If you're reading David Sax's recent book, Save the Deli, or follow his blog or moan, as many do, about the general state of the Jewish delicatessen, then you know that it's a pivotal time in this most hallowed bastion of comfort food.

For years, locavores and vegetarians, calorie-counting suburbanites and couscous-loving Sephardim and even heeb-hopping hipsters have been bringing their own favorite dishes to the Jewish table. You might not know this upon stepping into a deli, where piles of salty, fatty meat and schmaltz in the chopped liver and never-ending free pickles every day of the year define good eating. It's supposed to be a carefree zone where all the generations and sects can enjoy some chicken soup in relative peace.

Leave it to Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt in Berkeley to begin shaking up this world a bit. As the owners and hands-on managers of Saul's, these two widely read, passionately opinionated individuals are working hard to keep Jewish delis vibrant, relevant and delicious far into the 21st century. From adding Mediterranean mezzes to offering locally grown, locally made pickles, they're crafting a new sensibility for an old institution.

A multicultural, sustainable deli might seem like a quixotic pursuit, as many would argue that we should leave well enough alone. Any real and authentic Jewish deli doesn't need to concern itself with all this modern fancifying. But if you're a deli owner and you see your customers coming into your dining room less and less often -– how many pastrami sandwiches does one person eat these days? -- you realize that things need to change to keep going.

Of course, ideals do have a way of bumping up against reality. Let's take the last thing on the menu, that list of drinks at the end of the page. Such a minor thing, no?

Well, as it turns out, simple it most definitely is not.

For diners, drinks are usually just an afterthought. For green-minded business owners, though, the environmental costs of transporting flavored water, the impact of corn syrup and artificial sweeteners in our communities, and the waste of thousands upon thousands of empty cans and glass cannot be ignored. If you're somewhat concerned, you might just put out a recycling bin and offer a few cents off on coffee poured into insulated mugs. If you're a little more committed, you might try sourcing local sodas.

But if you're Karen and Peter, you have a much, much longer road to travel. You begin by studying the history of sodas and the science of bubbles. Along the way, you learn about the monopolistic technologies of multinational food corporations. You connect the dots between individual soda jerks, creative spirit and community values. You daydream down a short detour, one that takes you past designs for a working seltzer tap at each and every booth. You decide to compromise, backtracking to install a central seltzer dispenser. You call up a beer tap specialist to design a brand-new beverage system for you. You track down stronger fittings that can hold up to the pressure of C02. You convince colleagues that going back in time 60 years to revive obsolete tastes and technology will be a good thing for the business. You train special "seltzer baristas" to use the finicky machine with its nonstandard formulations. You develop recipe after recipe from scratch. (Cream Soda #8, you think, seems especially promising.) Then, years later, you launch your own house-made seltzers and, in a moment of unrestrained ambition, you decide to stop selling bottled, commercial sodas entirely. Even Dr. Brown's. Yes, even the Black Cherry and Cel-Ray.

And it's still not done. Now, you smile politely at your customers' dismay when they can no longer grab a can of soda with their take-out lunch and nod synpathetically at those most earnest of drinkers, the Diet Coke loyalists. You accept losing thousands of dollars in beverage sales. At the same time, you account for higher food costs because your drink bases, made from real fruit, are good for only four hours. You create and hope that your customers will enjoy the special syrups that taste slightly different day to day in flavors that come and go with the seasons.

You stand back and imagine a dining room full of people sipping sodas made by friends and neighbors from fresh fruit and whole spices.

You win some -- these sodas are phenomenal and you're proud and ecstatic, if a bit exhausted. They more than make up for past battles lost. There's still that ongoing campaign to source enough briskets from grass-fed cattle to feed your hungry customers. And let's not forget the recent Pickle Squirmish, when you tried charging for kosher dills -- in a deli! -- and took a fatal stab at explaining the seasonality of cucumbers.

Yes, one step at a time, one step at a time.

For now, you're happy to offer a taste of history: the sweet satisfaction and elusive effervescence of real seltzer flavored with homemade syrups.

Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of the Jewish Delicatessen
By David Sax (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
Sax's campaign to save the deli, as one mom-and-pop sandwich shop after another closes, brings him to the Bay Area this week. Stop by and meet him at Saul's this Saturday afternoon or at Book Passage on Monday at the Ferry Building. Listen to him read from his new book and then ask him for yourself: which city makes the best pastrami and why do we have to drink egg creams so fast and, yes, that most important question, what is the future of the Jewish delicatessen?

Saturday, October 24, 2009
4:00 pm
Saul's Restaurant and Deli
1475 Shattuck Ave Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 848-3354
Map

Monday, October 26, 2009
6:00 pm
Book Passage
1 Ferry Building, #42
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 835-1020
Map

Being a writer, I've worked a lot of retail over the years. I've sold flown-from-Switzerland chocolates to San Francisco socialites who spent more on three boxes of truffles than I made in a week. I've peddled Pez and Camel Lights from a tray slung around my neck, squeezed ladies (and gents) into latex dresses and leather corsets, frothed lattes for bond traders, boxed up cookies and talked tourists into overpriced art on Union Square.

In my personal life, I'm not a shopper, but I can see what people get out of good service, besides just new shoes and credit-card debt. You tell a dumpy guy with a thing for latex that he looks great in that $500 catsuit and you mean it, because he's so happy wearing it that just for that moment, he's Jon Hamm. You know you've made his day, along with a little bit of commission.

But what I realized last Sunday is how much more fun it is when you can just give the stuff away. Especially when the goods in question are beautiful organic fruits and vegetables, things everyone needs: yellow tomatoes and Japanese eggplants, kale and collards, curvy neon-bright summer squash, sticky green figs and late-season peaches.

Set up every Sunday from 1-3pm at the Parque Niños Unidos at 23rd and Treat Streets in the Mission, the Free Farm Stand is a joyful place. Anyone can come, and all different people do: determined grandmothers and families pushing strollers, clusters of groovy, effusively grateful British girls in tiny halter tops and oversized sunglasses, eco-hipster Mission couples in vintage dresses and ironic t-shirts, gray hair and glasses meeting bedhead and glasses.

By 2 o'clock, a steady stream of people has been flowing past the table for an hour. Jeremy, a frequent volunteer, starts tootling away on a wooden flute. Inspired by the giveaway, a man named Steve has set up a agua fresca stand nearby, quenching the sunny Sunday afternoon thirsts with free glasses of melony coolness. There's a separate table stacked with loaves of bread donated by Acme Bread, another full of free thumb-sized lettuce plants for home gardeners.

Only one guy grumbles about the line not moving fast enough for his taste. No one can take him seriously, though; it's a sunny Sunday in the park and the tomatoes are free. If you can't chill out here, you're way too tense, man.

It's set up like any farmers' market stand: a white tent overhead for shade, colorful tablecloths stacked with bowls and baskets overflowing with vegetables, herbs, and fruit. Volunteers pull out more tomatoes, more artichokes from boxes stacked beneath the tables, answer questions and offer recipes. There are plastic and paper bags on hand, but never enough; smart shoppers bring not only their own totes but their own recycled plastic bags for separating out the basil from the peppers, or the bean sprouts from the squashy figs.

One table is stocked with farmers' market giveaways, donated produce left over at the end of the day from Ferry Plaza and other top-notch Saturday markets. I recognize bundles of herbs from Marin Roots Farm, fat red tomatoes from Phil Foster's 200-acre organic ranch in Hollister, perfect-looking Brussels sprouts and box after box of red Russian kale and yellow-flowering Chinese broccoli.

Another table is the super-local table, filled with urban produce grown or gleaned all around the city, shared from backyards, parks, and community gardens. Regulars show up with baggies of lemon verbena, boxes of apples, bags of zucchini and butternut squash.

This is how the Free Farm Stand started, when Tree, a community gardener and longtime social-justice activist who works at the St Martin de Porres soup kitchen, decided that his gardens' extra communal produce shouldn't go to waste.

The goal was to make locally grown, organic produce available to all, especially those with low incomes or limited budgets, creating garden-to-table food security right on the street. With this in mind, Tree set up a card table inside the Treat Commons garden at 23rd and Treat Sts in April of last year, offering a little bit of whatever was growing around the Mission and Potrero Hill.

