On the New York Times

The Carnivore's Dilemma
by Nicolette Hahn Niman
published: October 30, 2009


IS eating a hamburger the global warming equivalent of driving a Hummer? This week an article in The Times of London carried a headline that blared: "Give Up Meat to Save the Planet." Former Vice President Al Gore, who has made climate change his signature issue, has even been assailed for omnivorous eating by animal rights activists.

It's true that food production is an important contributor to climate change. And the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.

But that's an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.

So what is the real story of meat's connection to global warming? Answering the question requires examining the individual greenhouse gases involved: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides.

Carbon dioxide makes up the majority of agriculture-related greenhouse emissions. In American farming, most carbon dioxide emissions come from fuel burned to operate vehicles and equipment. World agricultural carbon emissions, on the other hand, result primarily from the clearing of woods for crop growing and livestock grazing. During the 1990s, tropical deforestation in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Sudan and other developing countries caused 15 percent to 35 percent of annual global fossil fuel emissions.

Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil's soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process.

Meat and dairy eaters need not be part of this. Many smaller, traditional farms and ranches in the United States have scant connection to carbon dioxide emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and make little use of machinery. Moreover, those farmers generally use less soy than industrial operations do, and those who do often grow their own, so there are no emissions from long-distance transport and zero chance their farms contributed to deforestation in the developing world.

In contrast to traditional farms, industrial livestock and poultry facilities keep animals in buildings with mechanized systems for feeding, lighting, sewage flushing, ventilation, heating and cooling, all of which generate emissions. These factory farms are also soy guzzlers and acquire much of their feed overseas. You can reduce your contribution to carbon dioxide emissions by avoiding industrially produced meat and dairy products.

Unfortunately for vegetarians who rely on it for protein, avoiding soy from deforested croplands may be more difficult: as the Organic Consumers Association notes, Brazilian soy is common (and unlabeled) in tofu and soymilk sold in American supermarkets.

Methane is agriculture's second-largest greenhouse gas. Wetland rice fields alone account for as much 29 percent of the world's human-generated methane. In animal farming, much of the methane comes from lagoons of liquefied manure at industrial facilities, which are as nauseating as they sound.

This isn't a problem at traditional farms. "Before the 1970s, methane emissions from manure were minimal because the majority of livestock farms in the U.S. were small operations where animals deposited manure in pastures and corrals," the Environmental Protection Agency says. The E.P.A. found that with the rapid rise of factory farms, liquefied manure systems became the norm and methane emissions skyrocketed. You can reduce your methane emissions by seeking out meat from animals raised outdoors on traditional farms.

CRITICS of meat-eating often point out that cattle are prime culprits in methane production. Fortunately, the cause of these methane emissions is understood, and their production can be reduced.

Much of the problem arises when livestock eat poor quality forages, throwing their digestive systems out of balance. Livestock nutrition experts have demonstrated that by making minor improvements in animal diets (like providing nutrient-laden salt licks) they can cut enteric methane by half. Other practices, like adding certain proteins to ruminant diets, can reduce methane production per unit of milk or meat by a factor of six, according to research at Australia's University of New England. Enteric methane emissions can also be substantially reduced when cattle are regularly rotated onto fresh pastures, researchers at University of Louisiana have confirmed.

Finally, livestock farming plays a role in nitrous oxide emissions, which make up around 5 percent of this country's total greenhouse gases. More than three-quarters of farming's nitrous oxide emissions result from manmade fertilizers. Thus, you can reduce nitrous oxide emissions by buying meat and dairy products from animals that were not fed fertilized crops — in other words, from animals raised on grass or raised organically.

In contrast to factory farming, well-managed, non-industrialized animal farming minimizes greenhouse gases and can even benefit the environment. For example, properly timed cattle grazing can increase vegetation by as much as 45 percent, North Dakota State University researchers have found. And grazing by large herbivores (including cattle) is essential for well-functioning prairie ecosystems, research at Kansas State University has determined.

