You may have noticed some of the interesting new foodish ventures happening in various parts of the country. L.A., Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area all have thriving street food cultures.

New York always has – especially in Queens where informal vendors gather under the overpasses at odd times of day and night.

There’s a cool factor in this (anything underground is automatically cool), but the compelling thing is how the economy is driving interesting new models and innovations. People are attempting to color outside the lines. New ideas are flourishing and they don’t always match up with the regulations meant to keep everything tidy, legal and predictable.

Why Food Crazes Are Taking Off

On the consumer side, people are searching for authenticity and connection, and they want to meet face-to-face with the people who make their food. My theory is that the economic collapse has shaken our trust in “the system” (food safety scares haven’t helped either), and as evidenced in Katherine Butler’s piece on guerilla gardening, people have become so passionate about “going green” they are willing to break the law by planting their own produce.

Producers, who want to meet this need, and perhaps monetize a passion for artisan food production, are finding that the barriers to starting a new food business – whether leasing a building, licensing a cart or setting up a table at a farmers’ market – are sky high. From permitting to health department inspections, there are many hoops to jump through and daunting up-front expenses.

Many chefs who lost their jobs when their restaurants closed (not to mention great cooks from other employment sectors) would like to start their own food businesses. Whether that’s a salami and sausage business, a hot soup delivery service or a cart selling prepared foods, such start-ups are challenged in trying to get their wares to potential customers. Confusing regulations and conflicting rules between cities in the same metropolitan areas are just a few of the issues. There’s also the high start up costs due to the requirements that all such foods be produced in commercial kitchens.

But the customers want it, as evidenced by the lines around the block at the “underground farmers’ market” or the hours-long waits at the San Francisco Street Food Festival last August.

Here’s a rundown of just a few of the creative (and barely legal) ventures enabling would-be food sellers to creatively work with existing regulations until they can be rewritten.

Pop up General Store:

This venture is in Oakland (mere steps from my home, I’m happy to say). It’s a collection of local chefs and legit food producers who use commercial kitchens but don’t have brick and mortar stores.

Samin Nosrat and Chris Lee, two chefs who were thrown out of work when their restaurant closed, founded the Pop Up General Store. The store “pops up” every two weeks in the large, open lobby of a historic streetcar station turned catering kitchen. Customers can order ahead using a digital form, or pop in and buy what’s available. Until the website is built, organizers communicate with their customers through Facebook and an email newsletter. The foods are fantastic, and seasonal. Recent offerings included Posole Verde, Fresh Rigatoni, Corned Beef and Cabbage, Spring Lamb Roasts and for Passover, Matzoh Ball Soup.

I caught up with Nosrat and asked her where the idea for the general store originated. She told me she and Chris would often run into former regular customers of Eccolo, the Berkeley restaurant where the two chefs worked, and customers would tell them how much they missed certain foods.

“Why can’t we make it and sell it?” says Nosrat, explaining the thought process. “We wanted to find a way to keep making the foods we loved and share them with the people who want to eat them, while making a name for ourselves for the future,” she added.

Starting with the restaurant’s email list, the two got a much larger response than they expected. Soon, other chef friends and food artisans joined in. Many were chefs having a hard time economically due to layoffs or reduced hours. Others simply wanted to start their own food businesses, but not before testing the waters. Many, like Lee and Nosrat, are alumni of the illustrious Chez Panisse in Berkeley, so we’re talking about some stellar vittles. If you visit the Pop Up General Store, more likely than not, the very people who produced the food items you see there will be proudly hand-selling them too.

Just a few weeks in, the popularity of the Pop Up General Store is growing fast. Nosrat ventured a guess as to why customers so immediately latch on. “People like seeing the cooks who make their food,” says Nosrat. “In restaurants, cooks are never the ones sharing the food with the customers. They are always in the kitchen.”

331 Cortland:

This San Francisco start-up is an incubator. Somewhere between an indoor collection of food carts and a store, it’s a cooperative retail space that, once open, will house six vendors selling delectables like Japanese deli foods, vegan baked goods, fresh produce, pickles, sandwiches and more. There’s also a knife sharpening business that for years has been housed in the operator’s nearby home.

