For Chains, Buying Locally Still Means a Long Journey
By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 26, 2008; F01
CHARLOTTESVILLE -- When Chipotle Mexican Grill executives decided to begin serving local pork from one of the most famous farmers in America, they did the opposite of what most big companies would do when jumping on the latest trend. They said nothing.
There was no fanfare or official announcement. Even when the pork turned up in the first carnitas burrito last summer, no change was made to the menu or the $5.75 price. It wasn't until last fall, two months after Polyface Farm's pork made its debut, that a sign was posted on the days it was available. "We wanted to start slow, for us and for them," says Phil Petrilli, Chipotle's operations director for the northeast region. "This is a farm that's used to dropping off 12 chickens at the local restaurant." One of the fastest-growing chains in the nation, Chipotle serves about 350 pounds of pork per week in Charlottesville alone and more than 5 million pounds annually at its 700 restaurants.
This month, Chipotle hopes to serve 100 percent Polyface pork in Charlottesville. But that success comes after 17 months of complex negotiations and logistics, including buying extra cooking equipment, developing new recipes, adjusting work schedules and investing in temperature-monitoring technology for Polyface's delivery van. In recent months, Petrilli has visited the Charlottesville outlet about every two weeks, four times as often as he visits other restaurants in the region.
Chipotle's experiment is emblematic of the enormous hurdles that face national chains hoping to embrace the eat-local trend that has until now been limited to exclusive restaurants and farmers markets. Food grown by small local farmers may taste fresher and require less fuel to transport, but the quantities rarely are large enough to sustain one busy restaurant, let alone hundreds. "We get calls all the time from individual farmers saying, 'I've got three pigs,' or 'two cows,' and there's nothing we can do with those quantities," says Ann Daniels, Chipotle's director of purchasing.
And yet, some regional chains and national food service providers are launching their own buy-local experiments. For some, like Chipotle, it fits their corporate mission. Others are driven by rising concerns about food safety, skyrocketing fuel costs and growing consumer demand for fresh, seasonal food. Whatever the reason, the attempts are spurring a massive overhaul of the way these businesses operate, from the way they plan menus and pick suppliers to the way they think about food costs and distribution.
From Theory to Practice
Petrilli was already familiar with Polyface when Chipotle opened in Charlottesville in October 2006. Owner Joel Salatin had become something of a celebrity after Michael Pollan hailed him as a hero of the organic farm movement in his 2006 best-seller, "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Petrilli also was a member of the Polyface buying club, which periodically drops off meat and eggs for members in the Washington area.
The next month, Chipotle founder Steve Ells and President Monty Moran visited Charlottesville. Petrilli drove them the 48 miles to Swoope to tour the farm. Ells, a classically trained chef, was enamored of Salatin's holistic vision of farming and, like Petrilli, wanted to work with Polyface to determine whether it would be possible to source locally. "There's a huge cost to doing things this way," Petrilli says. "We're spending money to find out how and if we can bring small farmers with our values into the system."
Originally, Ells wanted to buy Polyface chicken, but the hurdles -- the birds would have to be trucked to a federally inspected slaughterhouse -- and the quantity that Chipotle demanded were too high. Salatin, meanwhile, wanted to move pork. His fine-dining clients and buying club members couldn't get enough of the chops and loins. (It's a company joke that Petrilli orchestrated the whole deal just to get his own personal fix.) But Salatin needed a customer to buy shoulders and legs, tougher cuts that are perfect for braising and wrapping in burritos.
Chipotle has long been a pioneer in bringing sustainable and organic food to the masses. In 2000, the chain began buying all its pork from Niman Ranch, an alliance of small farms that was then largely supplying white-tablecloth restaurants and high-end grocery stores including Whole Foods Market. Like Polyface, Niman had plenty of demand for the chops and the loins, and Chipotle's business allowed it to expand. "Every time Chipotle added a restaurant, we could add a new farm," remembers founder Bill Niman. At the beginning, about 75 small farms were part of Niman Ranch. Today there are more than 500.
