Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  This third-generation Harris grew into a big man, tall and heavyset, with a dour disposition. As one of his granddaughters recalls, “He was always very quiet except when he was cussing.”

  Harris wasn’t just a good cattleman, he was a local legend who could produce more meat per acre than anyone around. He got rid of the hogs, chickens and crops, and focused solely on cattle.

  “My daddy was a man’s man and he was a profane man,” Harris recalls. “You could cuss around Daddy when Mama wasn’t there, but if you cussed at him, that became disrespect.”

  When he was 12 years old, Will Harris III learned the distinction. He was helping his father corral some cattle that had escaped through an open gate and were wandering all over the road. His father, frustrated with his son’s progress, gave the stud horse the boy was riding a surprise crack of the whip. When the horse bucked, Harris exclaimed, “Goddammit, Daddy!” before he could stop himself. The cattle could wait: His father ordered his son down off the horse and whipped him. He never made that mistake again.

  Will Harris Breaks the Family Mold

  Will Harris III, the first in his family to complete college, studied animal science at the University of Georgia School of Agriculture when fertilizers and antibiotics were revolutionizing American agriculture.

  After the war, both pesticides and antibiotics became more commonplace, and farmers discovered a fringe benefit with the latter. Not only did antibiotics keep animals from getting sick, they made them larger and fatter when administered routinely.

  In 1947 a giant federal munitions plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched from making bombs to making chemical fertilizer, and the government began actively promoting ammonium nitrate to farmers as a way to increase crop yields and keep pastures green. Food policy historians, such as Michael Pollan, cite this as a turning point in American agriculture and beef production. With chemical fertilizers came an abundance of cheap grain. By the mid-1950s, Midwestern markets and packinghouses had risen to newfound prominence and were supplying the majority of American beef.

  Cattlemen like Harris’ father would raise the calves until they were old enough to wean, about 6 or 7 months, and then ship them off to concentrated animal feeding operations—feedlots—to finish out their lives.

  In 1959, the National Academy of Sciences assembled the brightest minds in agriculture for a conference at Purdue University titled “Beef for Tomorrow” to discuss the rapid changes in the industry and a two-thirds increase in per-capita beef consumption since the pre-war period. The conference objective read: “Authorities in industry and government have clearly indicated what this means to the producer of beef—he must produce more, more efficiently.”

  At UGA, one of Harris’ professors, A.E. Cullison, wrote an influential textbook called Feeds and Feeding that detailed formulations for the total mixed rations (TMRs) that were increasingly replacing grass and hay as cattle feed. Because ruminants like cows and sheep don’t have the stomach acids to digest the corn and soybean meal in TMRs, they also needed routine antibiotics and drugs to combat acidosis, bloat, heartburn, liver abscesses and the host of other problems that awaited them.

  Armed with this education, Harris went to go work for the family farm intent on putting his stamp on it. That proved difficult.

  “Mostly what I did was bump heads with my father,” Harris recalls. “We could hunt, fish and eat together. But we were both alpha male, and when we went to work, it was really problematic.”

  Then there was Jenni—the middle of the three girls Will and his wife, Von, were raising in a new home they built next to his father’s. She tottered around behind her father in a favorite pair of coveralls from the age of 4, accompanying him as he gave feed to the cattle in their confinement pens at the crack of dawn.

  “My grandfather and I did not have a good relationship,” Jenni, now 25, recalls. “I was the tomboy, the son my father never had, and my grandfather resented me terribly.”

  If Jenni wanted to tag along on the yearly visit to the video cattle auction at the county extension office—an event she says “was like the county fair”—her grandfather wouldn’t go.

  Alzheimer’s disease soon started to mute her autocratic grandfather’s bark, and as he slipped into a fog of dementia, her father started to rethink his family’s farm.

  “There was no epiphany,” Will Harris III says, though he began reading books about the American farming system he wasn’t assigned in ag school. He was particularly struck by The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry’s 1977 book that argued agribusiness was destroying the cultural and family context of farming. It made him wonder what kind of system his father had prescribed to, and what kind of legacy he was leaving for Jenni and his other daughters.

