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M way to circumvent grocery and fast -food empires that siphon away money from the community and keep consumers in the dark about the food sources. "Our mantra is, Know your pro- ducer," Finkelstein says. Community building aside, the public appetite for locally grown food is voracious. The number of farmers' markets in the United States has more than doubled since 1980. Many high -end restaurants, from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley to Chicago's Topolobampo, thrive by touting close relationships with nearby organic farmers. The weekend prix fixe dinner at Chez Panisse costs $75 a plate, and the five- course tasting menu at Topolobampo runs $65, yet both restaurants stay booked solid. "When people eat food that has been refrigerated, sprayed, and shipped, they may not be able to articulate what they are missing," says Rick Bayless, the chef and an owner of Topolobampo. "But the surging popularity of farmers' markets and the success of my restaurant demonstrates a hunger in peo- ple for something they don't currently have." Though Bayless purchases a small amount of California produce every year from November to May, he has become less and less dependent on it. He froze 18,000 pounds of locally grown organic tomatoes for last winter, and he financed the expansion of a Chicago opera- tion that grows spinach in a small, unheated building during even the coldest months. The few entrepreneurial urban farms that have achieved a degree of solvency in the United States have done so primarily by selling to buyers like Bayless, who can pay more than standard rates because of a demand for fresh, local food from well-off restaurant patrons. Michael Ableman wrote On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm, which tells of his decade -long struggle to pre- serve a 12.5 -acre farm from encroaching development in Goleta, Calif. Now edged on all sides by McMansions with swimming pools, his land might be better called a suburban farm, but any successful entrepreneurial urban farm is likely to have a lot in common with it. Ableman estimates that small specialty farms can be 15 times as productive and prof- itable per acre as large farms that grow staple crops compet- ing on the world market. Though Ableman has a small local subscription list, his farm can survive only by selling vegetables like white asparagus and baby artichokes to upscale restau- rants. He employs 25 people year -round and has a profit - sharing program. "The farm has had years where it has grossed $700,000," he told me. "By the time we pay expenses, it is kind of a wash. But we are in the black." - Eli Zabar, a purveyor of specialty foods in Manhattan's ritzy Upper East Side, has a similar business plan for his six rooftop greenhouses on East 91st Street. Discouraged by his inability to find good tomatoes off - season, Zabar decided to build the greenhouses five years ago. Three sit above one of his stores, and the other three are across the street. He now pro- duces more than 20 varieties of tomatoes as well as rare baby greens. A quick glance at price tags in the 91st Street store dis- pels hope that the produce's proximity to its growing site might hold down prices: One pound of Zabar's rooftop mesclun greens, for example, would set me back $11.96. Zabar's andAbleman's enterprises illuminate a split already predominant in the food system between lower - income pro- ducers and more affluent consumers. Their projects also show the difficulty of wedding the purpose of community develop- ment and environmental enhancement with job and revenue creation. Yet it became clear as I heard the plans of Rick Samyn —and watched him count federal food coupons gathered from women at the Arab clinic —that there wasn't a great deal of money to be made in his particular enterprise, and that anything he took in would barely cover his expenses, if that. `An urban farmer works for nothing and relies on volunteers," says Jason Fligger in Detroit. Fligger's organization tries to build coop- erative links between urban farms and connect them to buyers. This task has often been overshadowed by the larger challenge of keeping existing volunteer -run farms operating at all. "The reality is that the success of many of these urban agriculture projects hinges on one person, and if that person disappears, the MAY IJUNE 2002 63