and all with organic rice. Kamei handles the most difficult aspect of the work, which is making the koji, the fungus-inoculated steamed rice that is the blueprint for the sake she envisions in her head. The koji spores are added to the yeast starter, or shubo, which touches off the conversion of starch to fermentable sugars.

To this base, they add three rounds of steamed rice, water, and yeast then they filter the sake, sometimes pasteurize it, and bottle it. Kamei loves the trial and error aspect of her work, as she spends hours noticing and responding to minute changes in the koji. She compares the careful attention it takes to “watching a newborn baby.”

Kamei Myrick considers herself someone who “performs best in jobs that are more physical than mental,” so sake making has been a good match for her. From 2016 to 2018, she spent time in Fukushima Prefecture working as a kurabito, or sake brewery worker, at Miyaizumi Meijo Brewery and Akebono Brewery. As the first female foreign apprentice, and part of a family that runs a brewery in the U.S., she says that the head brewers “did teach me more than they would to some of their own kurabito; they knew I was going back to Sequoia and was committed to making sake.”

Kamei Myrick returned to California, where—to encourage her interest—her dad gave her a 500-liter (132-gallon) fermentation tank to experiment with. Though she likes the flexibility of working in a family business, she is also pursuing studies in food science at San Francisco City College, and her future career path is still taking shape.

Sake’s Origins

Sake is the more-than-2,000-year-old national drink of Japan, an agricultural product with roots in mythology and the Japanese Shinto religion. From about the 10th Century, its brewing was controlled by Buddhist monks; during the Edo Period (1603-1868), production was put in the hands of large landowners and merchant families that served and provided for the ruling Tokugawa clan and its lords.

After reaching peak sales in the early 1970s, domestic sake consumption has continually dropped in Japan. Due to government restrictions on sales and the long shutdown of restaurants in Japan, breweries have also suffered during the pandemic. But loss of interest in the drink in its birthplace has been offset by growing global interest. There are more than two dozen craft sake breweries in the U.S., and a half-dozen breweries in California alone.

New Global Sake Makers Spur Innovation

International sake brewers, unfettered by generations of tradition and societal expectations, are taking sake in new directions. For Kamei Myrick, that means a distinctly San Francisco-leaning direction. In 2020, she created her own sake, Hazy Delight, which is a soft-textured and refreshing usu nigori, or lightly filtered sake.

She selected its name due to its slightly cloudy texture, but also to evoke—through the vibrating neon image of a purple daisy on the label—the early cannabis culture of the 1960s Haight-Ashbury district. The nigori’s more-savory-than-usual quality means it pairs well with goat cheese from the Marin Headlands or North Beach pesto pizza. Hazy Delight proved so popular that it has become part of the regular lineup of Sequoia sakes.

Now, Kamei Myrick, who loved the developing and marketing aspect of that project, is thinking about two more bottles she can brew to form a trio of San Francisco-themed sakes. One will be a hiyaoroshi summer-aged sake that she hopes will express the cool San Francisco summer through an added savory quality. The other is a more labor-intensive kimoto-style sake, which relies on native yeast and lactic acid.

Noriko Kamei sampling a Sequoia Sake.

She envisions its high acidity and robust flavor as a good expression of the city’s own fermentation culture, which ranges from sourdough bread to third-wave coffee. “I’m a huge fan of fermentation,” says Kamei Myrick. “It’s really beautiful to live and work with microorganisms to create something like sake that brings people together.”

Sake Rice Growing in California, Questions of Sustainability

As interest in sake making and drinking in the U.S. has grown, so has the need to source sakamai, or sake rice. Myrick and Kamei work with fifth-generation Sacramento Valley organic rice farmer Michael Van Dyke, who grows five acres of Calrose M105—a hybrid bred both for its early maturing quality and high stable milling rate—for them. Its shorter growing season requires less water, an important quality in a state now suffering its third year of a historic drought.

Calrose is a table rice rather than a sakamai, one of 115 or so varieties grown specifically for sake making. This is not necessarily a negative. Even in Japan, more craft brewers are featuring sakes brewed with less expensive table rice as advances in brewing technology and know-how have helped offset differences between the two types of rice.

This season, the local irrigation board has limited Van Dyke’s water use to only 600 of his 2,000 acres of rice fields, well below his 50 to 60 percent planting rate per year. “Normally there are ups and downs in the water supply, and if you’re down a year, then you experience two or three good ones. But when you start stacking those [bad years] back to back, it’s tight. You have to look for every opportunity to cut costs,” he says.

Although many view rice as one of the worst water guzzling crops the state, Van Dyke notes that this perception—partially formed by the image of flooded rice fields—is not wholly accurate. Jay Lund, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at U.C. Davis, explains this perception gap.

“The soils rice are grown on—very heavy clay soils—in California are not suited to a lot of other crops.”

Rice “will rank very high” in water use if only the total amount of applied water is taken into account,” he explains, “but so much of that water is returned to groundwater or streams.” Of 60 inches of water applied to a rice field, the “evapotranspiration,” or total loss of water from land surface to the atmosphere, is 34 inches, which he estimates places the crop in about the middle of California agriculture products ranked by water usage.

Van Dyke’s soil is composed of light red clay with a layer of hard pan (compacted sandstone that prevent drainage). Unfit for most other crops because of its poor drainage, hard pan can result in natural water tables well suited to rice farming.

Left: Michael Van Dyke, Jake Myrick, and Noriko Kamei inspecting rice; right: finished Calrose rice.

Yet some who see flooded rice fields might still wonder whether this is a sustainable crop for a drought-plagued state. Bruce Linquist, a U.C. Davis cooperative extension professor and rice expert, says, “I’m sure that’s on a lot of people’s minds, but there’s not a lot of data supporting this. The soils rice are grown on—very heavy clay soils—in California are not suited to a lot of other crops.” And he points to the valuable ecosystem services the fields provide, most importantly winter habitats for migrating birds.

“You need a certain amount of rice land to support that kind of habitat,” Linquist adds. The heavy black adobe clay Linquist is referring to, says Van Dyke, “is technically a better soil [for rice growing],” but he prefers the red clay of his farm because it allows him to practice a drill seeding method that minimizes both water use and topsoil disturbance.

Both Van Dyke and Myrick point to the vast tracts of California farmland devoted to nut and pomegranate trees, which they consider far less sustainable than rice. Tree planting “almost always affects the groundwater,” says Van Dyke, because of the trees’ thirsty and deep roots, which tap underground sources of water in addition to benefitting from irrigation from drip lines and micro sprinklers. And they point to the fact that the flooding of rice fields can help replenish groundwater.

