“We have 12 percent unemployment in the state of California,” said vendor Shakirah Simley, after asking every other food vendor in the room to stand up. “What are we doing to encourage small entrepreneurs like these?”

The consensus at the meeting seemed to be: not much, except from not arresting them. But there was a certain giddiness and sense of utopian purpose not often on view at city meetings. “This is activating streets, parks, and nightlife,” said Larry Badner, zoning administrator for the city. “I’ve eaten street food. I love Fabric 8.”

“I would like to add that San Francisco is seen as America’s food capital,” said Dufty.

The vendors came across as slightly more dour, and anxious, than their proposed regulators. Among the suggestions posed by the vendors: allow smaller vendors to pool together and apply for a single permit for street festivals, take into account event duration when handing out permits (“We don’t need on-site heating, refrigeration, or bathrooms for a two-hour event,” one vendor said. “Trust me. We use the bathroom before the event starts”) to relax the regulation forbidding a food cart from being located within 1500 feet of a school for carts that sell healthy food, and to build a centralized commissary that would provide the cleaning and refrigerated storage facilities required for licensed food carts.

More than any other issue, vendors were focused on the desire that one city department, preferably the Department of Public Health, be put in charge of all food cart permits. Currently, the department handing out the permit varies based on whether the cart will be located on private, public, port, or park land.

One thing was certain. No one wanted the police handing out food permits any longer (they currently handle requests for carts located on public land.) “You just don’t want a homicide detective telling you where you can put your business at,” said one vendor.

“It’s inconsistent,” said Matt Cohen, who runs the San Francisco cart project. “You can got at different times of the day, talk to different people, and have a completely different permitting experience.” Liba, Cohen said, called off their search for a permit to locate on public land in San Francisco after they were told that not only couldn’t they sell food within 100 feet of a bricks and morter business that sold a similar product, but that their falafal sandwiches would be considered “similar product” to, and thereby competitive with, a business nearby selling coffee, or soda. Other vendors complained about the network of hot dog carts throughout the city that are grandfathered in to less stringent regulations, “They don’t have the same positive spirit that the new carts do.”

Larry Bain, of Let’s Be Frank hotdogs was one of the few people at the hearing with an actual cart permit. He described being turned down for a permit to locate a cart at the San Francisco Mint. “I had been assured that I would get this permit,” says Bain. “I had letters supporting the cart from every neighborhood business within 1,000 feet. It was denied on the grounds that similar food was being served at a nearby business. When I asked the person who denied my permit to state what that “similar” food was they declined to state what food was too similar. They did imply that they considered “similar” food to be food of any kind. I was told that I would get a chance to appeal, but that appeal never happened. I found myself out an $800 permit fee and a lot of time.”

Paula Tejeda, owner of the empanada business Chile Lindo, described herself as someone who initially sold food on the street, and eventually migrated into opening a permanent space. “Street food is not new to the Mission,” she said. “What is new is that white collar professionals are doing it.” White collar or not, though, she said that street food entrepreneurs were barely getting by, and that the city should take that into account while ticketing and handing out permits.

Bevan Dufty politely thanked everyone for coming around and promised to return in two months with some legislation for all to review. He did not specify what that new legislation would be.

Richard Lee, of the Department of Public Health, offered perhaps the most practical address of the day. “I know that there are carts out there operating without permits,” said Lee. “We can’t inspect them because we don’t know where they are.”

“Keep food below 40, or above 135 degrees,” he said, with no small amount of intensity. “Make sure you use an umbrella or a roof to keep things from falling in the food. Use proper handwashing.”

On 10:30 this morning, in city hall room 250, the city of San Francisco officially begins its debate on how best to harness the city’s widely-publicized street food movement and make the permitting process sane. In its favor: It has given talented, spirited, but underfunded cooks the chance to investigate the demand for their wares. It has makes San Francisco seem exciting and hip. It has prompted visits from Brian Boitano. It has given drunk people easily accessible food at times and locations where a licensed seller would fear to tread. In its disfavor, there is this: It’s totally in violation of California health code.

In the community of street cart owners, rumors abound that this hearing is a move by the local restaurant community to bar the gate against interlopers. This is not true, according to Kevin Westlye, Executive Director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. “I did not specifically approach Bevan Dufty to hold a hearing,” says Westlye. “As far as I know, he put this on the table all on his own.”

“We are monitoring the situation. Our members are not opposed to the concept. I’ve had as many members tell me that they’re planning their own food carts as I’ve had phoning in complaints.”

