Cake and Commerce

Taza Chocolate: Bean-to-Bar Revolution by Way of Tradition

There's something important and almost mystical about the experience of unwrapping a bar of Taza Stone Ground Organic Chocolate. First there's the paper - thick, textured, and brightly colored. Then there's the silver foil, hand creased and protectively wrapped around the bar. Even the disks of Chocolate Mexicano, Taza's version of Mexican drinking chocolate,wrapped in translucent paper and sealed with a sticker, make their own remarkable snap and crinkle when unwrapped.

And all that - the look and feel, the treat for eyes and hands and ears - is nothing compared to the engagement of the senses in smelling and eating Taza Chocolate.

The aroma, intoxicatingly bright, floral  and nutty, has an irresistable draw. Then, at first bite there's surprise:  the bar is grittier than most, with a sand-and-velvet texture that melts on the tongue. There's something almost primal about the flavor - it is chocolate, absolutely, but magnified by up-front acidity, fruit and citrus, coffee and nutty notes, a hint of bitterness and a round, sustained and mellow finish. One bite, one square, two squares are not enough. Happily, there are 3 ounces to a bar (2.7 to a Mexicano). Satiety is an option.

Method and tradition and ethics. And stone grinding, the way its been done in Mexico for generations.

That's what sets apart Taza from other bean-to-bar manufacturers (vs conventional chocolate manufacturers, many of whom are simply 'remelters' - companies that melt down cacao liquor and combine it with fat, usually cocoa butter but not always).  Like other bean-to-bar manufacturers, Taza controls the entire process, from sourcing to roasting to grinding to refining to bar. But when it comes to production, Taza stands out for its adherence to a tradition that few are familiar with but that produces a remarkable bar of chocolate.

Until I returned to Boston in January, hat in hand, my life in boxes stacked neatly in a storage facility, I had no idea that Taza existed. A trip to a local Whole Foods yielded my first bar, which both thrilled and confused me. It was nothing like the chocolate I was used to, the silken old timey French chocolate rumored to be conched (mechanically smoothed and refined) for 24 to 36 hours. It was gritty. It was inelegant. It was, however, more elemental than anything I had tasted before. It was chocolate ne plus ultra with a heady scent and even headier flavor. At $6.50 a bar, I knew there was a story behind it. So I started asking around.

The first thing I heard: Taza is made locally, in Somerville, MA, by hand.  Hand made? Seriously? How much chocolate can you make per batch when you are doing it by hand? Next thing: they use millstones. Millstones? Like those at the grist mill in the town where I grew up? And they don't conche chocolate. Not at all. How was that even possible? Did anyone I know know them? Not really. So I was stuck.

By chance I happened upon a Taza chocolate tasting in a natural foods market on a Saturday afternoon. I tasted all their samples - the slightly bitter and very assertive 80%, the 70% bar (pictured above), and all four Mexican Bars: the salted almond (truly remarkable), the cinnamon, the vanilla and the guajillo chili. By the end of the tasting I had the name of Taza's head of marketing and the resolve to ask him for a visit.

The name was vaguely familiar but I couldn't place it. I emailed him. And didn't hear back. I've never been a fan of cold-calling (I'm not particularly good at it) and my intro, which I'll paraphrase as, "Hi! I'm Linsey! I blog! So you want me to come over and see your place and blog about you? Say yes!" wasn't particularly effective. So I figured I'd have to get in some other way.

Around the same time I started working on a project in Somerville with a Thai Restaurant. I was responsible for creating a drinks menu that reflected the Thai food menu. Through a Somerville community relations liaison I connected with Adam Lantheaume, The Boston Shaker, a craft cocktail evangelist and artist who helped me with some ideas. Adam, it turns out, works closely with Taza, and was working on creating chocolate cocktails with them. I started following both Adam and Taza on Twitter and read an exchange between them about creating chocolate syrup. I did a quick chocolate experiment and posted the results to Twitter. And then I blogged about it.

