KAYTE YOUNG: Production support for Earth Eats comes from: Bloomingfoods Coop Market, providing local residents with locally sourced food since 1976. Owned by over 12,000 residents in Monroe County and beyond. More at Bloomingfoods.Coop. Elizabeth Ruh, Enrolled Agent with personal financial services. Assisting businesses and individuals with tax preparation and planning for 15 years. More at PersonalFinancialServices.net.
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From WFIU in Bloomington Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats. This week as promised we are checking in with Muddy Fork Bakery and One World Enterprises for more perspectives on local food during a global pandemic. And Josephine McRobbie has a story on how Slow Food USA is getting their message out. Stay with us.
Whether it's worrying about vulnerabilities in our national food supply, or wondering if you should start baking sourdough, some of us might be thinking about food more than ever. The goals of Slow Food USA, a grassroots organization focused on food justice for all couldn't be more timely. Earth Eats Producer Josephine McRobbie spoke with Slow Food USA executive director Anna Mule.
ANNA MULE: My name is Anna Mule, I'm the executive Director of Slow Food USA.
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We're based in Brooklyn, but we have local chapters throughout the United States and our headquarters is in Italy.
Yeah, the word of the month is "pivot". The word of the season is "pivot."
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Narrating] The grassroots nonprofit Slow Food USA operates in 160 countries around the world, with the USA weighing that's home to 150 chapters. Members include farmers, fishers, teachers, chefs, activists and scientists all-round the country all devoted to a goal of good, clean and fair food for all.
ANNA MULE: A lot of our work revolves around gatherings, bringing people together, meeting in person, enjoying food together and really, you know, learning about the whole chain from farm to fork through food but also enjoying the taste of food as well.
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Narrating] In the wake of COVID-19, Slow Food USA has had to find new ways for members to connect.
ANNA MULE : All our well thought out strategies don't work out anymore, so it's a matter of being really flexible, being really nimble and just trying new things to see what really works and what is most effective to respond to the needs of the community.
JENNIFER HOLMES: So, this is a really nice frame, what you're seeing along the top is all completely tapped nectar that's been turned into honey already. This is stores of preserves for all the baby bees that are gonna...
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Narrating] Beekeeper Jennifer Holmes is showing off her bee frames from her backyard in Stuart Florida. She's presenting a part of Slow Food Live, a zoom-based skill share program that covers topics like gardening and cooking.
JENNIFER HOLMES: [In the background] ... being born. Thus, the cells that are empty on the left may contain eggs, and younger...
So, our first one about sourdough, we had over 500 people register for that one and it's gotten thousands of views online now. You know we had a session how do you make Japanese Curry Bricks; how do you make Japanese Curry Bricks? These things that people wouldn't have time for before but now they find themselves at home and eager to experiment
[Music, woman singing]
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Awesome, awesome. Thank you Melanie-
MELANIE BROWN: Thank you, thank you so much.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: That was wonderful, what a great way to start this off. Hello everyone and thanks for joining the second installment of...
JENNIFER HOLMES: So slow fish is one of the events that got cancelled.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: And we just heard from Melanie Brown, who is a dear friend, a colleague and the person who taught me how to pick [inaudible] out of a set net in Naknek Alaska last summer.
JENNIFER HOLMES: Slow Fish is an amazing international group of people that come together around sustainable fishing and our slow fish event in New Hampshire was going to bring together indigenous fish harvesters, small scale producers, you know, everyone who is in the chain of fishing.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Just please remember that part of the safety of this forum, aside from the guaranteed distancing of at least the distance of a mature sturgeon, means that all comments should be thoughtful and respectful. So, let's jump in and get ready to...
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [[Narrating] In the gatherings that were moved to webinars the slow fish members shared the strategies, frustrations and successes of a changing food economy. Anna has seen this kind of activity throughout the organization’s chapters and groups.
ANNA MULE: Needs on the ground are so different. For instance, some ranchers used to share primarily to restaurants, and to airports, and to like large scale food distribution platforms. And now they're struggling because now they're trying to pivot to online sales, to direct to consumer. If they're able to pivot that way they've seen a really amazing response. You know, people are eager and ready to buy online, but they don’t necessarily have the technologies and the processes set in place to do that quickly and effectively. So, they need to... you know, they're working overtime, they're working around the clock to fulfill these online sales.
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Narrating] Not every food producer is able to set up an online store, delivery protocol, and customer management system on their own.