Meanwhile, Bevan Dufty reports that he is just trying to stop that thing that happened with the popsicle vendors from happening again. “Fifteen years ago the city was picking on the palateros,” says Dufty. “Suddenly we had popsicle salesmen protesting on the steps of city hall. I do not want another wagon train like that to happen again.” Dufty says that he called for the hearing not because there is a problem with the city’s burgeoning street food entrepreneurs, but because he finds that the current laws regulating street food to be outdated. “How do we decide the balance between what is in the public interest and what is in the merchants’ interest?” Dufty says, expansively. ” We need to find a balance.”

Unfortunately, isn’t much that Dufty, or anyone else in the city, can do about the laws that are currently on the books. The State of California passed a set of street food regulations in 2007 that make it extremely difficult for food carts not already grandfathered in to the system to operate on public land – which is a lot of land in San Francisco. Among the rules: each push cart must have a three-basin sink with running water and a foot of drain board on either side. Push carts with grills must also have an air filtration system. “They are state regulations – not local ones,” says Rajiv Bhatia, the director of Occupational and Environmental Health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “We just implement them.”

“The regulations were clearly written with the strong influence of the National Restaurant Association and the California Restaurant Association,” says Larry Bain, of Let’s Be Frank hotdogs. “They essentially make selling food out of anything smaller than a truck illegal. And a truck is going to cost around $50,000. Used. I’m the luckiest man in the world because I operate my hot dog cart on federal park land. Which is not to say that I still have to deal with these incredibly stringent, insane laws – I can’t purchase any supplies at a farmer’s market, for example.” As a city, San Francisco can only alter California’s street food laws in one way: by making them stricter.

But San Francisco has a history of being selective about what laws it feels like following. Marijuana is more or less legal here for those who have prescriptions, simply because the city has decided to be selective in its enforcement of state and federal laws.

The hope – quiet, but fervent, is that now that the city looks to be switching the permit process for food carts on public land from the department of public works to the department of public health, getting a permit will be a simpler matter than it once was, because actual health officials will be in charge of the process, and will perhaps not care so much about sink dimensions if they feel that the spirit of the law is being adhered to.

“In my opinion,” says Bain, “the Department of Public Health has a great perspective on how access to local, fresh food ties in the local economy, and to health of the city. They understand that the most dangerous part of the food chain is not what happens in the kitchen – it’s what happens on the farm, or in the slaughterhouse. Behaving as though it is otherwise is like putting perfume instead of taking a shower.”

And there is, says Bain, such a thing as too little enforcement. “In Los Angeles, they had a history of cracking down on Latino-run street food, but once white people started selling it, there was almost no enforcement. Now you have these traffic jams caused by 17 food trucks descending on Wilshire Boulevard at once, undercutting each other and, ultimately, their own business. And you have egregious exploitation of undocumented workers by owners who rent the trucks to them by the day, for extortionate rates.”

This could be prevented in San Francisco, Bain says, by including a commissary in the redevelopment plan for the city’s wholesale produce market. Since every mobile food vendor with a permit needs to store their supplies in a refrigerated space and clean their vehicle every evening, a city-run commissary would provide a centralized location to keep an eye on unethical practices – labor-related, food-related or otherwise.

Still, with the way things currently stand. It’s hard to beat the financial incentives to stay illegal. Space in commercial kitchens rents out at around $150 an hour in San Francisco, and spots at more affordable spots like La Cocina are highly competitive. Start-up costs for illegal food cart run at a few hundred dollars, including ingredients. Bain estimates that going through the permit process for his first hot dog cart (which was relatively simple, since it was located on private property) cost him about $5,000. The permits for the second one, in Crissey Field, cost him around $10,000. “If I get in trouble,” he says,”I have more to lose. I’ve been in the food business for years. My livelihood is at stake.”

The future, says Bhatia, may involve city support for helping people through the permit process, as well as subsidized commercial kitchens and more business incubators like la Cocina, as a way of providing an alternative to illegality.”We do want to facilitate the growth of local, independent street food,”Bhatia says.” But we also want people to understand the value of regulation. We don’t know if more street food is going to pose a greater health risk. What we do know is that if someone gets sick from street food, it will kill the industry.”

“If there’s a crackdown,” says Ben, of the Gumbo Cart. “I’ll just go back to graphic design full-time.” It’s a cold night, and Ben is ladling out paper bowls of gumbo to passersby. He attributes the boom in street food to one thing: The recession – the force that originally drove him and his grandfather’s gumbo recipe out onto the city’s streets. “People are looking for extra money,” he says. And they have a lot of time on their hands.”

Ben has yet to meet any health officials during his months of gumbo ladling. Or cops, for that matter. “The police have more important things to think about. Like crime. It’s like if a person jaywalks,” says Ben, warming up to the issue. “The car driver may get mad and say, “Hey, you aren’t following the rules.” But it’s like ‘Hey man, you’ve got a car.”

