Receiving on a Friday. Where will it all go?
(is it a still life if a person is in the picture? I need help from an art history major out there)
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Tagged cheese, cheese receiving, piave, red flannel jacket, still life, walk-in cooler
The cheese list at the end of a Saturday night:
May 26 — San Francisco, CA California Academy of Sciences “NightLife”, 6-10 PM (My reading will be at approximately 8 PM)
Gordon will be reading from Cheesemonger and cheese will be served by Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. This costs money, but “NightLife” events are super fun. Being in the museum at night always feels like getting away with something, doesn’t it? ($12,$10 for Academy members)
Check it out here: http://www.calacademy.org/events/nightlife/
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So, if you follow my facebook, you may know that the schnauzer snacked on my phone the other day. It is still (barely) operational, so I went through all the photos, trying to save the good ones. While going through these, I came across the damaged cheese photos that I used to get credit from distributors. Work-wise, that is the best thing about cell phones. Text over a picture of bad cheese on arrival and there is no room for argument.
Before I deleted them, I thought that you – dear readers – might enjoy seeing some bad cheese. This is stuff that never sees the retail floor though it is sometimes the answer to the question, “Why don’t you carry XXXX cheese anymore?”
Let’s start off ordinary. Here are some badly shipped fresh ashed goat logs. They probably looked great in the warehouse. Maybe someone should have thought about it before packing them loose in a box with Manchegos.
This was impressive. You can’t really tell from the photo, but that entire green mass was dust that fell out upon making the first cut. For mold lovers only!
This French Tomme was supposed to be a whole wheel. I guess someone quartered it for samples then forgot about it. We had ordered 30 wheels of this stuff for a promotion and all the other wheels were full and in great shape. Just this one, sad, plastic-wrapped and quarted wheel was mixed in the stack. No, we can’t use it for samples.
Someone shipped this with heavy cheese on top and this poor little Spanish cheese on the bottom. It went squishy. You could tell if had happened a long time ago (most likely from Europe to the US) due to how much and how deep the mold was.
Here’s an organic Parmigiano Reggiano. I think that groove was from a forklift tine.. Note how dirty the bottom was too. I love being charged a premium price for crap like this
Badly sealed tryer holes can really destroy an aged cheese
Coat-slipping, falling apart, and with mold in all the wrong places, I still think this is pretty, even if unsellable.
Ok, so I have my book events scheduled for Wisconsin:*
Madison Wednesday, June 22 · 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Fromagination Artisan Cheeses and Perfect Companions
12 South Carroll St. (on the Capitol Square)
Milwaukee Thursday, June 23 · 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Larry’s Market
8737 N. Deerwood Dr.
Tell your Sconnie friends!
*Sorry Chicago, I couldn’t make it this time. I owe you one.
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Hey cheesemakers, I know from talking to many of you that there are some folks in the cheese retail world who are serial crooks. They don’t just pay late by accident or in a pinch, but seem to consistently — as their way of doing business — not pay until leverage is placed upon them either by threat of a lawsuit or public embarrassment. Often a cheesemaker may even just give up with only partial payment of no payment at all.
What should be done about these people?
I just got an email from a cheesemaker who was asking me if I had any ideas about how to get a couple thousand dollars out of a retailer that was way past due. This retailer (not in SF, for the record) is a person who I know has done this to others. It makes me very sad to read that this is still going on, but also angry that word has not been able to spread in the cheese community that this person is a bad apple. These are not my stories to tell (at least not yet) because I do not have all the details but the same couple of names come up over and over.
Back when I reviewed zines, the publication I wrote for had a section for zinesters to write in and complain about people who didn’t pay their bills. Sometimes these people would write back and defend themselves but more often they would just slink away. While the original zine people often never got paid, at least it kept others from getting ripped off. Is there a place to share that info in the cheese world?
My favorite part of one cheese conference was going out to dinner with a few folks including a local (Bay Area) cheesemaker. The restaurant had family style seating and we were seated next to a local chef. After claiming he could say “I love cheese” in any language, he started talking about the cheese plate they serve. He bragged about how he only bought from one exclusive distributor and how he knew the owner personally.
The cheese world is small and it is notable that this distributor, who the chef was so proud to know, was not attending the conference in his own city. Our cheesemaker pulled out his card to hand to the chef. Chef looked honored. Then our cheesemaker said, “Next time you see (redacted), tell him to f***ing pay me!” We then all detailed our negative experiences with the distributor.
That was years ago but I see — from a quick internet search — that that guy is still out there doing cheese related events
So seriously, what can be done about these folks? Could the ACS facilitate a grievance committee or an arbitration board? Should cheesemakers be more willing to go public with these stories in order to save others? Would it be helpful for someone like me to compile stories?