With that I secured an invite to visit Taza. I couldn't have been more excited. And I don't get excited about much these days.

On a Tuesday afternoon Aaron, the head of marketing, contacted me to tell me they were going to be grinding beans later that afternoon and that I should plan on being there. I quickly finished up whatever I needed to get done that day and headed into the city. 

Since late 2006, Taza has been located, improbably or probably, in a large industrial building in the middle of a industrial part of town that houses scrapyards, technology, and more than a few office buildings. Taza is just one of many businesses located at 561 Windsor.

Around the corner was a banner and then a sign and then the office. I was downright giddy!

Aaron met me at the office and took me on a tour of the facility, which consists of three cavernous rooms: the office, the roasting and winnowing room, and the chocolate manufacturing room. We started in the basement roasting room.

I've worked in chocolate before but I'm no expert. In my last job I was responsible for a chocolate manufacturing project in which we made soy-free, dairy-free chocolate for the allergy-friendly market. We used a machine called the ChocoEasy, a German-made machine that is the chocolate world equivalent of a super-automatic espresso maker (think Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks before they went back to hand-making their drinks). You load up the machine with chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, sugar and flavor and, depending on the size of the sugar particles and the desired results, pump it out into a tempering machine 4-12 hours later. The ChocoEasy mixes, conches, and refines at the touch of a button.

Taza is the antithesis of the modern chocolate operation. There's nothing glossy or high-tech about it except maybe for the computers they use to track operations and communicate with the outside world.

Taza's return to tradition - specifically Mexican tradition - is refreshing and inspiring. Everything is low-tech and bears the imprint of the human touch. As I learned from Aaron, the head of marketing and my guide for the afternoon of my visit, Taza's equipment is antique, renewed and repeatedly rebuilt by the mechanically-inclined hands of Alex, one of the founders, and Mike, the head chocolate maker and production manager.

The entire process begins even before the first bean hits the roaster. The beans, purchased by direct trade from a 100-member certified organic, sustainable cooperative in the Dominican Republic that Taza has helped to finance and grow, are fermented (about 6 days total) and dried (7-10 days) to Taza's specifications to meet grading requirements (the beans are graded before and after drying). Instead of drying on concrete, which can cause the exchange of undesirable flavors and substances, Taza's beans are dried on a screen mounted on wood. Of the total beans grown by the cooperative, Taza selects beans from 30% of the farms in the cooperative and pays a premium well above both the commodity market AND Fair Trade; the remaining 70% is sold on the open market. In an unusual move, Taza pays FOB farm prices, meaning they take ownership of the beans at the farm and cover the cost of trucking the beans to the airport and then from the airport to Boston; most products change hands at a port, usually the port nearest the farmer/supplier.

(From May to late September, the rainy season, exports from the Dominican Republic come to a halt. By that point Taza has built up inventory and can last, without further purchase of beans, until the season starts up again).

Once the beans arrive by plane in 70 kilo bags (that's 154 lbs) packed 17 bags to a shipper, they are picked up by Mike and Aaron and brought back to the plant for roasting, grinding, and finishing.

The Taza logo graces the wall of the roasting room.

The beans start in the roaster, a cherry red antique Barth "Sirocco" rotary spherical roaster, which was found and rebuilt in Italy. The roasting times and temperatures are documented on a Roast Profile Log. Taza prefers a slightly less roasted bean than most, as less roasting brings out more of the subtleties and characteristics of their superior quality beans.

My pictures don't do it justice.

(Apparently quite a few coffee roasters use this machine as well, as do some nut roasters - it just needs to be reconfigured for those products).

The chaff, which is produced in far less volume than the chaff from roasted coffee, is vented outside, where it biodegrades:

Once the beans have been roasted and cooled (there's a vented "cooling" unit at the base of the roaster), they are moved to the winnower, which removes shells and breaks the beans into varying sized nibs. It sorts sizes by use of mesh "screens" with varying sized holes that are each at a slight angle. Gravity and vibration moves the nibs from screen to screen.