ANNA MULE: So Slow Food East Bay for instance is establishing... like a food hub at a central farm where these small-scale producers can drop off their goods. And then they and partners will manage all the logistics of getting that to... you know, low income communities who need food right now, or to organizing a drive by pickup kind of situation. I think it's all about logistics right now.
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So, we believe delicious food is a right. It's not just a nice thing to have. It's something that everyone should have access to.
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Narrating] The slow food movement started in the 1980s in Rome, during the protest of a planned McDonald's on the Spanish Steps. Its mission seems increasingly difficulty to reach, and now the cracks seem even more visible as members work for fair and good food for all.
ANNA MULE: I mean this is what happens in pandemics, right? That vulnerable communities are especially affected because they were already at a disadvantage.
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Narrating] Slow Food USA is concerned that these inequalities will intensify if policy decisions leave out people like their members and so they've worked to step up fundraising and advocacy efforts.
ANNA MULE: We're looking especially that small scale family farmers, and ranchers, and community-based fishers are not overlooked in things like the CARES act. In all of this is that, you know, there's a limited amount of funding and we don't want big AG to win. We want funds to go to the small-scale family famers, the folks who are really active players in the local communities, and making sure that those communities are getting healthy food.
JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Narrating] Like all of us, Anna and her colleagues are searching for meaning as the weeks wear on.
ANNA MULE: You know I think this moment, we all want answers on when this is going to end, and I also want answers. But I think we can also lean into this moment a little bit, and I think this is a moment to develop some new habits that focus on a really healthy and robust food economy. How can we hold onto those as the pandemic slows down? I think that's the message of Slow Food is we really want to help people understand those values of living slow, understanding where your food comes from, and hang on to those
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KAYTE YOUNG: That story comes to us from producer Josephine McRobbie.
Last week we featured a number of local food businesses to talk about how they responded to the COVID-19 restrictions. This week we're continuing with those stories. I spoke with Jeff Mease a couple of weeks ago.
JEFF MEASE: I'm Jeff Mease, I'm the founder and CEO of One World Enterprises - kind of a family of food and beverage operations. Pizza X, Lenny's, Bloomington Brewing Company, Hive, One World Catering, One World Kitchen Sharing and Commissary where we are now, and a small farm called Loesch farm.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] From a distance of six feet apart, we talked about the state of One World's Operations. The sit-down restaurants, Lenny's and Hive, plus One World Catering, have shut down. Hive, their newest establishment tried switching to take out at first.
JEFF MEASE: So, in the case of Hive we kind of shrunk it all down to the core of our menu which was a few sandwiches and the chicken stuff that we do. You know, people love the chicken, we do this great roasted Miller farms chicken and some sides. That's sort of what we focused on. And we had a remarkable few weeks before we closed because we were still doing pretty darn good sales with shortened hours and a much smaller menu.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] But even Hive eventually had to close.
JEFF MEASE: Hive is totally shut down, yeah. Here's what happened, we had an employee who got hospitalized with the virus and it sort of freaked us all out.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] Mease said the employee was put on a ventilator for more than two weeks. But when we spoke, Mease said the employee had recovered and had been released from the hospital. Mease said few other employees got sick, but they weren't tested for the coronavirus and none of them were hospitalized.
JEFF MEASE: So, but thankfully he's getting better, we haven't lost anybody. So...
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] The restaurant remains closed, and the employees are furloughed, but Pizza X is a take-out and delivery model and it's full steam ahead.
JEFF MEASE: Pizza X is mostly fine. I mean what drives Pizza X is mostly the campus location that’s one of the busiest pizza places in the country probably when they're peaking. I mean it just it is a rocker; the thing is a monster at 2 o clock in the morning, but then you know, we’re not even open at 2 o clock in the morning now. So, when IU is gone that store is dead-zo. I mean it doesn't even do anywhere near what our other little stores do. The residential stores are doing well, like normal school year well. So that's a blessing. But the campus store which really usually, they don't make much money than the residential stores really. I mean the campus store is what drives the whole thing.
KAYTE YOUNG: When the paycheck protection program or the PPP rolled out, One World Enterprises applied, and they were one of the lucky businesses that received funding.
JEFF MEASE: Actually, we didn't even know we were getting it. We got it at the last minute.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] The PPP loans are forgivable if a certain percentage is spent on payroll. Jeff Mease decided to pump up the pay of all Pizza X employees, the ones who continued to work through the pandemic restrictions. They will all earn 75% more than their usual pay for three months. I suggested it could be considered a hazard pay.