Additionally, several recent studies show that pasture and grassland areas used for livestock reduce global warming by acting as carbon sinks. Converting croplands to pasture, which reduces erosion, effectively sequesters significant amounts of carbon. One analysis published in the journal Global Change Biology showed a 19 percent increase in soil carbon after land changed from cropland to pasture. What's more, animal grazing reduces the need for the fertilizers and fuel used by farm machinery in crop cultivation, things that aggravate climate change.

Livestock grazing has other noteworthy environmental benefits as well. Compared to cropland, perennial pastures used for grazing can decrease soil erosion by 80 percent and markedly improve water quality, Minnesota's Land Stewardship Project research has found. Even the United Nations report acknowledges, "There is growing evidence that both cattle ranching and pastoralism can have positive impacts on biodiversity."

As the contrast between the environmental impact of traditional farming and industrial farming shows, efforts to minimize greenhouse gases need to be much more sophisticated than just making blanket condemnations of certain foods. Farming methods vary tremendously, leading to widely variable global warming contributions for every food we eat. Recent research in Sweden shows that, depending on how and where a food is produced, its carbon dioxide emissions vary by a factor of 10.

And it should also be noted that farmers bear only a portion of the blame for greenhouse gas emissions in the food system. Only about one-fifth of the food system's energy use is farm-related, according to University of Wisconsin research. And the Soil Association in Britain estimates that only half of food's total greenhouse impact has any connection to farms. The rest comes from processing, transportation, storage, retailing and food preparation. The seemingly innocent potato chip, for instance, turns out to be a dreadfully climate-hostile food. Foods that are minimally processed, in season and locally grown, like those available at farmers' markets and backyard gardens, are generally the most climate-friendly.

Rampant waste at the processing, retail and household stages compounds the problem. About half of the food produced in the United States is thrown away, according to University of Arizona research. Thus, a consumer could measurably reduce personal global warming impact simply by more judicious grocery purchasing and use.

None of us, whether we are vegan or omnivore, can entirely avoid foods that play a role in global warming. Singling out meat is misleading and unhelpful, especially since few people are likely to entirely abandon animal-based foods. Mr. Gore, for one, apparently has no intention of going vegan. The 90 percent of Americans who eat meat and dairy are likely to respond the same way.

Still, there are numerous reasonable ways to reduce our individual contributions to climate change through our food choices. Because it takes more resources to produce meat and dairy than, say, fresh locally grown carrots, it's sensible to cut back on consumption of animal-based foods. More important, all eaters can lower their global warming contribution by following these simple rules: avoid processed foods and those from industrialized farms; reduce food waste; and buy local and in season.

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On the New York Times

The Carnivore's Dilemma
by Nicolette Hahn Niman
published: October 30, 2009


IS eating a hamburger the global warming equivalent of driving a Hummer? This week an article in The Times of London carried a headline that blared: "Give Up Meat to Save the Planet." Former Vice President Al Gore, who has made climate change his signature issue, has even been assailed for omnivorous eating by animal rights activists.

It's true that food production is an important contributor to climate change. And the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.

But that's an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.

So what is the real story of meat's connection to global warming? Answering the question requires examining the individual greenhouse gases involved: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides.

Carbon dioxide makes up the majority of agriculture-related greenhouse emissions. In American farming, most carbon dioxide emissions come from fuel burned to operate vehicles and equipment. World agricultural carbon emissions, on the other hand, result primarily from the clearing of woods for crop growing and livestock grazing. During the 1990s, tropical deforestation in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Sudan and other developing countries caused 15 percent to 35 percent of annual global fossil fuel emissions.

Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil's soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process.

Meat and dairy eaters need not be part of this. Many smaller, traditional farms and ranches in the United States have scant connection to carbon dioxide emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and make little use of machinery. Moreover, those farmers generally use less soy than industrial operations do, and those who do often grow their own, so there are no emissions from long-distance transport and zero chance their farms contributed to deforestation in the developing world.

