Red Barn, Blue Roof

So something I've been doing since getting back from the farms is eating red meat. I never really did before except out of curiosity and for a while after giving up factory farmed chicken I was pretty much a vegetarian, being too lazy to cook meat for myself. Much better to subsist on pasta and potato chips, right?

In a way I respect vegetarians (I'm stealing off Micheal Pollan right now, I'm sure he doesn't mind because we have a deep soulful connection) because they consider what they eat and what the ramifications of their food choices are on something other than themselves. There are probably vegetarians out there who do it purely for health/beauty reasons but mostly they're sad about the wittle animals (Gross Generalization Alert!) I'm constantly on the fence about this because I wuv animals myself, but there are lots of places in the world where raising meat for food makes a lot more sense than any other kind of farm production.

Okay, but I live in America, land of plenty where I can have food shipped to me all year round that no animals were murdered to produce. Well, what is all the shipping and out of season vegetable/fruit eating doing to the planet at large? Who's exporting their own produce to me? What's the cost of the fuel to our environment? What went into this veggie/fruit production in pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers? If I'm eating processed grains what kind of energy did that take and what about all those poor little mice in the threshers? And the birds?? And the manatees! God, think of the manatees!!!!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my priority is ultimately with people (I've noticed lately I use the word ultimately a lot). The only reason I give two toots about the planet is because without a planet there are no people. The food choices you make today influence the environment of the future and eating meat under the right circumstances can be the better environmental choice.

Aside from that, grass fed beef if quite tasty. It begins to quench my thirst for blood....blood...

This summer after reading about how horrible corn fed beef was for the environment and how depressingly cruel people are to cattle just to get those McD hamburgers ground out I was pretty curious about these other cows living so dreamily off GRASS/CRAZINESS. So I visited a grass fed beef farm. I've told several people this story and each time it was met with a resounding Meh. Why is it so exciting to me that I went to a place where a bunch of cows are standing around chewing cud?


Well, since I decided not to eat meat without knowing where it came from, actually seeing a place where the meat is being raised is kind of a big deal-I could see how they were living and decide if I was okay with it or not instead of just accepting that grass fed is better, the way I accept organic is better though a lot of places are organic through loop holes rather than practical application.

Also farms are cool. Obviously.

We were greeted at the barn by Veronica, a very small Korean woman with a grip like a vise. She and her husband run the place with their son, raising and selling both sheep and cattle. We drove out to the fields to see the cows. NY state has great clay-ey earth for growing hay (though that makes it challenging for other kinds of produce without a lot of mulching etc.) so Veronica grows all her own hay for the winter months. The rest of the time the cows move from one pasture to another and as their designation implies, eat grass.


We stood on the side of the road and watched them chewing. They watched us back, tearing up the grass and occasionally lowing for attention. They started to wander closer and Veronica yelled, "No, it's not time yet! You stay there!" at which they mooed. As I looked one of the black Angus lifted its head and a stream of mucus drained from its nose. Gross. I asked Veronica if they give the cows antibiotics and she laughed. They don't need it, cows get sick when they're kept in close quarters and force fed corn, which isn't easily processed by their delicately evolved stomachs. So I guess mucus is normal?

After we got bored of staring at the cows and them staring at us we went back to the farm house which was a whole other menagerie. There were half a dozen dogs, a couple sheep, like twenty goats and a gaggle of black (?) ducks wandering the premises without the benefit of a fence between them.

There were chickens somewhere too as evidenced by the somewhat comical bucket of eggs in their foyer.



Dani, my WWOOF hostess who arranged this lovely visit, bought a bunch of beef and helped Veronica brainstorm ideas for self promotion. Dani loves the business aspect of her organic farm, PR I guess you could say. Veronica has a lot of beef and a lot more coming (though grass fed cattle have longer life spans than corn fed generally, about two years before heading to the slaughterhouse as opposed to seven or eight months). Despite this she seemed pretty lackadaisacal (sp?) about the whole thing, casually eating blueberries as she talked about maybe starting a web site or putting up signs along the road. I weirdly admire the kind of impracticality that resists outside influence but I could see Dani getting worked up about how little action the beef farm was taking to sell itself. Finally we left with our beef and that night Dani cooked it up.

My god. It was a revelation.

So here's this amazing web site about how factory farming is affecting the environment, the water we drink, our health. There are a few pictures of CAFOs but it isn't one of those sites that just throws how the animals are suffering in your face. It's pretty easy to distance oneself from the wittle animals especially when they're not super cute and snot mucus all over the place. But you cant distance yourself from the fact that corn fed beef is destroying parts of the planet and by supporting grass fed beef farms you're supporting a sustainable mode of production. Which is awesome. And tasty.

Oh and I forgot she had horses. It's not a very clear picture because she said one of them likes to bite and I didn't catch which. And they were closing in.

Roasted

Robin mentioned I should include recipes but I think of this blog as being about the experience of food in my life and how it changes what I do and how I think about other things. Also a lot of my recipes aren't so great and are totally ripped off other people's fantastic cooking ideas.

Still, I'd like to mention cooking food when it relates to an experience, like the first time I roasted an entire chicken which conveniently was just last week.

