Zester Daily

For almost 15 years, I was the food editor of Stuff Magazine, the fun, slightly incorrigible biweekly little sister magazine published by the Boston Phoenix. I loved every minute of it. Writing two pieces for each issue, deadline agita marked most of my Wednesdays. (Some days, it flowed all the way to Friday.) I ended up with a staggering (to me) clip file of 400-plus published pieces. I started out as a pretty good writer, but with the expertise and experience of my editors, I ended up winning national prizes.

When the Phoenix and Stuff combined last fall, I became the contributing editor for food. I began writing about food when it was still just “food” and about chefs when they were mostly known by their first and last names, if at all. There were stories about young chefs and old chefs; how hard it is to open a new restaurant; and why everyone suddenly shifted to small plates all at once. I wrote about Sunday suppers; public health issues; how to deconstruct a lobster roll; how French food came back into favor; distinguishing Salvadoran food from Peruvian and Ecuadorean; kimchee; “Top Chef” and “Chopped”; and the puzzling rise of burger joints. I wrote profiles about dishwashers and oyster shuckers, essays about “professional manners” — hostesses who were rude or oblivious, diners who just want to game the system for a free meal.

There was a time when a new restaurant would open every few months, not once a week, and when the new “hot” place had a chance of staying “hot” until at least the end of the month. When there was other riveting local news besides how soon the local Shake Shack would be serving custard.

Stuff Magazine examined Boston’s food scene in a different way

What Stuff did for the food scene of Boston was to make it safe to succeed, safe to take a chance. Safe to become a star, or not  – and just do a really god job of turning out good food 365 days a year. We saw ourselves as allies — not adversaries­­ — of the thousands of hardworking men and women who chose a ridiculous profession where you are only as good as the last meal any single patron has had at your restaurant. In the process, Stuff@Nite became the publication where Boston chefs could tell the truth — to our readers and to each other. And we became the bible for the local food community.

When I came to Stuff, I’d owned and run three restaurants. As a seasoned restaurant person, I knew that the miracle was that good, hot food ever got out of the kitchen on time and per the diner’s order. The opportunities to screw up a meal are multifarious, no matter how talented or attentive the chef. If restaurants were only about preparing good food, it would be a no-brainer job. But restaurants are complex teams of people as tightly interwoven as the rowers on a crew shell. And people are much harder to control than the produce withering in the walk-in. I can still feel the vibe gone wrong when I walk in to a restaurant. Did the chef’s wife leave him only that morning? Is someone at the emergency room? Deported? Is the bartender out on a bender? You can’t tell exactly what, but you intuit the vibrations. So, I saw my job at the magazine as helping readers peek behind the service counter, demystifying the process, understanding the minds and hopes of chefs, the staffs, the investors. And the degree of difficulty inherent in the simple act of making good food at a fair price.

Our mission at Stuff Magazine (formerly called Stuff@Nite) was to write about food and people who were interesting and had interesting life stories or simply the story of working hard, apprenticing well and coming up through the ranks. A kind of judgment-free zone. No reviews, no recipes, no scathing takedowns of Todd English or whoever was the too-big-for-his-britches poster boy of the season. If I had a bad experience at a restaurant, our style was not to Chow it or Yelp it at the universe, but to have a cordial phone chat with the manager or chef about what we experienced and go back in a few weeks. When diners emailed, wrote or called about some terrible injustice at a bistro we had liked, we gently asked that they pick up the phone and give the useful feedback to the chef. Give the chef a chance to make it right.

Note: Chefs are always willing to hear from their customers. They went in to the world of cooking because they like to please and nurture people. In general, modern chefs are people-pleasers, white-collar intellects in a profession with more than its share of blue-collar effort.

What you’ve lost in the closing of the Phoenix and Stuff, which folded in to the Phoenix last summer, is a dedicated outlet with an authentic fondness for good food and the people who create it. There are lots of other avenues to get your local “food fix” now, but each seems to have a hysterical sameness where chefs are either beatified as the “new” best chef, the next food TV star or a community saint or sinner. Or, it’s a place where we’re all panting for the new door to open.

Chefs and the professional support teams that work in restaurants are talented, hardworking men and women. With the demise of the Phoenix and Stuff, you’ve lost a chance to get to know them simply as real people who love to feed you, the no-judgment zone where a chef could read and could feel good about a colleague or competitor’s success.