Chipotle now has several pork suppliers and can brag that all the meat for its carnitas is naturally raised; the pigs live on pasture and are never given antibiotics or feed with animal byproducts. If supply can meet its growing demand -- this year Chipotle plans to open 125 restaurants and expects to continue double-digit sales growth at current outlets -- the company soon will serve only naturally raised chicken and beef, too. Fifteen percent of the 375 tons of black beans it served in 2006 were organic; that's as much as the company could get its hands on.
Sourcing locally was trickier, however. The pork for all 67 of its mid-Atlantic restaurants is cooked at a kitchen in Manassas, so Chipotle had to refit the Charlottesville branch to accommodate an oven where the Polyface pork could be braised, plus buy pots, pans and a cooling rack. There were two reasons: If Polyface meat were processed with all the other pork, it would be impossible to be certain what was being served in Charlottesville. Also, Chipotle chef Joel Holland had developed a recipe to ensure that carnitas made with Polyface pork, which tends to have a different texture due to higher fat content, tasted the way customers expected.
Chipotle also had to work with Salatin to ramp up supply. It took 17 months to arrange for custom cuts of the meat and to set up safe delivery, issues that usually are the responsibility of the supplier alone.
For example, Polyface makes its deliveries, all within a four-hour drive of the farm, in a converted bus with 150 Coleman coolers and ice packs. Unlike big producers, Salatin doesn't own a refrigerated truck and, he says, he wasn't ready to lay out $30,000 to buy one.
His system works for small restaurants, but it didn't measure up to Chipotle's strict food safety policies. After much research, Chipotle bought digital temperature strips for Polyface that monitor and record temperatures inside the coolers during transport from slaughterhouse to restaurant. "These are the hurdles that the institutional food system has created, and the average local foodie has no idea why farmers like us can't access a larger portion of the market," Salatin says. "We've been a square peg in a round hole for Chipotle. But at all the steps along the way that usually hold these deals up, they have fought to keep us on track."
Going Local, Nationwide
Forays by other companies into local sourcing confirm that it requires a strong philosophical commitment and a lot of hand-holding. A small farmer who wants to scale up needs a variety of technical and financial assistance, says Rich Pirog, associate director of Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture: "They need to provide easy ordering, reliable delivery, assurances about safety, and they don't know how to do that." In many cases, Pirog says, it's easier for small producers to sell at the farmers market.
That's why Clyde's Restaurant Group, an early proponent of local foods in the Washington area, had a dedicated driver to collect summer produce from farms in the region. But by 1998, with 10 restaurants, the company found it too time-consuming and costly to keep up the practice. Rather than abandon local farms, Clyde's cut a deal with a local distributor to perform the rounds, hauling the more than 20,000 pounds of asparagus and 42,000 pounds of tomatoes that today's 13 restaurants go through in a single season. "It's really affected our food costs," says John Guattery, Clyde's corporate chef. "But I think we would ruin ourselves if we didn't do it. I think people believe in it."
One large regional chain, Burgerville, is also keeping the faith. With 39 restaurants in Oregon and Washington, Burgerville has been sourcing locally since it was created in 1961 because that was just the way you did things back then, says Jack Graves, chief cultural officer for parent company the Holland Inc. Today, its naturally raised beef comes from Country Natural Beef, an alliance of cattle ranchers mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Yogurt for the smoothies comes from Portland. And the famous Walla Walla Onion Rings are on the menu only between June and August, when the sweet onions are in season. Graves estimates that roughly 75 percent of ingredients come from Oregon and Washington.
Burgerville isn't religious about sourcing locally. "Not everything is available here," Graves says. The key is "having the will to do it and seeing the value in it. People appreciate that we take care of the local economy and the local environment. It's a way of doing business that makes money."