Slowly, word of mouth (and blog) spread about this sweet neighborhood thing happening on Sunday afternoons. Other gardeners started sharing their bounty. Tree formed connections with growers selling at local farmers markets and began picking up their extras after the markets ended. The farmstand moved out in front of the garden, into the park, and turned into two tables, then three, with a line that could stretch out of the park and down the block when the harvest was in full swing and there were sweet treats like peaches and figs on offer.

But the crowds don't come just for the free lettuce, or even the free tomatoes. Everyone has a question:

What are these? Baby artichokes--clip off the pointy leaf tips and steam or boil them whole.

Is this salad mix? No, it's braising mix, a little too tough for eating raw, better for sauteing.

Is this cilantro? No, smell it, it's parsley; cilantro's over there.

What is this? This is red mustard, very good for you, strong-tasting and good sauteed, stir-fried or put in soup.

Can I eat the leaves? Yes, beet greens are delicious, cook them like spinach. You can cook radish greens too, if they're green and not yellowed or wilted. And this is curly kale, this is lacinato kale, what the Italians call cavalo nero and what American supermarkets call dino kale, because it's so bumpy and puckered, see, like dinosaur skin, and these are collards, this is chard. They're all in the brassica family along with cauliflower and broccoli, what used to be called the crucifers because of their cross-shaped stems.

OK, so maybe I get a little carried away giving out information. But I'm not the only one. Gloria, who works at a detox center in the city, is sharing her recipe for roasted kale (rub with olive oil, salt and pepper, bake at 375F for 20 minutes, better than potato chips, leave them in the turned-off oven under the pilot light for a day if you want them really crispy). Lisa's got a new favorite salad, radishes dressed with mustard, olive oil, fresh ginger, a little sucanat, garlic, salt and pepper, orange juice and chopped parsley. People are chatting with tote bags full of leeks and beets over their arms, eating burritos on the grass, talking compost and chayote squash in the garden while their kids splash the strawberries with a hose.

That it's all free seems to bring out the best in the crowd. No one grabs, no one hoards. Take what you can use or share, we say from behind the tables, and people carefully separate out a few sprigs of cilantro if that's all they want, pour half a box of cherry tomatoes into their bags and replace the rest. The feeling is one of abundance shared, not charity bestowed. Everyone takes home a slightly different mix, an urban stone soup cooked up by a community of growers from the Bay Area and beyond.

By 3 o'clock, the boxes are flattened and Christina, a regular volunteer, is sweeping up crumpled leaves and squashed tomatoes with a broom. The day's bounty has been reduced to some mixed greens and a few bundles of thyme and oregano. The baskets are stacked, the tent pulled down. We share chunks of homemade apple cake baked by Clara, another volunteer who gardens nearby.

I pick up my own box of veggies, thank Tree and head home over the hill, slurping a cold watermelon agua fresca from La Taqueria on the way. I've promised a friend in Oakland that I'll hang out with her two young boys today. The figs and tomatoes will come with me, I decide. There's always enough to share.

Wandering the unfamiliar, blandly mall-like environs of Jack London Square, a kind of mini-Emeryville, only with space, better taste, and a harbor view, you might have wondered where all the food-seeking hipsters were. It was Friday night, after all, the opening of Oakland's Eat Real Festival, yet there was no waft of organic pork carnitas, no compostable spoons littering the ground.

But wait, what's in the hand of that guy strolling by? Was it a Mason jar filled with watermelon wheat beer? And was that the Soviet-red logo for Ritual Roasters coffee, painted on the side of a bike trailer peddling (by pedaling) a load of high-octane iced coffee? Hay bales for seats, toddlers clutching ice-cream cones while Mom and Dad downed a brew: this was definitely the place.

Friday's unseasonally balmy night ("Earthquake weather," nodded numerous passerby sagely, but that didn't seem to stop them from promenading along the waterfront, lemon-shiso sorbet dripping down their chins) made a perfect soft opening for the festival, which began with an open-air beer tasting ($25 for your own festival-logo'd glass drinking jar plus 8 tickets for filling it up, or $7 for a single serve) and ice-cream social.

