Meet the Quadriplegic Food Fixer Who's Bringing Gourmet Goods to the Bay Area

The farm-to-table movement has altered the way a lot of Americans look at food, and has even forced some of our biggest agricultural behemoths to rethink their strategies. But those of us who don't buy our food directly from producers, or who even have trouble showing up for the weekly farmers markets, are often in the dark about the people who grow or make it. Who are our proxies in the Know Thy Farmer world?

For those lucky enough to live in or around Oakland, California, one such representative is Ryan Voss. I'm spending the weekend with him on his food-foraging forays to farms, small work spaces, and catering kitchens, riding along throughout the Bay Area, Sonoma, and Napa Valley.

Or maybe I should say I'm rolling with Voss this weekend. That's because Voss is quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down.

That hasn't always been the case. Ten years ago, during his last ride of the summer, he took a bad tumble while mountain biking and landed squarely on his head. He was conscious during all of it, and understood immediately what had happened. He noticed his hands had seized inward into frozen claws, and he couldn't feel or move his body. He knew he'd broken his neck.

Voss spent a month in ICU and was immobile for another month after that. His doctors said he'd never move again. But when I meet him at his home in Napa, he drives his wheelchair to the front door to let me in, leans forward at the waist and wraps me in a huge hug. Then he rolls himself to his converted 2002 Chrysler Town & Country minivan, clicks open the sliding door, motors his chair up the automatic ramp, and settles behind the car's wheel.

As Voss drives us through the Sonoma County countryside, pointing out his favorite farms and pulling over occasionally to scroll through directions on his phone, I ask about his seemingly miraculous agility.

"I keep progressing, even after ten years," he says. "They say it usually stops at about a year, you get more lock out." But every time a friend comes to visit, they marvel at how much more he's able to do.

Some of these skills are on full display when we finally snake our way through a nondescript, wholly unremarkable office park somewhere in Santa Rosa. We're here to watch Voss's friend and one of his most popular producers—Eli Colvin of rEvolution Bakery—make his bread. We'll be bringing his loaves to market in the morning. As we settle in, Voss unzips an insulated bag, pulls out cold cuts and pickled beets, and cracks open a beer.

On a normal night, Colvin bakes about 300 loaves. "Doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot of work," he says. He pulls dough from racks he hand-built, hunches over a work table, and shapes each ball before letting the dough rise one more time. "I do all the packing, I do all the dishes, I do all the clean-up." He also does most of the milling, the mixing, and the baking. He's hired someone to help him sell at the farmers markets, but he does much of that himself, too. "I like doing what I do…but I'm the hardest boss I've ever had," he says. He's not complaining. "It's just part of the sacrifice of doing what I want to do, how I want to do it."

But hand-making artisan loaves in a Wonder Bread world can often feel like a fight. "I'm set up to do wholesale, but that involves getting bags printed, making sure the ingredient list is within code. That's tricky for me, because my ingredients change all the time. I'm using all these super small-farmed grains. How do you put that on a bag when it's going to change in three months? Do you just put 'wheat'? No." This chafes him. "People don't realize that this is good stuff. This isn't just wheat, grown in, you know, the middle of Montana. This is grown in California. This is a specific variety that's grown for flavor."

His unheard-of 30-plus-hour fermentations slow production time, too, but Colvin won't have it any other way. He believes that long fermentation brings out the nutrients, making them more bio-available. Without looking up from the dough he tells us, "This is the way you're supposed to make bread."

The next day, Voss and I deliver the loaves to Grand Fare Market in Oakland. Grand Fare, a joint project by Doug Washington and his wife—artist and floral designer Freya Prowe—has since been put on hold, "Temporarily, to make changes to layout and equipment," according to Washington.

In the meantime, Voss and his producers are watching the developments with bated breath. Grand Fare was the reason Voss was able to do what he did. Washington, the Bay Area restaurateur behind San Francisco's Town Hall and Salt House, had known Voss for years, and in the lead-up to opening, asked if Voss wanted to come onboard. When I asked Voss about that phone call, he smiled. "I don't know if anyone else is lucky enough to have an old friend call them up and say, 'Go find food for me.'" If all goes according to plan, Voss will get to go back to it in January or February.