In contrast to traditional farms, industrial livestock and poultry facilities keep animals in buildings with mechanized systems for feeding, lighting, sewage flushing, ventilation, heating and cooling, all of which generate emissions. These factory farms are also soy guzzlers and acquire much of their feed overseas. You can reduce your contribution to carbon dioxide emissions by avoiding industrially produced meat and dairy products.

Unfortunately for vegetarians who rely on it for protein, avoiding soy from deforested croplands may be more difficult: as the Organic Consumers Association notes, Brazilian soy is common (and unlabeled) in tofu and soymilk sold in American supermarkets.

Methane is agriculture's second-largest greenhouse gas. Wetland rice fields alone account for as much 29 percent of the world's human-generated methane. In animal farming, much of the methane comes from lagoons of liquefied manure at industrial facilities, which are as nauseating as they sound.

This isn't a problem at traditional farms. "Before the 1970s, methane emissions from manure were minimal because the majority of livestock farms in the U.S. were small operations where animals deposited manure in pastures and corrals," the Environmental Protection Agency says. The E.P.A. found that with the rapid rise of factory farms, liquefied manure systems became the norm and methane emissions skyrocketed. You can reduce your methane emissions by seeking out meat from animals raised outdoors on traditional farms.

CRITICS of meat-eating often point out that cattle are prime culprits in methane production. Fortunately, the cause of these methane emissions is understood, and their production can be reduced.

Much of the problem arises when livestock eat poor quality forages, throwing their digestive systems out of balance. Livestock nutrition experts have demonstrated that by making minor improvements in animal diets (like providing nutrient-laden salt licks) they can cut enteric methane by half. Other practices, like adding certain proteins to ruminant diets, can reduce methane production per unit of milk or meat by a factor of six, according to research at Australia's University of New England. Enteric methane emissions can also be substantially reduced when cattle are regularly rotated onto fresh pastures, researchers at University of Louisiana have confirmed.

Finally, livestock farming plays a role in nitrous oxide emissions, which make up around 5 percent of this country's total greenhouse gases. More than three-quarters of farming's nitrous oxide emissions result from manmade fertilizers. Thus, you can reduce nitrous oxide emissions by buying meat and dairy products from animals that were not fed fertilized crops — in other words, from animals raised on grass or raised organically.

In contrast to factory farming, well-managed, non-industrialized animal farming minimizes greenhouse gases and can even benefit the environment. For example, properly timed cattle grazing can increase vegetation by as much as 45 percent, North Dakota State University researchers have found. And grazing by large herbivores (including cattle) is essential for well-functioning prairie ecosystems, research at Kansas State University has determined.

Additionally, several recent studies show that pasture and grassland areas used for livestock reduce global warming by acting as carbon sinks. Converting croplands to pasture, which reduces erosion, effectively sequesters significant amounts of carbon. One analysis published in the journal Global Change Biology showed a 19 percent increase in soil carbon after land changed from cropland to pasture. What's more, animal grazing reduces the need for the fertilizers and fuel used by farm machinery in crop cultivation, things that aggravate climate change.

Livestock grazing has other noteworthy environmental benefits as well. Compared to cropland, perennial pastures used for grazing can decrease soil erosion by 80 percent and markedly improve water quality, Minnesota's Land Stewardship Project research has found. Even the United Nations report acknowledges, "There is growing evidence that both cattle ranching and pastoralism can have positive impacts on biodiversity."

As the contrast between the environmental impact of traditional farming and industrial farming shows, efforts to minimize greenhouse gases need to be much more sophisticated than just making blanket condemnations of certain foods. Farming methods vary tremendously, leading to widely variable global warming contributions for every food we eat. Recent research in Sweden shows that, depending on how and where a food is produced, its carbon dioxide emissions vary by a factor of 10.

