This month marks the end of a groundbreaking entrepreneurial food initiative known as the Forage Underground Market.
For three years, the Underground Market served as a roving San Francisco meeting place for budding food entrepreneurs and their hip and hungry customers.
A $5 membership fee would gain a person entrance to the market. Once inside, members would be treated to a variety of foods prepared and sold by a rolling list of unlicensed vendors. These Underground Markets could draw more than 2,000 people.
The New York Times profiled the Underground Market not once but twice, characterizing it as “a tribal gathering of young chefs, vendors and their iron-stomached followers [that is] remaking the traditional farmers market as an indie food rave.” Copycat markets popped up as far away as Amsterdam.
The Underground Market will cease to exist this month because—as you probably guessed by now—it fell victim to California regulators.
The California Department of Public Health and San Francisco Fire Department shuttered the market in June 2011. They hit Forage and its founder and leader, Iso Rabins, with a cease and desist order that forbade Forage and the vendors who took part in the Underground Market from “donating, giving away, selling, trading, or other means of sharing food with/to the public until approval and permits are issued[.]”
Rabins, like me, is skeptical that government permitting and food inspections are a necessary precondition to safer food.
“The idea that what makes food safe is at the local level is not inspectors, but the inherent responsibility and care created by the local community,” Rabins wrote recently. “I think we proved that point. With over 50,000 people eating everything from Webber grill fired pizza to pulled pork, there was not one illness reported to the health department.”
I doubt this was due to any "iron stomach" the New York Times claims the Underground Market customers each possess.
