“The caviar flows like glue at the show,” Julia Child once joked. When an attractive Korean woman wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m Probiotic” walked by, I followed her back to her booth in search of something to eat. “Probiotics is the buzzword,” she said, spearing some red-hot kimchi on a toothpick and handing it to me. “The American palate is beginning to understand what live food means. Pasteurized and dead things are part of the old food system.” Her card promised well-being to those who consumed “the Champagne of Pickles.”
I found Stewart Reich, Max Ries’s great-nephew, taking meetings on a tartan-covered café chair at the lavish Walkers Shortbread booth. Behind him, imposing wooden display cases were filled with cookie tins, down-lit like handbags at Hermès. Walkers was a success story—an obscure Scottish cookie discovered in the seventies by two guys from the Bronx as they traveled through Europe looking for products to import. They placed an order and figured that if the cookies didn’t sell, they would give them away. At the time, Walkers was only in two or three countries; now it’s a $200-million-a-year business, with a presence in eighty countries.
There were lots of things like that at the show: food givens that the old hands could trace back to their uncertain beginnings. “Balsamic vinegar is in everything now,” Reich mused. “Not that long ago it was only available from Dean & DeLuca.” Mario Foah, the panettone guy, had Reich beat on that; he later told me that he was one of the first to import it, in the early eighties, before anybody knew what it was. “I went to somebody’s home in Milan and they made a risotto with balsamic vinegar. I said, ‘What’s this stuff?’” he recalled. He bottled it in a special straw-wrapped container, presented it at the Fancy Food Show, and dazzled the food press. “That was the year balsamic vinegar took off,” he said.
At the next booth over were the remains of Reese, which Max Ries sold to Pet Milk in the mid-sixties. (He died at home on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, in 1984.) Reese is currently owned by a distributors’ consortium called World Finer Foods, which also represents Bonne Maman preserves, McCann’s Irish Oatmeal, and Panda licorice. According to the consortium, Reese is still the country’s top-selling brand of artichokes, water chestnuts, hearts of palm, and wine vinegar. The wall of Reese products looked like the contents of a mid-century bomb shelter: capers, anchovy fillets, asparagus spears, packed in glass and labeled with idealized pictures of the contents.
When I ran into Ottolenghi, he was wearing his blue blazer and khakis and had just come from a meeting in Seattle with some importers of wagyu, extra-fatty Japanese beef; a nearly three-year ban on imports, due to hoof-and-mouth, was soon to be lifted. After that, he had stopped at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to investigate the potential of selling sea urchins from the last sustainable population, off the coast of British Columbia. Here at the show he was excited about some vinegar made from rotten bananas. “I don’t know who I’m going to sell it to—but someone!” he said. He spent a long time looking at the Cinco Jotas ham—an Ibérico even more expensive than Fermín, which was making its U.S. debut.
Then Ottolenghi saw something else, something slick and sleek and new, with a great story. It was Ian Purkayastha, a nineteen-year-old truffle merchant from Arkansas who had skipped college and was now the U.S. distributor for an esteemed Italian line, selling to Per Se, Daniel, and Jean Georges. (A few months later, he launched a new company, which specializes in wild edibles, like milkweed, pine bud, and Queen Anne’s lace.) He was trim and confident, with heavy dark eyebrows, and was wearing what appeared to be an Armani suit. Ottolenghi checked him out, and offered his impartial assessment. Purkayastha was the genuine article. He said, “He’s younger, and he sells way more truffles than I do.”
PART II
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Four
THE RAWESOME THREE
Neophilia and neophobia—loving and fearing the new—are conflicting impulses that arise simultaneously in infants around the time that they attain mobility: babies put everything in their mouths and start to reject the unfamiliar. That’s about where I was with unusual food, the crawling stage, when I heard about Rawesome, an expensive, all-cash, members-only specialty store devoted to radically unprocessed food, run out of a lot in Venice, California. Rawesome was based on the topsy-turvy idea that “safe” food was food procured outside official channels. Its members strained the boundaries of food adventuring to the point of reckless abandon—and did so with an attitude of extreme finickiness, in the name of protecting their health.