And it should also be noted that farmers bear only a portion of the blame for greenhouse gas emissions in the food system. Only about one-fifth of the food system's energy use is farm-related, according to University of Wisconsin research. And the Soil Association in Britain estimates that only half of food's total greenhouse impact has any connection to farms. The rest comes from processing, transportation, storage, retailing and food preparation. The seemingly innocent potato chip, for instance, turns out to be a dreadfully climate-hostile food. Foods that are minimally processed, in season and locally grown, like those available at farmers' markets and backyard gardens, are generally the most climate-friendly.

Rampant waste at the processing, retail and household stages compounds the problem. About half of the food produced in the United States is thrown away, according to University of Arizona research. Thus, a consumer could measurably reduce personal global warming impact simply by more judicious grocery purchasing and use.

None of us, whether we are vegan or omnivore, can entirely avoid foods that play a role in global warming. Singling out meat is misleading and unhelpful, especially since few people are likely to entirely abandon animal-based foods. Mr. Gore, for one, apparently has no intention of going vegan. The 90 percent of Americans who eat meat and dairy are likely to respond the same way.

Still, there are numerous reasonable ways to reduce our individual contributions to climate change through our food choices. Because it takes more resources to produce meat and dairy than, say, fresh locally grown carrots, it's sensible to cut back on consumption of animal-based foods. More important, all eaters can lower their global warming contribution by following these simple rules: avoid processed foods and those from industrialized farms; reduce food waste; and buy local and in season.

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The Sculpture Garden

Installation by Mike Ballou
Photo by Clint Spaulding
Send your photos of Angus and any ideas you have for future exhibits to anna@marlowandsons.com

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Photo by Clint Spaulding

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Pigs in the City

Most people know at this point that eating locally is nothing new, and much has been made of eating "the way your grandparents ate". Because of course it used to be that you couldn't not eat locally, since shipping food any distance at all was not really an option. The part people don't tend to think about is that when eating locally was that much a necessity, the food you ate was way more present in life than as just a plate on the table. Food was everywhere, and it shaped both how you lived and the place you lived in.

How different was it? One of my favorite local food stories is the history of the pig. New York City has a long and involved history with pigs. It started when colonists first came to America, bringing with them livestock and the notion of private property. Both were new to the Native Americans. As the colonists settled, they set about claiming property and trying to make the Native Americans conform to their ideas of ownership and boundaries. Fences and coercion (not to mention small pox) all helped the colonists make Native Americans see things their way, but it was the pigs that made the most convincing argument. The pigs brought over from Europe quickly made themselves at home in the New World, and roamed freely in large, aggressive packs, foraging for whatever food they could find. And what they found were the Native American's fields, with all the corn and other vegetables they could possibly want, all completely unprotected by fences. Needless to say, the pigs wreaked havoc, and the Native Americans were forced to put up fences, or else lose their entire crop. Once they put up fences, they had entered into the European system of private property, and were forced to live and interact with the colonists on their terms. New York, along with the rest of the Northeast, became land divided, a land of farms and fences and boundaries. The landscapes of today are the result of those first divisions, now multiplied and expanded into cities and developments as well as fields and farmland. There are even still some traces of those first boundaries: Wall Street really did used to be a wall, built by the settlers of what they called New Amsterdam. I even read somewhere that pigs were directly to blame for this wall too. Apparently the semi-wild herds of pigs could get pretty aggressive, and the wall was built to protect the settlement from rampaging pigs. This might not be true. The other explanation I've heard, which seems slightly more plausible, is that the wall was built to keep out hostile attackers of the human variety: Native Americans. But still, the pigs make a good story, and even if it's not strictly true, there's definitely some truth in there. It at least does go to show how important pork was to the building of fences.