Some real food to go with the beer would have been nice, but that would have to wait until the real crowds arrived on Saturday and Sunday. In the interim, then, there was the rare chance to sample and buy ice cream and sorbet from a dozen local makers with barely a line to be seen. Scream, Ici, Bi-Rite Creamery, Straus Ice Cream, Fenton's, Ceci, and more were scooping flavors ranging from pomegranate (Fenton's) to beet-lemon (Scream, and surprisingly good--like frozen borscht, in the tastiest possible way).

There was an open-air game of Edible Pursuit (who knew the popsicle was invented in Oakland?), a highly competitive canning contest (dubbed, of course, Yes I Can), live jazz and a whole lot of happy cone-licking kids.

Saturday, of course, was a lot busier, but the vibe stayed mellow. There was all that beer, for starters, and plenty of port-a-potties, and a lot of space to sprawl, wander, and lie out on the grass and watch the sailboats breeze by. You could check out the greywater recycling system set up by the crew at Aquaponics, watch cooking demonstrations, stroll through the expansive indoor marketplace to chat up farmers and artisanal jam-makers, or just go get more beer.

Or, if you wanted to eat, you could stand in line. It's inevitable, at events like this that are all about the food, that the main activity ends up being waiting in line. The lines weren't too bad, actually, but they moved slowly.

Very slowly. Watching four guys put together one plate at Jim and Nick's--one massaging the shredded pork into a ball and put it on the bun, one scooping the pimento cheese, another putting on the pickles and saltines, and a fourth chatting up whichever cute girl was handing over her money, I did a little minutes-per-plate x people-in-line math, and gave up, even though I was longing to try a plate made by a bunch of Southern barbecue guys who had driven their rig all the way from Alabama to crash the event and show the West Coast how to bbq.

The trick, I realized, was to pick one long line--like the one for Seoul Food's Korean tacos-- and then send your friends out on recon missions to the shorter lines, so you'd have something to eat while you waited in line for something to eat.

Where the recent SF Street Food Festival skipped actual street food for slimmed-down restaurant eats, Eat Real did keep it real, with taco trucks, soul food ribs and the Sexy Soup Lady in a pink apron straddling her three-wheeled soup cart. And the prices were right, too, with nothing over $5.

Of course, this meant was nearly everything was some culturally-inspired variation on meat and dough, all squeezed down to the size of a slider, from pulled-chicken barbecue on a bun and Korean spicy-pork tacos to pupusas and bite-sized brisket sandwiches. Finding vegetables (beyond salsa and coleslaw) took a little searching, and it helped it if you liked falafel, didn't mind patronizing the fancy-tapas truck of festival co-sponsor Whole Foods, or got there before the veggie-pie folks had sold through their entire inventory. For dessert, there was more ice cream, of course. And cupcakes!

What it was, overall, was a fun local event, a late-summer festival that did feel very Oaklandish, mixing up $3 pupusas with $20 "Street Food" t-shirts.

Farms...in Berkeley? Well, dairy cows may not be drinking lattes on Shattuck Avenue, but there are working urban farms in the Bay Area. So if you're garden-deprived or just longing to get dirty without leaving town, here are a few opportunities to dig in, learn, and taste what's growing in your city's backyards.

On Tuesday, Oakland's City Slicker Farms is hosting a BBQ and a showing of the movie "Fresh" at Fitzgerald and Union Plaza Parks (34th and Peralta in West Oakland). Come on down, meet your neighbors, and find out how City Slickers is going to turn part of the park into a new community farm. Can't make it on Tuesday? Check their website for volunteer hours at one of their half-dozen community farms, all dedicated to growing affordable produce for West Oakland.

Graze the Roof is Glide Memorial Church's innovative community-gardening project. The church's rooftop garden focuses on hydroponic and container gardening, and hosts community workdays every weekend and workshops throughout the month.

What could be a better mitzvah, or good deed, than growing food for those in need? That's the philosophy between Congregation Emanu-el's The Pe'ah Garden in Colma. This garden in, yes, a cemetery (hey, it's Colma. What did you expect?) is planted, maintained, and harvested by congregation members and volunteers, with the bulk of the harvest going to the San Francisco Food Bank. Jonathan Silverman, who coordinates the garden volunteers, also teaches ongoing gardening workshops throughout the year.