  He also began thinking about animal welfare in a different light. “If you weren’t intentionally inflicting pain and suffering on the animal, it was considered good animal welfare,” he said, reflecting a common sentiment among livestock breeders. “By that thinking, if you chain your kids to the TV and feed them a steady diet of potato chips, you’re not hurting them.”

  One day as he was sending 80 calves off in a double-decker hauling truck, the thought occurred to him that the just-weaned animals on the bottom would make the cross-country drive with urine and excrement raining down on them.

  Harris realized that he had become so focused on taking the cost out of production that he no longer considered the animals.

  He formulated this thought: “Not allowing animals to express their instinctive behavior is working against nature.” It stayed with him.

  Harris Finds a Market at Atlanta’s Woodfire Grill

  When Jenni was 11, Harris sat her down and said he needed to talk to her about her future and the future of the farm. He had been reading about organic farming and wanted to try it. Things weren’t going to be like they were in her granddaddy’s days.

  The next year was a disaster. Without any topsoil to hold the grass in place, it washed away in the rain and dried up in the summer heat. Harris had to buy hay just to keep his cattle fed, and he lost money. The thousand acres turned brown and rangy—an eyesore amidst the verdant row crops that surrounded the farm.

  “The weeds were eating up my ass in the pasture,” Harris recalls. Cattle wouldn’t eat the foot-high stalks of pigweed that had taken tenacious root, but sheep would. So Harris bought a herd and took his first step away from the cattle monoculture his father had built.

  While Harris still shipped calves off to western feedlots to make ends meet, he increasingly finished them on pasture and hay and took them to local slaughterhouses to be ground for hamburger. He marketed this ground beef relentlessly—handing out samples in food stores and fairs.

  He realized that any real customer base for his product wouldn’t be folks in southwest Georgia who wanted to stock their freezers, but rather Atlantans involved in the burgeoning “good food” movement. So he signed up to attend a dinner that Atlanta’s Slow Food chapter was holding at Woodfire Grill, one of Atlanta’s A-list restaurants.

  “What did they call that group? A ‘convivium?’” Harris chuckles. “Man, I was dreading it like a trip to the dentist. That dinner was $45! I had never eaten in a restaurant nicer than a Shoney’s and just pictured those people as a bunch of arrogant stuffed shirts.”

  Instead he found his target audience and his impetus to keep pushing. Julie Shaffer, then the local Slow Food leader, says, “It was so encouraging to find someone in our state who was trying to farm animals in such a humane and sustainable way. I felt proud to know him.”

  Harris saw there was a market for more than frozen hamburger. Atlanta chefs and regional Whole Foods markets wanted grass-fed steaks. He toured the state looking for a slaughterhouse that could process the animals economically, skillfully and humanely. It didn’t exist.

  So he secured more than $2 million in loans from banks, Whole Foods and a Georgia Department of Agriculture outreach program and set out to build his own processing plan
t. He hired Temple Grandin, an animal scientist whose autism helps her better understand animal psychology and create less stress for them at slaughter.

  “People ask me how I can care about animals and be involved in killing them,” says Grandin. “What I believe is we’ve got to give animals a decent life—one that’s worth living.”

  Grandin insists it doesn’t take her mind to see what makes cattle happy. “Let those girls out of their stalls in spring, and they just start running all over the place, udders bouncing along.”

  Harris completed the slaughterhouse in 2006 with the plan to process his own cattle to the tune of 30 a week.

  “Those were the dark days,” says Harris. With such a small production, he couldn’t keep his costs down enough to make his beef even remotely competitive with the conventional product.

  “In one year I went from being comfortable, never having taken a loan, to thinking, ‘I’ve really screwed this up.’”

  So he worked out deals with more than a dozen nearby cattlemen. If they’d agree to take their pastures organic, he’d pay more than they could earn from the feedlot brokers. He stepped up production fivefold.