I've mentioned before that I gave up factory-farmed meat which means I don't eat meat not bought and prepared by myself much. Where are all the restaurants advertising their cage free quails? I'll patronize them! (I've never eaten a quail but I saw some at the New Amsterdam Market and am intrigued...they look like dolls if raw chickens played with little dolls of themselves. Ew. Never mind.)

One of the things I missed the most was roasted chicken. There's a Cuban restaurant in my neighborhood that makes amazing rotisserie chicken and I mourn it.

I'm pretty lazy and when the taste for flesh comes on too strong I usually just broil a chicken breast or cook it on the stove top. As I trolled the poultry isle at the Park Slope Food Coop, in my fit of carnivorous lust, there was a cornucopia of animals that had been grass fed, hormone free blah di blah. Most of them still had their bones, or feet, most were probably stuffed with graphic little baggies of organs. Why haven't I ever had duck or rabbit (not technically a bird, but still)? Was it more than laziness but rather squeamishness, a reluctance to acknowledge that what I was eating was once a living thing that died to feed me?

Hunger and curiosity drove me to pick up a whole chicken and take on preparing the meal I always pictured in my mind as an event, something for a special occasion. When I got it home and unwrapped it I was surprised not by the blood or expected organ baggie, but by the heft and texture of the thing outside its packaging. It felt kind of like a baby (Note: If your baby feels like a raw chicken consult a pediatrician immediately).

So this is how I made it:

Wash it out then dry with paper towels. Cover the whole thing with black pepper and salt and stick some garlic into slits you cut in the skin (another weird 'this was alive' moment. The skin moves across the flesh so you can see your garlic chunks lost beneath the surface.) Put it in a high sided tray breast down then in the oven at 450 until that side is browned, flip it over and brown the other side. Then I took it out turning the oven to 325 and added onions and potatoes around the chicken with a little bit of water, probably more than I need to, then put the whole thing back in for about an hour, checking on it and basting it occasionally.


It was remarkably easy and tasty. Though the process of preparing it had moments where I was just plan grossed out I think this was a testament to how disconnected we become with the source of our food rather than a sign from God that eating animals is wrong. Perhaps on the farm as I lead a Billy-Goat to the slaughter house I'll reconsider that position, but for now I just want to use this experience to establish a personal ground rule for eating-If you can't bring yourself to handle the materials you shouldn't eat the product.

For info on where my chicken came from (It's Amish!) check out these chicken people:

dartagnan.com

Get That Delicious Meaty Monkey Off Your Back

Last night I received this text message:

"What the fuck kind of vegan bullshit are you getting yourself into?"

I responded with a disparaging comment about the sender's meat consumption, to which she replied:

"Red meat makes me happy. Blood red."

End of conversation. Now, I'm not a vegan. I'm not even a vegetarian. Shortly before last Christmas I made a vow to stop eating factory raised meat. I've maintained that vow except for two occasions. Once at my company's annual benefit at Tavern on the Green. No filling baskets of bread laid helpfully across the table to soak up all the alcohol from the open bar. No, you get one roll the size of a chihuahua's head (I like to measure things in chihuahua units) and you have to make the best of it. When the main coarse arrived the green beans were already soaked in the juice of their chicken breast counterpart. It was eat or drink more, and I ate. In retrospect that sounds like a stupid choice but it seemed like the right thing then.

The second time I broke my new rule was also at a benefit, for a public elementary school at a Chinese restaurant downtown. This wasn't intentional, I thought the little cube of something I popped into my mouth would be tofu. It wasn't. I'm not sure how it could be classified but it tasted like something suffered to make it.

Meat is a touchy subject for a lot of people. It has been fairly easy for me to stay away from factory farmed animal products mainly because I wasn't raised eating one of the most seductive and destructive-red meat. Blood red. I say destructive because CAFOs, the places where thousands of heads of steer are crammed shoulder to shoulder in their own filth, eating by-products of their predecessors (Helloooo mad cow disease), have changed the face of agriculture in America. No more small family owned farms growing a diversity of plants in a delicate ecosystem of crop rotation and animal grazing. Now it's acre after acre after acre of corn owned by large agribusinesses. To feed cattle, who aren't really built for eating corn anyway and have to be injected with all sorts of antibiotics to be kept from keeling over dead from ulcerated stomachs before they get to the slaughterhouse.

And I say seductive because red meat is tasty. I have eaten it and it tastes like blood and to carnivorous animals like humans, blood taste is the taste of protein and life and macho chest beating. All fun things. I could probably list a lot more reasons why steak is awesome if I were a connoisseur of that particular dish and had eaten more than a few experimental bites from a friend's plate. What I can say is that steak if heavy. If you don't eat it much a few bites will knock you out. So, is beef like crack and my friend craves it because she constantly eats it? Probably more like nicotine since I hear crack is instantly lovely that very first time while my memories of my first smoke all involved severe nausea and regret. Until it gets into your system.

There are options. There are free range chickens and grass-grazed beef. There's also this really interesting article I read a few weeks ago in the New York Times about how to start eating less meat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/dining/11mini.html

Not NO meat, just less. I think it puts a few things in perspective about how much meat we really need to eat. No one likes to be told what to put in their body but I do think its important to experiment and consider why we eat how we do. If nothing else you may find a recipe you really like.