Myrick adds of nut tree farmers: “They want fields to be dry, and we want them to be wet. Wet is a better ecological environment. Pumping water out changes the ecosystem. Look at Houston, [Texas]; it used to be a big rice producer because the clay soil of those delta wetlands are meant to hold water.” Now drained and converted to housing, the land has lost its ability to act like a sponge and absorb excess storm water, leading to catastrophic flooding and loss of property and life. Although rice may be better for flood mitigation than nut and pomegranate trees, Lund says that in measurements of evapotranspiration, the three crops’ water usage is similar.

Sequoia’s legacy may ultimately be cemented by such ground-breaking work, yet Myrick and Kamei still don’t know for sure if their daughter will choose to carry on the family business.

Water rights play a role in farm viability during drought, but Van Dyke says it’s not so much an issue for his farm, which does not have access to generous historic water rights, but can use some surface water from the nearby Bear River as well as groundwater. Linquist points out that water rights don’t mean a lot “if you don’t have the water” to dole out. This year, in particular, more than half of California’s rice fields are estimated to be left barren without harvest.

In the end, what disturbs Van Dyke’s sleep the most is not drought or climate change, but the encroachment of well-funded developers. Urban development spreading north from Sacramento is “taking us over,” he says. “That’s all high-dollar per acre compared to farming,” he says; that difference in land valuation often results in farmland being paved over.

Planning for the Future

In the face of an uncertain future for California rice farming as climate change advances, Jake Myrick has been working on what he hopes will be his own legacy, a project with Dr. Thomas Tai, a research geneticist at USDA-ARS Crops Pathology and Genetics Research Unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Japanese rice experts from the sprawling Iida Group Holdings conglomerate, which includes a Northern California-based rice milling subsidiary. Their goal: to breed a drought-tolerant, heat-resistant rice, just as agronomists and farmers in Japan are attempting to do. Their efforts center on reviving an older strain of the Wataribune variety that Japanese immigrants brought to California in 1906.

Today’s ubiquitous Calrose variety is a descendent of this heirloom Japanese rice, but it has been modified over the years to focus on qualities such as yield and pure white color over flavor. Myrick’s hope is that by recovering an older strain of Wataribune, he’ll be able to bring back some of its lost flavor and aroma.

At the same time, Myrick has been working with U.C. Davis to include sake brewing in their master brewing classes. Stalled by the pandemic, he hopes the program will get back on track to create a “cross-pollination, a wine and sake exchange” that could bring more innovation to the U.S. sake-making and -marketing landscape.

Sequoia’s legacy may ultimately be cemented by such ground-breaking work, yet Myrick and Kamei still don’t know for sure if their daughter will choose to carry on the family business. Though she watched her parents launch the business as a teenager and began helping out when she was 17, Myrick concedes that making sake is not the most secure vocation to envision for one’s child.

Kamei Myrick’s food science studies could end up exerting a bigger pull. Juggling her school work and brewing “has been difficult” for the family, Myrick admits. But he adds, with the hard-won optimism of a parent determined not to curtail their child’s freedom, “I’m loving this while it lasts.”

Photos and video credit: Mizzica Films.

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Civil Eats TV: Let Them Bee

Naomi Starkman — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 08:00:23 +0000

When the lightning-sparked Hennessey Fire, part of the LNU Lightning Complex Fire, swept through rural Vacaville, California, in August 2020, queen bee breeder and beekeeper Caroline Yelle thought she had lost her entire business.

“The fire destroyed everything in its path: the bees, my hives, the whole farm,” says the 29-year-old owner of Pope Canyon Queens (PCQ), who lost more than 400 hives. But out of the ashes, Yelle—and a new set of bees—have risen. “It was a huge bump in the road for us, but it has allowed us to do better.”

The aftermath of the LNU Complex Fire. (Photo courtesy of Caroline Yelle)

Now, almost two years later, and thanks to the support of her community, Yelle is back to breeding queens. She works with Carniolans, or Apis mellifera carnica, a hybrid she selected back home in Canada and reproduces in California in hopes that their genetic strengths can make them resilient to the many challenges facing honey bees today. Today, she has about 580 hives.

Pollinators, most often honey bees, are responsible for one in every three bites of food we take, and they help increase U.S. crop values by more than $15 billion each year. However, critical honey bee populations have been in serious decline for more than three decades in the U.S. due to high rates of colony loss, which stems from many factors, including habitat loss, decreasing crop diversity, increased use of pesticides and other toxins, climate change, and pests and pathogens. Other factors include industrial beekeeping practices—particularly in the large-scale almond industry.

This year alone, 2 million beehives—containing about 42 billion bees—were brought into the state to pollinate almond blossoms.

“If there are no bees, there is no food,” says Yelle. “To save ourselves, we have to save the bees.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers commercial honeybees to be livestock, due to their crucial role in food production. However, more bees die every year in the U.S. than all other animals raised for slaughter combined; during the winter of 2020–21, an estimated 32 percent of managed colonies in the U.S. were lost.

‘Give Bees a Chance’

In 2018, Yelle purchased PCQ from her mentor and business partner, veteran beekeeper Rick Schubert, for whom she began working in 2012. She had studied to be a lawyer in Canada, but after receiving her degree, moved to California to follow her dreams to help the bees. Between March and June every year, Yelle breeds roughly 25,000 queen bees. Since building back her business, she says the number of requests for her queens has been on the rise, and beekeepers who’ve received them tell her that their hives are now thriving.

Bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey, who has worked with Yelle, is a former manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw, Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at U.C. Davis. She has worked with Carniolan honey bees for more than 40 years, and has run one of the longest-running breeding programs in the world. Numerous studies clearly show that genetic diversity improves bee colony survival, and Cobey now incorporates honey bee germplasm from several European subspecies into U.S. breeding stocks to increase colony vitality and resistance to pests and diseases.

“Bees are probably one of the most complex animals to work with because they mate in flight, which is difficult to control,” says Cobey, noting that honey bees are sensitive to inbreeding and also at risk of population loss through the breeding process.

Queen bees mate with an average of 15 to 20 drones (male honey bees), so breeders like Yelle and Cobey mate the bees artificially under a microscope by anesthetizing the queens with carbon dioxide. They use a pool of genetic material from numerous drones to provide diversity.

The Carniolan honey bee, originally from Slovenia, a hotbed of successful beekeeping, holds a special place in the hearts of many beekeepers. Also known as a spring bee for its activity early in the season, it is also sought after for its gentleness and productivity, and is also considered highly resistant to the Varroa mite, which has become a major contributor to the demise of bee colonies worldwide.

Intensified Almond Production

California’s ever-expanding almond industry is worth $6 billion, and produces roughly 80 percent of the world’s almonds. Almonds are the state’s top agricultural export, hitting a record export high of $1.1 billion in 2020, with most of the crop sent to India and China. Demand nationally is also at an all-time high, in part because of sales of almond milk climbing each year.

And the need for pollination of hundreds of thousands of almond trees has created a monoculture of sorts for the honey bee: This year alone, 2 million beehives—containing about 42 billion bees—were brought into the state to pollinate almond blossoms.