Washington and Voss share a similar food philosophy, so collaboration is easy. When Voss scouts new producers, he asks around at farmers markets and local spots. "If you know anybody that makes anything cool, that's good food, I want taste them, I wanna try them; we'll get 'em in there." He continues, "Doug is very serious about that."

Bread delivered, we're off to Areté Fine Chocolate, in Milpitas. So far, Voss has driven almost two hours, he's backed into a tight parking space, he's traversed streets and sand, and he's just getting started.

Despite my best attempts at playing it cool, I admit to being baffled by what he can do. Voss, on the other hand, takes everything in stride. Even the accident. Long before his injury, he had set his mind on making peace with the inevitability of the unknown. "I just started with old age, preparing for the loss of body function." He was working on letting go of attachments, studying some of the world's greatest Buddhist and Hindu philosophers like Baba Neem Karoli, Ram Dass, Krishna Das, and Krishnamurti.

"To me, the most important thing we can do in this life is to go out in the way they say Gandhi went out, when he got shot," Voss says. "He just said, 'RamRamRamGodGodGodGodGod…' I want to be 'lovelovelovelovelovelovelove'—without being in pain or fighting or being sad about it. That is ultimately what I was preparing for." At the moment of his accident, he realized, OK,I guess this is how it's going to be now.

Now at Areté, David and Leslie Senk let us into their tiny, 800-square-foot, three-room factory. The couple has been making chocolate for five years, but their bars have only been on the market for one. David jokingly "blames" the business on a Groupon he got from his wife for a truffle-making workshop. Leslie enjoyed the evening, but David couldn't quite get it out of his head. Making chocolate hadn't seemed particularly difficult, and as vegans, they were sorely disappointed in the options available. Boom, instant niche. Fast-forward five years, and Areté Fine Chocolate is a 2016 Good Food Award finalist.

A lot has changed since David's initial musings on the subject, including his appraisal of the work involved. At Areté, every bean is individually sorted, and each one is sliced open to inspect for damage or disease. Everything is done by hand as a labor of love. Areté is exactly the kind of business Voss (and Washington) are there to support.

At our third and final stop of the day, June Taylor excuses herself as we enter The Still-Room, her retail space/kitchen, located in a string of warehouses on 4th Street, in Berkeley. She has unexpected customers and she's guiding them through her vast collection of concoctions. She has their undivided attention. As she walks the men through flavor descriptions, information about growing seasons, and a little of her personal history, she isn't selling something—she's connecting with them, through her little jars of food.

This is how she wants her products to be sold, she later explains in her lilting British accent over goat cheese and slices of house-made Christmas cake. "I sell to speciality food stores, independent stores," she says. "I won't sell to Whole Foods, I don't sell to people like that anymore." It's nothing personal against those retailers, but that's not the kind of business she's running. "I sell to people who are smaller, who can hand-sell it. Who are kind of on the same page as I am, in terms of the quality of the food. It's not about pushing it out in volume."

The focus on small-scale and quality means that Taylor has personal relationships with local farmers, most of whom are fellow Ferry Plaza Farmers Market vendors. As we stand in front of her shelves of conserves, she points to one bottle after another and tells us who sold her every piece of fruit inside. She recounts the time a producer collected raisins for a farmer who had lost their entire crop to late-season rain. June actually had some of the farmer's raisins in her kitchen, and gifted them back so they'd have something to sell. That's just what they do, she says. "It's a small community."

Later, I ask Voss about his hope for Grand Fare Market, and "community" comes up again. He wants it to re-open and he sees it as a place for people to come together, to build trust and connection. After he does his part at Grand Fare, or maybe sooner than later, if the market remains shuttered, he wants to open a market/cafe of his own in Napa. He'd love Washington to partner with him, if possible.

If this weekend has proven anything, it's that with Voss, possible isn't a problem.