A thank-you to Stephen Mindich and the entire Boston Phoenix team. You gave Boston’s culinary community a virtual clubhouse. Thanks for keeping the lights on for so long.

Top photo: Magazine covers from the Boston Phoenix, which included Stuff Magazine. Courtesy of Boston Phoenix

I crushed some of the red berries by mistake as I climbed into the seat of Clark Mackenzie’s white panel truck. It wasn’t exactly my fault. I was overcome by the scent. Pine and sap mixed with a cup of very stale black coffee. The truck belched a nuanced aroma of New England holiday, dozens of handmade pine Christmas wreaths, layered on top of fresh-cut trees. Welcome to the traveling office of the Sheffield Wreath Co. of Sheffield, Vt., where Mackenzie has been making handmade wreath for 27 years. By deft foot action, I didn’t spill the black coffee on a bag of red ribbons.

I’d agreed to spend the afternoon with Mackenzie, riding shotgun as he delivered and installed wreaths and trees. I’d met him when he was delivering a wreath to Rialto in Cambridge, Mass., the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. On a whim, I bought one too and pocketed his business card.

We stood in the lobby of the Charles Hotel as Mackenzie manically but methodically wired up my wreath, artfully burying crimson berries among the green branches. In the three minutes, I learned Mackenzie had been up since 5 a.m., driving around greater Boston, installing his handmade Christmas wreaths all over town, on front doors and hotel entrances, on real estate offices and private homes. I learned that he has been doing it for 27 years (“All but one year!”), collecting branches near his home in Sheffield; and that the Sheffield Wreath Co. was one of the only “male” wreath companies in New England. (“It’s an occupation that women dominate in the Northern Kingdom because it is tedious and repetitive.”) I also learned that Mackenzie went to the Culinary Institute of America and was a classmate of Anthony Bourdain and washed pots and pans for the infamously nasty French chef-instructor described in “Kitchen Confidential.” One of the times he got kicked out of the CIA was for wearing his black chef’s pants to class when they were still coated with flour. Mackenzie calls himself a “dropout,” not just from cooking. “But pretty much everything except for the wreaths.”

Making wreaths can be painstaking and painful

A wreath made by Clark Mackenzie. Credit: Louisa Kasdon

The wreaths are a pretty big deal. Especially if you are making 800, and every one of them by hand, as Mackenzie does. When Mackenzie and his brothers decided to start a wreath company, they had to wheedle the know-how from a local Vermont lady. It’s tedious work for sure, and even a little painful. “I don’t use gloves, so I get a lot of ouches,” Mackenzie says. It’s also very time-compressed, the essence of seasonal employment. The branches are collected in the fall, before the snow season, and have to be woven into wreaths before they begin to dry out. In the Northern Kingdom of Vermont, that means the window is six weeks max to collect the brush before the snow buries it all.

Mackenzie doesn’t have a tree farm, so he collects the pine boughs wherever he can find them. “By the highway, in the forest, in the back yard. I get some from friends with tree farms who are trimming natural pine-trees into the classic Christmas tree shape.” During “wreath season,” i.e. November, Mackenzie’s day starts at 4 a.m. He sits down in his swivel chair; sets up his plywood frame; assembles his needle nose pliers, wire, and stapler; and puts on his ear buds. “Books on tape are a wreath-maker’s best friend,” he says. Right now each wreath takes about 20 minutes, a little slower than a few years ago — but much faster than at the beginning. “I try to keep a positive attitude. It took me forever to make each one until I got the hang of it.” Mackenzie used to make his wreaths with white bows and red bows until one customer married a Buddhist who was repelled by the white ribbon, a symbol of death in Asian culture. “Other than that, everyone pretty much likes the red. And everyone likes wreaths. They are Christian and pre-Christian, pagan even. A wreath is about holiday, not religion.”

He’s skeptical of people who say they buy their trees from the Boy Scouts, “a paramilitary organization” in his opinion, and gets riled when people confuse wreaths and trees from Vermont with wreaths and trees from Maine. “Maine trees are heresy. It’s like the Red Sox and the Yankees.”

