No gods but sourcing

Enough of you liked Zingerman’s text that I will continue to write about them. There is, as mentioned, a lot of ground to cover, including some stuff I omitted.

I think you can take lessons from Zingerman’s about what food to value in your daily existence. Not specific brands, or even specific types of food, but ways of sourcing, making, and sharing that food.

Take something Zingerman’s is really good at: olive oil. I don’t care very much about individual brands or regions of olive oil, although I know what I like. What matters more than what Zingerman’s sells is what they value in olive oil.

Olive oil is highly volatile, more than you think, and it’s subject to all sorts of flaws in the process of making it. As a result, the best of it really can’t be made at scale. If you want a good summary of all the bad things that can happen to olive oil in the process of making it, Fat Gold, which is both excellent and not carried by Zingerman’s, has a summary. Then, three days before I wrote the first draft of this text, Zingerman’s themselves wrote a guide to why their sourcing matters.