Best Food Writing 2010

by Holly Hughes

  I turn to greet the Higgins—and congratulate Josiah. Not even the shadow of his black cowboy hat can hide the boyish elation: His heifer took gold in her category, and his bull took fourth. While Larry and Jacki’s animals didn’t do nearly as well, Josiah’s winning heifer is virtually guaranteed to bring the family a high price per pound.

  Across the auditorium, a local contingent from Slow Food USA—a national organization championing the farm-to-table way of eating—fills a row of the plastic seats. They sit together, all wearing the same T-shirts emblazoned with “Slow Food.” Their presence underscores their belief in knowing where one’s food comes from. Today, they’re bidding on five animals, the meat of which will be divvied up among interested members. Several weeks ago, I had contacted Krista Roberts, president of the Denver chapter, and asked if I could go in on one-sixteenth of an animal.

  Just after 11 a.m. the auction begins with the announcement of the winning bull’s measurements: He weighed 680 pounds after slaughter, showed no signs of ossification, had a 12.1-inch rib-eye, and excellent fat and muscle color. The gathered crowd nods in approval. Soon after, the head auctioneer begins his singsong and Dineen kicks off the bidding with a sharp nod. He’s procuring meat for both Ted’s Montana Grill and for Rocky Mountain Natural Meats. He plans to purchase five or six carcasses, depending on size and price.

  The gold-medal bull goes for $3.20 a pound, despite Dineen expecting prices closer to $4. (Josiah’s 586-pound bull, the lightest in its class, ultimately sells for $3.10 a pound.) But the final bid for Josiah’s 583-pound, gold-winning heifer comes in at $3.60—a fair price.

  After the auction concludes and the crowd filters to the exits, Roberts makes her way over to tell me the news: Along with four other carcasses, Slow Food Denver is the proud owner of Josiah’s bull.

  I’M STANDING IN MY BASEMENT, in front of a freezer with the door wide open. Inside, 40 pounds of Josiah’s bull, long since cut and neatly packaged into steaks, short ribs, roasts, and ground meat, are stacked to the top. I pull out a brick of short ribs, close the door, and head upstairs to find a plate for defrosting.

  It’s been a week since I drove to Roberts’ house to pick up my share of meat. As we transferred the vacuum-sealed parcels from her deep freeze to my car, I was flooded with an unexpected sense of pride and appreciation. It was not unlike the satisfaction of pulling the season’s first carrot from a patch of tended earth. I drove away vowing to honor the animal whose frozen muscles rattled in the trunk of my car.

  Back in my kitchen, I pluck fresh thyme leaves from their stems, zest a lemon, and crush garlic with the blade of a knife. I rub the mixture over the now-thawed short ribs before placing them in a heavy pot for searing. With the addition of onion, fennel, and celery, the house blooms with scents that are rich and full. I pull a wooden spoon from a crock near the stove, and stir. This moment—the smells and the spoon, which once belonged to my mother—pulls me to the center of a childhood memory: I’m standing at the knee of my mom as she prepares dinner with meat from the ranch. Onions and garlic sweat and perfume the air. I’ve got a spoon in my hand and an apron tied in a bow at my back.

  I pull my attention back to the stove, give the mixture a final stir, and cover the pot. My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter wanders in, pulling a small red chair behind her. She scrambles up and asks for a peek. It’s bison, I tell her. From a ranch I visited. She sniffs and grins.

  In a couple of hours, I’ll call my family to dinner and we’ll sit down to a meal of slow-cooked short ribs. As we eat, I’ll explain that, not long ago, this majestic animal—Josiah’s bull—was grazing on Colorado prairie grass and wearing ear tag #142.

  THE NEED FOR CUSTOM SLAUGHTER

  By Barry Estabrook From atlantic.com

  Humane slaughter—an oxymoron? Not necessarily so, argues Barry Estabrook—former Gourmet contributor and small-scale Vermont farmer—whose focus on sustainability makes a natural fit for The Atlantic’s thoughtful online food coverage.

  I stood behind Monte Winship on a frigid morning last December as he raised his .25-caliber Winchester rifle and aimed at Léo, a two-and-a-half-year-old Holstein steer.

  In an era when Food and Water Watch, an environmental group, reports that four giant corporations—Tyson, Cargill, Swift, and National Beef Packing—process 84 percent of this country’s cattle, the scene in that snow-covered field in Vermont is increasingly rare: an animal was about to be humanely slaughtered on the very farm where it had been raised.