But the story of pigs doesn't end there. In fact, it gets better. That's because the story of New York farms doesn't end with the start of New York City. Even after the city stopped looking like fields and started looking like buildings and streets, New York was still a farm. Talk about local: the meat that people (especially the poor) ate well into the 19th century didn't come from the country. It came from livestock the roamed the streets. Pigs were the most common of these animals, and possibly the most iconic. For a lot of people, they came to symbolize city life, not rural life, and they were seen as an image of the chaos and squalor of the poor and crowded areas of the city. Especially at the edges, where the city faded into destitute neighborhoods and shantytowns, you could find whole herds of pigs, roaming the streets and rummaging in alleyways.

In a time when trash was just dumped in the street or piled in the gutters, 19th century pigs gave a whole new meaning to using the whole animal. They acted as the only street cleaners or trash collectors New York had as they foraged for food, rooting through the heaps of garbage and disposing of anything edible. There was no real system in place for disposing of waste in the city, and it wasn't just garbage that collected in the streets. People also regularly tossed the contents of their chamber pots out the window, and when a carriage horse or a cow died, it was usually just left on the curb to rot or be eaten by other stray animals. So the pigs, doing their part to get rid of all this, were arguably some of the more sanitary residents of the city. They might even have been more important in their street-cleaner role than in their ham and pork role. That's not to say that these pigs were exactly a beloved fixture in the city. I think the hot dog probably receives a lot more love than they did. Even though they were helping keep the streets somewhat clean, the city was still filthy, and that the pigs lived off this filth made their presence emblematic of the unsanitary conditions that plagued the more destitute neighborhoods. Not to mention the fact that these herds of pigs could get pretty aggressive. Those rampaging pigs of the Wall Street story are no exaggeration: there are stories of semi-wild pigs menacing the residents of New York who got in their way, and even a few reported cases of children being attacked and even killed.

Pigs were a serious part of life in New York for a long time, and not just as food. We're getting back to local now, and we're doing a pretty good job. There are even a few chickens starting to show up in the city, as well as vegetables. But we've still got nothing on the local of the old New York. Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing. I'm not sure I want to be looking out surly, semi-feral pigs on my way to work in the morning.

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Diner Journal Has Valentine's Day Crush

On the New Amsterdam Market!

Please support our mission to establish a permanent, indoor public market in the City of New York, where purveyors such as butchers, grocers, mongers, and other vendors will source and sell food from the region.

By incubating and supporting these local businesses, New Amsterdam Market will provide additional outlets and opportunities for farmers too busy or too distant to attend New York's thriving Greenmarkets - a need made all the more critical by the economic collapse.

Our aim in 2009 is to begin holding New Amsterdam Market once every month. We have been speaking with the City about use of a public site in Lower Manhattan and are encouraged by this prospect. More news will follow!

Your generous support will help us start the market.

Purchase Tickets for you and all your friends NOW!

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Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know: Cecily Upton At Large

Last week, I drove across Nebraska. Nebraska is a really BIG state. Big and Flat. It's January, so there wasn't much growing as I passed through, but the remnants of our nation's great corn industry fanned out before me in field after field of broken stalks and barren irrigation contraptions. I know most people think this part of the country is boring, and perhaps I did feel a tinge of boredom after 300 miles on I-80 with nary a curve in the road to distract me. But mostly I think Nebraska and her sister states of Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas, are beautiful. Beautiful in the way that Jennifer Grey was before she got her nose job…a little plain, but kind of wild and alluring just the same.

So, I'm driving through Nebraska and I start to notice that out among the broken corn stalks in 4 out of 10 fields are herds of stout, black cows foraging freely. Foraging freely? In Nebraska? This is a state firmly in the grips of Our Nation's Food System. Subsidies are handed out here like handshakes at a campaign rally. Aren't all those cows supposed to be penned up, in chains, unable to move, force-fed unnatural diets of grain and animal parts and injected with all sorts of horrible anti-biotics? Isn't that what Fast Food Nation and King Corn tell us? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that doesn't happen, because it does. In fact, most, if not all, of those cows I saw munching away in the great open plains are destined for that very fate. Soon. And I passed those very feedlots the next day, in Colorado, and those animals are inhumanely jammed in there and there are MOUNTAINS of manure and it looks to be a pretty horrible existence. But, BUT, my east-coast, bleeding-heart, liberal, Slow Food sensibilities were kind of rocked when I saw those cows apparently enjoying themselves roaming freely amongst the corn stalks.