If you want to share your thoughts anonymously, you can comment that way or email me at gordon.zola.edgar at gmail dot com.
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I’m going to see Dee Harley a lot this month. That’s awesome because she is truly one of my favorite cheese people. I can never get enough of her. That’s why I brought my parents to her farm as a present.
It was a Christmas present, actually. But the Harley Farms farm dinners are so popular that even though we arranged it in December the first available spot was May 7. Now that I’ve attended one, I see why!
Starting at 4 PM with a full tour of the farm, you really get a sense of how much love goes into the care of the goats and land, and how much effort goes into the cheesemaking. Here are my parents walking through a field of goats. They hadn’t yet discovered how much these beauties can pee and poop!
Here’s my dad trying to extricate himself from one curious lady:
We got to meet some milkers, the llamas, and some babies. Here’s Laurie pushing the head of a baby male goat. She said that they love that and she should know since she raised goats herself awhile back. I didn’t catch the names of these goats, but since they are males, let’s call them Birria and Meatloaf.
Then we got to go to the cheese room. Now, there are a million pictures of me in a hairnet. There’s even one on the top of my website. But I’d never gotten a picture of my parents in hairnets before. Thanks Laurie!
I suppose if I was really a food blogger instead of a cheese worker I would be giving you the details of the Harley Farm acreage, the number of goats, the volume of output and throwing lots of silly adjectives around. But I’m pretty sure I’ve done some version of that before and I don’t know whether people ever really read that stuff anyway. I know I don’t unless I’m making signs for the store. No, the thing to know about Harley is that it’s a small, sustainable farmstead dairy where the goats are well cared for and they make great fresh goat cheese.
After we tasted cheese, we went upstairs for the dinner. I meant to take pictures of the food, but I was having too good a time (and too much BYOB wine) to remember to pull out my camera. What did we eat? OMG. First, a warm carrot, beet, asparagus salad, with feta. Then goat cheese raviolis. This was followed by the main course of spring lamb with mint sauce. We finished with fresh, warm ricotta with strawberries. Everything was awesome. Even better was sitting around the big, hand-carved wooden table and meeting all the other folks who were in attendance. The Harley folks put on a great event.
If you are going between Santa Cruz and San Francisco on HWY 1 and don’t stop at the Farm Store (and at Duarte’s Tavern for ollalieberry pie) I don’t know what you are thinking.
But May is truly Dee Harley month for me. We will be together at the New Leaf Cheesemakers day (along with Garden Variety and Schoch Farm) on Sunday May 15 (New Leaf Community Market Westside 2-5, free) and then at the California Academy of Sciences NightLife event where I’ll be reading, Dee will be talking and there will be a ton of cheese to eat (Thursday May 26 in San Francisco, $12, $10 for members)
My San Francisco book release party was over a year ago, but remnants of the evening remain.
While looking at Flickr cheese photos, I found this portrait of a cheese left over from the reading. Abandoned on Valencia, the picture is certainly evocative. A sad, neglected cheese, used and discarded, all alone and alienated in an overcrowded city.
(Photo by Jutta, click through for lots of awesome pics)
I’m glad I could help contribute to the urban art world and the ongoing story of the struggle of cheese to come of age in the Mission.
Often, when I represent my co-op at events, there is one audience member who insists on being annoying. It usually has to do with their discomfort at the existence of an actual large democratically-run institution that is somehow at odds with their fantasy idea of what we should be.
Our existence by itself is political but that is often not enough for armchair philosophers. I suppose its fair for people to be mad at decisions we make, but in a democratic workplace of 230 people, I can’t give a definitive answer for why we made a decision, I can only say what issues some people brought up and that the majority decided. People, even leftists, buy-in subconsciously to the spin-speak of places with huge PR budgets. We are a democracy: messy, opinionated, and sometimes wrong. It’s unwieldy at times, but it is also our strength.
Recently, after being on a panel discussing alternative workplaces and the philosophy behind them, I was confronted by an audience member.
“You said you pay a living wage, how do you figure that?”
“Well, our starting wage is a couple of dollars over the official SF hourly rate.”
“San Francisco doesn’t have a living wage ordinance, it has a ‘minimum compensation’ ordinance* according to my calculations, a living wage would be $18 or $19 an hour.”
