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Community breakfasts help farmers survive

By Carol Guensburg Scripps Howard News Service 8 min read

When his longtime community-garden plot got plowed under to make way for someone else’s new construction, remodeling contractor Jeff McCabe grew restless. He needed a fresh outlet for nurturing local agriculture. An idea percolated beneath his dark buzz cut: Why not try something new on his home turf?

We’re not just talking raised vegetable beds in his front yard.

McCabe and wife Lisa Gottlieb invited a bunch of friends into their roomy kitchen for conversation and breakfast – including eggs from their chicken coop out back, natch. That gathering in February 2009 has grown into a weekly Friday “breakfast salon” now routinely drawing upward of 120 diners.

“People are really hungry for community. We wanted to be a catalyst,” says McCabe, 51.

Eating and activism converge at the nonprofit, volunteer-fueled Selma Cafe, in Ann Arbor, Mich. (The name is an acronym for several neighborhood streets – the Soule, Eberwhite, Liberty and Madison affiliation – and “it has nice associations” with the civil-rights movement, McCabe says.)

Regulars and newcomers, including some students and staff of the nearby University of Michigan, drop in from 6:30 to 10 a.m. Fridays and slip a recommended $12 to $15 into the jars scattered around communal tables. After deducting food costs, they’ve chipped in at least $90,000 for a revolving fund for micro loans to fledgling farmers.

“This is such an incredible vision on Jeff’s part,” diner Leslie Lawther says while awaiting an order of vegetable quiche one Friday morning. A fifth-grade teacher and farmers’ granddaughter, she appreciates that “this is essentially a fundraiser” for sustainable local food.

Aside from having fun, “our mission is to fund hoop-house construction and local food infrastructure,” McCabe says, surveying the production line for quiche, waffles, bacon and potato puffs.

Hoop houses – basically unheated greenhouses of heavy plastic sheeting stretched over metal frames – extend the growing season through much of a biting Michigan winter.

Selma has lent the funds and volunteer muscle to construct 10 so far, including two in supermarket-barren Detroit.

Farmers gradually repay their loans and rebuild the fund, meanwhile lending their labor and expertise to new hoop projects.

Kate Devlin secured a $6,500 loan for Spirit Farm, which she manages on the grounds of Detroit’s Spirit of Hope ministry to supplement its food pantry. Selma volunteers put up a hoop house last May “to extend my season for hot crops: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and herbs,” Devlin says.

Tomm and Trilby Becker got an $8,000 loan, and Selma volunteers’ muscles, to build a 96-by-30-foot hoop house at their Sunseed Farm near Ann Arbor. “Hoop-house raising is kind of the modern barn raising,” says Tomm Becker, former student manager for Michigan State University’s organic farm. “It was a fun experience for everyone.” The Beckers sell produce to restaurants and clients of their community-supported agriculture (CSA) business. Their “hoop-house greens” brighten many a Selma breakfast plate.

Altruism started the Selma Cafe, and hearty, flavorful fare sustains it.

Local chefs, food purveyors and home cooks take unpaid star turns at the stove, turning out dishes such as lamb hash, quiche with home-cured prosciutto, eggs Benedict with sweet-potato croquettes, breakfast pizza, fruity bread pudding or huevos rancheros. Other volunteers prep, serve and clean up.

Occasional guest chef Scott MacInnis set a record of 150 diners last March with a menu of pulled pork and black-bean tostadas. (It has been broken several times since then.) He’s been cooking for Selma since its start, which dovetailed with the launch of his catering business, Tranche de Vie Fine Dining, also in Ann Arbor.

MacInnis does the Selma gigs partly for public relations, he acknowledges, but he gets encouragement in return: “This energy behind (the effort) drives me to source whatever I can locally.”

Another regular guest chef, Mary Wessel Walker, runs Harvest Kitchen, preparing meals for CSA customers too busy to cook. She credits the cafe with “furthering a lot of connections,” describing its breakfast scene as happily “chaotic” and “just fun.”

Gottlieb, a school social worker who coordinates the breakfasts and blogs about them on the website Repasts, Present and Future (http://www.repastspresentandfuture.org/), says she’s “always on the lookout” for volunteers.

“At first, there was the mystique of the special guest chef. … As time went on, we realized it was just as wonderful” to have a good home cook at the stove.

She and husband McCabe are among them, sometimes making eggs to order. And Gottlieb’s bread pudding – with seasonal or “freeze-onal” fruits, as McCabe calls them – is a menu fixture.