  Harris Returns Family Farm to Prosperity—and Its Past

  The trip from the old Harris homestead to Bluffton leads past a flock of aggressive, curious turkeys that come running from their roosts when they hear the Jeep’s engine. These aluminum-sided shelters line up like row houses and they can be moved about like hotels on a Monopoly board, letting the turkeys root for grubs and beetles and fertilize the ground before they arrive at the next destination.

  “You might want to cover your nose,” Harris warns as he drives past the bone yard. Thirty head of cattle are slaughtered every day, and their bones—still pink and slick with the bits of meat and tissue that would get processed into so-called “pink slime” elsewhere—come here to dry. They will eventually get ground into bone meal for the compost used in his one-acre organic vegetable garden.

  Like many old farming towns in the South, Bluffton today presents little more than a collection of homes in various states of care and decrepitude. There are no longer any schools, and the town post office is scheduled for closure. Turn off the main drag with its water tower and long-neglected park, and you come upon the town cemetery where the elder Harrises lie. After that, it’s row crops—peanuts as far as the eye can see.

  What pulse remains may be due in large part to Harris. White Oak Pastures sells nearly $20 million of naturally raised meat annually and employs 85 people who pump their $2.3 million in annual salary into the local economy.

  His business acumen and his environmental stewardship have earned accolades. He was selected as Georgia’s Small Business Person of the Year by the US Small Business Administration in 2011. The Georgia Conservancy named him as its 2012 Distinguished Conservationist of the Year for his efforts in promoting sustainable and organic farming.

  When Harris first switched to sustainable farming, “some people down in this area probably thought he lost his mind,” says Butch Wiggins, president of the Bank of Early, who loaned Harris the money for his abattoirs. “I don’t think they think he’s crazy now.”

  Harris turns into a craggy pasture, and as the Jeep hits an unseen pit, Harris jerks the glass of shiraz in his right hand, which sloshes close to the rim without spilling. “That was close,” he laughs. He has clearly had practice.

  Most of the 100 or more mama cows and calves stand in a companionable cluster as they munch on rye grass and red clover.

  Harris scans the perimeter to look for any cows that have just given birth. When the time comes, they wander off to a secluded hiding spot where they can bond with their newborns. One eventually appears by the trees edging the pasture, still and wary, with a calf standing by her side. Judging by the still-visible placental matter, the calf is but hours old.

  Are these happy cows? They are certainly curious and bright-eyed, with glossy coats. Miyun Park, the executive director of the Global Animal Partnership, a nonprofit charity group that rates farms based on animal welfare, says so. “I’ve been to farms and ranches across the country and around the world—some for profit and some not for profit. The life afforded to animals at White Oak Pastures far surpasses many of them. They’re given an opportunity to be cattle and sheep and goats.”

  The log cabin that James Edward Harris built is long gone. But the house where Will Carter Harris then Will Bell Harris lived is an active construction site. Workers are building a new wraparound patio with an extended roof line. It looks like the kind of porch that can accommodate quite a few rocking chairs.

  “I really do not want to run a bed and breakfast, but we’re going to need a guest house,” he chuckles. “This might as well be it.”

  These days agritourism isn’t just a matter of apple orchards and corn mazes. Visitors on their way to Florida beaches stop by White Oak Pastures—a member of the Georgia Grown agritourism association—nearly every day to load up on grass-fed strip steaks, hamburger, chickens and lamb. Jenni Harris—a dynamo who now directs marketing for White Oak Pastures—fields requests from visitors who want to tour the grounds, hold the baby chicks, poke their noses into the garden greenhouses. Or the abattoir, which she will permit.

  But first the old homestead needs, much like the pasture that surrounds it, to be restored. “My parents modernized,” Harris chuckles, with more than a hint of irony in his inflection. “They put shag carpets on the hardwood floors, installed fluorescent track lighting and covered the poplar siding with vinyl. I’m trying to return it to the way it was in the early 1900s, when my granddaddy lived here.”