JEFF MEASE: Absolutely it's a hazard pay, that's right. Another reason to do it, yeah. We're taking care of customers, they're working together, you can't always stay six feet away from people on a pizza line. I mean we're doing our best, you know "You get this phone, and you get that phone, and you know, that's your phone for the night." We’re doing as many things as we can, but it’s still more risky than sitting at home.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] They use a no contact free delivery system where the driver leaves the pizza on the porch rather than handing it to the customer. And now pizza x customers can also order cookies from a local business called Baked!. Pizza X and the Bloomington cookie company partnered as Baked! was struggling to stay open once the IU campus closed.
JEFF MEASE: They're very student oriented. They're like our campus store, where their business in the summertime drops off 70-80%.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] Baked! does generally do a lot of delivery.
JEFF MEASE: There was still mostly student driven. The larger Bloomington community doesn't know their brand like they know our brand. So, the idea was we're gonna use their ovens, because our ovens are busy with pizza, and they're set to make pizza. But they're like "We've got these ovens we're not using; we could bring them over into your store."
So, it was like "Okay, we'll use your ovens, buy your dough, your people could come train our people, but this can't happen overnight." And we said, "When do you want to shut down? They said, "We should shut down on a Saturday night."
Like "Okay, so... if we had a week what's the next Monday?" Oh, looked on the calendar, "Ah, it's 4/20." "Oh, how perfect that could be!"
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] "420" is code in certain subcultures for marijuana use, and the cookie company's name also plays with the reference.
JEFF MEASE: And so, we decide that's the night we're gonna say, "Call Pizza X and you can get Baked" and all these fun little playful ways to play that. And we thought it would be busy but wow it was crazy. And their people were in our stores, thank god, because it would have been a disaster. I worked till 11 o'clock, I was running cookie dough hither and yan, and pizza dough hither and yan, and then folding boxes and it was super fun.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] This week according to their Facebook page, Baked! reopened with limited online ordering and delivery. Their cookies are also still available through Pizza X.
One of the things that Jeff Mease started in the first week of restaurant shutdowns, continues today. He calls it the One World Family Meal Project, it started as a way to clear out perishable inventory from shuttered restaurants and to help their staff who had suddenly loss employment. It quickly expanded to assist folks from other restaurants and bars in the areas, and Mease started collecting donations from other restaurants and his own suppliers.
JEFF MEASE: It won't cost us very much, we're really efficient, we have the kitchen, we have a couple people still on staff, we could just do that. It's not expensive. And I just thought "If we did that, restaurants would probably donate us inventory and stuff. And they don't have to do it themselves cause we got a big kitchen we could just do it. And then people could just go to One World and they'll feed you." So that's how we started.
We can't tell people what we're gonna be making but we can let them choose between vegan, or an omnivore meal, or a gluten free meal. And they just choose that and then we know how many we gotta make, and we make them, and then they can get however many they want for their family. So that was the model and it's worked great. We're just gonna keep doing it until there's not a need to do it.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] For nine weeks they've been providing no cost meals, available for pickup at One World Catering Woolery Mill in south west Bloomington. On Jeff Mease’s Facebook page this week, he states that the meals are made possible by volunteer labor from One World Catering Staff who prepare the meals five days a week.
Jeff Mease is full of ideas. It seems the global pandemic and its local implications have sparked a wave of initiatives and innovation. Check out our website for links and information on everything going on at One World Enterprises. EarthEats.org.
[Earth Eats Production Support Music]
Production support comes from: Bill Brown at Griffy Creek Studio, architectural design and consulting for residential, commercial and community projects. Sustainable, energy positive and resilient design for a rapidly changing world. Bill at GriffyCreek.studio. Insurance agent Dan Williamson of Bill Resch Insurance. Offering comprehensive home, auto, business, and life coverage, in affiliation with Pekin Insurance. Beyond the expected. More at BillReschInsurance.com And Bloomingfoods Coop Market, providing local residents with locally sourced food since 1976. Owned by over 12,000 residents in Monroe County and beyond. More at Bloomingfoods.Coop.
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ERIC SCHEDLER: Door handles, light switches, music knobs, fridge handles, six to ten times a day get bleached.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] Eric Schedler of Muddy Fork Bakery will be a familiar voice to our regular listeners. Though it's a bit muffled this time since he's talking through a cloth face mask. I spoke with him from a safe distance at his bakery in rural southern Indiana. Eric has shared recipes with us for pita bread, pizza, challah, and pretzels.