Because Selma operates as a charitable fundraiser in a private home, Michigan state law doesn’t require a food license. Nor does it require parking facilities, though neighborhood streets can get congested during Thursday-evening prepping and on Friday mornings.

By 6:15 a.m. one fall Friday, volunteers are getting schooled on how to arrange plates, wait tables and manage crowds. By 8 a.m., roughly 40 diners crowd the big kitchen island, other small tables and an extended dining-room table, their voices nearly drowning out Elvis Costello on the sound system and the sizzle of frying bacon. Coffee, veggie stew and breakfast pizza scent the air.

“I like the local food and how the money’s being used,” Michelle Lin, a University of Michigan graduate student, says between bites of pizza topped with spinach, hard-cooked eggs and crumbled bacon. “I like that they’re self-sustaining.”

Diners can go home with more savory comestibles. The Selma Cafe Store – basically a corner of the Gottlieb-McCabe living room – boasts items such as whole-wheat bread, farm cheese, granola, hoop greens and salami, all at $5 a crack.

Selma has a formal affiliation with the nonprofit Slow Food Huron Valley. Selma’s directors decide which projects merit a loan, and they duly report all financial activities on the Repasts blog.

“Usually, you don’t see that kind of transparency,” says Angela Eikenberry, a University of Nebraska-Omaha assistant professor of public policy who studies philanthropy. She says she isn’t aware of “any other groups that make loans. … It’s very encouraging for me to hear these kinds of things going on.”

A National Farmers Union official is similarly enthusiastic.

“What a great idea! I’ve not personally heard of any other communities pulling together and doing something like that,” says Chandler Goule, vice president and lobbyist. He says it’s particularly helpful because, in recent years, “credit was extremely tight” for farmers seeking bank loans.

Selma’s fundraising concept has been catching on. In August 2009, a Thursday-morning breakfast salon began in nearby Chelsea to support a community kitchen that offers training and rents licensed commercial kitchen space by the hour. Since then, the salon, called Yellow Door, has cut back to occasional events, spokeswoman Jane Pacheco says, citing a strain on volunteers.

McCabe and Gottlieb’s work goes well beyond the weekly breakfasts and hoop houses. They’ve led Selma Cafe into a school garden partnership. They’re rounding up volunteers for “building 20 hoops in 20 days, June 15 to July 4, with a celebration of what independence means,” McCabe says. He’s working with a local bank to set up a “farmer fund,” a social investment program in which investors can back specific projects for a potential modest financial return.

And this spring, McCabe and friend Steve Thiry will launch a farm apprenticeship program at Thiry’s Tessmer Farm, partially supported by a $78,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The “four-season farmer incubator” project, which McCabe will manage, will train apprentice farmers in everything from developing a business plan to tending crops and animals. Later, an advisory panel will help them find their own land and financing. The plan calls for two apprentices at a time.

“When you come out of this two-year position, you graduate by owning your own farm,” says McCabe.

The Selma folks “have aspirations of doing all kinds of things,” McCabe says. After all, he and Gottlieb, in their weekly e-mail to the group’s fans, encourage diners to think big, too: “to pull up a chair and share your vision for the future of food.”

Bread pudding is a Selma staple. This sweet version was inspired by Eve, a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Mich. There, it’s a dessert tucked with lemon curd and raspberry jam.

For Selma, organizer Lisa Gottlieb uses fresh or “freeze-onal” fruits – the juicier the better – and replaces sugar with local honey.

FRUIT AND HONEY BREAD PUDDING

1 loaf day-old bread (rustic Italian or challah), sliced 1-inch thick

4 cups any fruit, in bite-size pieces

6 large eggs

1/2 to 3/4 cup honey

1- 1/2 cups cream

1- 1/2 cups half-and-half

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Lightly butter a 9-by-12-inch pan or large casserole. Cover bottom with layer of bread slices. Don’t worry about space between slices; the egg mixture will fill in. Spoon fruit over slices. Add second layer of bread.

In large bowl, combine eggs and honey, mixing until blended. Stir in cream, half-and-half, salt and vanilla extract. Pour mixture over bread and fruit. Cover with foil and refrigerate 1 hour while bread absorbs liquid.

Loosen foil and bake at 350 degrees F for 50 to 60 minutes or until bread topping is slightly golden and pudding is set but is not firm.

Makes 8 hearty servings.

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