  Winship and his old, lever-action rifle represent the polar opposite of the huge, 5,000-animal-per-day meatpacking plants that were so graphically brought to the country’s attention in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. “There aren’t many of us left,” said Winship, who is in his fifties. “When I was a kid, every town had someone doing this job.”

  In the jargon of the meat business, Winship’s work is considered “custom slaughter.” He is a freelancer, traveling from farm to farm, killing cattle and hogs and transporting their gutted carcasses to a nearby facility to be cut into parts, wrapped, and frozen. As a means for converting a living steer into meat, the practice has a lot going for it. For one thing, it is as humane as killing an animal can be.

  “It’s the best way to slaughter them because you don’t have to transport them,” Temple Grandin, the renowned author, livestock handling expert, and associate professor at Colorado State University, told me. Being trucked long distances and then herded shoulder-to-shoulder into confined areas with strange sights and noises is a huge stress on animals, she said. A cow killed on its home turf doesn’t know what hits it. “If on-farm slaughter is done properly, it’s very, very humane,” Grandin said.

  It is also a way for a skeptical consumer to make sure the animal had access to pasture and did not spend its final months in a feedlot pumped full of hormones and eating an unnatural diet of corn fortified with antibiotics.

  A humane death for Léo; healthy meat for the consumer. What’s not to like? Plenty, according to the United States Department of Agriculture—the same folks whose rigorous standards all but guarantee that yet another E. coli outbreak hits the news every week. Because the USDA refuses to give on-farm slaughter its little purple stamp of blessing, it is illegal to sell meat butchered this way. Léo’s meat would be consumed only by the family of the farmer who had raised him.

  On-farm slaughter is one solution to the problem of how to have local, sustainable meat properly killed and butchered, but legal questions aside, it has a major drawback. “Once you get into more than a few animals,” said Grandin, who is never one to mince words, “you’d have a dirty mess.”

  An alternative is to take animals to small slaughterhouses for killing and processing. But even as consumer demand has soared, the number of local processing facilities nationwide has plummeted. More than 1,500 have closed in the last two decades, according to the American Association of Meat Processors, which represents small- and medium-sized processors. As Patrick Martins of Heritage Foods USA, the sales and marketing arm of Slow Food USA, told Food and Water Watch, “The lack of slaughterhouses is the biggest bottleneck in the food business.”

  Such back-ups create huge problems. In one case, a dozen Vermont farmers pooled their resources to purchase a truck to serve the lucrative New York and Boston markets, where their products sell for three times the going rate in rural Vermont. But the scarcity of slaughterhouses means the animals must be trucked alive out of the state to be processed, which is both inconvenient and expensive. The situation is even more dire in New York State, where only 41 slaughterhouses remained in business in 2008, down from more than 120 in the 1980s. Pam McSweeny, a New York farmer who raises organic meat, has to truck her animals 10 hours to Pennsylvania and back to have them processed, a huge expense.

  To get around such backlogs, some small, sustainable producers have opened or purchased their own facilities. These include Will Harris’s White Oak Pastures, Georgia’s largest grass-fed beef producer ; Sall
ie Calhoun, owner of Paicines Ranch, a grass-fed cattle operation in San Benito County, California; and Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia, made famous in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

  Many of the problems forcing small operations out of business (and preventing would-be investors from building new plants) can be traced back to red tape imposed by the USDA. According to the Food and Water Watch report, the USDA’s regulations favor huge facilities that can spread the costs over hundreds of thousands of animals. Complying with policies is too onerous for many small operators. Extensive record-keeping and ever-fluctuating safety criteria add additional burdens. And Food and Water Watch adds that there have even been accusations of USDA inspectors singling out small facilities for harsh treatment because they make easier targets than national corporations backed up by staff scientists, legal experts, and well-paid government lobbyists.

  Having witnessed the process firsthand, I would have had no qualms about eating beef from Léo. The steer dropped and lay motionless in the snow, dead before Winship’s shot had finished echoing. After the carcass was hoisted by the hind hooves with a front-end loader, Winship skinned and gutted it, retaining the heart, tongue, liver, and kidneys. He used a saw to cut the carcass in half lengthwise, and after that he sliced each half in two. The four quarters—over 800 pounds of beef—were loaded into Winship’s pickup truck. In all, 90 minutes had passed.