Petitioners to the food auditions for the Underground Market will find themselves looking up at an undistinguished Victorian in the Mission District. A disgruntled-looking roommate is sitting on the porch in the late afternoon twilight. As people approach, hesitantly, he jerks his thumb in the direction of the door. “There,” he says, without further explanation.

Inside, there is a high-ceilinged dining room. A volunteer, Marissa Hockenberry is seated at a kitchen table piled high with boxes and packages. She is typing furiously on a laptop.

The doorbell rings. A woman in a Google hoodie enters, bearing Tupperware. She seems nervous.
“This?” she says “Is a Vietnamese pancake?”
“Excellent,” says Hockenberry, briskly. “Just set it on the table.”
The woman looks unnerved. “You’re not going to eat it now?”
“We will taste everything later,” says Hockenberry, not unkindly. Later it will be revealed that she has a degree in business administration (with a focus on the hospitality industry.) This will come as a surprise to no one. “Just set it down.”
The woman takes it out of the Tupperware and leaves it on the table, uncertainly. “It’s better when it’s hot?” she says. “So maybe…heat it up before you try it?”
“Thank you so much!” says Hockenberry.

To get into the Underground Farmer’s Market you have to do two things: pay a $50 fee, and prove that your food is delicious. Food auditions: As a concept, it seems utterly simple, and yet also like the cleverest way imaginable to get people to bring free cupcakes to your house and leave them there. Were it not for Hockenberry’s professionalism, this would feel even more like a scam.

The doorbell rings again. It’s a man, carrying an unmarked glass bottle full of yellow liquid.
Hockenberry looks up. “Kombucha?” she says hopefully.
“Hard cider,” says the man. “Made with apples from Woodleaf Farm.”

“Set it on the table,” chirps Hockenberry. “We’ll be in touch!”

The doorbell rings again. It’s a middle aged couple. The man pulls apart the lid of his Tupperware with a flourish. “This,” he says, theatrically. “Is salumi.”
“Excellent,” says Hockenberry. “If you’ll just set it on the table…”

“Oh, just one taste,” says the man smoothly, reaching into the container, and peeling a ribbon of meat off of a sheet of waxed paper.

“This is mortadella.” He dangles it in front of Hockenberry, expectantly. After a pause, she takes it.
“That is delicious.”
“And this,” he says, reaching further down into the container, and peeling up a dark red oval, “is sopresetta. I cure this with juniper berries. Juniper is not normally used as a flavoring in America.”

He shrugs. “Except in gin, of course.”

Behind her the roommate, now wearing only a towel, stomps through the kitchen. No one looks up. All eyes are on the meat.

The doorbell rings again. It is a woman, bearing boxes and boxes of cakes.

The doorbell rings. It is a man with a single, foil-wrapped, tofu mole taco.

A group of volunteers begin to trickle in from the back of the house, where Iso Rabins, the creator of the market, has been conducting an orientation. They look at the cakes with a hopeful ferocity. “Go ahead,” Rabins says, laconically. “Just make sure there’s some left. Anyone want some wine?”

He saunters over to the table, and picks up the bottle of yellow liquid. “What is this?”

“Hard cider,” says Hockenberry. “Do we sell alcohol?”

Rabins looks faintly regretful. “No. It’s just so much more…illegal.”

Iso Rabins, a professional forager, started the Underground Market after he tried, unsuccessfully, to get into any local farmer’s markets. “They would get really excited about it,” he says, “and then they would get thrown by the ‘wild’ thing.” Only two markets have occurred so far, but they’ve revealed a remarkable hunger among San Francisco residents for both a) selling food that they’ve made at home, and not in a licensed kitchen and b) buying and eating things made by people at their homes, and not in a commercially licensed kitchen. A hunger for what, under certain circumstances, might be described as a bake sale. Health inspection issues have thus far been averted by making the markets into a members-only “club” (sign-up is free, and takes place online), and by dropping the “Farmer” from the name (It turns out “Farmer’s Market” is a term that is legally controlled in the state of California.)

Back at the kitchen table, things have turned into a melee. The cakes are in fragments. Hands reach into a jar filled with peach halves floating in syrup and long, black vanilla beans, grab them, and down them like oysters. A popular frontrunner among the loot are some suspiciously professional-tasting espresso macaroons. A phone call reveals that they are Christopher David Macarons, and are indeed, made by a professional pastry chef. In a commercial kitchen, even. And they’re sold most days out of the Sandbox Bakery – an actual professional bakery, in Bernal Heights. “It seemed a little suspicious, just dropping off these macaroons at someone’s house,” says Katy David, partner in the macaroon business, and self-described “cubicle people” by day. “But it’s just so hard, getting into the farmer’s markets. It feels like you have to have a well-known name, or know somebody who knows somebody.”

