Restaurant Widow

Postscript to the Open Letter to the Dispatch

Dispatch Editor Ben Marrison was nice enough to post a reply to my letter on his own blog over at the Dispatch website.

The piece had some interesting fallout.

A few people who I expected would laugh off the whole thing were quite offended, and those I thought might be offended were actually pretty lighthearted about the whole thing.

I was pleased to learn, through the whole process, that the Dispatch is actually aware of some of their problems, and they have retained a crew of people to help them with their social media - and other - skills.

So, thanks to you, Ben Marrison, for taking my critique with a good dose of humor - you had some funny digs on your post that only close readers would have caught - and for acknowledging the road ahead.  It really is my hope that our paper can figure out a way to become great.  It would be amazing if we could lead the country in local papers who are doing something great.

I realize we are at a crossroads here, especially with print media, although I feel that we aren't really that far away from the model becoming online only.  My parents are in their 60s, and they read most of their news online.  I will admit they have always been closer to the cutting edge of technology than a lot of others their age, but it shows that there is a lot of room to develop your online presence.

I would encourage the Dispatch to see their criticism - not just here, but everywhere - as "an opportunity for improvement" (ha! That's one of those corporate phrases I hate but still love to use). Your city wants to support you. We want to root for you.  There really isn't a better place from which to start.

I look forward to seeing what the future holds, and don't forget my offer - always willing to lend my services as an overpaid consultant.  

This Week in Food & Food-Related Events::What a Week!

This coming week is big for food here in Columbus!  First of all, it's Dine Originals Week!  (notice it's no longer "Restaurant Week."  That name will go to 614 Magazine's Restaurant week.)

Dine Originals Week is a great chance to get out and try a new restaurant without spending a bundle.  All of the Dine Originals restaurants will offer menus for $10, $20, or $30, many of which are multi-courses.

While it seems I can never participate in any sort of restaurant weeks (such is the life of a waitress), I have eaten in many of the restaurants, so hopefully my insights are correct here...

Highlights include (links go to the menus on the DOC website):

G. Michael's - anytime you can eat at G Michael's for $30 a person, do it.  They never skimp on portions, and the food is always great. The fried oysters appetizer and the ribeye/veal cheek entree look particularly yummy.
The Refectory will be offering three menus for restaurant week! One for Monday & Tuesday featuring a beef filet and foie gras, Wednesday & Thursday's menu offers a choice of salmon or veal, and the weekend features a duet of lamb and beef.
The Top Steakhouse goes all out with four courses - from lobster bisque to steak to creme brulee.
The Elevator Brewhouse has Xtra lager corn chowder and pancetta-wrapped walleye.
Alana's has a classic coq au vin and a braised lamb shank.  Having had both of those items at some point or another in the past, I can assure you they are tasty.
And a little diner down the street from me, Wildflower Cafe, will be having Pork Schnitzel. I might have to try that one for the first time.

Of course, there are loads of great options - one unique option is Pistacia Vera, which will offer a dessert tasting menu - of ten treats! - for two (how romantic!)

Please remember that menus are subject to change, and you are very wise to make reservations when you can.  Have fun! I'll be working every day.

Moving along to Lisa the Waitress news...

On Friday at 11am, I will be on All Sides (820 AM and online) with Ms. Marilyn Smith and the Richs Terapak (I spelled it right this time guys!) talking about food and restaurants here in Central Ohio!  This is one of my favorite things to do ever and I am still honored that I am asked to be on!  Be sure and call in and ask questions!

This Sunday is Cupcake Camp Columbus!!! Tickets are sold out, so I'm sorry if you haven't purchased any, because it is a yummy and tasty time. It is actually a little deliciously exhausting as a judge, but I can't wait. 

Is there something else? I feel like I'm missing something...

Well, here's to a week of happy eating! 

An Open Letter to the Columbus Dispatch

Please allow me to start off by saying that I WANT the Dispatch to succeed.  I love my city and all that comes with it.  I WANT the Dispatch to be a great paper.  I WANT people to look at their website and think "wow, I should move there."  I criticize because I can't help but read the online edition and think of all these things whilst reading.  It might be hard to read those sentiments in this post, but it's true.  What would I have to gain from the paper flailing?  Nothing.  I really, truly, want the paper to listen, implement mine and other suggestions, and get better.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might already be aware of Dispatch Editor Ben Marrison's not-too-subtle jab at Columbus Underground and the fallout which ensued (it begins about halfway through this page).  I became curious about the Dispatch's ability to answer their tweets - or even see their @s - and Mr Marrison did, in the end, prove that he knew how to answer his tweets.  Nearly 24 hours after my inquiry, he responded with::

dispatcheditor @lisathewaitress Do I know how to respond to your message? Yes

So, bravo. The Dispatch knows how to respond to their tweets. Technically.  They just choose not to. Or something.  I used to follow their news feed (on Twitter) but when I tweeted them once and no one responded, I dropped them from my list.