“Almond production is the economic stabilizer of the bee industry,” says Cobey. “If you’re a commercial beekeeper, you pretty much cannot afford not to go to that crop. But at the same time, you’re bringing bees all together in a really crowded situation and diseases are easily exchanged; pests and parasites are easily exchanged. And you have all different levels of beekeeping [experience].”

Poor beekeeping practices have also led to more bee deaths, and recently, hive thefts. Around 600 hives were stolen across California last year and more than 800 have been taken so far this year, according to Butte County Sheriff’s Deputy Rowdy Freeman, a beekeeper, a law enforcement liaison to the California State Beekeepers Association, and president of the California Rural Crime Prevention Task Force.

The rapid growth of the almond industry and the speed at which millions of trees need to be pollinated every spring has taken a toll on the bees. “There is so much pressure [on the bees—from] being moved from one location to another to the stress from the trucks, and then they get to a new location and they have to reorient to where the food and water is. Then they pollinate the same flowers for weeks,” says Yelle. “As soon as they begin to adapt to that environment, we put them back on a truck and start all over again.”

After the almond pollination period comes to an end, Yelle takes her bees to diverse, organic farms—she calls them “spas” for the bees—to recuperate.

‘Bee Sense’

PCQ is one of the nation’s few women-owned queen bee breeding businesses, and Yelle’s team is mostly female. She believes women are especially adept at beekeeping and breeding. Cobey agrees.

“The women in this industry are very persistent, and I think they have to be overly so to prove themselves. It may be less so now than 10 or 15 years ago, but queen bee rearing is really attractive for women because it’s a little more specialized; it takes a lot more knowledge of the bees,” Cobey says. “I call it ‘bee sense’—you just have a sense of the smells and the sounds and the activity and behaviors. It takes a lot to learn all that. And I think women are maybe more sensitive.”

Caroline Yelle (center) with members of her beekeeping team.

Yelle’s business is still on the rebound, but as California prepares for another hot, dry summer, she intends to continue breeding better, more robust queens. “A queen bee is a reflection of the health of the hive. The bees will follow her habits, so, it might increase the resistance to pests and disease, and help them adapt to a changing environment,” she says.

“My goal is to help the bees survive. When your queen is healthy, it’s a huge accomplishment,” Yelle says. “Let them do their work, and bees will bring food to your table.”

Film and photos © Mizzica Films.

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Civil Eats TV: Women in Wool

The Civil Eats Editors — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 08:00:32 +0000

In the latest episode of Civil Eats TV, we profile the unique way women work together in the world of wool—from the land they manage and the sheep they shear to the ways they’re contributing to vibrant local economies.

We visit Bodega Pastures, a 1,000-acre sustainable sheep ranch located in Bodega, California, managed by owner Hazel Flett, who has long employed ethical and ecological practices.

We watch as Lora Kinkade, a 30-year-old traveling shearer—a rarity in a highly competitive, male-dominated industry—demonstrates her unique and humane approach to shearing.

And we learn about Kinkade’s longstanding relationships with local ranchers, the importance of sheep-to-soil health, and the necessary role shearing plays in the health of the animals.

“Shearing is completely vital for the health and well-being of the animal,” says Kinkade.

“[Shearing] helps them avoid heatstroke, heart attack, there could be parasitic infestation if we let the sheep’s wool get too massive,” explains Rebecca Burgess, the executive director of Fibershed.

Burgess explains the importance of investing in regenerative pasture-based systems that produce “climate beneficial” wool, which is ultimately sold through her organization, at farmers’ markets, and to Jessica Switzer Green, who we watch transform it at JG SWITZER, a nearby home furnishing store, bringing the end product to a wider market.

Women are at the center of this work to reinvigorate an alternative, renewable fiber economy that goes against the grain of today’s approach to fast fashion, synthetic materials, and expendable resources. “We have devalued and ignored all of these very virtuous materials that are coming off the landscape,” says Burgess.

In discussing the current global fiber economy, where fabrics are made artificially cheap by incorporating plastics, Burgess emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to food and fiber.

“We have to think about working landscapes as the real integrated systems they are—they’re not just feeding us, they’re clothing us,” she says.

Watch the full Civil Eats TV episode, “Women in Wool,” below; you can subscribe to our YouTube channel to see every episode and get notified when the next one airs.

Film and photos © Mizzica Films.

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Civil Eats TV: Planting with Purpose at Urban Tilth

The Civil Eats Editors — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 08:00:10 +0000

Update: On April 19, 2022, Governor Newsom appointed Doria Robinson to the California State Board of Food and Agriculture. She is the first Black woman and urban agriculture farmer appointed to the CDFA.

Update: On September 17, 2021, Urban Tilth purchased its North Richmond location from Contra Costa County, making it the first permanent farm in Richmond.

“Hunger is a choice we make as a society. There’s no reason, with the amount of food that we grow, that people should be hungry or [get] sick from food,” says Doria Robinson, the executive director of Urban Tilth, a community-based urban agriculture organization in Richmond, California, that takes vacant public land and transforms it into vibrant, living spaces.

And it’s needed, because Richmond is one of many cities impacted by “food apartheid”—also called “food deserts” or “food swamps.” In other words, it’s difficult to buy affordable, good-quality, fresh food there.

Trained as a watershed restoration ecologist, Robinson’s lifelong commitment to environmental justice and food sovereignty is exemplified in Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm, a once-blighted three-acre parcel, now home to a multitude of row crops planted in rich, black soil. The organization also offers educational and environmental programs, runs six community and school gardens across Richmond, two community supported agriculture (CSA) programs serving roughly 500 families a week, and several weekly free farmstands.

Since 2005, Urban Tilth has hired and trained Richmond residents as changemakers in transforming the food system for themselves, with the goal of producing 5 percent of the community’s own food supply. Robinson wants to give people skills to “grow healthy, whole food that other people don’t want to bring to this community, because we don’t click their boxes,” and also the deeper understanding of the “larger causes in our society at play that we need to resist or transform, so that we can move toward real liberation through food.” In addition to getting healthy food to Richmond residents, her work is also about helping people reconnect with soil and the land.

In the heart of an industrial area, the North Richmond Farm was a vacant lot for 40 years before it was transformed by Urban Tilth in 2016. It took four years to clean it and another two to build up the soil. Today, its rows are full of cabbage, kale, mustard greens, collards, onions, as well as a hoop house, a greenhouse, and a chicken coop. A team of BIPOC employees, some of whom started volunteering in high school, manage the fields, pack the weekly boxes, and run the farm stands. And there is a steady stream of elders who are dedicated volunteers.