Here Aaron shows me the shells, which are used as cocoa mulch by gardeners:

The Carle & Montanari winnower (please excuse the terrible photos - my eye struggled with this), also antique, also refubished, was found in a defunct candy plant in the Dominican Republic. To get it out of the building, its legs had to be sawed off and then welded back on once it was outside. Aaron told me it took 4 men 4 days to move it from the third floor down to the first floor.

Beans are moved into the machine by a sort of elevator:

Once broken, sized, sorted and separated, the roasted nibs are loaded into pails and carted up to the upstairs production room. They are now ready to be made into chocolate.

Walking into the production room reminds me of walking into a large art studio, except where there would be works of inedible art stacked on shelves, there is chocolate.

Chocolate inventory:

And samples ready to go

And beautiful ingredients, like these tubs of vanilla beans and sachets of fragrant, red-hot cinnamon sticks grown by the biodynamic Villa Vanilla in Costa Rica:

Nibs are kept in a large covered bucket and moved from the basement to the production room on carts

Notice the tattoo on Aaron's arm? The pig, divided into primal parts?

I noticed it immediately and realized I had seen it before. On him. A number of years earlier at a food show.  After the exchange of some information I realized I had met Aaron before, when he was still a cheesemonger in NYC. He even had the exact same job I had at the exact same company a few years after I left. We knew a lot of the same cheese people (and have 7 Facebook friends in common, all former colleagues). It was rather surreal. He had recently moved to Boston when his girlfriend started her Ph.D in sociology and had only recently switched from cheese to chocolate. Hey, as long as it is fermented, it is all in play.

Anyway, after we managed to get all the 'what did you think of x' stuff out of the way, he continued the tour.

Aaron showed me the first Molino, a platform-mounted antique Mexican chocolate grinding mill painted cherry red to match the rest of the machines.

The machine is powered by a flywheel that has been modernized with a belt and a motor.

Here's the motor:

The nibs are ground by two millstones, which are purchased in Oaxaca City, Mexico and hand-dressed (grooves cut etc) by Alex, who learned the craft from a molinaro in Oaxaca. The stones can easily be lifted and replaced. Taza keeps a few extra on hand:

Once chocolate passes through the first molino, it goes into a holding tank where it is mixed with sugar (the Mexicano are equal parts sugar and nibs) and possibly cocoa butter if Taza is making bars. If it is for a Mexicano round, it is then passed through a second molino and then formed into 1.35 oz disks. If it is a flavored Mexicano bar, the flavor is ground with the beans in Molino 1 - whole vanilla beans or cinnamon or almonds are added to the nibs as they pass through the millstones. Chili, which leaves strong, lingering flavor on the equipment it touches, is added in powder form to the chocolate once it is ground and in the holding tank, to eliminate any possibility of ending up in other products.

Soy lecithin is never added to the chocolate. There are no added emulsifiers at all in Taza chocolate.

Here's the second molino. The chocolate that has already passed through Molino 1 is now poured into Molino 2. My arrows show the path of the chocolate through the machine:

It is now moved to the tempering machine. Chocolate must be tempered - cooled by a process of agitation to approximately 82 degrees farenheit so that, when it is warmed up to 88-90 degrees farenheit,and poured into a mold and cooled, it forms a hard mass that breaks with a characteristic 'snap'. And doesn't leave chocolate on your fingers, unless you want it to.

Once the chocolate is tempered, it can be deposited into molds. Taza uses a very interestingly engineered donut depositor that pours just the right amount of chocolate into the molds to make about 50 bars/minute. Rumor has it they're actually trading it in for a custom-built depositor.

The round Mexicano molds look like this:

Once the mold has been vibrated for a bit to force any air bubbles out, they are set on a speed rack and tucked into an alcove where they are cooled and set. When the chocolate has set completely, the disks will pop out of the mold and have a gloriously shiny sheen.

