When Sadie Scheffer decided to start her own vegan, gluten-free baking company, the logistics were not her top priority. Like many small food companies without retail spaces, she started Bread SRSLY by delivering her breads and muffins on a bike, using a makeshift online ordering system through email and Etsy, and taking cash on delivery. Scheffer’s system worked when she was fielding a few orders at a time, but when it came time to scale up, it was less than ideal.

Enter Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based startup that provides online tools for small and sustainable food producers. Now Scheffer’s orders come through the Good Eggs online platform, and on top of taking orders from house to house, she now also drops off a lot of product at once at community pickup spots arranged by the company. She sells three times as many loaves of bread as she did before Good Eggs. Scheffer admits that she’s had trouble keeping up with orders, but adds: “That’s the fun part, the scary part, and the only way I’m going to grow.”

When Good Eggs was founded in the summer of 2011, co-founders Rob Spiro and Alon Salant knew they wanted to build “a product and company to serve and grow local food systems,” even if they didn’t know what it would look like. But Spiro and Salant are no amateurs: Spiro is an original co-founder of Aardvark, which sold to Google in 2010 for $50 million, and Salant is a co-founder of a software design company called Carbon Five.

The pair quickly set out to figure out how they could use technology to boost the local food community. They discovered that most small food businesses were built by food people, not tech people, and they were often missing the software they needed for even the most basic operations. Many, they found, were spending time they could be baking, pickling, or curating filling out charts on Google Docs by hand and taking one-off email orders.

As Good Eggs handles the logistics, its vendors are watching sales climb. But whether or not Good Eggs — and other sites like it — will be able to truly enable small sustainable businesses to scale up over the long term (after the trend factor dies down) is an open question. The costs of labor and quality local ingredients are still incredibly high, and while Good Eggs offers some solutions, it’s not a one-stop shop for all local food producers’ problems.

“One of the earliest surprises was that the food industry is not one industry, it’s a dozen industries,” Spiro told me. “So the way that a baker is selling their fresh bread subscription through Good Eggs is totally different than the way a ranch is selling a quarter of a cow.”

Click to see the invite.

Good Eggs launched its own site today, but for the past several months, the team has been building and running online storefronts on 40 San Francisco-based vendors’ websites. For 3 percent of each transaction, the Good Eggs team works closely with each to build a personalized online marketplace. “Our strategy is to align our incentives with the food producers,” says Spiro. The company also helps with marketing and promotion through what it hopes will become a large social media network of its own.

Take the Mission Community Market, a San Francisco nonprofit farmers market. It uses a Good Eggs platform to sell its Chef’s Market Box — a box of locally sourced ingredients with recipes from local chefs — but it also gets the company’s help writing and testing recipes, doing photo shoots, and handling delivery. It’s unclear which of these services will be available to Good Eggs clients in the future, but for Jeremy Shaw, executive director of Mission Community Market, it has made a world of difference. According to Shaw, “Without Good Eggs, the box wouldn’t be possible.”

Good Eggs is neither the first nor the last of the food-related startups scrambling to fill this space. Farmigo was one of the first of its kind when it was founded in 2008, and has since grown to provide 3,100 communities with farm-direct produce and CSA shares.

Plovgh similarly connects consumers with farmers, but gives buyers more flexibility and choice than a typical community-supported agriculture (CSA) box.  The New York-based site, FarmersWeb, offers an ordering system for local produce in bulk at wholesale prices. And because customers have to pay in advance, farmers no longer have to track them down and demand payment. Sarah Teale of the Adirondack Grazers’ Cooperative says working with FarmersWeb is “like having an agent.” “I really don’t want to be the one calling the restaurant saying, ‘pay up,’” she adds.

Technology has long played a role in advancing the food system — but that has usually meant the use of chemicals, hardware, and machinery to improve efficiencies. Now, says Danielle Gould, the founder of the website Food+Tech Connect, “technology is becoming increasingly focused on information flow. The internet, software, and low-cost hardware are making it easy for everyone along the food supply chain to connect and coordinate logistics.”

Gould’s hope is that this shift will infuse more democracy into the food system — through access to more information and much more choice in the kinds of foods available.