Meanwhile, further discussion reveals the salumi maker, James Grossman, to be a near opposite: a passionate and entirely amateur cured meat enthusiast. When in the Bay Area, he forays into Oakland’s Chinatown to buy buckets of blood and other difficult-to-obtain animal parts (“At Ranch 99 they don’t keep the pigs heads in the case because they might scare children. But if you ask for it they’ll bring you one from the back.”) When not in California, he travels around Europe eating cured meat products (“The Tuscans love to cure with red wine. The Venetians use white. The south – they are affected by the Arabs and the Phoenicians. And the markets in the Rialto- that’s where God gets his groceries. Or her groceries.”) Until he ran across a mention of the market online, he never even thought about selling what he makes.

Now, he’s a man with plans. “Have you heard the saying, ‘In New York and in San Francisco, no matter what you make, they’ll buy it?’ I think I’ll make a neat pate with pork liver.”

The next Underground Market is this Saturday, March 6th, from 5 to 11 p.m. Details here.

Do restaurants nourish a neighborhood or fill it with empty calories? That was the issue at a community meeting Thursday night as residents debated a proposed ordinance to allow more eateries on Noe Valley’s commercial corridor.

A straw poll showed the nourish faction winning nearly two-to-one.

“More title companies, nail salons and insurance companies do not make a vibrant neighborhood. Restaurants do,” said a resident who identified himself only as Michael.

But Elanor Gerhardt, disagreed. “No one is going to starve,” she said referring to the 30 or so existing places to grab something to eat.

Noe Valley zoning laws currently bar new restaurants, but District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty introduced legislation into the Board of Supervisors that would lift the ban, yet still require approval by city planners before receiving permits.

It was unanimously recommended by the Planning Committee,  but a date has not been set for the Board’s vote.

Gerhardt, who has been involved in other neighborhood planning efforts, stressed the importance of getting the right mix  of businesses. “It always comes down to balance and stability. Always. That’s what we’re always aiming for on 24th Street,” she said.

Some residents questioned the notion that the notoriously risky restaurant business would solve  24th Street’s vacancy problem. The vast majority of restaurants don’t make it to their first anniversary.

Still, Carol Yenne, Vice President of the Noe Valley Merchants Association said the business community wants to see more restaurants. She also tried to allay fears that a stampede of new ones would overwhelm the commercial zone, “We aren’t expecting a flood of new restaurants to open,” she said. “We’ll be lucky if just one does.”

But several residents said existing restaurants already cause a host of annoyances including noise and odors for those who live on Jersey and Elizabeth streets, where the back entrances to many 24th Street restaurants are located.

“We’re bearing the brunt of the rest of the neighborhood’s desire to have restaurants and stroll around,” said Mary McFadden.

Others complained that the city doesn’t adequately enforce codes or respond to complaints. Jersey Street resident Joann Swanson said, “the key is addressing these problems up front so we don’t have this war zone mentality.”

Planning Department staff member Elizabeth Watty said that even under the proposed amendment, zoning rules would require any new restaurants to demonstrate that they would be “necessary and desirable” in the community.

When asked to define those terms, Watty said Planning Commissioners factor in issues like the number of already existing restaurants, community support and more restaurants  fit into the city’s overall  plan.  “[The amendment] doesn’t make the process any easier. It only opens the forum to future restaurants,” she said.

A piece of 2006 legislation sponsored by Dufty granted an exception to the ban that allowed three new restaurant permits to be issued. But only one restaurant, Contigo, has opened using the new permits. Two other eateries began the permitting process but have not yet finished it.

In the same way that you can find the party by heading for the kitchen, the best way to find snails is to look for what they like to eat. Iso Rabins has only just caught sight of the field of wild mallow greens, and he’s already whipped a plastic to-go container out of his messenger bag and is stabbing air holes in the top with his pocketknife.

By the time I catch up to him, he is addressing the underside of a tangle of leaves. “Hey buddy,” he says  to the gumball-sized snail clinging the bottom.

The snail is silent. It looks like it doesn’t even suspect that its destiny is now to be the amuse-bouche at the $100 a plate wild-foraged Valentine’s Day dinner that Rabins is cooking. In fact, it appears completely oblivious to the fact that it is being addressed at all.

Rabins takes the snail between thumb and forefinger, plucks it off the leaf, drops it into the to-go container, and closes the lid. “You have to make sure you put the lid on tight,” he says, “or they’ll pop it off and escape. They’re surprisingly strong…” He moves on another leaf, “Hey buddy…” I hear him say, faintly.