Mackenzie fills his truck the day after Thanksgiving and heads into the city, where he bunks in with a friend until just before Christmas. Over the years, Mackenzie has built a pretty stable core group of customers for his wreaths in the Boston area. He doesn’t have a website, or even an email account. His card has only a name and a cellphone number. He simply arrives at homes and offices, kitchen and lobbies with his wreaths and trees. “People know to expect me,” he says. Sometimes customers change jobs, get divorced, even die from one year to the next, but by the holiday Mackenzie is sold out, and everyone knows the Sheffield Wreath Co. will be back next year.

Top photo: Clark Mackenzie hangs one of the hundreds of wreaths he makes and delivers each year. Credit: Louisa Kasdon

Sheffield Wreath Co. (“So Fresh You Can Smell the Difference”) can be reached at P.O. Box 309, Sheffield, VT. Phone: 802-626-5412 Cell: 857-366-0548

Confession: It isn’t even my recipe. It’s from my former stepdaughter. She was mostly nice to me, occasionally nasty, and always an excellent chef. Originally, I think she inherited the recipe from her grandmother, my former husband’s mother. So you can see that even with all the family drama that hinted I’ve at, I know this is the best noodle pudding in the universe. Topping even my Aunt Grace’s.

Noodle pudding. Credit: Bethany Versoy

More authentic American Jewish families call it lokshen kugel, which translates from German (with a few spelling corrections) right back to noodle pudding. Years back, I was surprised when a friend made “lokshen kugel” for an early school holiday potluck, and when I tasted it, it was just plain old noodle pudding. I hear that some Jewish families make a savory noodle pudding. In my world, that would be heresy. Or Italian.

Noodle pudding is a dessert disguised as a side dish. Buttery, crunchy, sweet and cream cheesey, and with all the blessed mouth-feel of baked noodles. I’ve made it for every Jewish holiday (save Passover) for 20 years and for countless other events when I want to contribute something substantial and wonderful that cements my reputation as a cooking hero.

Noodle Pudding

The noodle pudding freezes well, and the recipe can easily be doubled. And yes, you can make it with gluten-free noodles and/or with low-fat dairy products. But then it will simply be a very good noodle pudding, not the world’s best.

Ingredients

1 pound of broad egg noodles

4 eggs, beaten

½ cup of sugar  (add more to taste)

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 tablespoon salt

Cinnamon to taste

1 (16-ounce) container of cottage cheese

1 (16-ounce) container of sour cream

8 ounces of cream cheese

1 cup of raisins (blonde or dark)

2 tablespoons butter (more if desired)

1 (10- to 12-ounce) jar of apricot jam

1 cup of slivered almonds

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.

2. Cook egg noodles and drain.

3. Beat the eggs till they are lemon yellow, then add sugar, vanilla, salt and cinnamon.

4. Mix all the dairy products in a large bowl, then add the egg mixture, raisins and egg noodles. (The warmth of the noodles will make the entire mixture easy to combine.)

5. Dot the top with butter, then spread apricot jam on top with a pastry brush.

6. Sprinkle the top evenly with slivered almonds.

7. Bake for one hour at 350 F, or until golden brown.

Top photo: A slice of the world’s best noodle pudding. Credit: Bethany Versoy

Turkey conversation season is upon us again, with our annual quest for a crisp, moist, perfect bird. Some swear by brining the turkey (or any poultry) in a bucket with spices and salt to improve flavor and texture. I’m a skeptic with a standard home kitchen. Our family is big, and so are the birds we roast to feed them. Do I really need to give my 18-pound turkey an overnight beauty bath? Is the mess worth the work?

I asked Chef Tony Maws, chef owner of the award-winning bistro Craigie on Main in Cambridge, Mass. Maws, a recent James Beard Best Chef Northeast winner, is known around town as a perfectionist. One of the pioneers of the locavore movement and nose-to-tail cooking, in his early days Maws was known as a chef whose standards were so high that local suppliers wept during deliveries to his restaurant as he inspected and refused their local bounty. Maws has mellowed a bit. But he’s still a stickler known for serving perfect poultry. He seemed like a good person to ask about brining.

It turns out that although he has a great brining recipe (see below), he doesn’t think it’s a make-or-break step for a turkey. He gets dozens of frantic calls from his regular diners around Thanksgiving, he says. “Foil, not foil? High temp, low temp? Turn the bird midway, or roast it standing up? Almost none of it matters since there is so much variability in cooking a turkey. But a lot of people do ask me about brining.”