After all, no matter how ethical and pasture-based the ranch or how local the grains, food companies are only sustainable so long as they can stay in business, and the hope is that new technology will also offer stability.

Of course the irony is that maintaining a diversity of online services isn’t easy. And with all tech bubbles, it’s likely that one or two companies providing infrastructure for local food will outlast the others. But with a growing consumer base for organic food, and farmers frequently faced with more supply than they can sell, these new distribution solutions likely have plenty of room to grow.

As Spiro sees it, “We have a theory that local food as a whole is poised to grow 10 times over. So all ships rise with the rising tide. Farmers markets, food producers, and customers should all win.”  So who loses? “Safeway.”

Were you as disappointed as I was to see the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller flat-out reject his role as an influencer with power to change the food system recently? If so, this might give you hope.

This week, The James Beard Foundation (JBF) — best known for its annual food industry awards — sent 15 chefs to food policy boot camp. That’s right, the iconic culinary organization has partnered with Pew Charitable Trusts to actively encourage chefs to push for real, tangible change.

The intent, says JBF Vice President Mitchell Davis, is not to make all chefs advocates. But, he told the blog The Braiser, “increasingly, chefs are interested in these bigger issues, and increasingly they have some input that would help form some larger policy … that certain set of values, beliefs, experience [that comes from] literally feeding people on the front line.”

The boot camp brought a mix of celebrity chefs — from Top Chef Masters’ Hugh Acheson and Top Chef’s Mike Isabella, to well-loved regional chefs like Michael Anthony of New York’s Gramercy Tavern and Maria Hines from Seattle’s Tilth and Golden Beetle — to Tennessee’s Blackberry Farm for three days of policy education. The group took a deep dive into antibiotic overuse in animals (and the link to antibiotic superbugs, as it relates to Pew’s Save Antibiotics campaign) and got a primer on the current farm bill.

They also had a chance to strategize more generally about how to work with NGOs and advocates, and how to introduce their (often sizable) social media followings to important, if less sexy, food issues. (The 15 chefs attending reach over 100,000 followers on Twitter alone.) They also cooked what looks like a delicious collaborative dinner together.

“They’re leaders in the sense that they’re of a generation that young chefs look up to,” said Davis. “We want the people there to go back and inspire other colleagues and other young chefs to have a voice, to think about these issues beyond ‘What was the price of the pork tonight?’ [and toward] ‘What’s behind that price?’ What are some things we can do as chefs, given the opportunity, to make political decisions?”

Andrea Reusing from Chapel Hill, N.C.’s Lantern Restaurant says the focus on antibiotics for this pilot boot camp felt appropriate. Although it was timed around today’s deadline for public comments to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Reusing is concerned that government regulation will fall short on the issue.

“We have this terrifying public health threat. It’s a ticking time bomb and we have to sound the alarm,” Reusing told me on her last day at the boot camp. “We can’t wait for the FDA to act; we can’t wait for Congress to act. So I think the boot camp was well-timed. Once these antibiotics are gone, they’re not coming back.”

In addition to speaking publicly and in the media about food system issues, she said, chefs are often in a position to connect other important change agents.

“One story came out over the last few days about a situation where there were two NGOs and a state agency working on the same issue and none of them spoke to one another. It was only because they were all introduced by a chef that they got to know each other and work together,” she said. “Chefs have the potential to be the glue that can bring disparate community members together who wouldn’t otherwise be in the same room.”

For farmers all over the country, growing more than they can sell is just a part of doing business. As is routinely tilling surplus produce back into the soil. And because space is limited and time is of the essence, most farmers don’t have many other options — even if it usually means thousands of pounds of uneaten food.

“Nothing is lost when you turn something under; it just goes back into the dirt,” says Andy Griffin, owner of Watsonville, Calif.-based Mariquita Farm. “For us, loss comes when we’ve spent money to pick something, wash it, pack it, refrigerate it, and put it in a box, then [have to] take it out of the box and throw it away.” Of course, one could argue that the water and fertilizer required to grow the food — as well as the labor — is indeed lost, even if these are standard costs to farmers.