Tania Jacobo, a co-manager at the North Richmond Farm, says that because North Richmond is in an unincorporated area, it doesn’t receive the same resources as the city of Richmond, or other nearby towns, including wealthier, whiter Berkeley. “We don’t have a police station or a grocery store; there are only two liquor stores and no healthy food,” says Jacobo. “As a low-income community, we have a lot of health issues. We want to be the resource to help improve people’s lifestyles and eating habits.

As a resource, Urban Tilth has long-term plans to buy the land and transition it to community ownership—and create an agricultural park featuring outdoor classrooms, community commercial kitchen, a café, an amphitheater, and a watershed learning center.

Transforming Richmond

Long cited as one of the country’s “most dangerous cities,” Richmond is shadowed by its conjoined and complicated history with the local Chevron refinery, which has a long history of accidents and environmental harms, including a recent leak. A third-generation Richmond resident, Robinson’s childhood bedroom window looked out at the refinery; as she grew up, she realized that not every community has a major source of pollution in their backyard, and that environmental injustices are experienced primarily by poor, Black, and brown communities.

“With that, you get tons of underdevelopment, white flight, and redlining,” says Robinson. Most of her childhood friends were involved in gangs and drugs; every single young person she grew up with on her block was killed.

“It’s kind of the love of my life,” she says of Richmond. “It’s also a lot of heartbreak and loss.”

She was exposed to nature early in life through her grandfather, a Southern minister who moved to the area and, with his extended family, collectively purchased a 350-acre parcel of land in nearby Fairfield. Robinson grew up going there, learning how to grow vegetables and collecting eggs from the chickens. “I realized that everything I loved about the ranch was under my feet in Richmond—it was just covered up,” she says. “Nature is everywhere and is healing and sometimes we just have to break up the concrete.”

Robinson has seen a real transformation in Richmond in her 13 years at the helm of Urban Tilth. The organization has helped to restore the Richmond Greenway, a large stretch of previously abandoned railroad property, into both a local and regional transportation route and open space resource. Growing up, it was the path Robinson took to get to her grandmother’s house, but it was also a dividing line between central and south gang territories. Robinson felt it was a place that needed healing, and spent five years building it out. Today, instead of being a dividing line, it has become a gathering place.

“On opening day, we were in a place that used to be a big, open lot with tons of trash, and now there’s an 84-fruit-tree urban orchard, a playground, and picnic areas with barbeque pits,” says Robinson, overcome with emotion. “So many people said we were stupid for trying, and we did it anyway. A child rode by on his bike and asked his parents, ‘Can I go to the park?’ And I started crying . . . and said to myself, ‘Yeah, you can now.’ That’s what gives me hope—we’re creating a new norm for the kids coming up now. They have a park, they’re growing up where there’s food growing, there are islands of sanctuary. I didn’t have that; a lot of us didn’t have that.”

COVID Hits Home

Like other communities of color, Richmond was hit hard by the pandemic, and many staff members lost immediate family members to the virus. For Robinson, COVID also made visible how food-insecure people are, especially in her community. “We can’t un-see the impact of food swamps, food deserts, on our people. We can’t un-connect that cause from the death toll,” says Robinson. “It has made it so clear how important what we’re doing is.”

Last fall, as the pandemic was worsening, Urban Tilth’s waitlist for food aid also continued to grow. It expanded its network of regional BIPOC farmers and women-owned businesses to support the community, and set up a pop-up free farmstand that provides roughly 120 Richmond families with free fruit and vegetables every week.

Urban Tilth also launched its Farmers to Families program in May 2020 to specifically ensure that families in financial distress due to the pandemic, or in general need of support, would have access to free, healthy whole foods. Originally funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the program has received ongoing financial support from Growing the Table. As of October 2020, Urban Tilth delivered almost 5,000 free produce boxes to those most impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, including those living in public housing, veterans, elders, and low-income families.

Their paid CSA, the Farm to Table CSA, offers a pay-it-forward option, making it possible for a lower-income family to join the CSA and provide the fresh healthy food necessary for their family to thrive.

Despite a roller coaster of a year, that included the uprising against police brutality and for racial justice and a fourth year of catastrophic California wildfires, Robinson remains optimistic about the future.

“When I look around and see all we’ve been able to do in just 16 years, if it inspires others to do the same,” she says, “the breadth and depth of the transformation could be astounding.”

Photos and video by Mizzica Films.

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Civil Eats TV: Cacao Is a Food of the People

The Civil Eats Editors — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 09:00:04 +0000

“In Central America, cacao manifested as the food of the people, and that tells you a lot about how people live,” says Karla McNeil-Rueda, who grew up in a family of sugarcane and coffee farmers in a small town on the border of Honduras and Nicaragua.

McNeil-Rueda is now the co-founder of award-winning Cru Chocolate, based near Sacramento, California. The hand-crafted, bean-to-bar chocolate and drinking chocolate she makes in her home with partner and co-founder Eddie Houston is deeply connected to her heritage and to the story and mythology of Mesoamerican chocolate traditions.

Karla McNeil-Rueda and Eddie Houston. (Photo credit: Mizzica Films)

The cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, Latin for “food of the gods,” is native to Central and South America. The ancient Mesoamericans, which included the Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations, worshipped chocolate, or Xocolatl—bitter water—as the Mayans called it, and enjoyed it as an everyday drink as well as in rituals and healing practices. The Mayans considered chocolate a gift to the people that anyone could partake in, regardless of social standing. Chocolate became less communal under Aztec rule, when it was served as a drink primarily to the wealthy, members of the royalty, and priests.

Despite its storied legacy as a drink for kings, McNeil-Rueda strongly believes in the democratization of chocolate. “Cacao is not the food of the gods. It is the god,” she says. “And it’s always been available to all people.”

Colonialism spread cacao overseas, and today, 70 percent of the world’s cacao is produced in Africa. Americans consume roughly 10 pounds of chocolate per person each year, much of it coming from a small number of global multinational corporations. Millions of smallholder cacao farmers live on the margins, earning subsistence wages in an industry rife with deforestation and ongoing documented cases of child slavery and trafficking.

It’s against this backdrop that McNeil-Rueda seeks to center the history and culture of Central American chocolate in telling her own positive migration story. The Cru team looks for smallholder farmers who grow cacao without pesticides and who value seed diversity and food sovereignty, and the company’s goal is to ensure a fair price by investing in the long-term economic and community development of their growers. They directly source beans from Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and partner with women in the cacao production process through farming cooperatives, a rarity in the male-dominated cacao industry.

McNeil-Rueda says she is inspired by her culture’s relationship to nature and the cacao plant especially, that it nourishes and feeds her spiritually. And she has deep respect for the places it grows, the people who have grown it, and for the plant itself.

“The ultimate goal is sharing a delicious cacao, knowing where it comes from, and supporting the people who grow it in an ethical way,” Houston says.