Brining a turkey is

just one way to cook a quality bird

Maws thinks brining is just one of the things you can do to turn out a terrific bird. Brining, he explains, is an attempt to put two things into equilibrium by osmosis: the natural salinity of the fresh bird and the higher salt of the brine. The idea is that you can equalize the saline content in the bird and keep it moist and juicy and add a flavor kick to a pretty, plain protein without adding more salt.  “The hard thing is that you can’t taste what is happening to the raw bird as it as brining, so you sort have to take it on faith.”

Maws says it never hurts a turkey — or any poultry­­ — to be brined for six to eight hours or overnight, and it helps even more if you can rest the bird for another day out of the brine before serving, but he doubts it is practical for most households to add two more steps to a busy holiday ritual. “Brining is an effective tool, but sort of a hassle for a standard home kitchen. Very few people have the space to refrigerate a big turkey in a bucket of water overnight. Not everyone has a restaurant-scale walk-in.”

Tony Maws. Credit: Michael Piazza

“Look,” he says, rubbing his beard stubble with a faintly piratical smile, “I know it’s sacrilegious, but the idea of cooking a whole turkey in a standard stove and having it come out perfectly done is ridiculous. Breasts and legs need different amounts of time for optimal doneness. Even if you set your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit the temperature even in a fancy home oven fluctuates between 325 degrees and 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Between the corners of the oven and the contours of the bird, it’s always a different temperature at any given moment.”

Maws says when the breast is done, the legs still need some time. If you use the internal temperature of the legs as a guide, you dry out the breast. He’s given up on roasting a whole turkey and prefers to buy a good bird, break it down and roast it in pieces, removing the breast from the oven and letting the legs spend more time in the heat. According to Maws, the ideal interior temperature for a turkey breast is 143 F (62 C) and for the legs it is 150 F (66 C). As you can tell, he’s a pretty precise guy.

His suggestion for diehards married to the ooh-aah public presentation of a pristine golden bird: “Bring it out, show it around, take it back to the kitchen and put the legs back in the oven for 10 more minutes. That’s what the French do.”

Maws’ inflexible turkey rule: “Buy a good turkey. I’m not trying to be hippy-dippy, but all the things you read about free-range and natural birds are true. Turkeys are large, lean birds, much leaner than a plump, fat chicken, so you want to pay special attention to how the turkeys are raised and fed. The better and healthier the bird, the better the texture and flavor.”

Tony Maws’ Poultry Brine

Ingredients

5 liters of water, or less if you are using a brining bag for a 12- to 14-pound turkey

60 grams kosher salt

11 grams Kombu

1 teaspoon dried thyme

2 teaspoons coriander seeds

2 teaspoons fennel seeds

2 allspice berries

2 juniper berries

1 teaspoon chili flakes

2 cloves

Directions

Mix all the ingredients together in a bucket or container large enough to accommodate the turkey. Add the bird once thoroughly mixed.

Photo: A Thanksgiving turkey. Credit: iStockPhoto

This was the year I stopped waiting for the apples on my apple tree to turn red. After 20-odd years of dumping squirrel-nibbled greenish apples in the trash, I finally realized that my tree was a Golden Delicious apple tree. Not a good, old New England bright-red McIntosh (or, even better, a crisp tangy Baldwin). But still edible and natural, and you can’t get more locally sourced than my own backyard. The apples I’d been letting the animals eat for years, waiting patiently through September, then October, keeping hope alive until mid-November for a hint of a blush, turned out to be perfectly adequate yellow apples.

Abundance of apples

Clearly, I have no green thumb. Even still it is a little hard to admit to my willful avoidance of the facts. Until this summer. Our gentle 2012 winter and hot summer advanced the New England harvest so that apple-picking season is upon us, weeks ahead of schedule. My husband handed me the basket. I had a choice: Either I picked up the considerable mound of apples under the tree, or let the grass guy mow them into smithereens. I trudged out to the yard, cute little basket over my arm, sick of hearing about the guy and his mower and what a mess it would make. In minutes the basket was full, even after chucking the apples with teeth marks and brown spots. Some were kind of small, sad and knobby-looking. But many were big and round as a prizefighter’s fist.