I would like to compare this exchange with a few other people I've tweeted in the past few days: I tweeted amazing chef Rick Bayless to see if he could hook me up with his publicist, and he tweeted me back with his publicist's email address in under 3 minutes.  Just like he answers all of his tweets. Rick Bayless, who has 34,389 followers on Twitter, answered a lowly waitress/foodblogger in under 3 minutes.

I met writer/journalist Rebecca Skloot (4,413 followers on Twitter) last night at work (she came in for dinner), and I tweeted about something she said on All Sides with Ann Fisher this morning. As soon as she got out of the interview, she retweeted what I wrote (that there is hope for bad kids like me).

The previous two stories are perfect examples of the right way to interact with others on Twitter.

Newspapers are floundering.  Advertising dollars are down, journalists are getting laid off, papers are becoming thinner and thinner, and a few weeks ago, the Dispatch announced they are contemplating a change: they would like to begin charging for content. (The self-congratulatory tone of the column provides some great reading.)

Oh Dispatch.  Welcome to the digital age.  No one wants to pay for content. 

This has sparked a lot of controversy and discussion, especially over at Columbus Underground, which has been working very hard this year to become its own news source in Columbus.

The Dispatch has been in trouble for awhile now, and yet - and yet - they keep missing the mark.  Drastically.  The Dispatch continues to alienate readers - especially younger readers, who know how to get their news from other sources instantly. The truth is, Dispatch, your readers are voting with their dollars. They are not voting for you.  Something has got to change, I feel that is self-evident. I have spent a lot of time picking on you, so I thought I would offer up some solutions here.  For free.  

Now, as a blogger, and even worse, a widely-read blogger, I can be seen as a thorn in the side of real, paid writers.  Tthere is nothing a real journalist hates more than a blogger.  Real journalists see bloggers as ranting idiots - uneducated, unqualified - there is often the image of the fat naked blogger crushing can after can of Red Bull while they blog and tweet from their parents' basement with their cheesy poof-stained fingertips.  Who knows if these "writers" have any taste? Who knows if bloggers can be trusted?

What I have always found interesting about this idea is this: people aren't going to continue to read crap.  If I had been putting out crap for the past five years, I wouldn't have the readership I have.  People choose to come to my website, to read me in their feed readers.  And, while people also choose to read the paper, one can peruse the paper and read content they may or may not love.  But online, the mouse rules.  It's the click that matters.  The choice is there.  There is very little extraneous content on a blog, or even on individual pages of the Dispatch website.  You can skim over the headlines but what really matters is a reader clicking on the story.  (Even people who read writers whose opinion they hate continue because the writer is good.  I listen to Glenn Beck. I hate the man, but his rantings and ragings are engaging.  I really enjoy listening to his conspiracy theories and yelling at the radio like a crazy person.)

Consider, for example, this lovely snippet from a food writer (writing for one of the Dispatch's holdings) on the goods and bads of the decade:

Me-too food bloggers and "rate-it" websites like Yelp and Urbanspoon have revolutionized restaurant reviewing for both the good and the bad. On the good side would be widespread dining advice for out-of-towners and people who don't eat in ethnic or high-end restaurants much.

On the bad side would be that any glutton with a laptop, a camera and access to Wikipedia can now try to pass himself off as an expert, even if he doesn't even eat out that often himself, has a scattershot and clunky writing "style" not advanced beyond high-school diarist, has professionally biased and/or suspiciously personal motivations for writing reviews and will viciously slam an establishment after only a single visit.

I will just present that without comment.  I found it appropriate because it so directly attacks everything I do.  I don't mean to imply here that the writer is attacking me personally, but he is attacking the institution I represent. 

And, while I am not 100% on board with sites like Yelp, again: those who love Yelp vet the reviewers there as well.  The readers learn whose reviews they can trust.