The original intent of the space was to be a flexible, indoor food market. The spaces were to be customized to the tenants so vendors could cycle in and out as they find success, gain clientele and move onto their own retail spaces.

The building’s owner, Debra Resnik, wanted to provide a place for vendors who were producing their foods in commercial kitchens and had begun to make a name for themselves through personal deliveries, catering or other avenues, but who weren’t ready to take the leap into a retail space all their own.

I spoke with Resnik on the phone, where she outlined her mixed success with the planning/permitting functionaries in the city of San Francisco. I knew the opening of the space had been much delayed due to permitting issues, mostly because the space doesn’t fit into any well-defined category.

She explains, they were cleared to open and the vendors had started their build-outs, but her original idea for the space had to be adjusted to make it happen. “Because of the regulations,” said Resnik, “Some of the aspects of the flexible floor plan are impossible. We basically won half of what we wanted.”

In this case, the neighborhood and city wanted 331 Cortland to open, but it was difficult to get off the ground due to regulations. The various agencies haven’t been able to figure out where 331 Cortland belongs.

Resnik added that because they “went out there and tried this new concept, maybe other people will have an easier time. Hopefully their experiences will be streamlined.”

Though the process has taken much patience and work, Resnik remains excited. “Working with all of these creative food people has been incredibly rewarding,” she says.

331 Cortland is planning a mid-April 2010 opening.

Vendors are Della Terra Organic Produce, Bernal Cutlery, Paulie’s Pickling, El Porteño Empanadas, Wholesome Bakery, and Ichi Lucky Cat Deli.

Community Commercial Kitchens:

For farmers, being able to sell value-added products like jams, preserves, canned vegetables and pickles can mean the difference between survival and getting an office job. Legal food production, however, has to be done in a licensed, inspected commercial kitchen. Most farmers don’t have the resources to build one from scratch.

All over the country community kitchens are popping up. Many are in rural areas near farms. This is very exciting because, with all the talk of local food, it’s still a minuscule percentage of total food dollars spent. The distribution and transportation issues are just too great with perishables. But once a food is shelf stable, this becomes much easier. A quick Google search turns up dozens of these ventures across the country, in areas as diverse as New Mexico, Florida and North Carolina. (Some of the funding for these operations is coming from the USDA’s new Know your Farmer know your Food program.)

SF Underground Farmers Market:

The SF Underground Farmers Market is a project of Forage SF, a business that offers a CSA box and dinners to help diners become acquainted with the wild foods that exist all around.

Attending The SF Underground Farmers Market is a way to taste and purchase the food that is being produced in backyards and home kitchens in the Bay Area by artisans who lack the resources to “go legit”. The SF Underground Market is a place where budding businesses can get a leg up on their road to legitimacy.

According to the website, the first market was held in a private home in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, with eight vendors and about 200 attendees. By the time the third market was held, there were 47 vendors and over 1,200 people attending. How does The Underground Farmers’ Market stay on the right side of the law? To get notification for the events attendees must sign up for a free membership.

All these businesses have two things in common: Creativity and cooperation. Our society could use a little more of both.

Leave a comment and tell us about any favorite innovative new food businesses in your neck of the woods.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

The post Barely Legal: A Look Inside the Underground Food Craze appeared first on EcoSalon.

With a tag line, “putting the food back in fast,” snappy graphics and smart social marketing, the Eat Real Festival, a three-day community-based extravaganza in Oakland, Calif. set up exactly the right expectations. It promised to be a fun place to go, where good food would be served for affordable prices, without a side dish of politics. And that’s exactly what it was. But it was also radical in a way.

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, you wouldn’t think that an event focused on eating humble foods, without celebrity restaurant chefs, famous bands or highly sought after speakers, held in the city about which Gertrude Stein once remarked, “there’s no there there,” would draw unexpected crowds well over 50% higher than projected. Especially if that festival was competing with Outside Lands, a huge music festival across the bay in San Francisco. But it did, with nary a famous name in sight.