In the Pleistocene era, if you were a resident of the Mission you would hunt sabercats, dire wolves, sloths, mastodons, bears, mammoths, and prehistoric camels. If you were a resident of the Mission before the Spanish showed up, in the mid- 1700s, you would have fished, or hunted deer. After that, options narrow. You would still have fished, maybe rustled someone’s cattle. Today, if you are looking to catch a wild animal in the Mission and eat it, you’re down to squirrel, pigeon, raccoon, possum, and snail. It might be theoretically possible to catch a fish in Mission Creek, but you wouldn’t want to eat it.

And so it is snail – the slowest, and most readily huntable of the bunch. It’s not even native snail. California has more than 200 native snail species, but the vast majority of the Mission District snails are the invasive species Helix aspersa, closely related to the escargot. It was imported as food during the Gold Rush era and dumped after it failed to sell. Helix aspersa thrived, possibly for the same reason that it was thrown out in the first place: not many people in the Mission are especially excited about eating it.

Except for Rabins. The Mission District resident and ex-film student has built a business out of figuring out what in the neighborhood is consumable, and then using that information in different ways. He leads foraging tours. He has a list of subscribers that he delivers a box of wild food to. He throws underground dinner parties where the food is made from foraged ingredients. And so, eating the snail is more than just eating a snail – it’s linking people to the neighborhood in a new way. “You think about them as a pest, but then you find out that you can eat them,” says Rabins. “It’s just really exciting.”

Before Rabins started eating nature, he didn’t spend much time with it. In Vermont, where he grew up, wilderness was as he puts it “a place to get drunk with friends.” But when he moved to Eureka, he fell in with a group of professional mushroom foragers, and found a vocation. “I learned a little through books,” he says, “I read my Euell Gibbons – he’s pretty much the grandfather of modern foraging. But it never looks quite the same in a book as it does out in the real world. And so I mostly learned from other people.”

Among the things learned outside of the world of books was how little the foragers were being paid compared to the price the mushrooms they gathered ultimately sold for.  Rabins began to work as a middleman – cold-calling chefs, knocking on the back doors of restaurants, brokering deals.

There was a learning curve involved. “My original plan was to organize the foragers,” he says. “But it doesn’t really work that way. A forager doesn’t work the same way that a restaurant does.”

Instead, a forager might break an appointment one week, then call unexpectedly with a huge haul because they’d been up in the woods for two days on methamphetamine, a drug that, for all its faults, enables incredible bursts of compulsive searching behavior.   “It does makes them amazing foragers. They’ll be out looking for black trumpet mushrooms at night – you can hardly even see those during the day – and then come back with this huge bag of them,” says Rabins.  This cycle failed, however, to enable reliable business or social relationships.

So that was the first hitch. The second was when Rabins lost almost $2000 shipping a load of mushrooms cross-country. The mushrooms got stuck in transit in a hot warehouse on a hot weekend and essentially cooked from the inside. That was around the same time  he decided it was time to branch out.

“I can’t believe how many snails are out right now,” Rabins says happily. “I feel bad taking all these little ones” he continues. “I guess it’s just like “the fire that burns twice as bright for half as long.”

Rabins cuts off a tangle of radish greens and stuffs them into his bag. He’ll feed them to the snails later. Dusk is falling, and the snails are indeed suddenly abundant – oozing and munching their way across the greenery of the park. During the day, they’re hard to find – the sun dries them out, and so snails  hide in shady areas, pull back into their shells and secrete a membrane doorway that keeps them moist and away from the elements. “We would probably find as many if we went out at dawn,” adds Rabins. “But I don’t roll like that.”

Last year the SF Weekly ran a story about Rabins that got him banned from the Presidio. Since then, he’s asked reporters not to say where he forages. I will say this. We are in a park. In the Mission. Among the other things you can find in the Mission and eat: miner’s lettuce, chickweed, wild fennel, yerba buena, mushrooms (especially shaggy mane), oxalis, blood orange and meyer lemon trees, figs. Among the things that you might get from eating such things: leptospiriosis and/or that creepy feeling that you get when eating something that a dog might have peed on.

The first time I ever knowingly ate Mission-foraged food was years ago, when a video game programmer served a huge bowl of salad at a dinner party that she later revealed was full of miner’s lettuce gathered from the tiny wedge of park at Coso and Precita. As I set down my fork into my empty salad bowl, my mind drifted to my only memory of that park: escorting my roommate’s dog there so that said dog could do its business all over the foliage.

But I had already eaten the salad. It was delicious. I didn’t die. Leptospiriosis is rare – between 100-200 cases a year, according to the Center for Disease Control. And buying greens at the supermarket carries its risks too. I am still relieved to note that we forage in areas of the Mission that are off the well-trodden dog walking circuit, and far from industrial areas that may have heavy metals lingering in the soil.