Certainly there are plenty of people who don't agree with my reviews, and I welcome and expect that.  But the truth is, if I weren't a reliable reviewer or recipe writer, I probably wouldn't still be writing RW.  I might still be writing it, but if no one were reading it, I would probably have given up years and years ago.

And, if we bloggers are so worthless, then why are the papers trying so hard to copy us - down to the crappy low-light pictures of food?  

Competition is good for everyone, but when you whine and moan about the competition that is putting you out of business instead of trying to figure out what they are doing right, you look like a petulant child, thinking you deserve respect or that something is owed to you because of your past relevance. 

And so, Ben Marrison, Wolfe family, and the rest of you, here is some advice, which you can take or leave.

1. You cannot compare online and print.  They are completely different.  You cannot expect what has worked for a print paper to work for your website.
2. Your website is terrible.  I will go into the reasons in following points. 
3. It takes as long as 20 seconds for your home page to load sometimes.  This is your problem, not mine.  Believe me. I spend all day online here in my underpants in my parent's basement, and your site is the slowest by far. Frequently your site is taking forever to load because of the advertising you have on your site.  You also have a lot of pop-up and pop-under ads on your site.  These went out of favor years and years ago.  The fact that you still have them proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are behind the curve.
4. Speaking of advertising, you frequently have the same ad in the header space and on the sidebar.  Why wouldn't you put different ads in each space?  Seriously. That's just poor advertising space management, and you are shorting yourself by not having different advertisers.
5. Instead of paying good bloggers, you merely tapped your reporters with a magic wand and made them bloggers.  As you are constantly reminding the world, bloggers and journalists are different. Just because someone is a great journalist does not mean they will be a good blogger.
6. You do not understand the fundamentals of what people love about reading blogs. They love the casual voice, the freedom to say whatever the blogger wants (for bad or good), and the frequency of posting.
7. You don't require enough of your writers when they are blogging.  As I stated above, readers look to bloggers to post frequently.  You might not like it, but it's a staple of blogging.  I try to post four times per week, for example.  Sometimes I go a little longer, especially during the winter months, and sometimes I post cop-out posts such as lists and pictures of my cats.  My readers look forward to new posts and get testy when I don't write enough. And no, not just my mother. Some of your bloggers are going a month without posting.  In the blogging world, they would never survive
8. Your blog pages are clunky and unintuitive.  There is a kind of "code" or "style," if that's easier for you to relate to, for blogging.  You don't have any of those styles in place, and it makes it frustrating for readers to navigate the pages - especially if the readers are blog savvy.  I could actually go through your blog sections point by point and tell you specifically how to make them better and more user-friendly. But for that, you'd have to fork over a consulting fee.
9. Your comment sections are a horrifying embarrassment. It is inconceivable that you do not require any sort of authentication for people to post. The anonymity encourages the sort of racist and hateful speech that was around in the earliest days of the Internet.  You require letters to the editor to be from a valid person, why not do the same for comments?  Having to attach a name and working email address to your comments usually makes people think twice about posting some of absolute tripe which is posted currently.
10. You don't interact with your readers.  This is one of your biggest weaknesses.  No one moderates the comments sections, so they become runaway trains full of ridiculous comments, most bordering on outright threats.  
11. You do not respond to your tweets.  This shows you do not know how to use Twitter.  Editor Ben Marrison has about 250 followers.  He follows 15 people.  Most of whom are employed by other news institutions.  When I challenged him directly to answer if he knew how to read his @s, he finally responded.  From what I could gather by reading through his tweets since he joined twitter several months ago, it was his second reply ever.
12. You do not force your writers who are on Twitter to engage with the readers either.  You don't seem to require them to tweet at all.
13. In this age, readers want to engage.  
14. When you refuse to engage with your readers, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to see what news they want to read about.  If you listen, your readers will tell you what they want, what they are willing to pay for.
15. If you do choose to go to a pay system, figure out a way to charge people in micropayments.  Five cents an article, twenty cents a day, that sort of thing. iTunes and other sources like it, along with phone applications, have proven that people are willing to pay for some content, as long as it is easy.

So, there you have it, Dispatch.  Free advice. Take it or leave it.  But know this: you cannot dictate to your readers what they want, because they will find other ways to get their news.

epilogue: after writing this and just before officially publishing, I went to the aforementioned writer's blog to get his email address, so that I could warn him that although I used him as an example in this article, it isn't personal.  There was no link to an email address on the blog.  Do I even have to say it? FAIL.