National food service companies also are making a push into local purchasing. Sodexo, which serves 9.3 million meals daily at U.S. hospitals, schools, colleges and special-events venues, is shifting to a more decentralized ordering and distribution system. It works with 70 regional produce distributors representing more than 600 farmers that individual chefs can turn to for seasonal, local produce. Bon Appetit Management, which runs more than 400 dining rooms at universities, museums and corporations, has made local sourcing a centerpiece of its brand. Some staples such as salt or coffee are purchased centrally, but individual chefs largely do their own ordering. They are encouraged to forge relationships with farmers and, in a limited way, invest in the farms to create a steady supply.
For example, in 2006 Bon Appetit spent $10,000 to help a farmer near its Grove City College dining room erect four greenhouse tunnels on his farm. At Oberlin College, where 45 percent of food supplies are bought locally, the company has invested $15,000 to help build greenhouses and purchase a bio-fueled heater. The heater runs exclusively on used fry oil donated by the kitchen. In 2004, Bon Appetit mandated that 20 percent of all purchases be made locally. In 2006, the company average was 30 percent, accounting for $55 million in local purchases. "For so many people, it's still about price," says Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold. "If a fast-food vendor can get meat for seven cents a pound less, then they'll drop their supplier. For us, it's about building relationships and knowing we'll have a better product over the long run."
That's what Chipotle is trying to do in Charlottesville. The company estimates that it pays about a 20 percent premium for Polyface Farms pork. But that price gap could narrow. Salatin says he hopes to teach more farmers about his methods and loop them into the supply chain. And rising animal feed and oil prices will make it harder for industrial producers to grow cheap food.
"My hat's off to Chipotle," Salatin says. "I'm honored to be part of an aggressive attempt to rewrite the food model."
Thursday, March 27, 2008
In Trial Run, Chipotle Heads to the Farm
New Twist in Kennedy Mystery; Photo Negatives of Robert F. Kennedy's Assassination Disappear
By: EMI ENDO and ERIC MALNIC TIMES STAFF WRITERS
The negatives of some photographs taken in the moments surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy are missing.
That is not a matter of debate.
But almost everything else about the pictures is.
Did they show the crucial seconds when bullets felled the presidential candidate in a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, as claimed by the photographer, Jamie Scott Enyart? Or did they show nothing of the assassination, as alleged by the city attorney's office?
Could they have been destroyed, along with other evidence, after the official assassination investigation, as suggested by Enyart? Or were they simply misplaced, only to turn up in state archives more than 25 years later, as claimed by city and state officials?
And was a manila envelope containing the recently rediscovered negatives stolen from a courier's car in Inglewood last Friday, as claimed by the courier? Even attorneys for the city, who may soon have to mount a defense in Enyart's $2-million lawsuit over the missing negatives, admit that the circumstances surrounding the alleged theft are "highly unusual."
Enyart's attorney, Alvin Greenwald, hinted darkly at a conspiracy--a suggestion, never substantiated, that has haunted every investigation of the New York senator's death.
"Somebody, for some reason, is making sure those photos do not reach public view," Greenwald said.
Louis "Skip" Miller, an attorney for the city, conceded that the incident in Inglewood was strange, but he scoffed at Greenwald's suggestion.
"What happened here is just a petty theft," Miller said. "A run of bad luck."
The Los Angeles City Council offered a $5,000 reward Wednesday for the negatives' safe return, saying they are "critical evidence" in the defense against Enyart's lawsuit.
Enyart said Wednesday that he is in "absolute shock" over the missing negatives.
"They've been playing fast and loose with the evidence since Day 1," he said, suggesting that some important material in the case had been deliberately destroyed. "All I want is my photos."
Enyart, now a 43-year-old television special effects director, was a 15-year-old amateur photographer when he attended the primary election gathering at the Ambassador in 1968. By his account, he shot three rolls of film that night.
