By Phil Rubio 3.19.16
I’m doing my best to remember this story about Bruce and our Sunflower Kitchen cooperative restaurant just based on memory and hunch, not having access to any records or even photos. (I did find this photo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Campus YMCA at 306 North Brooks St.: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Content.aspx?dsNav=Nrc:id-4294956401,N:4294963828-4294955414&dsNavOnly=N:1135&dsRecordDetails=R:IM89990)
So this is just what I remember. Some of the particulars may be wrong, but I think I have the general story right. There are some things I know for sure: It happened in Madison, Wisconsin. It was 1972. It was either spring or early summer. And it was not too long before Bruce and Jana left Madison for Kansas City, Missouri, to pursue their dream of training in and teaching Montessori.
By 1972, people had been drifting away to do different things other than working shifts at our cooperative natural foods vegetarian restaurant in the campus YMCA that we called Sunflower Kitchen. Sunflower had been doing it since before I got there in early 1971. But now we knew that it was coming to an end. Our little group couldn’t keep it going. It was time to hand it off to someone else. An earnest, self-confident group was poised to take over. They seemed so young. Most of us were in our early to mid-twenties. But they looked and acted like nineteen year olds—probably because most of them were. And they seemed quite certain that they could do a better job than we had done. Ah, youth!
Anyway, we had a problem to fix first. Sunflower was deep in debt. I don’t remember how much exactly. But it was a lot of money for the time, probably several hundred dollars. It seemed like an impossible feat to pay it back. Now it’s not like we overpaid co-op members: we only paid ourselves maybe 7 to 10 bucks a shift. Nobody worked fulltime, and it was open Monday to Friday. Most of us had other sources of income. People could come in and wash dishes or scrub pots and pans for a couple hours in exchange for a meal instead of cash. And rent for the space was low.
So how did we get into debt? We never did cost accounting. We ordered most of our produce, cheese, and other goods from the citywide cooperative with the clever moniker Common Market (as in the European Common Market, today the EU). Whatever we ordered from them, we ran up a tab. Apparently we had been doing that for a while. We set prices based on what we thought people could afford, which meant ridiculously cheap. You could eat well for less than a dollar. Every time we apologized to the Common Market’s director for our ballooning debt with promises to start repaying it soon, she would say, “Oh, don’t worry about it!” (Five words you should never tell an indebted twenty-something.) And then she would add: “You guys do good work for the community!”
Meanwhile, Bruce and Jana had moved to a farmhouse outside of Madison from our Marion Street house that we rented near campus. People did that over time. Like a big immigrant family crammed into a small urban apartment where after a while family members gradually peel off to go out and find their own places. Bruce and Jana had been busy doing other things and had cut back on working shifts (anywhere from 4-8 hours) at Sunflower. But they still came to meetings, hung out with everyone, had us over to their farmhouse, and generally kept involved with Sunflower Kitchen.
We needed to get rid of the debt. We needed to pay back Common Market. Especially since we are getting ready to hand over Sunflower’s management to someone else. So how to do that? Bruce came to one meeting and proposed what he saw as a practical solution to our problem. Our customers, he said, could and would pay more for what we served: rice and vegetables, rice pudding, vegetarian chili, Mexican and Chinese-themed dishes, or whatever. We would need to have fewer people working shifts, and all take small pay cuts. And we would especially need to watch the costs of our menu items. Mushrooms, for example, were more expensive than other vegetables, so we had to stop throwing so many of those into dishes when cheaper vegetables would do. Huge slabs of cheese weren’t needed for the always-popular broccoli-cheese-rice casserole. And we needed to start making regular payments to Common Market. So we did all those things. A little bit saved here and a little bit saved there and the debt started to come down and kept coming down.
There was a period of time toward the end--it was probably only a week or so--when it seemed like everyone was out of town or busy. As I recall, Bruce and I were covering a lot of shifts. One particular day we were covering the same shift. I think it was around lunchtime. By now, Sunflower had gotten so successful at cooking and serving up our fresh vegetable stockpile that just about all that remained were radishes. There were only so many salads into which you could dump a big radish inventory, however. And what was our special going to be that day?
I remember Bruce had this impish inspiration. Let’s make a big skillet of vegetables, he said, that uses up all of the radishes plus whatever else we have left. Ratatouille is a French dish of seasonal vegetables—usually onions, zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, and garlic, all fried and stewed in olive oil, then served hot or cold. What I liked the most about the dish was saying the name: ra-ta-TOO-ee. Bruce called his dish Radish-touille. That’s what he wrote on the big blackboard menu that we put out front in the small dining room that was the Sunflower Kitchen. We were both laughing. It was absurd and inspired at the same time. Cooking at Sunflower had been fun, but there had also been some stressful times when personalities and individual tastes clashed. But this was like old times. And soon it would be time to leave. We cooked the Radish-touille, we served it, and people came in and ate it. We were the only natural foods restaurant in town, and I think people came out in support when they heard of our financial predicament. How did it taste? Good enough. Not spectacular, but what do you expect from a lot of radishes, plus onions, garlic, whatever other vegetables we had left to use up, and olive oil?
In my mind I still associate Bruce’s Radish-touille dish with the final payoff of Sunflower’s debt to Common Market. It was like the miracle of the last drop of olive oil you always have saved in a big bottle that you turn upside down so as not to waste it when you finally need to get it out, and you hope that maybe it will be enough to coat the pan for one meal. Only this drop of olive oil (assuming we didn’t substitute something cheaper), in a manner of speaking, lasted eight days and eight nights, or eight weeks, or however long it actually took to clear our account with our friends at Common Market. (Sunflower, I just recently learned, had helped donate funds back in 1970 to start Nature’s Own Bakery at 1101 Williamson Street in Madison, still around today as Nature’s Bakery: http://naturesbakery.coop/pages/history.)
That’s one of my favorite personal Bruce Marbin stories. Besides jamming on instruments together, which we also did a lot, we were making food for the masses and helping leave a solvent legacy. And having fun doing it, which Bruce always insisted on.