Meyer Lemon Blueberry Coffee Cake with Yuzu Syrup

I'm not quite sure what it is specifically that makes a cake a coffee cake, but this one has blueberries, so I'm calling it coffee cake so that I might eat it for breakfast without raising eyebrows.

This cake is incredibly moist, thanks to a big dose of yogurt.  See? It has yogurt! That makes it healthy!  I've tried to take the picture very close so that its moistness would show through.  

One thing I like about this sort of recipe is you don't need a mixer or anything.  You only need 2 bowls, a fork, a spatula or wooden spoon, and a cake pan. You can have it on the breakfast table in just over an hour, although it is definitely better the next day.

Yuzu juice is incredibly hard hard to find in Columbus.  I have found it three times at Tensuke, and I am including a picture of it at the bottom of the post to aid in your search. (it's also expensive; I don't know if you can see the $9.99 price tag for the 100ml bottle)  If you can't find it, you can use all Meyer lemon juice or a mixture of lime and lemon juice.  The flavor is actually closer to Meyer lemons and limes than it is to regular lemons.  A little yuzu juice goes a long way, so don't overdo it.

You do not have to use cookie crumbs for your pan, but it is a great trick I learned from the Silver Spoon Cookbook.  All of the cake recipes call for butter and crushed amaretti cookies instead of butter and flour.  Brilliant! Flour has no flavor, but cookies are delicious and their larger grain helps the cake come out easily. I love it! You can even use stale cookies.  I used about 4 small crunch gingersnap I had knocking about. Graham crackers would also be a great choice.

Meyer Lemon Blueberry Coffee Cake with Yuzu Syrup - serves 10

1 cup thick plain yogurt
4 eggs
1 1/2 sticks butter melted, plus one tablespoon for greasing your pan
1 tbsp cream or milk
juice from 4 meyer lemons
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups AP flour
1 tsp baking soda
pinch salt
1 cup sugar
zest from 2 Meyer lemons
1-2 tbsp whey from the yogurt or a little milk

cookie crumbs (or flour, see above)
1 cup frozen blueberries
1 tsp flour

1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp yuzu juice (or other citrus juice, see above)

Preheat the oven to 325.  Brush a Bundt pan liberally with butter and sprinkle with cookie crumbs, tapping out any extra.

Combine the yogurt, eggs, cream, lemon juice and vanilla.  Stir to combine.  In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, sat, and sugar.  Whisk with a fork to combine.  Sprinkle the whey over and stir just to barely moisten the flour (this helps the cake stick together and not become crumbly. I learned that from Shirley O'Corriher! Works for cookies too!)

Combine the wet and dry ingredients and stir until just completely combined, but do not overmix.  

Toss the frozen blueberries in a little flour, until they are all lightly dusted (supposedly this keeps the blueberries from all sinking to the bottom, who knows.  I like to use frozen because then they don't mush and turn everything green).

Pour half of the batter in the pan and sprinkle half of the blueberries over the batter.  Add the rest of the batter and sprinkle with the rest of the blueberries.

Bake for 20-30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  The cake will not turn brown on top, and it might still look damp, because of its moistness.  Rely on the toothpick test.

Cool in the pan on a wire rack for an hour, and then turn it out of the pan onto a plate.

Combine the sugar and water and bring to a boil in a small pan.  Remove from the heat, allow to cool about 5 minutes, and then stir in the yuzu juice. Pour about a fourth of the syrup over the cake, wait about 10 minutes and repeat until the syrup is gone, allowing it to dry in between.  Serve with coffee or tea!

Fudha, a Simple Idea::Feed Others by Feeding Yourself!

I love a simple concept. Like Free Rice. You show you can define words, and the World Food Programe will donate rice to hungry people in developing countries around the world.  Simple.  You can even see your little bowl of rice filling up, which is one of my favorite parts of the website.  You get the instant satisfaction of seeing a representation of your brilliance (or lack thereof) right there on the site.

Fudha is an equally simple concept.  Fudha is a website which offers discounted gift certificates to great restaurants around Columbus. Each day, you can purchase a gift certificate for 50% of its face value for the restaurant of the day and voila. Money is donated to the MidOhio Food Bank.  You can keep tabs on current donations right on the first page.  (They've already raised $446 since they launched on Monday).

Well, there you have it. It's that easy. I would love to see more of these super simple concepts in the future.  My only suggested would be a badge which automatically updates to let people know what the deal of the day is - like I could have one on my site which automatically says "today's deal is Due Amici!" (which it is).

