Food Raves, or Street Meat Gussied Up For Hipsters, Is A Thing Now

First it was organic, then it was local. Then came the farmer’s markets and the cultural cool that comes with cooking. Soon, the food trucks rolled into towns and all of a sudden, the simple act of eating became swallowed up by the same hegemony usually reserved for rock clubs and tattoo parlors.

So it seems that because the mainstream has continually embraced the cool things in the food industry, the cool kids have resorted to starting underground food raves. Yup, it’s come to this. The underground food raves are essentially hush-hush late-night food markets, the kind of things one would normally only see when Anthony Bourdain traipses through the late-night food markets of Southeast Asia.

The underground market seeks to encourage food entrepreneurship by helping young vendors avoid roughly $1,000 a year in fees — including those for health permits and liability insurance — required by legitimate farmers markets. Here, where the food rave — call it a crave — was born, the market organizers sidestep city health inspections by operating as a private club, requiring that participants become “members” (free) and sign a disclaimer noting that food might not be prepared in a space that has been inspected.

Members of the gathering have few qualms about the sampling. “I want something savory and awesome,” said David McDonald, who works with Ms. Corpuz and estimates that he spends 40 percent of his income on dinners. “I want food that will put me in a coma before I go to sleep.”

Fueled by Twitter and Facebook, the phenomenon, which began in San Francisco, has now spread to other parts of the country, including Atlanta and Washington.

“When I was their age I was doing drugs and going to rock shows,” Novella Carpenter, an urban farmer and author, told the New York Times. She recently got into a spat with the City of Oakland for selling chard and other produce at a pop-up farm stand without a permit. “That’s not their culture. Their culture is food — incredible yummy-tasting food.”

All of this would be easier to stomach (har har) if these underground food markets were less about DIY cultural capital for foodies and more honest about their intentions, which essentially amounts to not wanting to pay the rising costs associated with traditional farmer’s markets.

“The small-batch economics just don’t work,” said Iso Rabins, 30, who started the San Francisco food rave back in 2009, according to the New York Times. He cites the costs for renting commercial kitchen space ($45 to $75 an hour), as well as the farmer’s market fees — business and product liability insurance (around $250), space rental ($40 to $55 a day), yearly member fees (around $110), and a health and safety permit (about $500) – as his reasons for starting this movement.

The goal is to be an incubator for culinary start-ups, and be a profit-making venture. Vendors pay $50 to reserve a cooking space and return 10 percent of sales over $500 to ForageSF. “The feeling in the food community is that if you’re making money, it’s not something you’re passionate about,” Mr. Rabins said. “But if we actually want to change anything — dedicate our lives to it — we need to make money doing it,” he said.

Amateur cooks around the country are pushing to have the right to sell unlicensed goods directly to consumers. So-called “cottage food” laws that allow products considered nonhazardous, like pies and cookies, exist in 18 states, with five more considering similar legislation.

It’s hard not to escape the feeling that yes, this is cool. It’s incredibly cool. It’s amateur chefs doing what they love to do in a way that’s on their own terms — even if it’s late at night when most people are asleep.

When you watch Anthony Bourdain snake his way through an over-crowded tent city of food, it’s hard not to feel like we’re missing out on that in America. The scents, the smells, the excitement, the pleasure of discovery! But it’s also hard not to get upset at the branding of this new American movement — street meat gussied up for hipster foodies — as something “underground” or “cool,” when it’s really just capitalist in nature, even if the participants refuse to acknowledge that.

[Article reposted from: http://hypervocal.com/culture/2011/food-raves-or-street-meat-gussied-up-for-hipsters-is-a-thing-now/]