He said most of those exposures were made during Kennedy's victory speech in the Ambassador's ballroom, but a few captured the critical moments when Kennedy was gunned down seconds later in a nearby pantry.
(Enyart's pictures should not be confused with the widely circulated photos of the dying senator by Times staff photographer Boris Yaro and Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge.)
In the weeks that followed the slaying, investigators confiscated every photograph they could find that had been taken that night at the Ambassador. Enyart's were among them.
Later, when he asked for his film, he learned that the courts had ordered that investigative files on the case--and all evidentiary material related to it--be sealed for 20 years.
After waiting 20 years, Enyart asked for his photos back in 1988. The city said it had lost them. Enyart, who had begun work on a book about the assassination, responded with a $2-million lawsuit that he filed against the city and state on Aug. 14, 1989.
Last August, Enyart was told that his negatives had been found in the state archives in Sacramento, where they had been filed mistakenly under the wrong name. The state hired a courier, George Phillip Gebhardt, who flew to Los Angeles International Airport on Friday with an envelope that was said to contain the negatives.
Gebhardt later told Inglewood police that as he headed downtown in a rented car, he got a flat tire on Century Boulevard near Freeman Avenue. He said that when he got out to inspect the tire, he may have left the right front window partially open. The courier said that when he got back into the car, his jacket, which he had left on the front seat, and the envelope, which he had left on the back seat, were missing.
Gebhardt acknowledged that he didn't see anyone near the car when he got out to check the tire. But he said that when he had stopped for a traffic light a block earlier, he had seen a man get out of a red car behind him and start pounding the fender of the red car with his fist. That man, Gebhardt suggested, might have slashed his tire.
On Wednesday, during preliminary court maneuverings for the trial of the lawsuit, which is scheduled to start Feb. 5, attorneys for the city displayed contact prints they said had been made from the negatives before they were lost. None of the prints showed Kennedy after he left the ballroom.
Enyart insisted that the contact prints were incomplete. He said he had taken pictures that showed Kennedy twisting and falling after he was shot in the pantry: "I watched Kennedy fall to the ground. Where are those photos?"
Miller, the attorney for the city, responded with skepticism.
"He's trying to say two more rolls of film are missing, but they don't exist," Miller said. "There are no pantry pictures."
AIPAC TRIAL POSPONED INDEFINITELY!
A judge has again delayed the trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists after prosecutors indicated they may take an unusual pre-trial appeal of a ruling on what classified information the defense may present to the jury.
At a hearing today in federal court in Alexandria, Va., Judge Thomas Ellis III postponed indefinitely the trial that had been set for April 29 for the two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman
Messrs. Rosen and Weissman were charged in 2005 with conspiring to receive classified information and pass it on to journalists and foreign diplomats.
Prosecutors told Judge Ellis that they are likely to file a notice of appeal of a lengthy order he issued Wednesday after months of hearings under the Classified Information Protection Act. Lawyers close to the case cautioned that the notice is simply a mechanism to protect the government's right to appeal and does not necessarily mean an appeal will be pursued.
A spokesman for the prosecution, James Rybicki, confirmed the in-courtroom events. He would not comment on whether prosecutors had approval from officials in the Solicitor General's office at the Justice Department to pursue an appeal, which would be directed to the 4th Circuit in Richmond, Va
Mr. Rosen's defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, expressed frustration over the further delay. "It now appears the government does not want to try this case," Mr. Lowell told The New York Sun this evening. "They filed these charges almost three years ago without thinking them through and there doesn't appear to be anybody in the government with either the authority or the courage to admit they made a mistake. The delays are devastating to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman."
Mr. Lowell's suggestion of disarray in the prosecution team seemed to refer to the fact that a longtime lead prosecutor on the case, Kevin DiGregory, quit last month and took a job with a private law firm.
Under the law, an appeal of the classified-information order is supposed to be expedited, but lawyers said it was unclear how quickly the 4th Circuit would move if an appeal is pursued.