The only thing which isn't simple is the pronunciation. Is it foood-HUH? fooood-HA? If you know, please feel free to enlighten me.

What do You Need to Learn?

It's winter.  Although I have brief periods where I am inspired to cook, longtime readers will know this is the time of year when I start getting a little lazy in posting.  It's the time of year my mom will call and say "you haven't written in awhile..."  And I'll say "yeah, I know I know."  Compound the gray snow with my yearly desire to hibernate completely and the fact that February is the least monetarily beneficial month in the restaurant biz, and there you have it: a recipe for a lazy blogger.

I bought Meyer lemons last week. That's the extent of my seasonal inspiration. I haven't even used them yet.

At any rate, I thought perhaps I would take this time of lack of inspiration to see if there are any topics you would like to learn about?  Anything you would like to learn how to make?

Any restaurants you have been curious about that you'd like me to try out?  Things I promised to tell you about and haven't?  Ditto recipes?

Leave them in the comments! 

Vanilla! Vanilla! Vanilla!

 

Oh vanilla. When it's real it's amazing, when it's artificial it's a horror.  Vanilla is expensive - a treasure - growing it is painstaking, requiring the most delicate precision, nudging exotic flowers along, pollinating them with a paintbrush, aging and curing the green pods for months, all to produce one of the most expensive ingredients in the world.

Vanilla is known to have one of the most complex aroma structures known to mankind. Its intriguing scent is a known aphrodisiac. One pin head's worth of seeds is enough to flavor enough ice cream for the whole family.  

Vanilla is naturally at home in both sweet and yes, savory applications as well.  It adds that je ne sais quois to a whole range of dishes. It especially loves another tres cher exotic, saffron, and no cake or creme brûlée would be the same without it.

All of this, and yet we consider vanilla to be something boring. When someone is without interest, personality, or humor, we refer to them as "vanilla." But clearly, vanilla is the renaissance woman of the spice world, and I would be flattered to be called such.

Because vanilla is so expensive, very few of us get to appreciate its full beauty.  We frequently purchase inferior imitation extracts; and sometimes it can be hard to justify an eye-popping $8 per bean at gourmet food shops.  Even when I was a baker I took it for granted.  Ever Monday and Thursday I would arrive at the restaurant to make my creme brûlée and used - and discarded - 4 beans for each batch.  And we went through a ton of creme brûlées.

The expense of vanilla was one of my main motivations for starting bulk club.  From being a baker, I knew purchasing vanilla in bulk was a major savings over purchasing it in a store.  

When I spent my day with Spencer and his crew of amazing bakerellas at Pistacia Vera a few months ago, vanilla became a topic of discussion, especially its use, reuse, use, and reuse. 

You see, one should never, ever throw a vanilla bean away.

A vanilla bean, though expensive, was born to be a good value.  Like your grandmother's Chanel suit that that still looks fabulous, a vanilla bean moves effortlessly through creme brûlée, sugar, and into its final resting place, alcohol (what a charmed life).

So. This is how you can use your beans: Scrape the beans to make ice cream (or cream brûlée, or what have you). Most pods can be scraped twice - remember, a little flavor goes a long way. 

So. We've scraped the vanilla bean twice to be used in something creamy and yummy. Third pass, I like to make vanilla sugar.  Usually I put a pair of rubber gloves on and rub the pods into a bowl of sugar; the grain of the sugar helps scrub any remaining seeds still clinging to the pods (although vanilla seeds are really there for their beauty - they get their flavor from the pod, so the pod has to be stored in the sugar).

Sugar is a good storage place for vanilla beans as long as it doesn't get too dry.  So, even though vanilla beans look beautiful sitting in a jar of sugar, I admit that I usually vacuum pack it.  

If your beans dry out too much, just give them a little dip in vodka, and leave them in a cool oven (pilot light only, or "keep warm" setting) for a few minutes.  And, just when you think your beans have contributed everything they can, it's time to make extract.

Which couldn't be easier.  Simply place them in a bottle of decent vodka (Tito's is tasty and affordable) and let them soak for a few weeks.  You can even drink this concoction in your morning orange juice! I'm just kidding, of course.  It's just as good in mango smoothies.

The best thing about this whole vanilla bean lifecycle?  At the end of the year, you can pluck the drunken bean out your Tito's, and put it in a pretty bottle and fill it up with your vanilla extract. Voila! A holiday or hostess gift an savvy eater would love!

