Wednesday February 1st at 7:00 at Elliott Bay Books
Friday February 10th at 6:00 at Vashon Book Shop.
Wednesday February 15th at 6:30 at Book Larder
]]>Off to the make-room to work on Dinah’s Cheese. Thankfully it is a toasty 72′ in there.
The misunderstanding I am referring to is people thinking I believe in local foods as being intrinsically superior to mass produced foods. I doubt that I have ever written that or said that because I do not believe that. I believe in eating the very best foods, made in the very best ways. Oftentimes that is a small local grower / farmer / producer, but it is not necessarily always the case.
There have been two notorious cases of problems with small creameries in Washington State in the past few months. Both Sally Jackson creamery and Estrella Family Creamery were small local cheese producers. Both had trouble with the regulators for possible contaminations. Both are shut down. These are great examples of local is not necessarily better.
Would I want a strawberry in December from Chile? Not at all, I love a great, local strawberry picked from a small farm in my area. But possibly a wedge of Cheddar from Cabot Creamery in Vermont is a good bet for a cheese fix. Cabot Creamery is a fairly large producer, a factory if you will, but they make exceptional cheese.
The way that this recently came up was because I posted on Facebook encouraging friends to go to Amazon.com. Critics were outraged that as a promoter of local foods I should therefore be an advocate of their local bookstores. I like the small book stores. I shopped in them for years and still do when I am in town. I also shop on Amazon.com.
I was recently on book tour in San Francisco and did a reading at Omnivore Books in San Francisco. It was without a doubt the most amazing bookstore I have ever seen. It is tiny, maybe four hundred square feet, with a beautifully curated inventory of primarily cookbooks. From now on, whenever I am in San Francisco I will stop in there to buy a book or two.
The largest and most successful book store in Seattle sells my book. I was the second highest seller of non-fiction books at this store in the month of February just after my book was released. I packed the reading room the night of a book reading and people left because there was not enough room. They sold out of my book that night. Let me repeat that: people came from across town, parked, came to a reading and could not buy a book. I now stop in once per week to check to make sure that they have books. Twice I have showed up and there were no books in stock. I was told that they were in the basement and had just been delivered. How do books sell if there aren’t any on the shelves? I love this book store. I buy books there, but it is most frustrating as an author to stop by and to see the shelf with none of your books. This is an example of local sometimes just isn’t good enough.
Amazon is headquartered in Seattle. I have many friends and farm customers who work for Amazon. They also want my support. I think they do an amazing job. They always have my book. People can always buy it. It is cheaper than in the stores. And they link my book to others in a generally very good way. And they sell the vast majority of my books across the country.
The issue of price is a tricky one. It is similar to buying cheap food. I never advocate for buying cheap food. Something is just wrong about that. It makes for poorly managed land, poorly paid farmers and out poor health. I believe that books are different however. ‘Growing a Farmer’ that you paid $16.77 on Amazon is exactly the same book that you paid $24.95 for at the small bookstore. There may be repercussions in the publishing world because of their pricing, but the book is exactly the same.
So, I hope this clears things up a bit. Buy local if it is great. Buy not so local if they do a great job. Look for quality — quality of product if it is strawberries and quality of service if it is something like a mass produced book.
]]>With a bit of luck, I will find the time to get back to writing. The proposal for my next book is sitting on my desk, screaming for attention and I have ignored this blog for far too long. Time for Spring, time to get back in the swing of things.
If you missed the Martha Stewart episode, here is the link:
http://www.marthastewart.com/336007/septieme-hard-rolls
The book launch party was this past Monday and was a great success. Two hundred and fifty people packed into Chase Jarvis’ photography studio in downtown Seattle to have a glass or two of wine, a plate of tacos made with Kurtwood Farms pork and listen to me ramble on about small farms.
On Tuesday I was at Elliott Bay Books to read from the book to a standing room only crowd. It was the greatest thrill seeing old friends who had heard about the event. Next week I am off to Powell’s In Portland and Village Books in Bellingham. Sure to be great fun at both.
Here is a quick video we made to promote Growing a Farmer. The cows take center stage.
]]>I used to work at the Heinen’s on Route 306. I loaded groceries into cars. It was a shit job, because we were paid awfully (pretty sure I made $3.15/hr), had to belong to a union, couldn’t get any tips, and people were generally ungrateful.
I lasted about four weeks until I walked off the job in the beginning of my shift in the middle of a rainstorm (I’ve always assumed, obviously incorrectly, that I was meant to do something useful).
It’s the kind of thing where I’d prefer to say I never had to go back to that Heinen’s again. I can’t. I’m there at least once every time I come home. This time, I went back to look for some wine. Ohio makes some terrific wine, but fuck me if I can find any of it for sale besides versions of pink catawba, a style of wine so horrible that adding carbonated buttermilk would be a significant improvement.
So I looked through the aisles, couldn’t find anything I really wanted, decided to buy some mass market wine sparkling wine, and then discovered, of all fucking things, a picture of Dinah’s Cheese. On a magazine. At this fucking grocery store in a shithole town in Ohio.