The nice folks at the Garden for the Environment in the Inner Sunset are compost evangelists. Put your soggy leftovers into the green bin, sure, but carrot peels, wilty lettuce leaves, grass clippings and more --anything that's strictly plant matter--can get turned into a fabulous soil booster right there in your own backyard. (Or even under the sink, if you get a wormbox working). Composting workshops are always on the class roster, or you can come to one of the twice-weekly workdays (Wed 10am-2pm; Sat 10am-4pm) and get a more impromptu lesson as you fork, turn, and rebuild the garden's three ever-evolving piles. Since this is an educational demonstration garden, not a farm, the amount of fruit and veggies produced here is small, but depending on the season, helpful workers should go home with at least a salad's worth of greens. Plus, there's often Arizmendi pizza to share after the morning's work.

Play hooky Monday afternoon and join the Marin Organic Glean Team, a new project from Marin Organic. Every Monday from 4-6pm, volunteers gather at a different local organic farm to "glean," or pick what's left over after the day's commercial harvest is done. This second harvest is then donated to local school lunch programs. And of course, volunteers get some too. This Monday, the gleaners are converging on Paradise Valley Produce in Bolinas.

If you've ever buzzed down 280 to the airport, you've passed what's probably San Francisco's largest urban farm. It's very easy to miss, but it's there: the Alemany Farm, at the southern edge of Bernal Heights. Like most urban farms, it's also an educational non-profit, working with kids and teens from the surrounding public housing along with energetic volunteers. There's a lot growing here, from strawberries, carrots, and collards to green beans, broccoli, kale, lettuce, tomatoes, flowers, fruit trees, squash, wild blackberries, and more. Workdays (alternate Saturday and Sundays, plus Monday afternoons) end with a harvest, and the haul is divided up between workers.

Last Sunday, a brand-new farmers market opened in one of my favorite San Francisco neighborhoods: The Inner Sunset. The market, in the parking lot at Ninth and Irving streets, is run by the Pacific Coast Farmers Markets Association and will run from June through November. Walking into the market, you get a feeling of a true community event. Neighbors are greeting each other, and the general atmosphere was festive and fun. The market is mostly vegetable and fruit vendors, but shoppers can also purchase eggs, baked goods and prepared foods. There is even a tofu vendor, but I don't remember seeing any cheeses or meats.

By the time I arrived, the eggs were sold out, but the vendor -- Smart Eggs -- looks interesting. It's a student-run egg farm that is from Modesto Junior College.

There are quite a few farms from the coastal region and several from the Central Valley. I will be returning to this market. It's a fun, mellow option for a Sunday morning market.




The vendor list, as I noted it, is as follows:

Serendipity Farms
Far West Fungi
Berrylicious
De Palma Farms
Capay Organic
Wassum Ranch
Smart Eggs
Tofu Yu
Bakers of Paris
Her Farm
Arizmendi Bakery
Garcia Farm
Rodin Farm
Calolea
City Bees
Fifth Crow Farm
Kashiwase

Inner Sunset Farmers Market
9am - 1pm, Sundays
In the parking lot behind the Irving Street shops.
Enter from 9th or 8th Ave
Runs through November 22

If eating is an agricultural act, as Wendell Berry so famously said, then what better way to celebrate the connection between food and farming than at Dirt to Dining?

Jesse Cool, the down-to-earth owner-cook (don't call her a chef!) of Menlo Park's Flea Street Cafe is hosting this benefit for the Ecological Farming Association right in her own backyard--which just happens to be a bountiful edible garden on the edge of the Stanford campus.

Cool, well known for her longtime dedication to seasonal, locally-sourced and sustainable cuisine, is opening up her address book, too. On hand to nosh and chat will be dozens of organic farmers and winemakers, including those from Full Belly Farm, Frog's Leap Winery, Green Gulch Farm, Live Earth Farm, Swanton Berry Farm, Robert Sinskey Vineyards, Frey Vineyards, and more.