Now that it’s almost pitch black, there’s a snail under nearly every leaf. In the indigo of nightfall, all that is visible is the beam of Rabins’ flashlight skittering along the undersides of the greenery. The only sound is that of the plastic container being peeled open, and snapped shut, the light briefly flashing through the shimmering web of snail mucus streaking the sides.

The quarry...

The darkness, plus the flashlight, is making us conspicuous. Time to go. “Heh,” says Rabins, as we walk past a stern-looking parks worker. “We’re leaving with a bag full of snails. And no one is the wiser.”

The next time I catch up with the snails, they’re diced and stuffed into mushroom caps. They taste like butter and garlic and something chewy – you’d never know that they were caught just a few minutes from here, or even that they’re snails. A crew of volunteers plates them up and carries them out to the center of a Mission District warehouse, where couples clasp hands across candlelit tablecloths.

The mood in the dining room is boozy, convivial, intermittently mutinous. The necessity of washing dishes in between most courses creates lag in the 10-course menu. At one point supplies run low, until resourceful on-site foraging reveals leftovers from a dinner party the prior evening. Problem solved.

A tipsy group gathers at the front of the building, where the owner of the building is explaining how when the warehouse was first built over a hundred years ago, boats would float past what is now the front door, and tie up at a dock outside. The creek, buried under Caesar Chavez street for decades now, is still running underneath us. Another fragment of the natural world folded into the city – running parallel to our own lives, largely unnoticed. A moment of quiet falls, then passes. The group returns to its wine and romancing, and in the kitchen one of the volunteers downs the last snail-stuffed mushroom.

Friends,  family and Mission Eyes gathered at the Mission Cultural Center Wednesday night to watch Papalote’s owners, Miguel and Victor Escobedo, take on Bobby Flay on the Food Network’s Burrito Throwdown.

Brooke Budner could see it out of the window of her apartment at 18th and Guerrero. It was hidden from street view – hemmed in on all sides of apartment buildings. It looked exciting. Abandoned. Alluring, even.

It was, she thought, a really nice patch of dirt.

Two years later, that patch of dirt is, improbably, a working farm. Budner, 29, and her farming partner, Caitlyn Galloway (also 29) grow a salad mixture composed of a different tiny, strong-tasting plants: among them arugula, mustard and fava greens, mache, spinach, tatsoi, pea shoots, fennel, chervil, lemon balm,  and thyme.

They are quietly, intensely nerdy about what they do. “Plants are biology and chemistry and ecology,” says Budner. “Every plant has its own needs and desires. I could spend the next five years studying this and still know nothing.” The two make compost with coffee grounds from Faye’s Video (a half block away), and hold up the shade cloth over planting beds with broken bicycle hubs from the Bike Kitchen (five blocks away). Periodically, an enthusiastic neighbor stops by and drops off a bucket of what is rhapsodically described as “the loveliest worm compost.”

As far as local food goes, it’s hard to get shorter than the distance between the greens raised by Little City Gardens and the plates at Bar Tartine: about two blocks. Budner and Galloway chose to grow greens and herbs because they’re a crop that can be grown in a very small space and sold for a good price because they’re fragile and don’t stay fresh for long after they’re picked. Attempts to grow other things on the site, like tomatoes, haven’t worked out.

“It was dismal,” says Budner. “We got them to grow, but it was so pathetic compared to what they’re like just a few miles inland. They need the warm nights to ripen.” At this point, one of the farthest-traveling components of the farm is Budner, who has since moved to the East Bay. She now rides the BART into the city to do the farming.

Community gardens are not uncommon in the Mission. What is uncommon is the notion of trying to make a living growing food in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the country. The landlord who owns the lot lets the two cultivate it for free. “We try to give him lettuce,” says Galloway, “but he won’t take it. He’s this nice, old-world Greek immigrant whose wife likes to garden.”

Budner and Galloway do share one key thing in common with other farmers in this country: they both have second jobs. Budner continues to work as an illustrator (she first became curious about farming while she was a printmaking student at the Rhode Island School of Design) and Galloway is a painter of wooden signs and hand-gilded apartment numbers (she also studied art, at UC Santa Barbara).

When not at their other jobs, they battle snails. And slugs. “Half of our harvest we just throw into the middle of the path because it’s slug-eaten to hell,” says Budner (It’s later eaten by people who don’t mind asthetically challenged greens – usually Budner and Galloway). And then there are other infestations, mysterious or not: “We never did figure out what those white specks on the plants in one section of the garden were,” says Galloway. “They came and then – fortunately – they didn’t stay.”

Visiting the farm involves going to an inconspicuous garage door, calling Budner or Galloway, and then winding your way through a  garage, past cars and bicycles and furniture, until you turn the knob of another, equally inconspicuous door and emerge into a patch of green so hemmed in by the buildings around it that it feels like being in the bottom of a terrarium. Or like any number of children’s books that involve stepping through doorways from one world into another.