The (all-stone ground) process for the Chocolate Mexicano Bars is: Roasted Nibs -> Molino 1 -> Holding Tank -> Molino 2 -> Tempering -> Moulding ->Wrapping

When they're wrapped, they look like this (the boxes are hand-letterpressed by next door neighbors Albertine Press):

Taza's chocolate bars are slightly more refined. Instead of running through Molino 2, they run through a refiner, which produces a finer grind than the molino.

Here's the stone refiner:

The chocolate moves via the belt into a tub and then either to a tank for holding or directly into the tempering machine to made into bars. Depending on the percentage of cocoa liquor in the bar, there is more or less cocoa butter added to it. Taza currently buys their cocoa butter but are planning to possibly make their own in the near future.

The current (all-stone ground) process for bars is: Roasted Nibs -> Molino 1 -> Holding Tank -> Refiner -> Tempering -> Moulding -> Wrapping

The organic sugar Taza uses is produced by the Green Cane Project in Brazil, one of the largest and most biodiverse and sustainable sugar cane plantations in the world. All of the spent cane is used to fuel the plant and the town nearest the plant. The sugar itself has a lovely golden hue.

The bars are then tempered and deposited into bar molds. Here the molds wait, clean, for their next mission:

Once the bars are set, they are hand wrapped twice: the first time they are foil wrapped, the second time they receive an outer wrapping that contains the label.

Here's how the bars are queued up for wrapping.

Two women, Stephanie and Sarah, hand measure, stamp and wrap every item that comes off the line. Here they are packaging chocolate-coated nibs:

Taza is currently testing out mini-bars for coffeehouses and other establishments serving coffee and other treats (and for anyone else who appreciates mini). They're adorable:

Along with the bars, nibs, chocolate-covered almonds, chocolate covered nibs and Mexicano disks, Taza also sells wholesale to restaurants and bakeries: 

They're packed to order. The Linkery, a farm-to-table restaurant in San Diego, uses quite a bit of Taza's chocolate:

With my tour ostensibly done, Aaron left me to observe and photograph Kellie, the assistant chocolate maker, running a 300 lb batch of chocolate, starting with 150 lbs of roasted nibs. Kellie began her life at Taza wrapping chocolate. When the assistant left for another job, she took his spot.

Mike, the head chocolate maker and former professional skydiver, had to warm up the molino with a hand-held warmer. The cooled chocolate (from the last batch) caused the wheels to stick together, making operations impossible until the chocolate was melted off the millstones:

Once the millstones were separated again, Kellie began grinding the beans:

The chocolate is pushed past a rare earth magnet (the grill-like protrusion in the above and below photos) that pulls out the rare stray stone or piece of metal in the unlikely event it makes it past the roasting and winnowing processes:

The beans are then forced by gravity between the millstones, which spit out finely ground beans resembling what we think of as chocolate: chocolate liquor and cocoa butter. The arrow points to the place where the chocolate emerges: right between the two millstones.

The chocolate then flows down a conveyor belt into a holding tank:

Once the batch is completed, Kellie cleans off the conveyor belt and the inside of the molino with a dough scraper:

Because the grinding started so late in the day, Kellie would be letting the chocolate hold in the tank overnight. The next day they would turn the batch in their new Guajillo Chili Chocolate Mexicano. I sampled a finished round. It was delicious - and not too spicy.

Once a year Taza holds an open house for all their friends, family and fans. To keep track of all their comings and goings, their blog and Twitter feed are good places to start. Or stalk.

There are numerous bean-to-bar boutique chocolate manufacturers in the US, but none occupy quite the same space as Taza. There is no waste produced by their operation: everything, including cacao chaff and shell is reused or recycled or returned to the earth. Employees bike or walk to work. Taza goes out of its way to source sustainably and pay a premium for products that are produced in keeping with the founders' ethics.

The results - a fruity, brightly acidic bar that is chocolate at its most primal and bold - are a revelation. With trailblazers like ScharffenBerger now owned by Hershey and reduced to a shadow of what it once was  and other bean-to-bar companies producing elegant but undistinctive chocolate (each conched to conventional smoothness) relative newcomers like Taza are taking the lead in creating truly original - for some, polarizing - chocolate.