The Eat Real Festival was founded as a way to connect eaters with their food (real food, not the rarified kind) and the people who make it.

It was set up as a social venture to inspire eaters to choose good food, and to benefit local organizations working to increase healthy food access in underserved communities.

Admission was free and all foods were priced between $1 and $5. The focus was on delicious and sustainable street food that everyone could have access to.

The festival organizers reached out to purveyors as varied as the traditional taco trucks in east Oakland and the new generation of trendy, sought after underground San Francisco street food vendors. All these people worked together, along with the grassroots community food access organizations to make the event happen.

These are people that don’t always get a chance to talk to one another. People always say that food brings folks together, but I’ve never seen it in action quite like this.

In addition to food there were local entertainers, local (non-celebrity) chef demos, a canning contest, a butchery contest and gardening workshops.

I had a chance to catch up with Susan Coss, Marketing Communications Director for Eat Real, to ask her a few questions about the event.

Vanessa: Why did the organizers decide to do this event?

Susan: The organizers of this event were some of the same people that organized last year’s Slow Food Nation. Despite best efforts to talk about accessibility around that event, there was much criticism that organic, sustainable food is elitist. Everyone does have a right to great, locally-produced food, but there is an affordability challenge. So we thought, what could be more simple than a taco truck and beer festival? Why not showcase this satisfying, affordable, humble and healthy “fast food” as a great alternative for people on the go? And while we’re at it, why not work toward connecting these food purveyors with local, sustainable producers?  We wanted good food without pretense. We wanted to apply slow food principals to a fast food mentality.

Why did you choose Oakland as the venue?

Oakland already has a vibrant street food culture and an active pushcart alliance, especially in the Fruitvale district. There’s also so much going on here in the urban agriculture movement. And Oakland’s economic and ethnic diversity makes it a mass market in a way that San Francisco is not. Also, Oakland was once the largest produce district port on the West Coast, and the produce district is only one block away. Locating the event here in Oakland’s historic Jack London Square was a great way to connect with that history.

Speaking of produce, how did you work with vendors on sourcing local, sustainable organic supplies without making the barriers to entry too high?

We wanted vendors to serve the same great food they always do, but connect them with local farmers and producers. We worked with the vendors to ensure that they were sourcing at least one or two ingredients from local, organic or sustainable producers. One interesting thing we found was that many of them were already using local produce. One of the biggest successes we had was connecting vendors with local ranchers to help them source responsibly-raised meat.

It’s clear that the eaters benefited. But what was in it for the vendors who participated?

It gave them an opportunity to be introduced to a larger audience. It also made them feel like part of a community. They connected with one another in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise. They feel like part of a legitimate community now. Showcasing these local vendors increases their business opportunities and keeps money and jobs in the community. The event was a great way to highlight the importance of our interdependence and have a great time.

For people hoping to replicate such an event in their communities, what were the biggest challenges in pulling it off?

Money. It’s not as simple as the trucks pulling up and opening their windows. There’s a huge infrastructure that has to be put in place. Things like health permits, fire marshal requirements, parking, space rental, electricity, water and marketing. It’s really about relationship building and working together with the city, the sponsors and the nonprofit organizations.

What was the most inspiring thing about the event?

There were so many: the number of people who entered the canning competition (we had around 100 entries and we thought we’d get around 30); the thousands of people who watched a butchery contest on Saturday night; the diversity of the crowd; and the fact that everyone donated their time. Not one musician, chef or entertainer was paid.

What was the most surprising thing about the event?

The attendance! We thought we’d get around 25,000 people but were hoping for 30,000. We actually got something like 70,000, throughout the weekend. The amazing thing is that, for the most part, the vendors didn’t run out of food. They just prepped more on Saturday night and early Sunday morning. This was after working from 10am-9pm serving food to thousands of hungry people. It took a huge effort by so many people to pull this off. It was such a success that we’re going to make it an annual event.

To learn more about the culture of street food and efforts to preserve street food culture worldwide, go to streetfood.org.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

The post Eat Real Festival: Building Community 1 Street Food Cart at a Time appeared first on EcoSalon.