As much as Griffin says he’d like to see every vegetable he grows find a home, he has to be realistic. “Sometimes you need a bunch of stuff out of the way. Rather than wait and lose the opportunity to put the next crop in, I turn whatever’s out there under. There’s a choreography to moving stuff through the fields.”

Yet in this tightly timed dance, local food entrepreneur Larry Bain saw a chance to cut in. Owner of a Bay Area-based grass-fed beef hot dog company called Let’s Be Frank, Bain saw an enormous surplus of organic produce and an eager market looking to buy it, but a scarcity of good distribution options. What would happen, he wondered, if someone were to create minimally processed, shelf-stable products out of this extra produce?

This summer, Bain has teamed up with San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market and several other Bay Area businesses to find out. He’ll buy the surplus produce at a reduced price from California farmers like Griffin, in an effort to “capture the food at its very best moment,” preserve it, and sell it under their new label, The Gleaning Project.

According to the Bi-Rite website, the grocery estimates that “every year [their] farmers plow under almost 50 percent of what they grow when market conditions make them unprofitable to harvest, pack and ship.”

This first summer, Bain says he’s taking a “chaotic approach” with the project. One of the Gleaning Project’s first experiments was green garlic, a crop that’s less perishable than most, making it the perfect starter crop. After buying 280 pounds of green garlic from Griffin at $2.75 per pound — 50 cents lower than Griffin’s target price but high enough for him to pay for labor and still make a profit — Bain sent the large bulk of it to the nearby commercial kitchen where it became 260 jars of green garlic pesto. A smaller portion went to local preservers, which turned it into 85 jars of green garlic pickles. Now, both products are being sold at Bi-Rite for $9.99 per jar. (It’s almost hard to believe that they’re made from the same vegetable: Though both retain that garlicky taste, the pickles are spicy and crunchy — perfect for a Bloody Mary — while the pesto is mild and smooth.) According to Bain, “each of the partners got pretty close to equal portions of the final sale price of the product.” No one will see big money this year, but had Bain not stepped in, that 280 pounds of green garlic would have become fertilizer in Griffin’s fields.

Next, they’ll turn apricots into jam and August’s booming tomato crop into sauce. At the end of the year, they’ll look back and see which products were most successful.

The project’s success hinges on a number of factors and players, highlighting the interconnectedness and unpredictability of a local food system. Griffin may have only a few days to contact Bi-Rite and alert them of a surplus, and within that time, Bain needs to find a commercial kitchen that can handle the pickling and/or preserving.

Because many commercial kitchens have multiple week-long waiting lists, the companies he’s working with play a crucial role by providing the space and skills for pickling on extremely short notice. For Jordan Champagne, co-owner of the preserving company Happy Girl Kitchen, that’s part of the fun. “It’s our flexible production model that really makes it possible. It tends to be kind of chaotic in its nature, but luckily I thrive on chaos, so it’s worked out perfectly.”

The Guardian reports on two competing efforts to generate lab-grown meat — all of the tastiness, none of the nastiness. The intent isn’t to make a niche product for vegans, but to formulate something that’s indistinguishable from real meat — and to thereby end meat production as we know it.

Winston Churchill actually predicted the rise of this industry in 1932, saying, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He was off by a few decades, but scientists and entrepreneurs are working hard to make up for lost time.

Mark Post heads up a Dutch team that’s trying to grow animal muscle tissue without the animal — sometimes called in-vitro meat, or shmeat:

Post envisages a future where huge quantities of high-quality meat are gown in vats, incorporating not only muscle fibres but layers of real fat and even synthetic bone. “In 25 years,” he says, “real meat will come in a packet labelled, ‘An animal has suffered in the production of this product’ and it will carry a big eco tax. I think in 50-60 years it may be forbidden to grow meat from livestock.”

An animal does need to be killed to kick off the in-vitro process, but “in theory, a single specimen could provide the seed material for hundreds of tonnes of meat.” The process of making shmeat is not yet cost effective, however. A single burger made with the stuff will be served for the first time this October and will cost an estimated $331,000 to make.

In a separate effort, Patrick Brown leads a secretive, well-funded Silicon Valley startup, Sand Hill Foods, that’s working to develop synthesized meat and dairy products. His approach is “to manipulate plant material to create a meat-facsimile” — no animals involved at all.