And everyone should take notice.

To read co-founder Alex Whitmore's recent piece in the Atlantic Food Blog on Mexican Chocolate, click here.

Public Radio Kitchen, WBUR Boston's amazing food blog, linked to this post on 4/16/2009. Check them out!

Is Big Food similar to Big Tobacco? Two researchers think the answer is yes.

(Twitter, considered by some to be 'the worst thing ever', sometimes brings vital research to the attention of many. Today, Marion Nestle posted this piece, which links to an important article by Brownell and Warner published recently in the Milbank Quarterly. Having worked in Big Food for 4 years -and hating almost every minute of it - I have been waiting for something like this article for a long time. Thank you Marion!).

I've been getting frustrated with ranting websites and blogs sounding the alarm about the vast conspiracy engineered by shadowy companies manufacturing products consumers buy every day in supermarkets, restaurants, and anywhere else food is sold. Most of the rants are, in general, nothing more than lazy coded shorthand, sloganeering and repetition of anti-big food conventional wisdom, painting big food as a monolith  (when it is, in fact, an exceptionally fragmented industry), working against consumers and public health. Information is gleaned largely from bestsellers, films, and other websites and reflect little research, experience, or genuine understanding.

Don't get me wrong - I'm no big food apologist. I don't eat processed food and haven't since I learned how to cook as a teenager. But there's one thing I can't stand -   the knee-jerk syndication of information that fits in well with that particular website's/blogger's world view. Slogans and alarmism have replaced good information - on both sides of the Big Food fight.  Even Nick Kristof of the New York Times wrote something about it on 3/19/09 in his Op-Ed in the New York Times. This passage, in particular, I found particularly resonant:

...there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

Later in the piece he states:

The result is polarization and intolerance.

A good example of an important Food Industry report few on the Big Food side will never read (and likely dismiss out of hand based solely on the title) is  The perils of ignoring history: Big Tobacco played dirty and millions died.  How similar is Big Food? a fascinating piece of research and analysis by Kelly Brownell (of Yale) and Kenneth Warner (of the University of Michigan). The comparison between food and tobacco, already 'rejected''**  by the American Dietic Association as "not valid", is presented in a compelling manner by the two researchers, who have taken great pains to show from history and present example, how there are truly similarities between the two industries.

Let's make something clear. No one is saying food is tobacco, especially not Brownell and Warner. Food is a necessity, tobacco is a choice. Food is vital to sustain life, tobacco is not. Tobacco almost always leads to illness and death (my dad, a smoker, died from lung cancer at age 65). Food can, but it isn't inevitable or necessarily probable (though with 2/3rds of the US population currently overweight and the rates for children rising THREE times the rate for adults, it is indicated in more and more obesity-related diseases). Tobacco is clearly addictive. Food may be - the research is just beginning.  But in the tactics adopted by major food corporations in the fragmented food industry, from ingredients suppliers (ADM, Cargill, Bunge, Monsanto etc) to consumer packaged goods companies (General Mills, Sara Lee, Kraft, Nestle, Unilever, Pepsi Co, Coca-Cola etc) to the foodservice industry (McDonalds, Yum Brands, Burger KIng etc), to supermarket chains (Albertson's, Kroger, Publix, etc) the resemblance is uncanny. Obesity, the epidemic responsible for surging rates of metabolic disorder and diabetes, can be seen as a direct result of these tactics, which include but are not limited to advertising and other messaging ('push' strategies), lobbying, influencing scientific research, and flat-out denial of responsibility.

The paper highlights these details and elaborates - over nearly 30 pages - how big food has played a major role in the oversupply and the overfeeding of the consumer and how the tactics - legal challenges, PR campaigns, lobbying, and the publication of seemingly empathic recognition of the problems they are responsible for and the steps they are taking to make amends -  favored by different trade associations representing different constituents of the big food universe (National Restaurant Association, FMI, GMA and all of the industry specific associations such as the Corn Refiners Association and the Sugar Association etc) look astonishingly like those used by Big Tobacco.