Our conversation this week is focused on changes in their business model in response to COVID-19 restrictions. Muddy Fork Bakery makes sourdough breads with freshly milled flour as well as croissants, pretzels, granola, and other goodies. And they make most of their sales at area farmers' markets, they also sell some bread at Bloomingfoods - a coop grocery in town.
They bake in a wood fire oven which determines the schedule of their baking. They fire on the oven on Thursday, bake on Friday for Saturday markets, and continue to use the oven as it slowly cools for lower temp products such as granola. The first week the winter market closed back in March, they were scrambling.
ERIC SCHEDLER: We didn’t have a really clear plan and I think we didn't anticipate how suddenly everything would just stop. That first week we just made a bunch of bread for Bloomingfoods, and basically a lot less then we normally would have. And then there was a crowd of people waiting for us to bring it into the store, which was not socially distanced, at all. Like a line of people inside the store in the bread aisle waiting for our delivery.
So, within a week we had set up an online store through square which is our credit card processing already. It’s been surprising to me how quickly customers have switched over to "Oh, I'm gonna just order stuff on Muddy Fork's website and I'm gonna do it by Wednesday for Saturday, for what I want to eat on Saturday." It's a really big mental shift when you're used to just walking by and grabbing whatever looks good, to having to plan three or four days ahead. And then we've been participating in the winter market drive through and the community market drive through options as well.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] The Bloomington Community Farmer's Market Where Muddy Fork has been selling for a decade, has switched to online ordering and drive through pick up. Muddy Fork is still participating but more of their business is coming through their own online store.
ERIC SCHEDLER: Totally new thing that we've never done before. So, we're offering home delivery for a $25 minimum order and bakery pickup for people who want to come, or people who aren’t ordering $25, or people who don’t live in the city. We're trying to keep our delivery routes somewhat compact.
We have been having like seventy-ish home deliveries every Saturday for the past few weeks. People love home delivery. You know, especially people who are more vulnerable or more fearful, they don’t have to leave and have another point of contact with anybody.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] And Eric says business sis good.
ERIC SCHEDLER: Yeah, its amazingly stable. I was really worried for a couple of weeks, but after the first two-weeks our orders are strong as they would normally be. So, the mix of products is a little different, there's more bread, and tons of flour and then I’ve ever milled for customers before, which has to do with the supply chain issues with flour. I was reading 95% of flour that gets used, normally gets used in food service, and only 5% is packaged for retail. And the demand's completely flipped right now because so many restaurants are shut down, food service places are shut down, and people are baking at home.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] While I couldn't find a source to back up those exact numbers, it is true that demand for many products, including flour, has shifted dramatically from wholesale to retail.
ERIC SCHEDLER: Industrial supply chain doesn't easily flip from 50-pound bags to 5-pound bags. So, a lot of people have been asking for flour. Being a small business and working with small growers, we work mostly directly with a grower in Illinois for almost all our grains. So that's easy for us to flip what we're doing, whereas the industrial chain will take a while to catch up.
We work with Janie's farm and Janie's Mill in Illinois, and we get more grain then flour from them because we mill all of our whole grain flours. They do make a shifted or bolted wheat flour that we use - where a lot of people use a white flour. And they mill everything, they have a big mill. And they sell a lot, I think they sell more flour than grain, in general. And their mail order business, I think they told me it went up about 3000%, and they're working around the clock to try to keep up.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] Next week we'll be talking with folks from Janie's Farm & Mill to hear more about what the dramatic shift in demand has meant for their business. Eric is grateful that he's been able to keep his bakery going through the COVID-19 restrictions.
ERIC SCHEDLER: And I'm just really glad to be able to keep all of my employees working. It would be easy as a business owner if demand fell, to just cut back the amount of staff so that I’m okay. But I didn't want to have to do that, you know, with my employees. And many... well everyone who had a second job lost their second job, that works for us. So, we've been doing what we can to give them extra hours to try makeup for some of that. We are also homeschooling our girls while all of this is happening, so feel like I’m still working a ton, but I’m trying to pass off as more than I usually do to our employees to give them more work. And probably good for the long run anyway, have more people know how to do things in the bakery.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] I asked what his Saturdays look like now.
ERIC SCHEDLER: Saturday is really different but we're using about the same amount of staff. So, people that would be working at market helping a lot of customers, were divided up into delivery routes. So, we all gather in there at six in the morning to start packing.