If either venture succeeds, the meat industry will be on the defensive.

This is a disruptive technology — one that threatens to overturn a powerful and established order. The global meat industry, which is populated by some very ruthless people, is going to fight this hard. “I think the meat industry will be an adversary, and maybe a dangerous one,” Post says.

Another challenge will be overcoming the “yuck” factor. But today’s meat eaters already avert their eyes from the factory farms and other unsavory systems that currently bring meat to our tables, so will eating meat from a lab really be that much of a stretch? As reporter Michael Hanlon puts it, “In terms of yuckiness, real meat is at the top of the scale.”

Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have some proven expertise in determining the next big thing. So it’s notable that they’re investing in a vegan meat company called Beyond Meat, whose products are said to be the most freakily convincing fake meat yet. Sure, maybe you think you don’t WANT a better fake meat, but you probably thought you didn’t want a social network that let you transmit 140-character bon mots, either.

A lot of vegetarians aren’t really in the market for a realistic meat substitute. Either they gave up meat because they didn’t really care for it in the first place, or they’ve gotten unaccustomed enough to the taste and texture that they think it would be weird. But others miss meat desperately — and then there are all the meat-eaters who might be moved to make more sustainable choices if they knew it didn’t mean giving up their burgers. A really good meat analogue, which Beyond Meat apparently is (“It feels fatty and muscly and like it’s not good for you when you’re chewing it,” says Stone — yum!), could wean carnivores off inhumane, environment-destroying factory-farm meat, even if it didn’t convince them to go veggie entirely.

Another Beyond Meat bonus that might have caught Stone’s and Williams’ eye: It’s not just made out of soy, which some people avoid as studiously as meat. The chicken strips have soy in them, but the beef is made of peas, and the company’s founder is talking about using mustard seed, barley, and lupin for future products. I don’t know what Shakespearean fairies and Hogwarts professors have to do with it, but I assume he knows what he’s talking about.

Anyway, I’m not saying vegan meat is the new Twitter, but GUYS MAYBE VEGAN MEAT IS THE NEW TWITTER. Or maybe vegan meat is just the new meat, which might be even better.

Did you have your morning cup of coffee today? Probably shouldn’t have:

The international trade in Central American coffee has spurred forest clearing that eradicates habitat for the endangered [black-handed spider] monkey and, ultimately, the monkey itself.

The monkey’s woes come despite its protected status. This spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) shelters behind the legal shield of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, meaning it cannot be openly sold, which is meant to keep it from becoming a pet (yes, it’s that cute). But no such protection exists for its habitat, which may ultimately make any other protections moot. Not even the monkey’s amazing gripping tail can help it hang on in the face of forest clearing.

And that’s why this spider monkey is just one of at least 25,000 animals currently threatened around the globe.

Did you drive to work? So did everyone else even though they know they shouldn’t:

[A]bout half in the poll said they would find it difficult in the next year to take steps such as buying a more fuel-efficient car or carpooling. This, despite knowing that such changes would make a difference. A clear majority — 64 percent — said Americans use a lot of energy and are unwilling to reduce their demand, making that the most frequently blamed reason for the country’s energy problems

Smaller steps, such as turning off the lights, turning down the heat, installing more energy-saving appliances and driving less, were the more common ways respondents said they chose to reduce energy in the last year.

“Americans are extremely wasteful,” said Army veteran Jerry Winter, 39, of Arnold, Mo., reached during a vacation.

Did you prepare for the increasingly likely collapse of civilization as we know it and the ensuing era marked by resource limitations up to and including coffee and gasoline? Maybe you should.

The earth could be nearing a point at which sweeping environmental changes, possibly including mass extinctions, would undermine human welfare, 22 prominent biologists and ecologists warned on Wednesday.

Acknowledging in a new paper that both the likelihood and timing of such a planetary “state shift” were uncertain, the scientists nonetheless described warning signs that it could arrive within a few human generations, if not sooner.

Our Dave Roberts has a whole lot more on this last point. Have a nice afternoon.