It’s the kind of place that attracts pilgrims. Specifically, it attracts fresh-faced women in clogs and thrift-store cardigans, a group of whom arrive mid-interview and stare at Budner and Galloway with thinly disguised adoration. “Are you guys WOOFers?” asks Budner. They shake their heads “no” shyly.

Every world has its acronyms, and WOOFers – volunteers on a network called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms – work in exchange for room, board, and the chance to pick up new farming techniques. Budner spent many holidays WOOFing across the United States and, once, Italy. “So many ways to farm,” she says, dreamily. “Biointensive. Biodynamic. Permaculture. No-till.”

The group of visitors turn out to be from British Colombia. They launch into a story about their own efforts to piece together a farm out of the backyards of local volunteers, which spiraled into a nightmare of perpetual transit between sites – turning irrigation off and on, weeding, dealing with pests. “It’s just more time than you ever think to run back and forth and work all these tiny spaces,” one of them says. Budner and Galloway nod knowingly. “So many people want to farm in San Francisco,” says Budner. “There’s a lot of motivation and big ideas. There’s not much space.”

Space is an issue that preoccupies Budner and Galloway. In the winter, a long shadow cast by the apartment building at the southernmost end of the farm turns their usable space from a 50×50 patch of earth to 25×25. It’s been a struggle deliver the agreed-upon 5lbs of greens to Bar Tartine every week.

Getting a bank loan to expand would be impossible, but a week ago Budner and Galloway posted a business plan on a Kickstarter, a Brooklyn-based fundraising website. They asked for $15,000 to buy the shadecloth, irrigation equipment, tools, and time needed to seek out a new site and nearly quadruple their turf. In return, they promised seeds, silkscreened prints, handwritten postcards, and a choice of signs hand-painted by Galloway, including one that says, in flowing cursive script, “Let’s Figure This Out Together.” In seven days, the project has already raised more than $10,000. The garden, so close to the bustle of 18th street, feels secret, but it’s linked to an informal quasi-subterranean network of chefs and other farming enthusiasts that turns out to have a surprisingly wide reach.

Snails still come to eat the greenery, but Budner has begun to, in the French style, eat the enemy. “Put them in a jar of cornmeal for a week, and then cook them,” she says. “They’re actually pretty delicious.”

The café that appeared at Florida and 21^st St at the end of January was reminiscent of many popular Mission brunch spots:  mimosas flowed, a live band strummed soul tunes, and cups of artisan coffee and delicate muffins circulated among the waiting crowd.

Two key factors, however, set the affair apart: everything was free and it would disappear once the day was through. It was an All Access Café event, an experiment in community-supported dining.

“We were thinking about a way to address urban food justice, locally sourced food, and community building,” says Abigail Wick, a 27- year-old Mission-based writer and activist who, along with the late Kirsten Brydum, co-founded the project in the spring of 2008.

Their idea was to explore the intersections of food justice, local produce, and gift economies by transforming public spaces into temporary full-service gourmet restaurants that ask diners for donations or labor rather than delivering a check at the end of the meal.

The first two cafes held in May and July of 2008, were well attended, but both had problems. The most significant, Wick says, was accessibility. “We’re white kids in this community of artists and activists,” she says, “but we’re often serving these alternative ends that might not be rooted in true community outreach.”

A third event was planned for the fall of 2008, but was put on hold in the wake of Brydum’s murder. The young activist was on a two- month cross-country trip to research alternatives to capitalist economies, and made a stop in New Orleans. After a concert on the night of September 26^th, she biked home alone and was later found shot in the head, the victim of an apparent robbery.

Café organizers stepped away from the project for a year and a half following Brydum’s death, but supporters failed to forget it. “People would approach me,” recalls Wick, “and say ‘what about All Access Café? It was so important to me.’”

With the January brunch, All Access Café has come out of mourning, thanks in large part to 23-year-old activist, artist, and food-lover Nikole Lent.

“I felt that we owed it to Kirstin’s memory to keep the project going,” says Lent, a key member of the project since its inception. “It’s important to carry the torch.”

All Access Café is not the first organization to use food to strengthen community. Soup kitchens, common during the Great Depression, exploded during the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Panther Party organized free breakfast and lunch programs that eventually pushed the federal government’s free or subsidized public school lunch.  Food Not Bombs, which began serving free meals made from farm and market surplus in the 1980s, has also inspired similar programs.

The January café at the Box Factory served close to 300 people in four hours – an efficiency Lent credits to great volunteers. “I was amazed at how many people were so eager to contribute in any way they could,” she says.

Those who didn’t pitch in with dishwashing, cooking prep or cleaning up, donated funds, all of which will go towards the next All Access Café later this spring.