And of course, going along with the garden tours will be plenty of delectable food and wine. That fava-bean canapé? Probably made from beans grown by the guy sipping sauvignon blanc right next you. Never seen a fava bean in its natural habitat? It's over there, hanging on vines right next to the carrots. Dining doesn't get any dirtier than that.

Dirt to Dining: A Day in Jesse Cool's Kitchen Garden
Sunday, June 7, 2009
2pm-5pm
2150 Amhearst Street
Palo Alto, CA
Tickets: $75

We carnivores who live in the Bay Area are a privileged bunch -- on any given day, we can choose to eat Fatted Calf's bacon, Fra Mani's salami, 4505's chicharrones and countless other artisan charcuterie around the city. To that list, I would add Boccalone's pork ragu. It's a lucious ragu that is intensely spiced and just perfect when tossed with pappardelle. Until a couple weeks ago, my main interface with Boccalone was to buy the ragu, or to pick up a sandwich or two for a picnic.

Boccalone is a store that is located in the Ferry Building, and is the brainchild of Incanto chef Chris Cosentino and his business partner Mark Pastore. It has been open less than a year, and attracts great attention in the Ferry Building with its pristine meat slicers and case of hanging meats. In addition to their delectable porcine products, Boccalone also offers sparkling water (like what is offered at Incanto) -- I love filling up my bottle on farmers market days before I battle the crowds.

I've been spending more time at Boccalone these days, however, and it's all the fault of a delicious new product called Nduja. Let's all say it together, class: en-doo-ya. Can't remember how to pronounce it? Ask for the "N-Judah," like I do, and you will get a smile and the lovely Boccalone staff will hand over the $11 salami-shaped package. Nduja is a Calabrian spreadable salami that is spicy and full of flavor. I love bringing it to room temperature and eating it on fresh bread. Once it's at room temperature, it spreads just like butter and is has a great mouthfeel. Nduja roots come from the French andouille sausage and the flavor profile is not unlike the andouille in smokiness and layers of flavor. Friends have been tweeting about mixing a dollop of it in omelettes.

Because this is such a new and unusual product, the folks at Boccalone tend to have some out on sample -- I would suggest that you try it next time you're at the Ferry Building.

Photo Credit: Bunrab.

For about as long as I have been talking about eating food from local farmers, I have been talking about Gary Paul Nabhan. He is the author of a book called Coming Home to Eat which definitively changed my life's course and really made me focus on talking about eating local food.

Gary Paul Nabhan spoke at a CUESA-sponsored event last week, and I cleared my calendar to go hear him speak. I'd never seen him in person, and was excited to do so. I was running late and starving, so I grabbed a quick salami sandwich from Boccalone and dashed upstairs at the Ferry Building to get a seat.

I have a tiny aside here that I need to mention before I go on: I am pretty shy socially. Around my friends, I'm brave and slightly irreverent. But when I have to introduce myself to strangers, or have to speak or represent myself, I'm pretty shy.

That's why it's remarkable that halfway between scarfing down my salami sandwich and settling in my seat, Mr. Nabhan walked over and I casually introduced myself and we chatted about the Eat Local Challenge. He and I had emailed last year (when he submitted a post for the Eat Local Challenge site), so I was pretty safe in introducing myself, but I'm still a little stunned that I was able to calmly chat with one of my heroes like he was a friend of mine. It was a thrill.

Mr. Nabhan was speaking in conjunction with Ashley Rood about their book Renewing America's Food Traditions which highlights the endangered foods in America. Mr. Nabhan is a proponent of Eater-Based Conservation -- the idea that if you want to save a particular food, you have to eat it. He says that without a demand for a unique food or varietal, a farmer will never make room on their farm for it. We have many examples of endangered foods here in California. I talked about Santa Maria Pinquitos a few weeks ago, and they are highlighted in the book along with the Sierra Beauty apple, white abalone, and other native foods.

Mr. Nabhan and Ms. Rood had wonderful stories of foods around the country that have been revived through this project -- from the Marshall Strawberry to the Makah Ozette potato which can be found in the Northwest and is now more widely available.

The CUESA staff recorded this discussion and will be posting it at CUESA Listen & Learn when the recording is ready -- it's worth a listen.