  THE IBÉRICO JOURNEY

  By Tim Hayward

  From The Financial Times

  English food writer Tim Hayward is a busy fellow indeed—freelancing for The Guardian and the Financial Times, broadcasting on the BBC, running a bakery in Cambridge, and editing Fire &Knives, a quarterly journal of new food writing. But there’s always time to go chasing the world’s most delectable ham.

  It’s dark, very dark indeed, with thick cloud blanking the sliver of moon. The farmhouse sits squat and black on the peak of the hill, and only the headlights reveal it as we rattle up the track. There are four of us in the Jeep and we’ve come to see something die.

  In rural Spain, pigs are still killed the traditional way as part of a family event called a matanza—literally “a slaughter.” The family members would gather so that when the animal was killed, there would be enough willing hands to process everything that could be preserved, as quickly as possible. Then, the store cupboard stocked until the next killing, that which couldn’t be laid away was consumed on the spot—a brief celebration of plenty before returning to the hard life of the farm.

  I’d come to Extremadura—along with Simon Mullins, co-founder of the Salt Yard Group of Spanish and Italian restaurants in London, and Ben Tish, the group’s executive chef—to watch a little piece of cultural history played out and to participate. But we’d also come to see a slaughter more real than most will ever experience. There is a natural inquisitiveness about death. There’s a moral aspect for a meat eater in connecting with the living animal that has to die for you, and there’s the challenge: how will you handle yourself? Witnessing the process has become a rite of passage for a certain kind of serious food lover, so we’d come to join a family matanza, we’d come to learn about Ibérico pigs, but, at the core of it all, we had come to see something die.

  “Quique” Asparrago owns Señorío de Montanera, one of the principal producers of Ibérico hams. His family also owns Finca Alcornocal in the Province of Badajoz, deep in Extremadura. It’s a fortified farmhouse encompassing a courtyard and surrounded by acres of squat scrub oak trees, around which the handsome black pigs root. The finca is way off any utility grid, and at night the arrhythmic wheezing of the geriatric diesel generator is the only thing keeping us anchored in this century. Tonight we’ll sit around a fire built of vast oak stumps and drink lethally strong “gin
tonics,” but at six in the morning we’ll kill the pig and by the end of the day it will be salchichón, chorizo, morcilla and hams.

  A few pigs due for slaughter have been isolated in a pen as we walk out at dawn to choose one. The animal is weighed, a rope is tied round its hind leg and we all walk back to the farmhouse together, the pig gambolling unnervingly like a large dog on a leash as the slaughterman wrestles with the rope.

  Outside the gate of the finca somebody has set up a low table, something like a picnic bench but only a foot or so off the ground. Two local women have arrived from the village, one holding a plastic washing-up bowl. They are not introduced to us and stand off from the main group. Antonio Blas is the matarife, or slaughterman, who has come from the Montanera factory for the day, along with a couple of hands to help out. As the pig is led to the table our little team stands, awkward, and there is an embarrassed pause.

  Then things move quickly. Four farmhands grab the pig, taking a leg each, lift it on to its back on the table and then roll it over onto its side. Blas whips a short length of rope around its snout, neutralising its ferocious little tusks and giving him purchase to control the position of the head. The pig is, of course, squealing, but although we’ve been told that it sounds “like a child” or “a human cry,” it doesn’t seem that way. It is bewildered, furious, it grunts and puffs and, to make the obvious error of anthropomorphising, it sounds indignant.

  Blas has pulled a knife from his holster. It’s a regular butcher’s blade with a bright plastic handle. He cuts a 5cm slash in the tough, loose skin across the throat—which, weirdly, doesn’t seem to bother the pig at all—then switches his grip on the blade with an adroit flick and slides it through the cut, vertically down into the pig’s chest. He twirls the blade from side to side, wrecking main vessels on either side of the windpipe, withdraws with the first gout of blood and then drives it in again.