Editor’s note: Finally, Sandor Katz — the nation’s fermentation expert — has written a bible-sized book about his craft. Beyond sauerkraut, bread, and beer, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World takes readers into the outer realms of the theory and practice behind this edgy, traditional approach to food preservation. What follows is an excerpt from Katz’ introduction, but it can also serve as a kind of manifesto for his work. See Katz’ recipe for homemade ginger beer and “ginger bug” for more on the how-to side of things.

One word that repeatedly comes to the fore in my exploration and thinking about fermentation is culture. Fermentation relates to culture in many different ways, corresponding with the many layers of meaning embedded in this important word, from its literal and specific meanings in the context of microbiology to its broadest connotations. We call the starters that we add to milk to make yogurt, or to initiate any fermentation, cultures. Simultaneously, culture constitutes the totality of all that humans seek to pass from generation to generation, including language, music, art, literature, scientific knowledge, and belief systems, as well as agriculture and culinary techniques (in both of which fermentation occupies a central role).

Sandor Ellix Katz. (Photo by Sean Minteh.)

In fact, the word culture comes from Latin cultura, a form of colere, “to cultivate.” Our cultivation of the land and its creatures — plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria — is essential to culture. Reclaiming our food and our participation in cultivation is a means of cultural revival, taking action to break out of the confining and infantilizing dependency of the role of consumer (user), and taking back our dignity and power by becoming producers and creators.

This is not just about fermentation (even if, as a biological force upon our food, that is inevitable), but about food more broadly. Every living creature on this Earth interacts intimately with its environment via its food. Humans in our developed technological society, however, have largely severed this connection, and with disastrous results. Though affluent people have more food choices than people of the past could ever have dreamed of, and though one person’s labor can produce more food today than ever before, the large-scale, commercial methods and systems that enable these phenomena are destroying our Earth, destroying our health, and depriving us of dignity. With respect to food, the vast majority of people are completely dependent for survival upon a fragile global infrastructure of monocultures, synthetic chemicals, biotechnology, and transportation.

Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food — plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi — and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively. We can become creators of a better world, of better and more sustainable food choices, of greater awareness of resources, and of community based upon sharing. For culture to be strong and resilient, it must be a creative realm in which skills, information, and values are engaged and transmitted; culture cannot thrive as a consumer paradise or a spectator sport. Daily life offers constant opportunities for participatory action. Seize them.

Just as the microbial cultures exist only as communities, so too do our broader human cultures. Food is the greatest community builder there is. It invites people to sit and stay awhile, and families to gather together. It welcomes new neighbors and weary travelers and beloved old friends. And it takes a village to produce food. Many hands make light work, and food production often gives rise to specialization and exchange. And even more than food in general, fermented foods — especially beverages — play a significant role in community building. Not only are many feasts, rituals, and celebrations organized around products of fermentation (such as bread and wine), ferments are also among the oldest and most important of the foods that add both value and stability to the raw products of agriculture, essential to the economic underpinnings of all communities. The brewer and the baker are central participants in any grain-based economy; and wine transforms perishable grapes into a stable and coveted commodity, as does cheese for milk.

Reclaiming our food means reclaiming community, engaging its economic interconnectivity of specialization and divisions of labor, but at a human scale, promoting awareness of resources and local exchange. Transporting goods around the globe takes a huge amount of resources and wreaks environmental havoc. And while exotic foods can be thrilling treats, it’s inappropriate and destructive to organize our lives primarily around them; most globalized food commodities are grown in vast monocultures, at the expense of forests and diverse subsistence crops. And by being totally dependent on an infrastructure of global trade, we make ourselves exceedingly vulnerable to disruptions for any number of reasons, from natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, tsunamis) and resource depletion (peak oil), to political violence (war, terrorism, organized crime).

Fermentation can be a centerpiece of economic revival. Relocalizing food means a renewal not only of agriculture but also of the processes used to transform and preserve the products of agriculture into the things that people eat and drink every day, including ferments such as bread, cheese, and beer. By participating in local food production — agriculture and beyond — we actually create important resources that can help fill our most basic daily needs. By supporting this local food revival, we recycle our dollars into our communities, where they may repeatedly circulate, supporting people in productive endeavors and creating incentives for people to acquire important skills, as well as feeding us fresher, healthier food with less fuel and pollution embedded in it. As our communities feed ourselves more and thereby reclaim power and dignity, we also decrease our collective dependency on the fragile infrastructure of global trade. Cultural revival means economic revival.