The article points out that if American consumers were to eat a healthy number of calories (ie equal to or slightly less than what they need per day), these food companies would stand to lose a huge amount of revenue. It is not in these companys' best interest - and, most importantly, in the interest of their shareholders - to see consumers turning away from cheap calorie-laden snacks and processed foods and turn toward healthier, fresh, and home-made alternatives.The bottom-line consequences would be huge, paradigm-shifting disruptions.

Brownell and Warner point out the defensive 'playbook' utilized by the different constituents of the big food universe who are fighting to justify their existence. The basics of their strategy, which look remarkably similar to Big Tobacco's, include (page 7):

• Focus on personal responsibilty as the cause of the nation's unhealthy diet.
• Raise fears that government action usurps personal freedom.
• Villify critics with totalitarian language, characterizing them as the food police, leaders of a nanny state, and even as "food fascists", and accuse them of desiring to strip people of their civil liberties.
• Criticize studies that hurt industry as "junk science".
• Emphasize physical activity over diet.
• State there are no good or bad foods; hence no food or food type (soft drinks, fast food, etc) should be targeted for change.
• Plant doubt when concerns are raised about the industry.

The food industry has become a propaganda machine, adopting similar tactics as psy-ops and totalitarian states, leafletting our cities and towns with their own planted 'truths". With enough fly-overs and dumping of information designed to deflect attention from their products and methods and refocus it on personal responsibility, obesity no longer becomes their problem.

At my former employer, I worked with our company nutritionist and our R&D team on new products. When Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food came out, I copied a few choice sections and sent them to these people. When I approached them later, their response was not dissimilar to the #3 response above, "vilify critics with totalitarian language, characterizing them as food police." There was no self-reflection or a glimmer of contrition.

Nothing was getting through. 

Later, at an all-company meeting, the CEO made a speech about how we were now in the healthy food market, thanks to a few products we already manufactured that were naturally low in calories and some new products that were 'healthy' versions of existing products. Some had reduced salt, even.

I realized that I was mostly alone at my company, an industry player that - thankfully - never marketed to children but that was as responsible as any for manufacturing foods that emphasized taste and flavor and cheapness over quality and healthfulness. They hypocrisy of our organization - touting a few "healthy products" while flourishing from sales of the unhealthy ones - made me ill. While my product lines were less stomach churning (I worked on products that customers had requested), I was still contributing to a company that profited from the manufacture and marketing of foods I didn't believe in or would ever eat.

I was the hypocrite.

I was pushing the cause of real food privately while publicly supporting the food I hated and spent my life rallying against.

I witnessed the tactics, the press releases, the backroom discussions of how we were going to work on products that had a 'health halo' so that the company image would benefit. I witnessed conversations that sounded an awful lot like this: "yes, we could make (healthy product x) but our consumers wouldn't want it, and our brand is associated with indulgence."

How do you fight that kind of failure of confidence and cynicism? 

The sad part is that now that consumers have developed a taste for this kind of salty, fatty, crunchy, chewy, savory, sweet crap, they crave it. Weening the consumer of the bad food habit takes more than just an outpouring of outrage and public service announcements. It means fighting the propaganda machine with facts, with data, with real food that tastes great, with indisputable facts, with food pricing that reflects the reality of food costs - both real ingredient costs and long term impact costs. Consumers needs to push back. And change themselves. And stop believing everything they see and read and taste - especially when so much of it is part of strong PR efforts on the part of the individual companies, the industry associations, and their hired agencies.

I don't really do justice to Brownell and Warner's research and article, which concludes by urging the food industry to change its tactics and approach to avoid the same fate as Big Tobacco and to help reverse the rapid decline in health caused by the obesity epidemic.

I urge you to read the article, as It is one of the best researched and informed pieces I've read on the subject and provides a lot of food for thought. It reawakened in me a sense both of urgency and anger at an industry that has, for the last 14 years, in one way or another, been my meal ticket.