The apples were ripe and ready. When I bit into one, it tasted sweet. Not tart and refreshing like a Mac or a Cortland. But hey, these are mine and I love all my children. In 10 minutes I had three bushels (or more or less because I truly don’t know exactly what a bushel is). I started to think about what to do with my homegrown bounty. I’ve always been a red apple kind of cook and felt struck dumb by the idea of cooking with gold. I called my friend Linda whom I always call to resolve any personal crisis, especially if it involves production-scale cooking. She wasn’t home. I left a message of desperation on her voice mail. “What do I do with three bushels of yellow apples?”  Her voice mail called mine while I was in the shower. “Applesauce, apple butter and apple chutney. And Julia’s recipe for tarte tatin.”

I began to work through my stack of cookbooks. Julia, of course. But also Amy Traverso’s “Apple Lover’s Cookbook,” where I found a great apple crumble recipe (her Italian grandmother’s); an old “Joy of Cooking” with several recipes for apple butter; and an online recipe from Ina Garten recipe for apple chutney.  My friend Bonnie Shershow, a professional jam maker and founder of Bonnie’s Jam’s, counseled me against the apple butter. “Too fussy. Too much constant stirring and puréeing. You’ll hate the whole process.” I crossed the apple butter off my list and set aside my rubber-banded copy of “Joy of Cooking.”

Preparing apple dishes

I made apple fritter and pork loin with mustard and apples, put apple in a coleslaw that I was taking to my mother’s, experimented with a gluten-free recipe for apple crisp (not all that bad). But I fell in love with the idea of apple chutney. Suddenly, I could see rows of shiny Mason jars with ribbons and a cute label: Apple Chutney, Grown and Bottled in Cambridge, MA. Hostess gifts and Christmas presents solved for the next six months.

Apple chutney. Credit: Louisa Kasdon

The chutney was a great success: Easy to make — and filling the house with a tangy, home-harvest mustard perfume. Sweet and hot, sticky and silky at the same time. Great with the roast chicken I tucked in the oven and easily a proud effort that I will be bearing with great pride, a shiny jar with a cute, kitschy label and an apple green ribbon whenever we are invited to sup with friends and family, from now until the jars run out. But oops, they may not run out so fast. I forgot. The tree is still full of apples. My apple-picking days are not yet numbered. Time to pick the apples.

Apple Chutney

With a nod to Ina Garten’s recipe for Granny Smith apple chutney, I took a few liberties, making it spicier and more tangy to correct for sweeter golden apples.

Ingredients

12 Golden Delicious apples, cored, peeled and half-inch diced

2 cups chopped onions

4 tablespoons minced fresh ginger

2 cups fresh orange juice

1½ cups cider vinegar

2 cups dark brown sugar, packed

1 tablespoon whole dried mustard seed

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

2 tablespoons kosher salt

2 red bird’s eye chilies, seeded and chopped (optional)

2 cups raisins (golden or dark)

 Directions

For the chutney:

1. Combine the apples, onion, ginger, orange juice, cider vinegar, brown sugar, mustard seed, red pepper flakes, salt and chopped chilies in a large saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium high heat, stirring occasionally.

2. Reduce heat to low and simmer for an hour or less until most of the liquid has evaporated. (Do not overcook. Mind that the apples keep their shape).

3. Remove pot from heat and stir in the raisins.

Covered and cooled, the chutney will last in the refrigerator for two weeks, more or less.

For the canning:

I do the canning the simple way: Cool the chutney, spoon it into Mason jars with new lids and place the jars in a pot of water that comes halfway up the jars. Boil for 15-20 minutes and remove jars with tongs or jar-lifters.

Top photo: Just-picked apples on a bench. Credit: Louisa Kasdon

For consumers who want to fuse their purchasing decisions with their social consciousness, buying green and righteous just got a whole lot more confusing. There’s a skirmish going on within the fair trade community, between the good guys and, well, the good guys. When every organization involved in the controversy has a word like “fair” or “equal” in their mission statements, you know you have a problem.

Fair trade certification was born out of the concept that there is a route out of rural poverty that doesn’t require aid from donors, just better access to the marketplace by paying farmers directly and avoiding the middleman. For decades, the fair trade designation has been granted to individual rural farmers and small farmers’ co-ops that grow commodity goods such as coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate, bananas and spices and provide direct access to the marketplace. Larger estates and plantations could not be certified as fair trade, a core principle that is now beginning to change. On Jan. 1, Fair Trade USA, the largest independent certifying organization in the U.S. — with an annual reach of more than 30 million consumers — announced that it was leaving FLO-CERT, the leading international fair trade organization, and would certify products grown on plantations and estates in addition to small farmers farming co-ops.