Cru is also a cottage food business: They make their products in their home garage and kitchen roasting, de-shelling, and stone-grinding the beans using modern machinery, with some home hacks. They create bars and wheels that are designed to be melted into hot water to create a range of hot beverages from classic hot chocolate to a new line of powdered cacao-mushroom adaptogenic drinks.

Photo credit: Mizzica Films

“Chocolate’s origin is a cacao-based drink, in some cases blended with corn and spices, that you drink for breakfast or in the afternoon following a long day of work. Cacao and corn have spiritual and cultural significance in Central America,” says McNeil-Rueda. “They are plants that have evolved along with humans and that together have weaved and enriched the net of life as we know it today.”

After Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras in 1998, McNeil-Rueda’s grandparents encouraged her to leave farming and pursue an education; she became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She received a degree in industrial engineering and an advanced degree in sustainability, and then studied cacao technology and fine chocolate confectionery at the Chocolate Institute of Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. She came to the U.S. in 2005, and together with Houston, who is also an engineer, started Cru in 2016.

Cru’s mission includes a focus on helping people create and grow their own businesses by providing education and facilitating small-scale equipment purchases. In 2018, McNeil-Rueda and Houston were invited by Madeline Weeks, then a U.C. Davis graduate student, to visit the Red de Mujeres Women’s Network of cacao growers in southern Petén in Guatemala, a multi-generational group of Indigenous Mayan Q’eqchi women who work with Asociación Maya Q´eqchi´, Waqxaqib Tz´ikin, an association of cacao farmers. They worked together to empower the women to help them get their traditional products into the global marketplace.

The couple also started buying from the cacao association to support the women and others in the Petén.

“Cru Chocolate is an example of a business with a heart and people who walk the walk,” says Weeks. “Karla’s unique approach to making chocolate begins with a deeper appreciation for the cultural heritage of cacao and how it can be used in diverse ways. She is relentless in her drive to source ethically, work with smallholder producers, and swim upstream to truly improve people’s well-being.”

Karla McNeil-Rueda preparing chocolate with Guatemalan women. (Photo credit: Madeline Weeks)

Weeks noted that Fundación ProPetén, the organization that helps coordinate logistics between the communities in Petén, was instrumental in helping with Cru’s sourcing trip, and continues to be an export liaison to the cacao communities.

For McNeil-Rueda, the connection was the beginning of a deep cultural and commercial relationship. “It was important for me, because they are Mayan women who have a very strong and alive culture,” she says. “They are the ones who invented chocolate. I wanted to see how they saw chocolate, and learn from that.”

Last year, Cru purchased one ton of cacao from the association of cacao farmers, and this year, 65 percent of their production will come from Guatemala. Due to the strong cultural heritage of consuming cacao, only around 5 percent of Guatemalan cacao beans are exported, mostly to the U.S. and Europe, and Houston says the taste of the chocolate is quite unique.

“As you’re roasting it, you can remember the people and sights and sounds, and bring that into the chocolate,” Houston says.

The Cru team hopes to be able to grow their business and transition out of their home factory in the near future. In the meantime, they continue to help consumers gain a greater understanding of the importance of buying chocolate that allows consumers to make a direct investment in women.

“The fact that I get to make chocolate in the United States, and people are being exposed to it, opens doors to other definitions of what chocolate can be,” McNeil-Rueda says. “Up until now, the focus has been on candy, and as long as people chase that sugary dessert, what chocolate can be—and what people have been doing for thousands of years—will remain invisible.”

The post Civil Eats TV: Cacao Is a Food of the People appeared first on Civil Eats.

Civil Eats TV: Duskie Estes Is Gleaning with Meaning

The Civil Eats Editors — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 08:30:38 +0000

“It’s pretty incredible what the power of many small acts can do,” says Duskie Estes, the executive director of Farm to Pantry, a nonprofit organization that focuses on gleaning community gardens and farms to feed the growing number of food insecure people in Northern California’s Sonoma County.

On a recent fall morning, she and a half-dozen volunteers were out early gathering the last zucchini, tomatoes, and eggplant on Farm to Fight Hunger, a six-acre property owned by Bruce Mentzer in Healdsburg, California.

In a region where other crops are often replaced by wine grapes, Mentzer made the rare choice to pull up a vineyard to create the nonprofit farm. All of the produce grown here goes to food pantries and other community organizations serving people in need.

This year, Mentzer grew five tons of produce—the equivalent of 40,000 servings of vegetables—and donated more than 10,000 eggs. Much of that was donated to Farm to Pantry.

Farm to Fight Hunger is just one of the several hundred properties Estes and Farm to Pantry visited this year to collect surplus. Along the way, she’s creating community partnerships and long-term networks to ensure that more food ends up on tables than in landfills.

The ancient practice of gleaning—collecting crops from fields after commercial harvest—is described in the Old Testament, which commanded Hebrew farmers to leave a portion of their crops for others. The Biblical tradition continued into modern times in France and England, where the rights of the rural poor to glean leftover crops from nearby farms were enforced.

Today, gleaners are mostly volunteers who are granted permission to gather food at farms, orchards, and backyard gardens to ensure that post-harvest leftovers aren’t plowed under or left to rot.

And it’s desperately needed. Like most communities facing economic stress and skyrocketing hunger during the pandemic, Estes estimates 1 in 3 people in Sonoma County are facing food insecurity, which has also been hard hit by recent wildfires. Undocumented farmworkers working in the wine industry have been especially impacted, and are hesitant to make use of these services, says Estes, who has worked to bring food to that community through partner organization Corazón.

While food-pantry lines have grown exponentially, many local farmers lost their market partners as nearby restaurants were shuttered by the pandemic, leaving massive amounts of produce in the fields. In the United States, up to 40 percent of food is wasted under normal circumstances, with a vast amount occurring on farm fields.

With food banks running out of food, Estes saw a natural match at a critical moment, and she jumped at the chance to activate her background and connections in the food and farming community to rescue food for those in need.

This year, Estes and her team harvested 200,000 pounds of produce, serving more than 800,000 servings of fruits and vegetables. Since she began at Farm to Pantry in April, Estes has increased the number of volunteers from 30 to more than 300, the number of gleaning properties from 30 to more than 225, and the amount of harvest from 1,000-2,000 pounds a week up to 13,000 pounds a week.

“This is not waste, this is beautiful produce,” says Estes. “We only deliver delicious food we would eat ourselves.” She acknowledges the criticism of short-term solutions to food security or that solving hunger and food waste together is an easy fix. But Estes sees this as a win-win for farmers and growers who want to feed people in the immediate term. “This work is critical,” she says. “This is a safe way to give back in the time of the pandemic.”

It’s not the first time Estes has focused on feeding people. She has spent a long career as a well-known celebrity chef, appearing on the Food Network, writing award-winning cookbooks, and running acclaimed restaurants. Earlier in her career, Estes worked in a variety of mission-driven roles, including positions at Share Our Strength, where she organized and led a direct service program for chefs in hunger relief, now known as Cooking Matters; humanitarian chef José Andrés was one of the first volunteers in her program. She also ran the kitchen at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, serving up to 3,000 people a day.

