June 16, 2006
By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau
American Flatbread, the Waitsfield restaurant and frozen pizza company, will have its dinner protesting the state’s agriculture and food rules tonight, but The
Chicken Event will not feature the chicken in question.
That’s because an injunction issued Thursday at the request of the Vermont
Department of Health will stop the eatery from serving meat from the nearby Gaylord
family farm.
The conflict is a symptom of a food system that puts large-scale operations ahead of
local producers and damages efforts to establish small-scale diverse agriculture in
Vermont, according to the farmer and the restaurateur.
But the regulations are needed to protect public health, especially when dealing
with poultry, state agriculture and health officials said.
The problem, according to George Schenk, founder and president of American Flatbread
is that without a costly processing facility, local farmers like the Gaylords cannot
get their meat inspected for retail sale. Therefore, while they can sell chickens at
their farm, they can’t sell them to restaurants and stores. American Flatbread makes
about 700,000 pizzas a year, and would love to buy local chicken, Schenk said.
“They are preventing us from serving the chicken from our neighbor across the road,”
he said. “If we were to serve it, we would be in contempt of court.”
Connie Gaylord, who runs the Waitsfield farm with her father, said she wonders what
the difference is between selling chicken in a restaurant and selling it from a farm
stand.
“I don’t understand why it has to be this strict,” she said. “Why is it OK if I sell
it off my farm, but I can’t sell it to George?”
However, there is a fundamental distinction between selling uninspected meat from a
farm, where consumers know what they are buying and can see the operation
first-hand, and being served a flatbread with meat that diners naturally assume has
been inspected, said Interim Commissioner of Health Sharon Moffatt.
“The regulations are there to protect the consumer entering into that restaurant and
assuming the products have been fully inspected and are safe,” she said.
Schenk transforms his commercial bakery into a restaurant on Friday and Saturday
nights. The rest of the time the bakery, along with its other locations in
Middlebury and California, sends flatbreads to groceries in 45 states.
This week he was going to host a party with music, a speaker, films and chicken
flatbread made with meat from the Gaylord farm as a way to object to the state
rules.
Since the injunction, however, he cannot risk it, Schenk said. So while the party
was scheduled to go on, the chicken will not.
Violating the injunction could put the company’s food license at risk, as well as
represent contempt of court, according to state officials.
Schenk said he hopes the creation of a committee he and state officials agreed to
form will find a solution, he said.
The collaboration between American Flatbread and the Gaylords is the kind of market
the state wants to encourage, said David Lane, assistant secretary of agriculture
for development.
But farms must build covered, inspectable slaughtering and processing facilities to
safely sell products through retail outlets, with washable walls, hot-and-cold
running water and other requirements, he said. Inspections of such facilities by the
state are free during regular business hours, he said.
But doing that for their farm, which sells fewer than 1,000 chickens a year, would
force them to get bigger, spend more and hire more people, Connie Gaylord said.
“Why force us to do something which means we get bigger,” she said. “It is not
helping the little guys.”
“Why can’t local just stay local? Why does everything have to come from far away,”
Gaylord said. “It’s not feasible financially for us right now” to build a butchering
facility.”
Nobody has gotten sick from eating the chickens they raise and sell, Gaylord said.
“This was fundamentally wrong,” Schenk said. “This is some of the best food that our
society makes. Their work should be celebrated and honored.”
“Farming is already a hard enough thing as it is. We have created a system that adds
to their burdens,” said Schenk. He said while he disagrees with them, the state
officials he has dealt with have been “thoughtful, respectful and kind.”
As for Lane of the Agency of Agriculture, he hopes to attend the event on Friday night.
Farmers are pretty resourceful about figuring out how to deal with the regulations
and build facilities that comply with the rules, he said.
“If someone was selling to restaurants I think the economics are probably there to
build a facility,” he said. “Farmers are pretty ingenious and pretty resourceful in
how they can set up these small slaughtering facilities.”
Amy Shollenberger of the advocacy group Rural Vermont, which helped organize the
Waitsfield event, said real changes in the regulations are needed – not a study
group.
“Farmers have been asking for help with this situation for several years and the
Douglas administration has been ignoring them at best,” she said. “We are glad that
flatbread has raised the issue, but we don’t have a lot of hope (the agency) will
pay attention to family farmers.”
Contact Louis Porter at louis.porter@rutlandherald.com