It’s a mess in the making. Twenty-plus Fair Trade USA members resigned. Petitions were flying back and forth over the blogosphere, representatives of the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Small Fair Trade Producers (CLAC) wrote protest letters, international nonprofit membership rosters are still rattling, and globally responsible corporations such as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Equal Exchange coffee, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Honest T all felt compelled to take sides.

Organic cacao grower Eusebio Laron Torres belongs to an agrarian coffee cooperative in Peru. Credit: Courtesy of Equal Exchange

A rare good-guy CEO-to-CEO fight made it out into the public sphere with a full-color, full-page advertisement in the May 20 edition of the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press.  The ad was signed by Bob Everts and Rink Dickinson, co-presidents of the Massachusetts-based Equal Exchange coffee company, and written to Larry Blanford (“& Friends”), CEO of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, based in nearby Waterbury, Vt., urging Blanford  (“& Friends”) to leave the American-based nonprofit Fair Trade USA and rejoin the international organization, FLO-CERT. “We ask you to open your eyes to the controversy raging around you,” the public letter concluded. Rodney North, spokesperson for Equal Exchange, explained the objective behind the open letter: “We’re not actually asking GMCR to do anything new. Rather we’re urging them to return to the international fair trade system that they had always been a part of until their certifier, FT USA, left it so as to unilaterally make up a new set of rules.”  In 1986, Equal Exchange introduced the first fair trade coffee to American supermarkets and coffee shops. Today, the company is an employee-owned corporation that works with 40 small farmer cooperatives in 25 countries.

Understandably, Fair Trade USA founder and President Paul Rice has a different perspective. He characterizes the current back and forth not as a fissure in the fair trade community but as a “healthy” and necessary consequence of growth, in the tradition of the growth pains for the organic movement 10 years ago. “If fair trade stays small, its impact stays small. If we expand and adapt fair trade principles and take them mainstream to the Starbucks, the Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Costco, Dunkin’s — we can have a bigger impact and raise more people out of poverty.” Rice estimates that 2 billion people worldwide live in poverty, and fair trade is only affecting 10 million farmers. “It’s too tiny a fraction.”  The pressure to expand and adapt the fair trade certification, Rice says, came from rural farmers, from NGOs and from his hundreds of farmers and trading partners worldwide. Rice founded his nonprofit 14 years ago after 11 years of working and living in rural Nicaragua. What began as a “scrappy little nonprofit with a total team of one” now has 800 partners, and the fair trade certification label is recognized by 34% of Americans consumers. “But that’s not enough.”

A certified fair trade product typically sells at a premium to the consumer, a differential hopefully netting a living wage for the farmer. U.S. sales of fair trade products topped $1.5 billion last year, which yielded a $250 million premium to the farmers. Coffee beans are one of the most successful fair trade crops, with mega giants like Starbucks regularly featuring a fair trade bean option. And yet only 5% of the coffee market in the U.S. is for fair trade coffee.

Fair trade began as a social justice movement in the 1940s and has become a player in the global commodities market. The fair trade movement is a large and very international coalition. As an example, FLO-CERT, the leading international fair trade certifying body, represents 70 countries and has its headquarters in Germany with offices in India, Costa Rica and South Africa. FLO-CERT employs 100 fully   trained auditors in 50 countries. When Fair Trade USA resigned its membership in FLO-CERT, the resignation created shockwaves, Rodney North of Equal Exchange says. “FT USA sold out. One small peasant is a farmer. One thousand small farmers is an institution.” So far, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has yet to respond to the open letter to its CEO asking him to withdraw his company from FT USA. Whole Foods, Starbucks and Coke’s Honest Tea brand have all reaffirmed their support of FT USA.

Fair Trade USA has just unveiled a new black and green logo to be displayed on the more than 100,000 food and personal-care products and ingredients it certifies in the United States. The takeaway to the socially conscious consumer? Stay tuned. It’s never easy being green. So many shades of gray get in the way.

Top photo: Organic cacao grower Julia Najarro la Rosa in a coffee cooperative in Peru. Credit: Courtesy of Equal Exchange