Rawesome attracted a clientele of health-seekers, yoginis, celebrities, and the seriously ill. The store, which advertised itself with a sign that read “Rawesome Foods—Raw and Organic—Out of the Ordinary and Downright Extraordinary,” carried provisions that were otherwise inaccessible: unheated honey from the Bolivian highlands (outside the fallout range of the A-bomb tests), sun-dried cashews from Bali, raw cow colostrum, goat whey, and camel milk from a dairy selling it for “craft use.” Cheese came in unmarked tubs—often lacking dates or labels—and in the meat cooler there were jars containing raw bison kidneys, spleen, hearts, and testicles, which customers often sliced open and ate on the spot. “We had some real vampires going through there,” a former Rawesome worker, who lived for a time in a shipping container on the lot, said. “Everyone wanted to suck the cow’s udder.” Liv Tyler and Mandy Moore shopped there occasionally. Mariel Hemingway was a regular, as were Peta Wilson and Vincent Gallo. Fred Segal, the boutique owner, ordered a box of food every week, and John Cusack’s personal chef, Rawesome workers said, was forbidden to shop anywhere else.
James Stewart, Rawesome’s owner, a robust man in his mid-sixties with a beachcomber’s moustache and a wardrobe of Hawaiian shirts, had been in the food business a long time. As a teenager in the mid-sixties, Stewart told me, he moved from New York to California with his mother and sisters, who became famous Hollywood groupies; one of them, Reine, had a baby with Peter Tork of the Monkees. Stewart lived across from the Whiskey and got a job at HELP (Health, Education, Love, Peace), one of the city’s first health-food stores, where he was introduced to the teachings of Yogi Bhajan, a Sikh who brought kundalini to the United States, and started wearing a turban. He grew sprouts, which he sold to supermarkets, and worked for the Beach Boys at their store, Radiant Radish. One of Stewart’s companies, an organic produce business, was called Green Energy. “I figured it was just green coming out of the ground, turning into money,” he told me. “It was a cycle.” For his ability to source shade-dried manuka raisins and dried persimmons—rarities in the seventies—he earned the nickname Mr. Exotic. By the time he opened Rawesome, he said, half the products he stocked could be found at regular health food stores and farmers’ markets; the other half, the “unique products,” he called them, were illegal.
Early one morning in the summer of 2011, as one of the coconut juicers—known around Rawesome for their stoned demeanor and their unsocialized way of wearing mud masks in public—started extracting the day’s supply, there was a knock at the gate. Outside, more than a dozen agents from the FDA, the county health department, and the Franchise Tax Board had assembled, in raid jackets and tactical vests; armed LAPD officers provided security. Stewart was arrested and put in handcuffs. He had $9,000 in his pocket, because he’d been planning to go downtown to pick up merchandise. His fruit money was entered into evidence. Over the next several hours, a crowd of about a hundred Rawesome members gathered to watch as agents loaded produce onto a flatbed truck. When the agents dumped some eight hundred gallons of raw dairy down the kitchen drain, members wept.
At its core, Rawesome was a raw-milk business. For more than a year, it had been the subject of a nine-agency investigation, in which undercover agents infiltrated the network of dairy dealers supplying the club. Count 3, Overt Act 12 of the felony complaint for arrest warrant: “‘Deb’ is in beige colored Ford van. . . . When ‘Customer WardKennedy’ asks for his order, ‘Deb’ searches through five ice
coolers in the back of the van and pulls out the water-soaked order: six unlabeled containers of raw dairy products.” The operatives, among them the feared California Department of Food and Agriculture investigator Scarlett Treviso—code-named La Rue—mingled with customers and, using what Stewart’s lawyer said were “purse cams and pole cams,” photographed Rawesome’s cooler, dry-goods trailer, and open-air produce market. They also took pictures of members coming and going through a corrugated metal gate. What they saw there shocked them, including, according to the complaint, membership agreements that said, “‘As a member, I completely reject and refuse all governmental standards . . . any governmental sanitation standards for food storage and display’ and I am ‘out of the jurisdiction of any governmental department and its regulations.’” An undercover source told me, “It was one of the two most extreme communities I’ve ever worked in. The other was animal rights.”