That's the thing that's new, and different, and a little stressful, is that everything is prepaid, everything is spoken for. So, you have to make sure you have enough of everything, and you don't have any ugly ones that you have to throw in because that's the last whole wheat loaf. Whereas in the farmer's market its easy if you get to the end and there's a couple burned ones or something, then you just show it to people and say "Well this is what I have if you want it, and I’ll give you a dollar or two off and if you don't want it, I have this other thing."
But it's not as easy, and it feels a little stressful when everyone is committed to what they ordered, and they've paid you already. And not mess up any orders too, because with 70 deliveries and 30-40 pickups, that's a lot of orders to get right. We actually consulted with a friend of ours who worked in a packing warehouse, said "How do you do this to make sure that nothing ever gets done wrong?"
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] And the answer was simple.
ERIC SCHEDLER: Double checking, having a different person double check every bag. Nobody is gonna be perfect no matter how careful they are.
KAYTE YOUNG: Muddy Fork is also now participating in a new program called Neighbor Loaves.
ERIC SCHEDLER: The Artisan Grain Collaborative is an organization in the Midwest, it's headquartered in Chicago. And it connects growers, bakers, distillers, and chefs, and customers, and it’s trying to build the local or regional grain economy. And it's Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan for now. And the director there came up with an idea right after closures hit and demand at food pantries started to really spike, that we could all help out and get our customers to help out. So, we have neighbor loaves for sale on our website, and you're basically purchasing a loaf that we will bake and then in our case we're delivering them to Mother Hubbard’s Cupboards on Tuesdays. So, you're sponsoring a loaf. And we're doing about 75 - 80 loaves a week, and it creates an extra day of work for one of our bakers, and it provides a lot of bread. Healthful, whole grain, sourdough, sandwich type loaves that we're dropping off.
And it’s a time when food pantries are not able to get the same mix of products that they normally get in. I think bread is one of the things that because it's been short in supermarkets there’s not as much being donated to food banks and food pantries right now. Helps the people who need food, healthful foods, and it helps local bakeries in the Midwest that are participating to keep their business up and keep their employees working, and it helps the regional grain growers to keep their demand steady.
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] This is an example some of the interesting ideas that food producers all over are coming up with as they reimagine what a food system could look like as we witness this one breaking down.
ERIC SCHEDLER: I'm really grateful. I want... you want to contribute; everyone wants to contribute at this time in some way and bread is what we do. So, it's natural that we would want to bake extra bread and donate it, but having the neighbor loaf project allows us to do a lot more than we would if it was just all coming out of our business. I wouldn't be able to make 80 loaves of bread a week and donate them, it would be less than that. So, I’m really glad to have the support from our customers and our community to be able to do that. It could be one of those, you know, positive things that comes out of coronavirus. We won't live in the same world afterwards and if we can leave some positive changes that would be good.
KAYTE YOUNG: That was Eric Schedler of Muddy Fork bakery. If you're itching to do some baking of your own, check out past episodes where Eric Schedler walks through the steps of baking pita bread, pretzels, and more. Find links to all of those recipes on our website, EarthEats.org. Next week I'll walk you through the steps I follow to make sourdough bread at home, and we'll hear from a miller and a farmer at Jaine's Farm and Mill in eastern Illinois.
Thanks for tuning in this week and thank you for supporting this work and this station, WFIU. If you've contributed lately to help this public radio station to continue to bring you the news, stories and music you love, thank you, and we'll see you next week.
[Earth Eats Theme Music]
RENEE REED: The Earth Eats team includes Eobon Binder, Chad Bouchard, Mark Chilla, Abraham Hill, Taylor Killough, Josephine McRobbie, Daniel Orr, The IU Food Institute, Harvest Public Media and me, Renee Reed. Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young and our executive producer is John Bailey.
KAYTE YOUNG: Production support comes from:
Elizabeth Ruh, Enrolled Agent, providing customized financial services for individuals, businesses, disabled adults including tax planning, bill paying, and estate services. More at PersonalFinancialServices.net.Bill Brown at Griffy Creek Studio, architectural design and consulting for residential, commercial and community projects. Sustainable, energy positive and resilient design for a rapidly changing world. Bill at GriffyCreek.studio.And insurance agent Dan Williamson of Bill Resch Insurance. Offering comprehensive home, auto, business, and life coverage, in affiliation with Pekin Insurance. Beyond the expected. More at BillReschInsurance.com
