Griffin’s path through American farming has been motley and mottled: he started out as one of the hippies selling vegetables to the likes of Chez Panisse, then climbed up the corporate ladder to manage hundreds of baby salad pickers, then gave that up and went back to small-scale farming. Along the way, he cultivated a strong sense of social responsibility and a conviction that food, farming, and eating are political acts. He also picked up a gift for spinning metonymy into metaphor, and crafting endings so snappy that they make those of us who write full-time bite our knuckles in envy. His parables make for tasty, nutritious reading. 

In the piece hyperlinked above, Griffin parallels the “salad days” of microgreens to his own green beginnings as a farmer, then traces their rise from yuppie chow to McDonald’s, and describes his own role as one of the puppet-masters of mesclun, until it becomes “Californian in the purest sense…mechanically harvested to reduce labor cost, triple-washed in stainless steel factories, before being merchandised nationally using gauzy images of nature and flowers and little farm girls. Pure Hollywood.”

Another Griffin piece I love came out right after last year’s spinach E. coli debacle. Initially it appeared as a guest post on über-foodie blog Chez Pim, but was circulated widely on the Internet. His experience as one of the original owners of the company that became Natural Selections, the company responsible for the disaster, gave him a unique insight on how the problem spiraled out of control. He blamed the packaging and machine-labor methods of large-scale operations for the fact that the bacteria had been permitted to spread uncontrolled. “Every sealed bag of pre-washed greens is like a little green house,” Griffin wrote. “If the produce in the bag is clean, great, but if it isn’t the bacteria present has a wonderful little sealed environment to reproduce in, free from any threat until the dressing splashes down and the shadow of a fork passes over. Frankly, I think convenience is overrated.” 

Two bonus bits: here’s Andy on why he no longer sells produce at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market, and a beautiful piece on George Harrison, red carrots, and Salinas. 

As if being a farmer wasn’t enough work. Dang these people!