On this day, Civil Eats traveled with Estes to deliver the freshly harvested food to Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa, where a small kiosk has been set up in the lobby, showcasing the free food for everyone in need. A young, pregnant couple stops by to pick up a bag of tomatoes.

“Beautiful food! It smells delicious,” another young woman says, as she packs her grocery bag high, saying she’ll share the goods with her family. Catholic Charities normally serves around 1,000 people per month with food. Since the economy has crashed, that number is up to 1,700.

Later in the day, Estes delivered the freshly picked produce to Elisah’s Pantry, a food pantry built by a partnership of three congregations, Congregation Shomrei Torah, Christ Church United Methodist, and Bethlehem Lutheran Church. Twenty cars are already lined up ahead of the pick-up time at 4 p.m.—some days the parking lot is full an hour before the distribution begins. That day, around 90 households will receive some of Farm to Pantry’s produce.

“We’re so excited when Duskie and her team come,” says Elisha’s Pantry coordinator Lien Cibulka. “It’s really amazing what they’re doing. They’re gleaning produce so it’s not wasted and we can provide it to our community.”

Some of the day’s harvest will also be delivered to other partner organizations that will cook and prepare it into meals for homeless shelters and others who don’t have access to kitchens.

At the end of the long day, Estes is still energetic, as she shares her vision to get more farmers, givers, and gleaners involved. And as the coronavirus-driven economic crisis continues, and an estimated 54 million Americans—including one in four children—don’t have enough to eat, it’s work that will be needed far into the future.

“The food is out there, and no one should be left behind,” says Estes. “All we have to do is go get it.”

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Civil Eats TV: Liquid Gold on Tribal Land

The Civil Eats Editors — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 09:00:13 +0000

“We were always told if you take care of the land, the land will take care of you,” says James Kinter, tribal secretary of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, whose ancestral homeland is located in Northern California’s Capay Valley. “This is something that we fought blood, sweat, and tears for. Because we had to buy back land that was stolen from us.”

James Kinter of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation.

Kinter is standing in an olive orchard on a blustery November morning, in the shadow of the tribe’s Cache Creek Casino and Resort and nearby golf club. “Before the gaming era of our tribe, we were very much in poverty,” he said, describing the tribe’s long journey from decimation to reclamation over more than 100 years. “Transforming this land really helped our tribe; we never forget where we came from.”

More than 4,000 years ago, the Yocha Dehe thrived as farmers and hunters in this region. By the mid-18th century, they were forced off their land by Spanish colonizers, enslaved by missionaries, and rendered nearly extinct. In the 1900s, the tribe was forcibly relocated by the U.S. government to a barren and non-irrigatable reservation; by then, the tribe’s population had dramatically declined from 20,000 to just a few hundred members.

For decades, the tribe, once resilient and self-sufficient, eked out a subsistence living, reliant on the government for survival. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when portions of the Yocha Dehe ancestral land were returned, that a period of stability began, including the development of a bingo hall (later to become the casino), which helped reverse—and return—the tribe’s fortunes.

A Return to Farming

With the money from their successful enterprises, the tribe began farming again in 2003, first planting wheat and sunflowers, and later, alfalfa, safflower, garbanzo beans, sunflower, sorghum, walnuts, almonds, and seven varietals of wine grapes, with the support of the research and development team at U.C. Davis and Jim Etters, the tribe’s director of land management.

Today, with more than 22,000 total acres in production, the Yocha Dehe own one of the most diverse farming operations in Yolo County, and it is one of just a few tribes that are expanding their agricultural footprint in California. Of the 3,000 acres the tribe is currently farming, 250 acres are certified organic (they grow organic wheat, asparagus, tomatoes, and squash), and more than 1,200 acres are in permanent conservation easements. In addition to the farming operation, the Yocha Dehe run a herd of 700 cattle, following a sustainable grazing program on the tribe’s more than 10,000 acres of rangeland.

Wherever possible, the tribe uses sustainable farming practices, and has received several grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service for water and rangeland conservation, and for ongoing work on sustainable grazing practices, erosion control, and invasive weed control.

“Growing up, we weren’t into farming in the way we are now,” says Kinter. “We were more the people working on the farms. And now we’re the owner[s].”

Reclaiming their land has also led to tribal gold: the Yocha Dehe produce award-winning extra virgin olive oil, grown, harvested, and produced under the Séka Hills label, named for the blue hills that overlook the valley. And while olives and olive oil are not a traditional Native crop, it seems fitting that the tribe has taken a practice brought by Spanish colonizers and made it their own.

A Crop of the Future

Walking under a silvery canopy of Picual olive trees—known for their bitter, robust-flavored fruit—Etters says the Capay Valley is perfect for this crop because of its undulating topography, hot climate, and limited water. For these reasons, the tribe decided on olives, he says, noting that it takes sustainability and their culture into account in every decision they make on their farm and ranch.

“The tribe was really concerned about water conservation and pesticide usage, and that is one of the key reasons, along with soil and climate, that they chose to plant their first olives,” says Etters. “They really do see it as a crop of the future.” The olives use a third of the water as the nut trees.

Jim Etters.

Today, the tribe farms roughly 500 acres of olives, including Arbequina, Arbosana, Coratina Frantoio, Koroneiki, Picual, and Taggiasca. It sells single-varietal olive oils, a “Tribal Blend,” made from Arbequina, Frantoio, and Taggiasca olives, and Olio Nuovo, freshly milled Arbequina olive oil, which is bottled directly after milling (most new harvest oils are “settled” for several weeks before bottling).

The olive oil has received dozens of awards, including several gold medals in this year’s California State Fair Commercial Olive Oil Competition. Séka Hills sells out of olive oil every year; this year, due to the pandemic, it has seen an uptick in e-commerce sales, which has made up for the sale losses from its foodservice business.

Starting in 2008, the tribe began planting super high-density (13 by 5 feet apart) Arbequinas—described as buttery and fruity—and pruned into short, square hedgerows to enable mechanized harvesting. There are only a few varietals of olives which can be grown in this matter, which Etter says has made it a more viable commercial crop in California, reducing the high cost associated with handpicking. The Picuals are planted at medium-density, and harvested with prune or pistachio shakers and then collected onto conveyor belts.

The tribe decided to invest in an on-site mill in 2012 when it became untenable to drive long hours to the closest mill; they can now produce a high-quality product quickly and with lower transportation costs. The mill, a state-of-the-art operation with gleaming machinery from Italy, produces 75,000 gallons a year of Séka Hills olive oil, and also serves as a community mill for other local olive growers. The tasting room and 2,300-square-foot retail space sells other Séka Hills products, including estate-grown wine, vinegar, wildflower honey, prepared nuts, and Angus beef. It has remained open, but on a limited basis, during the pandemic.

