Human Beans

When I first moved out to California, I was a little bit skeptical about the whole fixation on food and ingredients. Thinking too much about the farm that your food came from seemed like more the usual hippie earth-hugging stuff that’d made me roll my eyes at the Bay Area in the first place.

But I slowly started to come around — let’s face it, paying attention to what you feed yourself just plain makes sense. And part of the reason why I started to pay attention to the ingredients that make up a great meal was because I started to meet the people who bring that food to us. Our office at Six Apart isn’t too terribly far from the Ferry Terminal Building here in San Francisco, which houses a farmer’s market a few days a week.

That’s where I met Steve Sando. He’s a bean enthusiast, a guy who started Rancho Gordo. Rancho Gordo brings us heirloom beans — instead of the usual flavorless, canned beans from the grocery store, Steve helps promote and distribute varieties of beans that had nearly disappeared. As a result, Rancho Gordo beans are used by great cooks all over the place, from some of the best local chefs to the on-campus restaurants run by our friends at Google. And most weekends, when I swing by the farmer’s market, Steve is there telling people about his beans, face-to-face, offering a human connection that helps explain why this one item on your plate matters.

Steve’s kept in touch with the latest happenings in the food world on a one-on-one basis, but in the larger food community as well. And these days, that means following food blogs. TypePad hosts many of the best and most popular food blogs on the web, and so when it was time for Steve to start a blog, the official Rancho Gordo blog launched on TypePad.

I’m always happy when we see another small business that’s using a TypePad blog to help grow their company, but for a company like Rancho Gordo where the human connection is so much of what makes their work unique, it’s especially satisfying. Good luck to Steve with his new blog, and more importantly with his advocacy of human beans. And congratulations on being named our TypePad Featured Blog today.