Everywhere I go I meet people who are making the choice to be part of this culture of revival. Perhaps this is exemplified best by the growing number of young people who are choosing to take up farming. The second half of the 20th century saw the near extinction of the tradition of regional food self-sufficiency in the United States and many other places. Today that tradition is in revival. Let us support and become part of it. Productive local food systems are better than globalized food for many reasons: They yield fresher and more nutritious food; local jobs and productivity; less dependence on fuel and infrastructure; and greater food security. We must become more closely connected to the land via our food, and we must have people willing to do the hard physical work of agriculture. Value and reward that work. And get involved with it.

I don’t want to give the impression that this culture of revival is brand-new. There always have been holdouts who resist new technologies, such as farmers who never adopted chemical methods, or never stopped using and saving the legacy of seed resources they inherited, or still use horses in lieu of tractors, or families who have unceasingly maintained fermentation practices. There have always been seekers looking to reconnect to old ways, or unwilling to accept the “conveniences” of modern culture. As much as culture is always reinventing itself in unprecedented ways, culture is continuity. There are always roots.

Cultural revival certainly does not require abandoning cities and suburbs for some remote rural ideal. We must create more harmonious ways of life where people and infrastructures are, and that is mostly cities and suburbs. “Sustainability” or “resilience” cannot be remote ideals you have to go somewhere else to fully realize. They are ethics we can and must build into our lives however we are able to and wherever we find ourselves.

Nearly 20 years ago, I moved from a lifetime in Manhattan to an off-the-grid rural commune in Tennessee, and I’m so glad I did. Sometimes a dramatic change is exactly what you need. I was 30 years old, had recently tested HIV-positive, and was searching for a big change I could not yet imagine, when a chance encounter led me to a communal homestead of queers in the woods. I can personally testify that rural resettlement can be a rewarding path. But rural living is certainly not intrinsically better or more sustainable than city life. In fact, rural dwelling, as most of us (myself included) are practicing it, involves driving frequently to get around. In the city I grew up in, most people do not have cars and get around using mass transit.

Cities are where most people are, and much incredibly creative and transformative work is being done in urban and suburban areas. Urban farming and homesteading are on the rise, flourishing especially in cities with large expanses of abandoned properties. The revival of artisan fermentation enterprises is centered around cities, mainly because they hold the major markets, no matter where production may occur.

The late, great urbanist Jane Jacobs put forth an intriguing theory that agriculture developed and spread from cities rather than rural outposts. In her book The Economy of Cities, Jacobs rejects the prevailing assumption that “cities are built upon a rural economic base,” which she calls the “dogma of agricultural primacy.” Instead she argues that the inherent creativity of urbanism fostered the innovations that spawned (and continually reinvent) agriculture. “The first spread of the new grains and animals is from city to city … The cultivation of plants and animals is, as yet, only city work.” Her basic idea is that a trading settlement that is a crossroads for people migrating from different areas provides a dynamic environment for incidental seed crossing and selective breeding, as well as greater opportunities for specialization and the development and spread of techniques.

If Jacobs’s theory is correct, then fermentation practices must also have urban roots. Rural dwellers may frequently be guardians of inherited legacies such as seeds, cultures, and know-how; however, it is primarily urbanites who are spurring agricultural change in the countryside by creating demand — starting farmers markets and providing the bulk of the community support for what is known as community supported agriculture (CSA). Urbanites can grow gardens and ferment, just as rural dwellers can. They can also tap into the deep currents of creativity that exist in cities, and the inevitable cross-pollination that occurs there, to foster change. That change can incorporate ancient wisdom that is in danger of disappearing, just as much as it can foster innovation.

Photo by Marisa McClellan.

Vanilla-rhubarb jam
Makes four pints

Ingredients

10 cups of chopped rhubarb (approximately 2 1/2 pounds of stalks)
5 cups sugar
1 cup Earl Grey tea (you could just use water; I happened to have some leftover tea around and it added a nice note to the finished product)
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
1 lemon, juiced
Pinch of salt
1 packet liquid pectin

Preparation

Sterilize your jars in a large pot of boiling water. If you’re making refrigerator jam (it will keep nicely unprocessed in the fridge for two to three months), skip this step.