How do you grow a farmer? You start with dirt and seeds and water, of course. But just like good vegetables also need mulch and worms and pollinators and beneficial bugs to chase off the pests, a farmer learns not just through her own experience but through the hard-won experiences of other farmers, a whole long bloodline of observation through years of harvests and springtimes, of rain slicing down into mud and hot sun swelling the tomatoes sweet, of aphids clumping up inside the broccoli and leaf miners boring wiggle tracks across the chard.

That's great if you come from a heritage of family farmers. But what if the closest you have to a back forty is a pot of basil on steps? Or what if your family's farm is corn and soybeans, and you want to grow organic lettuce? If you're young and hardy, you can rent yourself out as an unpaid intern or WOOFer, and hope you get to do more than just water and weed.

Or you can dig into a hands-on, intensive program like the one at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. For a six-month growing season, you'll live, learn, eat, sleep, and farm on a beautiful 30-acre spread of organic educational farmland.

Graduates of this program, which has been running for over 40 years, are the farmers feeding you now. They're the ones building school gardens and working on food justice and sustainability issues all around California and beyond. For a program that graduates just 35 to 40 farmers a year, its impact on the organic movement has been both broad and deep. As a graduate myself, I've met countless farmers and food people over the past couple of years, only to find out that they, too, are former "farmies."

And now it's time to help the farm grow its farmers. What the program needs is housing. After several decades of letting apprentices live rent-free in tents (and before that, teepees) while in the program, UCSC is now demanding that proper temporary housing be built on the farm. The result? Some $250,000 needs to be raised by mid-summer, or the program will have to go on hiatus next year.

Hence, the campaign to Grow a Farmer Campaign. Throughout May, participating restaurants and businesses around the Bay Area are donating 10% or more of their sales on a particular day to the campaign. If you're a chef or restauranteur, you can sign up here. If you're a happy eater, check out the list of events for this month.

Because who will grow your food if you don't help grow your farmers?

It's an exciting time around the farmers market these days. I hadn't been to the market for about two weeks, and was amazed at how much the market changed in a short amount of time. There is a promise of summer fruit in the air, and the spring vegetables are in abundance. Here are some of the things I am looking forward to this month:

CHERRIES

Cherries are making their way to the market, and should be available for approximately a month. We usually see the Brooks variety cherry first which is a crisp, tart cherry. That will be followed by Bing cherries, Rainier and sour cherries among other varieties. I am partial to Bing cherries from Lagier Ranch -- Mr. Lagier brings them to the market when they're perfectly ripe and delicious. This year, I will be keeping an eye out for sour cherries, as they make for a delicious brandied fruit which can then be used throughout the year for cocktails and desserts.

POTATOES

A while back, I told you about new potatoes -- the beginning of the season potatoes that are spectacular in flavor and freshness. I'm happy to report that they are back and I spotted them at the Berkeley Farmers Market last week at the Full Belly Farm booth. They are expected at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in the next month or so.

PEAS

Denise told you about making a pea soup this week, and I am looking forward to trying out that recipe. The fact of the matter is that my peas rarely make it past the shelling stage as I usually eat them raw or slightly steamed. But if you have the willpower, now is an excellent time to shell and freeze peas. My favorite place to purchase them is the Swanton Berry Farm booth that is in many local farmers markets.

STRAWBERRIES

Northern California is very lucky: our strawberries have an extremely long fruit season, and we will have them around for a while. Still, this is the perfect time to buy strawberries and freeze them if you can. If you have room, I suggest hulling the berries and freezing on a large cookie tray before storing in a freezer bag. I buy mine from Lucero Farm and from Yerena Farm.

ALMOND BUTTER

This is not really a seasonal product, but I just wanted to give a shout-out for Greg Massa's excellent Almond Butter. You may know Massa Organics farm for selling really delicious brown rice at many Bay Area markets. If you check his booth carefully, you will notice an almond butter that he has been producing for a few months. I am addicted to this almond butter, and highly recommend trying it. It's pricey, but if you eat almond butter as slowly as I do, you'll only be making the investment every few months.

What are you looking forward to at the market this month?