I pointed out that we have an unbelievable health plan free to workers, real profit sharing, discounts on food and numerous other benefits that make our wages even higher, but none of that was really the point and he didn’t seem interested. Because I was representing the co-op, Mr. Leftist simply couldn’t speak to me as a worker, he was speaking to me as the boss. He probably felt brave speaking truth to power and all that except that he wasn’t speaking truth and he wasn’t speaking to “power”.**
Of course, I was also exhausted since I had been working at 7 AM that morning and this conversation happened after 10 PM. You gotta love a conversation about work where it goes on too late for most people who work for a living to attend.
At another talk – actually one where I was doing a reading from my book –someone confronted me about “a friend” that once worked there and got fired and how they had all these criticisms of the co-op. Of course, I was at a disadvantage because 1. I didn’t know who they were talking about, 2. Even if I did, I might not know the situation and, 3. Even if I knew both those things, I certainly couldn’t talk about it in a public setting because it’s illegal. There are one of two cases in my 17 years at the co-op where the folks got fired and I disagreed with it, but in most of the other cases, people had it coming. If someone gets caught padding their timecard***or stealing they aren’t going to tell their friends that. They are going to say, “It’s not a real co-op.” “It’s a popularity contest.” Or some version of “I spoke truth to power.”
The funny thing is that there are certainly valid criticisms of our co-op. We have no real models for what we are doing and have made stuff up as we went along. We could have better systems for some things and we could have more actual democracy in some cases. One of the reasons I finally came around to opposing coupons**** is that I felt like it was affecting our internal democracy. Everyone was too tired and too busy to go to meetings.
But the bottom line is that we are not a philosophical wet dream of a worker co-op. We are an actual worker-coop: the biggest retail worker-coop in the country. I’m proud to work there, warts and all. It’s not a workers’ paradise, it’s a constant work in progress.
*I looked it up later and this is true. At the time of its implementation, the term “minimum compensation” was substituted for “living wage”. However, according to the we are still well above the number calculated in SF for a single person.
**To be fair, he was speaking to 1/230th of the power in the store.
***We operate on an honor system in many ways so offenses like padding time cards, giving out discounts to people not approved for them etc. are firing offenses.
****When I represent Rainbow publicly, discussions of why we stopped coupons are totally the new “Why don’t we boycott Israel?” And no I won’t discuss the second question here.
*****Clearly this whole entry (and anything on this website) is my opinion and I am not speaking for Rainbow here.
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Tagged co-ops, public speaking, worker-coops, workplace democracy
It’s all over the internet and there will be better obits written by folks who knew her or were around to see X Ray Spex play. But Poly Styrene died yesterday after a battle with cancer and it just wouldn’t be right to not mention it.
X Ray Spex was one of those bands that was almost mythical those of us who were into that kind of thing. The only made one record before they dispersed into drugs and Krishna, but what a record it was! Not that anyone I knew had ever seen it… Out of print for a long time by the early ‘80s, we all had crappy cassette copies or vinyl bootlegs. Anything above 4th generation was highly sought after.
Those of us into that kind of thing liked punk rock but weren’t sold on the idea that the newest (at that time) kind of punk was the only punk. Hardcore* was in ascendance in the USA and while I loved that too, I always had a soft spot for edgier new wave and – to be honest – music made by people other than straight white dudes (like me). Much has been written about the way that the more rigid musical style* and violence of early ‘80s hardcore pushed out the women and the queers, but there were also a lot of people who kept those flames alive, trading tapes of bands like Au Pairs, Delta 5, Raincoats, Slits and supporting bands like X or The Mutants even if we didn’t talk about it much.
But X Ray Spex, they were extra special. Maybe the effort we had to go to listen to them added to the intrigue – as did the fact that the lead singer was a biracial, female teen-ager — but they were not a derivative band. They sounded totally new to us. Personal lyrics about the times we were growing up in… alienation that was unafraid… saxophone… no one was like them.
Clearly riot grrrl owed a lot to X Ray Spex. Bikini Kill – even without a horn section – sounded more like them than any other band. It didn’t seem like it in the ‘80s, but their sound, style, and message was dormant but not dead.
Goodbye Poly Styrene. You may have only made one listenable record, but it was one of the best punk records ever.
*I always feel the need to explain this now because things changed so much but “hardcore” in 1981-85 meant stripped down, super fast, political, and not afraid of violence. It did not mean backpacks, whining about one’s feelings, or guitar noodling. Nothing wrong with those things, it’s just not what was going on back then. Minor Threat was mad about social situations, not sulking in the corner.
** My favorite example of this is from the Big Boys. Funk punks themselves, they felt the need to write, “I’m a punk, and I like Sham (69). / Cockney Rejects are the world’s greatest band. /But I like Joy Division, Public Image to / Even that’s not what I’m supposed to do” Imagine a time when liking Joy Division or PIL was seen as selling out!
Gordon ("Zola") Edgar 