**The ADA wrote in its rebuttal to the piece:

“When it comes to public health, we have to focus on synergy,” said [ADA President Martin] Yadrick. “…Food labels, trans fat substitutions and many other recent changes have come about because everyone worked together and I think all those involved in these changes recognize that.”

"In this regard, [the ADA's President's] views were broadly resonant with those expressed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association regarding industry’s efforts to move towards healthier formulations. The GMA said that industry had reformulated over 10,000 healthier products and would continue to play its part in tackling obesity."

I worked for a company 'reformulating' many hundreds of its SKUs to be 'healthier'. Truth was, our products were still unhealthy, but they had taken the trans fat out. Portions were the same, as was the sugar content  and overall fat content. If that's what passes for healthly these days, we should be very worried about industry associations and lobbyists. Many members of the ADA are corporate nutritionists who work in the best interest of their company, not public health. Further, the ADA's annual meeting features a trade show featuring these same company's booths - showing off 100 calorie packs, whole grain products, and their healthy/organic brands. The ADA would hate to lose sponsorship or piss off its most powerful members.

Three Stone Hearth: a (r)evolution in eating

For the last 16 months, out of a crowded Berkeley kitchen leased from a social services facility, Larry Wisch (the kitchen's "Fermenter") and his partners Porsche Combash, Misa Koketsu, Jessica Prentice, and Catherine Spanger at Three Stone Hearth have been preparing and selling sustainably sourced and produced foods based on the ideas originated by Weston A. Price, the "Charles Darwin" of nutrition science. Although Price was a dentist, his interest in diverse cultures around the world (he referred to the people he studied as 'primitives'), diet and dental health led him to the conclusion that 'native' (local, pre-modern) diets, rather than modern diets, were better for the formation of the palate, teeth, and ultimately, health. In 1939 he published Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which linked modern methods of agriculture and food production to disease. Michael Pollan has helped to introduce a generation to the teachings of Weston A Price in his books Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and many, including the five owners of Three Stone Hearth, are putting theory into practice.

Once a week customers line up to pick up yellow bins full of glass mason jars stuffed with rich stews and soups, lactofermented vegetables (think sauerkraut), and all nature of fermented drinks. When customers return to pick up their weekly bin, they return the used mason jars and bottles so that Three Hearth Kitchen can reuse them.

Below, jars of Russian Beef Soup are lined up just after they've been sealed in jars and cooled. Three Stone Hearth publishes a weekly menu that customers order from.

Here's the cooler, lined with jars - in a day, the cooler will be filled with the yellow bins ready for customer pick up:

In the back room, Larry keeps large, imported crocks built for fermenting vegetables - and for making fermented drinks:

A milk crate filled with coolers, including root beer coolers:

Larry shows off a jar of Kvass, a ruby red tonic made from fermented beets with a little bit of sauerkraut juice - when Larry has extra.

We stood around a table in the Black Room as Larry opened up the jar of kvass. This was the second beverage he served us - the first was a lightly fermented soda made from douglas fir essence and whey (that's what he's pouring in the photo above). Delicate with a hint of the forest, it was the perfect precursor to the salty, acidic kvass, said to be an excellent liver cleanser.

According to Larry, Three Stone Hearth's goal is not to be a large, profit-making entity (which would, invariably, force them into many of the conventions of industrial food production that they are trying to avoid), but to teach people from around the country to practice similar sustainable food purchasing, preparation and distribution (as a community supported kitchen they rely on volunteers for everything from picking up cheese to working in the kitchen). The idea is that as interest in this kind of food grows, the demand for farms that are producing truly sustainable meat, eggs, dairy, produce, and fruit will increase, and more farms will begin farming in this way, and people will have more access to good, real food - food that nourishes the soul and the body in equal measure. It is a noble goal - and something I ardently hope will happen.

This post is part of the Food Renegade's Fight Back Friday, April 3, 2009