  I followed Winship for about 30 miles to a building off to the side of a winding gravel road. The unimposing structure, not much bigger than a two-car garage, was the headquarters for the company that had hired Winship, Rup’s Custom Cutting, a mom-and-pop business run by Rupert LaRock and his wife, Jeanne. The spotlessly clean facility is regularly inspected by health officials, so apart from the manner in which he had died, Léo would comply with all state and federal policies regarding the sale of meat. LaRock, a butcher for 41 of his 55 years, hoisted Léo’s quarters onto meat hooks connected to an overhead rail. He immediately started spraying them with a high-pressure hose, commenting on the size and high-quality of the carcass, but nonetheless grumbling, “Cows get so dirty this time of year.” I could detect no traces of filth.

  Because of the slaughterhouse shortage, LaRock is run off his feet. He processes only one cow per day. “And it gets busier all the time,” he says. If you want Rup’s to butcher, wrap, and freeze one of your steers, you have to book an appointment three to four months in advance.

  For those of us who want to eat local, sustainably raised meat, LaRock has some words of encouragement. “Every time there’s an E. coli scare, my phone starts ringing. There’s so much demand out there that they are going to have to open on-farm slaughter to commercial sale soon.”

  EATING ANIMALS

  By Jonathan Safran Foer From The New York Times Magazine

  Novelist Foer (Everything Is Illuminated) stirred up a hornet’s nest with his impassioned 2009 book Eating Animals—part memoir, part dialectic, spiced up with his trademark stylistic flair. Here’s a taste....

  Seconds after being born, my son was breast-feeding. I watched him with an awe that had no precedent in my life. Without explanation or experience, he knew what to do. Millions of years of evolution had wound the knowledge into him, as it had encoded beating into his tiny heart and expansion and contraction into his newly dry lungs.

  Almost four years later, he is a big brother and a remarkably sophisticated little conversationalist. Increasingly the food he eats is digested together with stories we tell. Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (their physical health matters, the pleasure they take in eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter.

  Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sushi “lunch dates” with my mom, and eating my dad’s turkey burgers with mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and of course my grandmother’s chicken with carrots. Those occasions simply wouldn’t have been the same without those foods—and that is important. To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting—even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

  My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice. According to an analysis of U.S.D.A. data by the advocacy group Farm Forward, factory farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in this country. And despite labels that suggest otherwise, genuine alternatives—which do exist, and make many of the ethical questions about meat moot—are very difficult for even an educated eater to find. I don’t have the ability to do so with regularity and confidence. (“Free range,” “cage free,” “natural” and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal welfare.)

  According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity. . . . Eating factory-farmed animals—which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants—is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.

  Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. Turkeys have been so genetically modified they are incapable of natural reproduction. To acknowledge that these things matter is not sentimental. It is a confrontation with the facts about animals and ourselves. We know these things matter.

  Meat and seafood are in no way necessary for my family—unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods. And we are healthier without it. So our choices aren’t constrained.

  While the cultural uses of meat can be replaced—my mother and I now eat Italian, my father grills veggie burgers, my grandmother invented her own “vegetarian chopped liver”—there is still the question of pleasure. A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.

  This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

  Children confront us with our paradoxes and dishonesty, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why—Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that?—and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood—which is a good shame—is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.

  And then, one day, they will choose for themselves. I don’t know what my reaction will be if they decide to eat meat. (I don’t know what my reaction will be if they deci
de to renounce their Judaism, root for the Red Sox or register Republican.) I’m not as worried about what they will choose as much as my ability to make them conscious of the choices before them. I won’t measure my success as a parent by whether my children share my values, but by whether they act according to their own.

  In the meantime, my choice on their behalf means they will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.

  Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I understood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. I’m thinking of those Saturday afternoons at her kitchen table, just the two of us—black bread in the glowing toaster, a humming refrigerator that couldn’t be seen through its veil of family photographs. Over pumpernickel ends and Coke, she would tell me about her escape from Europe, the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn’t. It was the story of her life—“Listen to me,” she would plead—and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now, what it was.

  Listen to Me

  “We weren’t rich, but we always had enough. Thursday we baked bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted the whole week. Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and soup with noodles. You would go to the butcher and ask for a little more fat. The fattiest piece was the best piece. It wasn’t like now. We didn’t have refrigerators, but we had milk and cheese. We didn’t have every kind of vegetable, but we had enough. The things that you have here and take for granted.... But we were happy. We didn’t know any better. And we took what we had for granted, too.