The day of the bust, the police also went to Santa Paula, sixty miles away, to hit Healthy Family Farms, a small operation that supplied the club with poultry, eggs, and, for a time, raw goat products from a forty-head herd that Rawesome boarded there. The farmer, Sharon Palmer, a single parent who manages the farm with her three teenagers, was arrested. A fifty-nine-year-old graphic designer named Eugenie Victoria Bloch, a Rawesome member who helped sell Palmer’s products at farmers’ markets, was also arrested, outside her home in Los Angeles.
Stewart, Palmer, and Bloch, who came to be known as the Rawesome Three, were charged with felony counts of conspiracy; Stewart and Palmer were charged with an additional two felonies, for running an unlicensed milk plant and processing milk products without pasteurization, and with various misdemeanors, including counts of poor sanitation and improper labeling. (All three pleaded not guilty to all the charges.) The the tax-board data indicated that Rawesome was generating more than $500,000 a year in income, yet neither the business nor the proprietor had filed state tax returns. Stewart’s bail was set at $123,000, with the stipulation, common in drug cases, that he be held until the court could ascertain that the bail was not “feloniously obtained”—high stakes for a grocer. For his defense, he hired Ajna Sharma-Wilson, at the time an attorney at one of the top marijuana-defense firms in Los Angeles. The analogy was plain: raw milk was the new pot, only harder to get.
Paranoia and defiance rippled through the Rawesome community after the raid. At a screening of Farmageddon, a documentary about small producers victimized by national and state food-safety laws, which concludes with absurd footage of an earlier raid on Rawesome, in 2010—agents, guns drawn, stalking among crates of fruits and vegetables—Stewart, in a white palm-tree shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, said that he was not at liberty to talk about some of what he had learned from the discovery. A big, mustachioed man, hunkered down in his chair, cautioned him to be even more circumspect. In a thick accent, he said, “Are you aware that there is possibly an informer sitting amongst us right now?”
Sharma-Wilson tossed her long dark hair. “I invite an informer to hear this,” she said. “Our forefathers drank straight from a cow.” She went on, “This is a guerilla war. This all started with the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. The FDA actually stated recently that ‘There is no “deeply rooted” historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.’”
At a hearing in October 2011, thirty supporters wearing white T-shirts that read “Raw Milk Heals” gathered outside the courtroom. Many were baffled by what had befallen their neighborhood market. “Rawesome was an intelligent local food ecosystem. It was alive, and it was regulating itself on a level so far beyond what the USDA or the FDA means when it says ‘food safety,’” Camilla Griggers, who teaches English at a nearby college, said. “That we would be dragged through the court system on a food-safety issue is so laughable. Rawesome was a gourmet club par excellence of the best food you could get anywhere in the world.”
• • •
Never mind the immersion circulators and the hydrocolloids, refined American cuisine has a regressive side, wrapped up in nostalgia for an idealized past. Raw milk stirs the hedonism of food lovers in a special way. After relying for years on milk smuggled from California and Utah, Ottolenghi, in Las Vegas, is trying to build Nevada’s first raw-milk dairy. Because raw milk is not heated or homogenized and often comes from animals raised on pasture, it tends to be richer and sweeter and, sometimes, to retain a whiff of the farm—the slightly discomfiting flavor known to connoisseurs as “cow butt.” To chefs, it is almost mystical. “Pasteurization strips away layers of complexity, layers of aromatics,” Daniel Patterson, who has used raw milk to make custard and eggless ice cream at Coi, his two-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco, said. “At the beginning of spring, the milk is at its sweetest. The cows are getting a lot of herbs that are really verdant and green, and the milk has a higher fat content.” It is not just the flavor, though, it’s what it represents: something unprocessed, sentimental, pure. “Raw milk is a primary touchstone of that sort of agrarian, old-fashioned way of life,” Patterson said.