In a four-quart, non-reactive pot, bring the rhubarb, sugar, and tea to a boil. Add the vanilla bean, lemon, and salt to the pot and let it bubble gently for about 10 minutes (on my stove, this means I set it to medium-high). After 10 minutes have elapsed, add the pectin, stir to combine, and let cook for a few more minutes.

At this point, dip a spoon in the jam and see how it coats the back of the spoon. If you get a nice, even sheet, the jam is done. You can also taste at this point, to see if you like the balance of flavors. Add a little more lemon juice if you feel it needs additional brightening.

Pour into hot wide mouth jars, remove any spillage, and apply lids and rings. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Remove from water and let cool.

It’s delicious on toast. If yours turns out more syrupy than jammy, serve with pancakes or waffles and tell everyone you did it on purpose.

Buenos Aires, Argentina: It’s no secret the people here love beef.

In 1958, the average Argentine consumed 216 pounds of it per year. (For context: U.S. beef consumption peaked in 1975 at 89 pounds per person.) Argentina was once the world’s fifth largest economy, due largely to the strength of its global dominance in the beef trade. Because of a grand confluence of factors including climate and natural grass diversity, Argentina was long known as a hungry cow’s heaven — and the arbiter of the world’s best beef.

But today, much of the country’s famous grasslands have been turned over to crops. Beef consumption and exports are way down. And lest you think it’s because overall meat consumption is down, irony would have it that Argentina is now the world’s No. 1 exporter of soymeal, No. 2 of corn, and No. 3 of soybeans, increasingly used as animal feed in China, where meat-eating is through the roof.

Images of cows on pasture are still common in Argentina’s guidebooks and on postcards and butcher shop windows, but cattle production now largely relies on the feedlot. As a result, a small but growing movement of consumers, providers, and environmentalists is beginning to demand the beef of days past.

The “grass” was always implied

Many scientists agree that meat consumption is intrinsically tied to climate change. And beef, lamb, and other methane-emitting ruminant animals are said to be responsible for a large portion of the greenhouse gases caused by food production. One recent study also concluded that people in the developed world must cut the amount of meat they eat in half to reduce emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas.

But in Argentina, conservationists argue that raising beef on natural grasslands is a sustainable tradition, and much better suited to the biodiversity of the grassland, called “the Pampas,” than industrial row-crop agriculture and feedlots.

Just 20 years ago, virtually all of Argentina’s cows still grazed freely. But as global agriculture markets boomed, it became harder for cattle farmers to resist the quick profit from soy, wheat, and corn. Hastened by a major financial crisis in 2001, many cattle ranchers sold their cows and turned over their land. Whereas grass-fed cows may take three to five years to be ready to sell, a farmer can turn around a soy or corn crop in a matter of months.

“Basically, cow production got pushed out of the Argentine Pampas,” says Ricardo Sager, director of scientific and technological development at Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA).

To keep beef prices low on less land, the Argentine government developed legislation in the late 1990s that provided subsidies for the corn-fed to feedlot cows. Both INTA and the Argentine Beef Promotion Institute touted use of the feedlot for quick, effective production. Now, much of the country’s beef — up to 80 percent by some estimates — has been through a feedlot.

Argentine cultural ties to beef remain strong. And by most standards, Argentines still eat an enormous amount of it — an average 118 pounds per person in 2011.

“Meat in Argentina is a strategic food,” Sager says. “Like rice in Asia and corn in Mexico, everyone has to have access and it has to be cheap.”

A gaucho, or Argentinian cowboy.

Not everyone sees it that way. At one farm in Entre Rios, Argentina, ranchers are trying to turn Sager’s argument on its head, by contributing to the creation of a premium for beef for the first time ever in Argentina’s history.

There, on 65,000 acres alongside the Paraná River, 20,000 cows graze without being bothered by humans. The herd, owned by Estancia Grass Fed Beef, is one of the largest pasture-raised herds of steer in the world.

“We’re essentially working in the traditional Argentine model,” says J.P. Thieriot, the co-founder of Estancia, “which not long ago was a model for sustainable farming.”