Sustaining Their People

The tribe’s long-term approach to stewardship and environmental sustainability reflects a sacred commitment to their land and to the well-being of future generations, says Kinter. In 2003, the governor bestowed the tribe with the state’s highest environmental honor, the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award.

It is an active part of the Yolo County community, and its fire department is a contributing member of the region’s emergency response force, as well as the only Native American fire department to achieve accreditation from the Commission on Fire Accreditation International. It was active in responding to this year’s devastating fires in the county, and lost 12,000 acres of rangeland in fire, which turned their cattle feed to ash. And though COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on Native communities nationwide, the tribe, which has suffered much loss and devastation historically, has thus far been spared.

As the Yocha Dehe tribe strives to preserve its legacy, its goal is to grow its population and tend its natural resources, following traditional wisdom and creating long-lasting connection with the land.

“The tribe’s been here for thousands of years; this is our homeland, our aboriginal territory,” says Kinter. “We’ve been here since the beginning of time, and we’re going to be here until the end of time.”

Photos and video by Mizzica Films.

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Civil Eats TV: Cultivating Sacred Grains for the Bread of Life

The Civil Eats Editors — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 10:12:36 +0000

On a hot mid-August morning, Elizabeth DeRuff is out early, harvesting wheat with 25 volunteers in Healdsburg, California. The sounds of sickles cutting long, glossy stalks of Sonora and Hourani wheat mix with the murmurs of volunteers, who have come to participate in Honoré Farm and Mill’s sixth annual wheat harvest and threshing.

DeRuff is an ordained Episcopal priest and an “agricultural chaplain”—a role that is not uncommon in the United Kingdom, but rare in the U.S. She’s also the founder of Honoré, a nonprofit organization with a mission to reconnect and strengthen people’s relationship to the land through the ancient practice of grain cultivation, and to help her community “reflect reverence and the regenerative capacities that are present both in the wheat fields and within us.”

“I love the moment when I’m walking up to the wheat field at dawn. I just think the awe of standing with your feet on the earth with the smell of the soil . . . and the quiet … I feel that I am more receptive to God,” said DeRuff. “It’s just an awe-inspiring experience.”

Named for St. Honoré, the patron saint of bread bakers and flour merchants who lived in 7th-century France, Honoré grows wheat on small plots throughout Northern California through a volunteer educational program. Today, the volunteers are harvesting grain from an eighth of an acre on Doug Lipton and Cindy Daniel’s HomeFarm.

Honoré also provides flour to Episcopal churches at a discount to bake communion bread for their services. In the Christian tradition, Jesus used bread as a symbol, and called himself the Bread of Life. The Holy Communion (or Eucharist) commemorates Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, wherein bread (or a communion wafer) symbolizes the body of Christ, while wine or grape juice symbolizes His blood.

“I started to think about the wheat on our altar not so much as a sacrament, but more as a biological process. I thought, ‘Wheat [is] coming from the industrial food supply, is that really the symbol of life that we call it?’” said DeRuff, who once tracked a communion wafer and found that the grain had traveled 4,500 miles.

Instead, Honoré is creating a network of farmers, millers, bakers, and churches that grow, mill, bake, and serve communion bread made with local flour from ancient wheat. Annually, heirloom wheat seeds are distributed to member churches to bless on their altars. The seeds are then saved to be planted for next year’s community harvest.

DeRuff sees her role as serving the land and the people working it. “Chaplaincy is the work of empowerment and advocacy for either people in hospitals or schools, and I feel like that is my work for the land,” says DeRuff. “Farming is really, really hard work, and desperately difficult financially. That burden weighs heavily on a lot of farmers.” She says she has been able to bear witness to that pain and suffering and to offer encouragement and confessions to many farmers.

Ancient Wheat for Modern Times

The wheat grown for today’s harvest has historic and religious connections to DeRuff’s work. Sonora wheat was introduced in North America by Spanish and Italian missionaries to make communion bread, and in addition to being disease resistant and drought tolerant, it grinds to a flour that is prized by bakers for its sweet, earthy flavor and nutty texture, and also by brewers for its fermentable and maltable wheat berries. Honoré plans to mill the wheat to make into the flour it sells to support its mission.

The seeds for the Hourani wheat harvest were grown more than 2,000 years ago at the Masada fortress in Israel and discovered by archeologists in the 1960s; more recently, some of the seeds traveled to the USDA seed lab in Aberdeen, Idaho, and then on to The Bread Lab, where it was saved for Honoré. Most of the Hourani wheat harvested on this day was for seed; just a small amount was to be milled and baked into bread, and tasted for the first time. (Just days after the harvest, an intense lightning storm and historic wildfires will burn across the area, but the wheat will be spared.)

“We want to put forth a new vision that is actually very old” said DeRuff. “That wheat is actually a health food; it’s the original superfood. It’s what has fed our civilization for thousands of years.”

Graphic courtesy of Honoré Farm & Mill (click image for larger version)

DeRuff points to the recent history of industrialized wheat, including the way it’s currently milled (which strips away the nutrients and fiber) and farmed (with pesticides and fertilizers). Honoré uses low-till farming practices that DeRuff says decrease water usage, improve soil health, and draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground.

“Most people don’t think about flour or bread this deeply,” said DeRuff. “And when you hear the story and taste it, something gets lodged in people, and they start to wonder, ‘What has happened to wheat?’”

Like many enterprises, COVID has had a big impact on Honoré, and DeRuff says people started buying its flour at unprecedented levels after the pandemic began. “We could see through COVID how brittle and fragile our industrial food supply is, because people couldn’t buy flour,” she said. “It was really the small farmers and millers who were able to step up and provide.”

As the last stalks of wheat are harvested, and the community sits down to a prayer over lunch, DeRuff says, “The lasting effect that I hope people take away from this is a deeper appreciation of wheat, the education around it, the connection they have with the land—and each other.”

Video and stills by Mizzica Films.

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Civil Eats TV: Meet the Queen of Vegan Cheese

The Civil Eats Editors — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 09:01:07 +0000

“The end of meat is inevitable,” says Miyoko Schinner, who is on a mission to end animal agriculture. Schinner, a chef, cookbook author, and founder and CEO of dairy-free cheese brand Miyoko’s Creamery, wants to change people’s perception of farm animals, “so that we start seeing them not as food or commodities, but as individuals who have lives of their own . . . [and] to create a more sustainable and more compassionate food system.”

A vegetarian since age 12, Schinner became vegan in the 1980s, taught vegan cooking classes in the 1990s, published her first vegan cookbook in 1991, and opened the vegan restaurant Now and Zen in San Francisco in 1994. Along the way, she launched a number of vegan food brands, and co-hosted the PBS cooking show, Vegan Mashup, but says that none of her businesses really took off; she faced multiple business “disasters,” where everything she touched “turned to dust.”