Another highly regarded California chef told me he had helped a nearby farmer buy three cows from a breed carefully picked for the character of its milk and set up a small herd share, an agreement of uncertain legality whereby consumers own a percentage of a herd and are entitled to an allotment of milk. The farmer insisted on cash payments, no paper trail. “Only recently have they allowed receipts to go through my bookkeeper, but even now we don’t say what it’s for,” the chef told me. “We say ‘cow services.’” He uses the raw cream to make butter, ice cream, and a cajeta—Mexican caramel—that he describes as “haunting.” He said, “Dairy is the single most delicate and sensitive indicator of terroir I have encountered. When you take milk or cream and pasteurize it and homogenize it, you’ve killed the originality.”
Naturally, I wanted to try it. When I went to the chef’s restaurant, though, I thought it wise to pass the butter up. I had just found out that I was pregnant. Milk, being rich in protein and low in acid, is one of the best growth mediums on the planet. Bacteria love it. Unpasteurized milk can carry salmonella, campylobacter, and E. coli O157:H7, the strain that came to public attention in the nineties, when four children died after eating contaminated meat at Jack in the Box. Listeria—which can cause miscarriage, premature birth, and newborn death—has been traced to queso fresco‒style raw-milk cheeses, sometimes known as “bathtub cheese,” a reference to unsanitary home-production methods. The USDA fact sheet for consumers that I found online offered unambiguous advice. If you want to avoid listeriosis, it said, “Do not drink raw (unpasteurized) milk.”
Only a small fraction of the population—between 1 and 3 percent—drinks raw milk, and fewer than 200 cases of outbreak-related foodborne illness are attributed to it each year. Still, its popularity is rising, and regulators, puzzled by the raw-milk phenomenon, are growing concerned. A recent CDC study reported that raw dairy was 150 times more likely than pasteurized to cause an outbreak. Tanya Roberts, a retired risk assessor for the USDA who specializes in E. coli O157:H7, told me, “I would never drink it. It’s loaded with pathogens!” The FDA “strongly advises against the consumption of raw milk,” maintaining that there is no nutritional advantage and a great health risk; John Sheehan, the agency’s director of dairy food safety, has likened it to “playing Russian roulette with your health.”
The government’s real objection to raw milk is that they think people are playing Russian roulette with their children’s health. Pasteurization was introduced to the American dairy industry to solve a children’s-health crisis. By the mid-nineteenth century, most of the milk available in cities was supplied by “swill dairies,” stables built alongside distilleries, where cows were fed macerated grain left over from the production of whiskey. The spent grains boosted milk production temporarily but left the cows—confined to dirty, crowded pens—malnourished and prone to disease. In 1858, The New York Times published an editorial
titled “How We Poison Our Children,” decrying the “bluish, white compound of true milk, pus and dirty water” and blaming swill milk for eight thousand infant deaths in the city the previous year. “The article which had borne from the beginning of the world a reputation for wholesomeness was in reality a deadly poison,” the Times said. The state of milk was “intolerable to civilized society.”
Four years later, Louis Pasteur came up with a heat treatment to kill bacteria in wine, and his method was soon applied to milk. When Nathan Straus, a philanthropist and later a co-owner of Macy’s, set up depots where poor families could get pasteurized milk at discounted prices, the number of deaths among New York City babies dropped precipitously. What began as an argument for treating milk produced under unsanitary conditions became an argument for treating all milk. Speaking at the Pasteur Institute in 1905, the director of the depots read a statement from Straus saying, “It is milk—raw milk, diseased milk—which is responsible for the largest percentage of sickness in the world. . . . I hold that the only safe rule is—Pasteurize the entire milk supply and make it a function of the municipality.”
Others, believing that pasteurization should only be a last resort, argued for dairies to be inspected rigorously and held to strict hygienic standards. Though a number of states set up “medical milk commissions” to oversee a dairy certification process, pasteurization, the more efficient and fool-proof approach, won out. Raw-milk sales are now illegal in eleven states and permitted in a number of others exclusively through herd-share agreements and on-farm sales; in four states, raw milk can be sold only as pet food.
Anything That Moves Page 10