The Green Fork is the official blog of the Eat Well Guide. Click here to Find Good Food.

Here’s another post from Devra Gartenstein of Seattle, who takes time out from a busy schedule writing cookbooks like her upcoming Local Bounty (she also wrote The Accidental Vegan), blogging at the Quirky Gourmet and running her Patty Pan Grill (phew!) to volunteer for Eat Well.  Here, she touches on some of the challenges she faces sourcing and serving the most sustainably produced food while still maintaining a healthy bottom line.  If, like Devra, you grow, produce, cook or even just eat good food and have a trial or tribulation to share, drop us a line at blog[at]eatwellguide.org.

If you think it’s hard making decisions every day about the right way to eat, imagine trying to make thoughtful, conscientious choices about feeding hundreds, even thousands of people each week. Like consumers, we producers care about the quality of the ingredients we buy, struggling to find affordable food that has been sustainably produced. But our very livelihood can depend on finding a careful balance between cost and integrity.

As individuals, each of us navigates the complex world of food each day by establishing a set of criteria and priorities, whether or not we’re aware of it. We may choose our foods on the basis of flavor, cost or convenience, or we may choose vegetarian or vegan options, or items that have been locally or organically grown. Few of us are entirely consistent: we make exceptions when we go out to eat, when we travel, when we share meals with people we love who eat differently than we do, or when we’re simply tired of all the effort. I know organic farmers who eat corn dogs and Egg McMuffins, and one long time vegan who insists on using butter in her sweet potato pie.

Similarly, people who own and run food businesses strive to build something that expresses our vision, however imperfectly that may be possible given the real world constraints of price and availability. We navigate a world of wholesalers, retailers and distributors, with minimum orders and scheduled delivery days. We do the best we can, and then we offer our creations to an audience of people who embrace or reject them, filtering their reactions through their own tastes and standards.

For me personally, as a customer and a vendor, my most important criteria is being able to buy ingredients directly from the people who produce them. I believe passionately in local economies, and in the benefits that they offer to communities. I have a deep distaste for distributors and I would rather shop at the mainstream food service grocery a mile from my shop than at the organic wholesaler thirty miles away, where I’ll struggle to meet an order minimum by padding my shopping list with items I don’t necessarily need, at least not in case quantities. Besides, if I save money shopping at the mainstream wholesaler, I have more to spend at the farmers’ market.

Some vendors meticulously vet every one of their sources, just as some consumers do. I don’t try to produce a perfectly pure product, but rather a reasonably pure one, for a great price. For me that’s a way of pushing back against some of the elitism and snobbery that I sometimes see among those of us who care about what we eat. It’s also in part a reaction to having grown up in a kosher household, where unacceptable foods couldn’t even touch our plates.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy, concise way to explain all this to the people who approach my booth and ask, “Is everything organic?”