It made my fucking day.
Eric ]]>
This past Tuesday I was in the city. Seattle, that is. I needed to leave the Island for an appointment, even though it was the height of summer and I am loathe to leave my sunny spot of a farm. As I had a few minutes to kill, I walked over to the Frye Art Museum, a few blocks from my tardy meeting.
The Frye is a relatively unique museum. It was founded at the turn of the earlier century by a wealthy Seattle industrialist. Actually he sold a lot of pork products. His new found wealth gave him the ability to purchase a trove of European paintings: some quite good, others rather dull.
Upon his death he willed his home and art collection to be a museum open to the public. Only a century later did it become an interesting vibrant place. Now it is my place of refuge in the city; calm, quiet and filled with some lovely paintings.
I spent the mid day walking among a great exhibition. I relished the Sydney Lawrence views of Alaska, enjoyed the lush Bougereau and was rather bored by the lesser Renoir. And then I stepped back into the middle of room and pondered the message as a whole.
Here were a dozen beautiful paintings — essentially no different than paintings created over the past thousand years. They represented our collective Euro culture. Scenes of daily life, the artists impressions of the world around us, snapshots into feels, emotions and vibes.
What I am most curious about is if this chapter of history has been eclipsed by our present digital, ephemeral world. I am trying to imagine an artist spending days, weeks, months creating a single, one off image. Even more unlikely is the idea that we will save and catalogue and display those unique, single images and cherish their vision.
We have moved to a time of scaling; of distributing information to the broadest possible audience, in the quickest amount of time. As I sat there in the middle of the gallery, the idea of a museum of our present generation looking anything like these fine canvases seemed distant and unlikely.
My pondering fiinished, I left the cool, calm Frye and headed back to the city, to the ferry and back to my verdant pastures. ]]>
I have decided, however, to leave the three cows in milk in the pastures so that they can have the last remaining fresh grasses to eat. Seems like a good plan — the milkers on the high quality pastures, the dry cows in the barn paddock eating hay.
The three milkers — Baby, 4×4 and Dinah 2.0 — think otherwise. Their ability to reason and view a complete scenario is limited. They are presently standing at the fence line staring at the rest of the herd locked in the barn eating last winters left over hay. They have been stationed there for the past four hours, bellowing loudly. They feel that they have been cheated; that they got the short end of the stick. In reality, they have ten acres to roam and find great, fresh, pasture grasses.
It is tempting to fall into the old axiom of ‘the grass is always greener…’ but I will try to steer away from that. I am myself often that milker standing at the fence line looking forlorn at those beasts locked in the barn. It looks so nice. It must be better than the pasture under my feet.
The thing that I have taken from this morning experience is not that you think it is better on the other side of the fence, but rather, even though you eventually learn the truth, it takes a bit of time to do so. The trio of milkers will eventually get tired of complaining and turn around and begin to forage for themselves. It will take some time though. They could have been eating their bellies full all morning long.
And so I am trying to appreciate the pastures beneath my feet. Sure, that barn looks great from a distance, but in reality it is the distance that makes it appealing. ]]>
http://bddw.com/STONE_BARNS/barns_00.html
This is an extraordinary property: 147 acres near New Paltz with stone barns and a beautiful old farmhouse. I could live there, raise a larger herd of cows than I now have and make a tremendous amount of fine cheese.
I most likely will stay here on Vashon Island however. I have been here for the past twenty years, the herd is excellent, the cheese fabulous and the cheese cave is nearly complete. It is hard not to look at pictures of old stone barns with ten times the acreage I now have and imagine living there. Thankfully the $1.9 million price tag will keep me based in reality.
I do wish I could master the art of reveling in the present, instead of looking for a grander future. The present is damn nice.
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But then, I get a glimpse of our former ways and I revel in it. Last week a reporter from the Seattle Times came out to the farm to interview me about cheese making. We spoke for a bit, the next day a photographer came out to take some photos; the next day a videographer. I knew that there would be an article coming out sometime this week on the small farms of Vashon, but I really didn’t know when.
Early this morning I received the first email from people who had read the morning paper. I did what I have done a few times over the years, I hopped in my truck and drove to the grocery store to buy a paper. Not yet showered, not having finished my morning chores, I got to the store soon after it opened.
I bought a few copies of the morning paper, quickly thumbing through them in line, hoping to see how it looked. Then, in the parking lot, my dog bored in the passenger seat, I opened up the Times to read the article. Most pleased, I drove back to the farm to a complete review.
I enjoy this. The early morning paper buy. The small stack of copies. They will go into the box in the attic with others from the past three decades. In the dim winter months I often paw through the box, reminded of past stories, past photographs printed in this paper or that.
I just don’t get the same excitement from the web. I don’t get up early to see if a web site includes a mention, a photograph, a video of me or my work. I might notice the mention days or weeks or months later, with little fanfare. I never print out a blurb or a link or a blog post. That box in the attic has little added to it in the past half decade.
I enjoyed the early morning parking lot read especially today. I get a big smile on my face, even if my dog Daisy would have preferred to stay in bed a few minutes longer. ]]>