At issue is an order of more than 270 pages that Judge Ellis issued setting out what classified information the defense can use at trial and how classified information can be paraphrased or substituted. The judge cannot force the government to abide by the order, but he has the authority to dismiss the case or to impose some other sanction such as partial dismissal or exclusion of evidence important to the government.
In federal court, appeals are not usually permitted during pretrial proceedings, but the classified-information law, known as Cipa, permits them. Nevertheless, such appeals are rare. One previous Cipa appeal in the 4th Circuit was taken in the case of a former CIA station chief for Costa Rica charged with making false statements in the Iran-Contra probe, Joseph Fernandez. A district judge in Alexandria, Claude Hilton, threw the case out after the government refused to accept his rulings on what classified information was essential to the defense. The 4th Circuit upheld the dismissal.
Judge Ellis indicated today that he plans to hold another hearing next week to discuss how to proceed with the case against Messrs. Rosen and Weissman.
NSA Had Access Built into Microsoft Windows
A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA "help information" trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.
The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA.
Computer security specialists have been aware for two years that unusual features are contained inside a standard Windows software "driver" used for security and encryption functions. The driver, called ADVAPI.DLL, enables and controls a range of security functions. If you use Windows, you will find it in the C:Windowssystem directory of your computer.
ADVAPI.DLL works closely with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but will only run cryptographic functions that the US governments allows Microsoft to export. That information is bad enough news, from a European point of view. Now, it turns out that ADVAPI will run special programmes inserted and controlled by NSA. As yet, no-one knows what these programmes are, or what they do.
Dr Nicko van Someren reported at last year's Crypto 98 conference that he had disassembled the ADVADPI driver. He found it contained two different keys. One was used by Microsoft to control the cryptographic functions enabled in Windows, in compliance with US export regulations. But the reason for building in a second key, or who owned it, remained a mystery.
A second key
Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5. He found that Microsoft's developers had failed to remove or "strip" the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY".
Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their secret meaning, to "Advances in Cryptology, Crypto'99" conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did not deny that the "NSA" key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge.
A third key?!
But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even Microsoft's top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was "stunned" to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and report on the "entropy" of programming code.
Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code is said to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for modifications to be inserted without the knowledge of even the respective product managers.
Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be intended to let US government users of Windows run classified cryptosystems on their machines or whether it is intended to open up anyone's and everyone's Windows computer to intelligence gathering techniques deployed by NSA's burgeoning corps of "information warriors".
According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system "is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system". The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards.
"For non-American IT managers relying on Windows NT to operate highly secure data centres, this find is worrying", he added. "The US government is currently making it as difficult as possible for "strong" crypto to be used outside of the US. That they have also installed a cryptographic back-door in the world's most abundant operating system should send a strong message to foreign IT managers".
"How is an IT manager to feel when they learn that in every copy of Windows sold, Microsoft has a 'back door' for NSA - making it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer?" he asked.
Can the loophole be turned round against the snoopers?
Dr van Someren feels that the primary purpose of the NSA key inside Windows may be for legitimate US government use. But he says that there cannot be a legitimate explanation for the third key in Windows 2000 CAPI. "It looks more fishy", he said.
Fernandez believes that NSA's built-in loophole can be turned round against the snoopers. The NSA key inside CAPI can be replaced by your own key, and used to sign cryptographic security modules from overseas or unauthorised third parties, unapproved by Microsoft or the NSA. This is exactly what the US government has been trying to prevent. A demonstration "how to do it" program that replaces the NSA key can be found on Cryptonym's website.
According to one leading US cryptographer, the IT world should be thankful that the subversion of Windows by NSA has come to light before the arrival of CPUs that handles encrypted instruction sets. These would make the type of discoveries made this month impossible. "Had the next-generation CPU's with encrypted instruction sets already been deployed, we would have never found out about NSAKEY."