Making vegan cheese became her life’s mission. “It was on my bucket list; at some point, I was going to figure out how to make great vegan cheese and be able to enjoy a glass of wine with a cheese platter,” says Schinner, who started Miyoko’s Creamery in 2014, and earned $50,000 in orders the first weekend it launched.

It took off from day one, she says, because “vegans really, really wanted cheese.” And she’s not targeting just vegans; she wants to convince omnivores and flexitarians who say they’d absolutely go vegan—if they didn’t have to give up cheese. “We live in a culture that puts cheese on absolutely everything,” says Schinner. “People say ‘cheese makes everything better.’ It’s really, really hard to ask people to give up a food they really love.”

The pandemic has put a spotlight on an already booming plant-based market, as companies have warned of potential meat shortages, COVID-19 cases at meat processing facilities have continued to soar, and some are drawing a connection between intensive animal agriculture and COVID-19. Schinner says the pandemic will have a long-lasting impact on how people interact with food. “We all have to remember that COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease,” she says. “When we force animals to live in close confinement, in an unnatural setting, they’re going to get sick, and we’re going to get sick.”

And Miyoko’s Creamery stands to gain from the shift. The cashew-based artisanal cheese wheels, mozzarella, cream cheese, and cultured butter are already available at more than 16,000 retail stores, including mega-stores Costco and Walmart (some products are oat-based, and a new, lower-priced line will be nut-free, made from legumes and vegetables). As a woman of color, Schinner is a rarity in the white, male-dominated “food-tech” sector, raising more than $12 million from heavyweight investors, including Ellen Degeneres. The Petaluma, California-based operation has an estimated annual revenue of between $20 million to $50 million, more than 150 employees, and the business has doubled ever year over the past few years.

Schinner also now has a big legal win in her back pocket, which could serve as a bellwether for other plant-based products currently facing legal labeling challenges nationwide. After being told by the California Department of Food & Agriculture to drop the terms “butter,” “lactose-free,” “hormone-free,” and “cruelty-free” from its vegan butter, a U.S. District Court recently ruled in the company’s favor, allowing it to use the term “butter,” lactose-free,” and “cruelty-free” on its products.

While she prides herself on making products from whole, organic foods without additives, and doesn’t want to eat genetically modified foods (or GMOs) herself, Schinner says that if GMO foods help some people eat less meat, she’s all for it. The debate over the use of GMOs in plant-based products has been a hot topic, with some advocates pushing back on the idea that “fake meat will save the world.”

Recently, Lightlife, which started making old-school vegan hot dogs, bacon, and other products in 1979, published an open letter in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal calling out Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat for using GMOs and additives. “Enough with the hyper-processed ingredients, GMOs, unnecessary additives and fillers, and fake blood,” the letter read.

Beyond cheesemaking, Schinner, a self-proclaimed radical, has been a vocal opponent of ranching in nearby Pt. Reyes National Seashore, to the concern of the local ranching community, although says she has tried to engage ranchers in conversation. But there are many people engaged in pasture-based, high-welfare ranching who don’t see removing animals from the land as a viable environmental option.

To that end, she wants to work with farmers to help them transition away from raising livestock, along with animal rights advocacy group Mercy for Animals, although the program has been impacted by the pandemic. She believes the shift will benefit animals and the environment, while boosting farmers’ economic outlook.

At her animal sanctuary, Rancho Compasión, located at her homestead in West Marin, Schinner has rescued around 70 animals, including cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, geese, and donkeys. Her goal is to “take these beautiful, sentient beings that have lives of their own out of the food system, to let them return to the lives they were meant to live.”

Schinner envisions a future food system that doesn’t include animals. She hopes humans can evolve to “become more caring, compassionate people who care about others—not just other people, but animals as well.” And she plans to spend the rest of her life, “fighting for their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Photos and video by Mizzica Films.

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Civil Eats TV: Regenerative Ranching in a Pandemic

The Civil Eats Editors — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:00:18 +0000

Coronavirus is hitting the meat industry hard. It’s impacting workers in meatpacking facilities, many of whom are getting sick and dying.

At the same time, distribution has caused bottlenecks in the food supply, especially in large-scale meat production, and, due to public policies that have allowed the industry to become highly consolidated, many farmers are being forced to kill their animals, while others are seeking to find ways to sell them in ad-hoc, online markets.

Meanwhile, some small-scale and pasture-based farmers and the processors with whom they work are experiencing record demand for their products.

As our senior policy reporter Lisa Held explains, for years, many have “touted the superior resilience of their alternative system, which they see as returning value to regional economies and respecting animals, workers, and the environment.”

We wanted to learn more about how the pandemic has impacted a regenerative, pasture-based rancher managing all of these complications, so we visited Loren Poncia, owner of Stemple Creek Ranch and a fourth-generation rancher in Tomales, California.

Poncia says his goal is to “raise an awesome, wholesome, nutritious product, and, at the same time, do the dance with Mother Nature to build soil health and biodiversity.” As one of the first operations to develop an official carbon-farming plan in the state of California, Poncia has been working toward creating a perennial pasture that helps sequester carbon in the soil.

Poncia is part of a growing movement of regenerative agriculture among farmers and ranchers, who, despite naysayers, believe that carbon farming helps to mitigate climate change.

Like many farms and ranches, Stemple Creek Ranch lost 99 percent of its restaurant business when COVID-19 hit. Poncia was able to quickly pivot to sell direct to consumers, and that aspect of his business is now booming, he says. But the change hasn’t been without its challenges; he has to work with a dozen processors in multiple locations to cut his meat into consumer-friendly packages—he now travels more than 200 miles to reach some of the limited slaughter facilities that can process his meat.

Loren Poncia of Stemple Creek (Point A, just north of San Francisco) travels across the state to reach meat processors.

“Processing is the huge bottleneck,” says Poncia. “If we had more local processing [facilities], it would be way better for the carbon footprint, it would be better for the animals, and hopefully better for the consumers as well.”

He notes that the crises occurring at large meat processing facilities show that efficiency isn’t necessarily resilient. “You can have 3,000 people working in one facility, right next to each other . . . or you can have a smaller-scale [facility] where there are 5 to 15 people, and do social distancing, the way we need to, but it’s not as efficient.”

All of this adds to the cost associated with Poncia’s small, niche business, but it’s one he says reflects the true cost accounting of an agriculture system that’s better for people and the planet.

“You can eat less meat, and eat better-quality meat. Or you can get with friends and family and buy larger quantities,” says Poncia. “There’s definitely a lot of power in consumers being able to vote with their dollars, and that’s [what I] hope comes out of this COVID experience, that people really connect to local producers.”

Photos and video by Mizzica Films.

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