Market People

For 10 years, people have been making their way to the Santa Monica Farmers Market on Wednesday mornings to buy and sell food. It is an extraordinary resource that offers enormous diversity and unbeatable prices. It is a place where you can buy tomatoes just hours out of the earth and fish caught just the day before. But most of all, it is a place where you can meet the people who produce the food that you eat. And they are a rather remarkable lot.

Manuel Gorgita--everybody calls him Junior--has fished all his life.

His grandfather came to Southern California from the Portuguese Azores; in summer he worked on fishing boats, in winter he went inland looking for farm work. Junior--born less than a block from where he now lives in Santa Barbara--started fishing when he was 7. At 13 he became a deck hand. At 17 he married his high school sweetheart, Dee. By the time he was 20, searching for independence, he bought his grandfather’s boat. “A young man,” he says, “needs to get out on his own.” A few years later he sold the first boat and built, by hand, the boat he now operates.

His new boat sits next to his old one, which has been bought and sold many times. Junior glances at it and lets his disapproval slip out; the new owners, he thinks, are more interested in the romance of fishing than the reality.

The reality of Junior’s life is that he has spent most of his waking life at sea, more or less alone. He puts out every day at 4 a.m., dragging the bottom of the sea using a mix of electronic equipment and his own intuition. He returns 12 hours later with a catch of ridgeback shrimp, larger prawns, sea cucumber, snapper and halibut. The catch depends on the time of year, but occasionally there is swordfish and shark as well.

“I don’t make a lot,” he says, “but I make steady. That’s the name of the game.” On weekends he repairs his nets.

About eight years ago there was a change in the routine; Junior’s usual wholesalers left the market and he found himself with a lot of shrimp he couldn’t sell. “We didn’t know what to do,” says his wife, Dee, “so we sat down along the dock and sold shrimp to the public for $1 a pound. That worked out fine. Pretty soon people were coming and asking to buy larger amounts and we’d sell 50 pounds at a discount.”

The buyers were trucking the shrimp from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles and setting up shop on street corners. Soon Dee decided to cut out the middlemen--she and her daughter Christine started bringing Manuel’s Monday and Tuesday catches to the Santa Monica Farmers Market themselves. They’ve been there, every Wednesday, for eight years.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Dee says. “You get a real fashion show, all the clothing and jewelry. You even meet movie stars.

“And people are really into the fish,” Dee adds. “The first thing they ask is, ‘Where is it from? Is it from Santa Monica Bay?’ I tell them no and then they ask, “When was it caught? What does it taste like? What’s its texture? How do you cook it?’ ”

Her usual reply: “As simply as possible.” Pressed for a recipe, she insists, “I’m a modern every day housewife, I just want to get it made,” and offers vegetables sauted in V-8 juice and covered by a filet of the day’s catch.

“I stopped giving out recipes,” she says, “because people would come back and say that it didn’t taste good that way. Now I say: ‘Look, my husband catches it, I sell it, and it’s your job to cook it.’ ”

Aptly named, David Mountain is possessed of ample girth and a broad, inviting grin. By nature a salesman, he got a degree in business and went into the record industry where he quickly rose through the ranks. “I learned a lot,” he recalls, “including a lot of things I didn’t want to know.

“One of my friends took me by the lapels and told me I was turning into . . . a different kind of guy--that wasn’t the expression he used. I thought about it and kept catching myself saying things just to be a pusher. I didn’t like it.” Mountain quit, moved to Washington state and started teaching school in British Columbia.

It was there that he met his wife, Susan, a botanist with an interest in exotic plants. And it was there that he also discovered what was to become his passion: mushrooms.

At first Mountain sold grow-it-yourself mushroom kits. Later he branched into gathering wild mushrooms and eventually into mushroom cultivation. There was lots of competition in the Pacific Northwest, and since most of Mountain’s business was in Southern California, he eventually moved the business to Santa Barbara. Today David and Susan Mountain produce about 1,500 pounds of shiitake mushrooms and 800 pounds of oyster mushrooms every month and are beginning to cultivate morels. “We’re trying to replicate the forest environment indoors,” he says.

Mountain thinks that indoor farming is the wave of the future. “With our environment shrinking, with a lot of farm land and wild land going to developers, and with the atmospheric environment becoming more polluted, we’re going to find that there are more specialty farmers simulating environments indoors to produce products year around.”

Mountain’s mushrooms go mostly to restaurants--Rockenwagner, Remi, Citrus and the Broadway Deli. But what he likes best is selling them at farmers markets (he goes to Santa Barbara as well as Santa Monica). “I like seeing a 70-year-old woman who’s never had an exotic mushroom buy a dollar’s worth,” he says, “and then come back to get more.”

Chris Cadwell is the grandson and great-grandson of farmers. Cadwells began working land in Carpinteria in the 1850s. And although his father left the farm to teach music, Chris Cadwell resumed the family tradition after inheriting a small piece of property. He began by planting vegetables. Soon he was showing up at Santa Barbara restaurants offering a variety of lettuce, peppers and tomatoes.

He was so successful that he and his wife, who teaches German literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, began growing organic herbs and vegetables that could not be found in supermarkets. They sold them to farmers markets.

“I’d find something in a seed catalogue, grow a little and then take it to market,” Cadwell says. “Inevitably somebody would show up and say, ‘I haven’t seen this since the old country.’ Then they’d tell me how to use it.”

Cadwell, whose father is now farming with him, recently purchased 100 acres north of Santa Barbara, between Lompoc and Buellton. It’s a quiet spot that has water from a river. Most important to Cadwell, however: The land has not been farmed in more than 20 years. “I got this ranch,” he says, “because I want to invest into the soil. I didn’t want to lease ground where chemicals had been used.”

In the center of the new acreage is a greenhouse; he is quick to point out that it is open on the sides. “There’s insect life in here--good and bad,” he says. “Snakes, lizards, frogs and birds come in. It has a balance.”

Balance is Cadwell’s credo. He believes passionately in organic produce and believes just as strongly that balance can be achieved by diversifying crops. If you grow a variety of crops, he says, when one thing goes awry, you’ve got another.

He is equally passionate about the importance of farmers markets. “Farmers markets,” he suggests, “are going to change a lot of people. It’s really the old way coming back.”