The problem of outreach, Lent says, has not been solved. Like its predecessors, the January brunch failed to incorporate the wider Mission community. Flyers were translated into Spanish and advertisements placed on various web sites but most diners were connected with the Mission’s artistic hipster establishment.

Like Brydum and Wick, Lent is set on making the project more accessible. Ideally, she says, “we want to create a place that’s comfortable for (a greater cross-section of) people from the area to get involved.” To that end, she hopes to collaborate with Mission-based community groups like the Latin American Cultural Center and Galeria de la Raza.

Aside from plans for another event, Lent and her fellow volunteers are focused on how to expand and sustain All Access Café. “It provides people with an opportunity to be generous,” says Lent. And that, she thinks, is something today’s urbanizing world can’t have too much of.

Making Valentine cards out of chocolate, biscuits and candies is easy and fun! Artist Michele Simons showed us how.

On a recent Friday night, Kate Kuckro and Mindi Caner bundled up against the cold and set up shop outside the public library at 24^th Street and Bartlett. They didn’t have to wait long for their first customer, a man towing a small rolling suitcase who doubled back when he noticed their Sweet Constructions cart.

“I hear a lot about the carts, but I never see them,” said Ken Paul Rosenthal, taking a free brownie sample and buying two more before continuing on his way.

A few minutes later, a young woman paused in front of the plexiglass case. After some deliberation, she settled on the chocolate crackle cookie, which has a fudgy brownie inside and a crunchy outside.

“I was craving something sweet,” said Angelie, who declined to give her last name. She’d had a bad day at work, she added.

Kuckro and Caner have sold baked goods from their cart since July, but they began baking en bulk in 2001, selling holiday gift boxes to law firms.

Kate Kuckro, left, and Mindi Caner share a laugh as they wait for customers in front of the public library at 24th Street.

Every year, the women say,  the gift component of their business has grown, with the biggest orders coming from corporate clients.

A few years ago, Kuckro and Caner started selling their goods wholesale to Jackson Place Café in the Financial District year round, and have been steadily adding more cafes to their client list.

Their first time out with a cart, a converted baker’s rack with canvas signage and plexiglass display case mounted on top, was during July’s Sunday Streets. Being out with other mobile vendors was so enjoyable, the women decided to make it a regular event.

“It’s really nice to have interaction with people,” said Kuckro.

Kuckro has worked full-time at Sweet Construction since June, when her hours as a nanny were cut down to 10 per week. Caner still has a full-time job at a law firm.

Over the holidays, the women enlist the aid of friends. The rest of the year, they’re on their own.

Kuckro and Caner bake goods at a commercial kitchen they rent by the hour in Hunter’s Point. On Sundays, they prepare batches for Monday’s café deliveries. Tuesdays and Thursdays are reserved for online and other orders, including catering events.

It’s on Fridays that they bake about 300 cookies of nine different flavors, and four kinds of cupcakes, for their street sales. They park their cart first at 24^th Street in front of the public library, then at 20^th Street and Valencia Street, by the abandoned gas station.

Treats on display inside the Sweet Constructions cart.

Their choice of location is based on both foot traffic and other businesses in the area.

“We view ourselves as members of the community and we don’t want to conflict with established businesses,” Kuckro said.

“Plus we don’t have to push (the cart) too far,” Caner joked.

Sweet Constructions developed from their friendship. The women grew up one town apart in Connecticut, but didn’t meet until they moved into the same duplex in San Francisco.

Caner was the first to enroll in a cake decorating class; Kuckro followed. They began making cakes for Caner’s daughter to take to school on special occasions. Friends and schoolmates took notice of their developing talents, and soon the pair was spending hours fashioning elaborate cakes serving about 250 people.

When baking cakes became exhausting, Caner and Kuckro switched to cookies over the holidays. Cookies proved less stressful and more profitable, and they decided to make the swap permanent.

The owners fondly identify their cart’s regular visitors by the desserts they choose. There’s the man who always orders a coconut caramel bar. The young women who use their leftover laundry money to buy pecan snowballs. And, once, a couple from Germany had their first cupcakes ever at the Sweet Constructions cart.

The sandwich cookie, made of two coconut butter cookies with a vanilla butter cream and raspberry jam filling, and snickerdoodles are Kuckro’s favorites.  Caner says her husband is partial to chocolate crackle 

On the street, the bestsellers are chocolate crackles, ginger and sandwich cookies. Sweet Constructions treats range in price from 50 cents for pecan snowballs and cupcakes at $1.50 to the $3 organic fruit tart.

But with their cookies selling like hotcakes, so to speak, the women are considering setting up their own shop indoors, ideally on Valencia’s busy corridor.

“It’s pretty hard to get me out of the Mission,” Caner said.