Good to Go Local and Organic

Turkey Canadian bacon grilled cheese with caramelized
onions, arugula, and tomato.

Long time readers know we're big fans of organic gardening and organic and local food in general. Now that we live in a rural area surrounded by great organic farms, we've decided to put our money and effort where our mouths are: a small, take out restaurant that focuses on local and organic food: Good to Go.

We've just begun the venture, so we're at the fundraising stage. Rather than trying to borrow all the money to start the business, or going to accredited investors through a crowd funding site, we've decided to sell a 20% interest in the soon-to-be-formed LLC to our friends, family, readers, and community. We see this as a chance for anyone who truly believes in the resiliency of the local and slow food movement to help us create more demand for our local farmers.

Shares are $100 each, and represent a 0.1% share of the company. After we've been in business a few quarters, we plan to start buying back the shares over a 5 year period. During that time, by law, the LLC must pay each co-owner (known as members in New York) their percent of the net profits.

Visit the Good to Go Organic and Local Food web site, read the business plan, and decide for yourself. We're sure you'll see this as a great way for the slow, organic, and local food community to create more demand for food that gets eaten as close to where it's grown as possible. And while we're not getting too dreamy about the whole thing, we see this as a kind of co-op model for financing these kinds of ventures as an excellent opportunity for investors and those who want to do something similar.

So, please, get involved today. We're also looking for suppliers of organic and local food in the Cherry Valley, Cooperstown, and Sharon Springs New York area. If you have any questions, just leave a comment, or contact me directly (scott at supak dot com).

Food Centric

Seems my life has evolved around food. Not sure why, really. My family wasn't all that big on food. My Dad liked to make his specialty things, like award winning chili. But there weren't any restaurant workers in my family, until I got my first job as a dishwasher at Le Mirabelle, a French restaurant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I grew up. I managed to work my way up to salad chef, and did the deserts for a while.

Then I worked at Mikes, a beer joint on the south side of the tracks, where I cooked hamburgers and served beer in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I went to college. That was an experience worth forgetting. So, I got out of the food service life, until I met my wife, who was a cook in Hawaii before she started slinging beers at the 326 Bar in the Farmer's Market in LA, next door to CBS Television City, where I was working as a stagehand.

The rest is history.

Our vacations to New York and points east were always based around food, not the least of which was always a few days at the house or Robin's cousins, Cathy and Eric, owners and operators of Woodstock Moveable Feast, a Hudson Valley catering company. Staying at their house was always a culinary adventure! The picture above is from their website.

When I became disabled and couldn't work as a stagehand anymore, we moved back east to be near Robin's family here in Cherry Valley, where our brother-in-law, Clem, runs The Rose and Kettle, a gourmet restaurant near Cooperstown, and he has a delicious food blog. He met his wife, Dana Spiotta, when they both worked at the Giorgio's of Gramercy, a great place to eat in New York City.

Once we moved up here, we started looking for business projects. Since farming and ranching is so big up here, we thought we'd team up with a local grass-fed beef outfit to make Robin's gourmet beef jerky. Robin met Sonia, who along with her partner Dave, run Nectar Hills Farm, which grows grass fed and pasture raised meats, including the naturally low-fat Highlander Cattle (they have less fat because they have hair, as you can see in this picture), the top round from which we make into naturally healthy and delicious gourmet grass-fed beef jerky.

My friend Mort Mather, who lives (happily) up in Maine, and I converse regularly about organic gardening, which he does for his son's southern Maine restaurant. He and I go way back to the early days of the internet when I published his organic gardening articles at my organic gardening web site (which was one of the world's first).

I've started gardening again (albeit lazily due to my physical limitations) and it seems my food friends will never let me fade away from the culinary life: My Los Angeles caterer client, Emma, now has a LA Catering blog. Even my Maui bed and breakfast client often writes about the delicious tropical fruit she grows in her garden.

Oh, and then there's the organic Kona coffee farm that I used to do the web site for, back when Dr. Faust ran it. He sold it to Mike, who now, because times are tough, pays me with the best coffee on earth, because he's not making enough money to pay me with cash. And that's fine, because, well, it's organic Kona coffee!

So, somewhere out there someone's going to be reading this, and they'll think, hey, this guy's all about food! Let's contact him! Since we gave up eating pork almost two years ago now (for ethical and environmental reasons), and we try to eat only grass-fed meat, and we grow a lot of our own food, and we try to stay away from fast food, and we are the very definition of a slow food family, I just hope that person is Michael Pollan.

And after we Mad Max the place...

I stumbled upon a speech, Social Collapse Best Practices, posted at the blog ClubOrlov, written by Dmitry Orlov, aka kollapsnik. He predicts what my wife and I call the Mad Maxing of America, or the collapse of the US government. Having seen the collapse of the Soviet Union first hand, Orlov is not some nut on speaker's corner. I'm sure most people will want to dismiss his reasoned thesis as survivalist rantings. I suggest you give this speech a read, keep an open mind, and think.

In a big way, what's been happening to me is a kind of microcosm of what's going to happen to us all, eventually. I was a cog in the entertainment industry, riding big ladders and scissor lifts, hoisting big lights and scenery to create a world of make-believe, calling it art, and selling it for big bucks. Well, the "owners" got big bucks. I got decent bucks, and even though I was never much more than a daily hire, I had a good career at free-lance stagehand work for 20 years.

Well, this cog wore its gears out, and has been tossed aside. My pension, if I ever see it at all, is shrinking. Social Security Disability will deny that you're disabled for years, while your doctor tells you not to dare lift anything over 20 lbs. The house I'd invested in turned out to be worthless when I couldn't afford to pay for it anymore. My skills as a hard laborer who understood stagecraft are now useless. My writing skills still scrape up some cash, in the internet marketing world, but that's internet dependent.

In the social collapse scenario, though, I do have one skill that will make me a valuable person. I'm a skilled organic gardener. And in the world of collapsing social order and government control, the farmer will be king.

Organic Kona Coffee Is Back, Talking Story on Hawaii

Back in 1998, when we were living on Maui, I was contacted by an organic Kona coffee farmer about helping him sell his gourmet coffee beans. He was one of my best clients until he sold his farm and retired in 2006. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard from Mike Tucker, one of the guys who bought Dr. Faust's farm.

Tucker has been refurbishing the farm, getting organic control of the weeds (cutting them), installing his own processing equipment, starting and planting his own coffee tree seedlings, getting the Hawaiian coffee farm certified organic, and much more. It's an amazing amount of work to farm anything organically, especially coffee.

Great thing about this story is that you can read the entire experience, because Mike kept a journal of the entire organic coffee farm refurbishing story, and it is now his blog. Judging from what is there already, this would be a good blog to subscribe to if you're into organic agriculture at all. All you organic coffee farmers will love it!

Or maybe you just love fresh roasted organic Kona coffee beans showing up ot your front door when there's a foot of snow outside. Like me.

Maybe you're a real coffee nut and you want to home roast your own organic green coffee beans from Hawaii... Mike says you can use an old popcorn air popper!

You don't have to Digg organic Kona coffee in order to Digg the story of organic Kona coffee farming. It's an enticing blog, like the aroma of fresh brewed... Ah, you get the idea! Plus, there are all kinds of great pictures of Hawaii, the big island of the Hawaiian Islands.

The organic Kona coffee from 1500 feet up the side of Mauna Loa near the Hawaiian sanctuary town of Honaunau is back! And it is better than ever!