That model, he explains, involves grazing and fertilizing by free-range cattle for five to seven years, until the ground is primed for a short (one- to two-year) crop cycle.

“Such a system is essentially eternally sustainable,” he says.

Thieriot grew up on cattle farms in Argentina and California. He says Argentina and Uruguay are really the only places in the world where it’s possible to raise such a high volume of top quality cows year round, due to the temperate climate, access to water sources, and expansive, rich grasslands. Estancia’s animals are never given antibiotics nor hormones; the soil never sees pesticides or fertilizer. The company employs local ranchers and uses innovative animal welfare techniques.

Next he’s working on branding the product. “Creating recognition will eventually create a demand, which will create a price premium,” Thieriot says, “which will make it more compelling for Argentine ranchers to keep or add cattle — instead of getting rid of them to plant wall-to-wall soy.”

Estancia sells three main, prime cuts to high-end markets and restaurants overseas: tenderloin, rib eye, and New York strip. The rest of the cow (the majority of it) enters Argentina’s domestic market, where it is sold alongside beef from a feedlot, for the same price. But there is no labeling, grading or certification infrastructure in place for meat. All farmers sell in the same market.

“So basically, customers at a grocery store in Buenos Aires are buying Estancia’s beef without knowing it,” Thieriot says. “It’s completely unlabeled.”

Some Buenos Aires chefs intentionally serve grass-fed beef, however. And customers in good relation with their butchers may be able to get it, too. But the vast majority of consumers pay no attention to the overall tenderness or distribution or color of fat, for instance, which are telltale ways to distinguish feedlot versus grass-fed. In Argentina, grass-fed beef has never needed a title or a label — the “grass” was always implied — and it’s unlikely that many consumers are aware of the difference.

Many acres of the Pampas, a traditional grassland, have been cultivated to grow industrial-scale soy.

A threatened ecosystem

Plans are in the works for the first-ever label for grass-fed beef in Argentina, which will be available this year in select towns, starting with certification of 35 farms. It’s being spearheaded by Aves Argentinas (Argentine Birds), a wildlife organization that is part of an alliance to save Argentina’s grasslands, in partnership with Fundación Vida Silvestre (The Wildlife Foundation of Argentina).

“The label will signify what we like to call ‘grassland beef,’” says conservationist Gustavo Marino, who works with Aves Argentinas. “This means meat from farms that conserve grasslands and their biodiversity.”

Cows must be fed and raised on native grasslands, with feedlot usage prohibited. To receive certification, farms will have to be registered with the Alliance and adhere to a variety of protocols.

“The idea is to offer consumers the option for a product that contributes to saving a threatened ecosystem,” Marino says.

The Pampas is one of the richest areas of grassland biodiversity in the world, with up to 200 species of grass per hectare. Historically, these grasses have attracted hundreds of species of birds and other wildlife unique to the area. But with the intensification of agriculture, this biodiversity is disappearing, Marino says.

The alliance is also working with 18 ranchers throughout the country to introduce best practices for maximizing production while promoting biodiversity, in a project funded by the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank. A pocket-sized guide to the birds and grasses of the Pampas is distributed to farmers, so that “rural producers can recognize the animals and nature of their environments.”

The challenge ahead: creating demand

Some say the creation of a premium product faces a steep uphill battle.

“For farmers, once land is converted to grain, it is a difficult proposition to revert back to pasture,” says Mike Skowronek, an American rancher in Buenos Aires.

“A soy farmer, for example, would have to skip a harvest payday to buy new cows and wait for his grass to re-grow.”

Skowronek says he’s perhaps the only rancher still committed to the grass-fed method in Tapalqué, in the middle of Buenos Aires province and once the heartland of free-range cattle. He blogs extensively about the challenges that come with grass-fed farming in modern-day Argentina.

But Marino says he is confident demand will grow the more people learn.

“Of course we’re going to have to get them interested because of the flavor first,” he says, “and then educate them about the other reasons to choose grass-fed.”

Editor’s note: If you liked the series of photos we featured from the Lexicon of Sustainability this winter, you might enjoy this video — which is one of three currently running on PBS.org.