Madagascar Bourbon vanilla is generally regarded to be the best vanilla; and frequently encompasses vanilla not just from Madagascar, but from other areas around the Indian Ocean.  For example, I bought some Ugandan beans for this month's bulk club; they are the same type of bean (V. planifolia), the Ugandan beans have show to have an even more complex flavor than those from Madagascar, and they are very plump and juicy. The "bourbon" refers to the Island of Bourbon, and does not refer to the American spirit.  Although the two do go well together.  

You can read lots and lots about vanilla here.

Dining with the Stars

Dining with the Stars is my absolute favorite food-related charity event of the year.  Chef Hubert at Spagio brings in great chefs and winemakers from all over the country and sets them up throughout the restaurant - even in the kitchen.  Dining with the Stars is a fundraising event put on by the Nationwide Children's Hospital Pleasure Guild.  It takes place next Monday and you should go!

Here's a slideshow from last year's Dining with the Stars:

RW Discuss::Let's Talk!!

Dear Readers! I've tried various forms of message boards in the past with mixed luck, but last week I discovered Square Space, which is super awesome and also has a great and very simple page for discussions.  So. if you click on the pretty polka-dotted badge in the upper left-hand corner of my page, or on the link below, you can post questions, recipes, whatever.

The nice thing about the platform is that you do not have to register or have a password or anything.  You can just post on a whim.  At least until the spammers get a hold of it.

I would especially like everyone to share their potluck recipes!  I already have one recipe up - the much-requested pesto filled celery boats!  

So, if you would like a recipe, tip, or whatever, please post them!  Let's get a conversation going! I know you are all fabulous foodies in your own rights, and there are times when you will will be able to help each other when I might not be around or just behind in answering my emails.

Also, I thought I'd start a few posts for some of the questions I get very frequently.

Here it is!  RW Discuss!

La Lutte Raisoneé

Husband and I were having brunch with a wine writer and his wife this weekend when I remembered that this man had introduced me to a French concept whose name I could never remember but always wanted to write about.

La Lutte Raisoneé.

La Lutte Raisoneé literally translates to "the reasonable struggle," and it is a great sentiment which French (primarily) wine growers use to define their method of growing.  It pretty much means that organic methods are used until the struggle becomes unreasonable; it is used to define a method which is sustainable, but not necessarily certified organic.  It also means that when organic methods fail, the farmer will resort to a non-organic method to save their crop from whatever is threatening it.  This usually happens because the farmer simply cannot afford to lose an entire crop - or vineyard - to a pest or fungus.  When you are talking about vineyards or orchards particularly, you are talking about a decades-long investment which simply cannot be ruined; occasionally non-organic methods of intervention must be taken to ensure the livelihood of the grower.

There's something about Americans, I think, that we expect an "all or nothing" sort of attitude to everything, which you don't always see in other cultures.  For example, it seems over the past decade, some Americans have become militantly committed to certified organic foods.  Never mind the fact that there are few universal definitions of "organic," there is not one single (worldwide) oversight committee to keep these standards in tact, and in other countries, organic might mean something completely different.  Add to that the generally laissez faire attitude regarding things like slavery, indentured servitude, and child labor in some countries, and suddenly you have a lot of people feeling smug about their decision to go all certified organic without stopping to think what it might actually mean.

I have long held the idea that for me, at least, local trumps organic every time.  I find it far more important to be able to see the grower face to face than to rely on a logo on a box.  

I feel as though I write something similar every year.  As we go into the growing season (I know it's kind of hard to think about when snow if falling outside at the rate of an inch per hour), keep in mind that organic certification is a long process; farmers have to make a living while applying for and receiving their certification - a process which takes at least three years of monitoring.

Personally I would love to see a wider set of standards here in the US, especially for products grown in other countries or in parts of our country known for their questionable labor practices.  I would love it if "sustainable" or "organic" would include requirements not just for land and livestock but for laborers as well. I would love to see this in theory, that is. I don't think we really need another regulation committee floating about.

I am not advocating that we start to pour pesticides over everything and ruin all of our drinking water and natural habitats, of course.  However keep in mind that even if a farm is not certified, many of them are still practicing La Lutte Raisoneé. 

Don't be afraid to ask farmers about their methods.  They should be happy to discuss their methods.  Many of the farmers I have spoken with use organic methods either exclusively or primarily, with non-organic methods used in severe circumstances.