Then I got to thinking. And this is what I thought: what I'm seeing here might not be a quaint antithetical anecdote to the Evil Feedlot/Bionic Beef nightmare we know exists, but instead might be, in actuality, THE SADDEST INDICATOR OF HOW F***** UP OUR FOOD SYSTEM REALLY IS. Now, I'm still a little emotional about this, as you can tell. I'm going to try and lay this out clearly, but bear with me if it gets a little tangled. Here goes. These fields, in the spring, were most likely planted with GMO corn destined for one of three fates: feedlot grain, high-fructose corn syrup, or biofuel. Now, I need to make one thing clear: this corn is inedible. People cannot eat it. It can and will only be used for one of the three products I just listed. The farmers who grow this corn are most likely losing money on each acre and are subsidized by Uncle Sam to ensure the United States' bread-basket (note the irony here, given that these crops are not destined for food) remains productive. So, the sun shines, the fields are irrigated, the corn grows. Now in the good old days, some of these fields would be something other than corn and that other stuff would be harvested to feed animals like cows through the winter before a short diet of grain was imposed to fatten them up before slaughter.

I say a short diet of grain because grain is toxic to cows. Their stomachs can only tolerate it for a short period before it becomes infected, they sicken, and they die. Anyway, growing that other stuff became less and less profitable once the government began writing the checks. The government will really only write checks for corn and a few other, mostly non-edible, staples, so it didn't make much sense to be growing acres of crops that you wouldn't get paid for. Besides, science and technology had, in the meantime, invented all of these glorious drugs you could give your cows that prolonged the period that they could tolerate grain. So now you could send cattle to the feedlot at an earlier age, keep them on corn for longer, and they'd fatten up faster. Sounds like a win-win, right? Well, I think everyone reading this blog knows it's not, but I want to get back to the cows I saw munching away in the barren fields.

So, I'm driving along and I won't lie, my black Brooklyn heart warmed a bit when I saw those happy cows in the fields, but it soon iced back over when I realized the sad irony. Here were cows, spending their last short weeks before the feedlot, scavenging in snow-covered fields for the remnants of GMO corn that they would soon be force-fed in too-close quarters while standing in their own waste. These poor animals will never know what it feels like to follow their natural instincts. Over the years, they've had those instincts bred out of them. They're bred to eat, and eat they will, anything they can find. And in these fields, what they were finding would soon kill them. Then that heart got even colder and more ice-covered when I thought about this: what if those fields were used to grow actual food, for actual people. Food that nourished and provided our population with the nutrients and vitamins that many of us so desperately need. And what if, once that food had been harvested, the remnants of that system were left to be slurped up by hungry animals who could turn it not only into further nourishment, but also into natural fertilizer, making those fields even more productive next season. Ahh, what if? I'm no farmer, so I'm sure it's just a crazy idea dreamt up by a silly kid from the city who doesn't know what she's talking about, but I kind of feel like I might be on to something here.


by Cecily Upton

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Transmission from our friends The Greenhorns

Sharp hooves, and a fierce nibbling habit make sheep herds 'high impact' users of grazing territory. For this reason, land managers of the U.S. Grazing Service in 1939 sought to limit soil degradation by charting the capacity of the region to sustain the sheep. The dotted sheep corridors are mountain-passes that are accessible to watering holes and train tracks.

Data-intensive management of our agricultural soils, precious aquifers and urban foodsheds remains critically relevant today. Now, more than ever we have the digital tools to carefully inventory our natural resources. Google Earth, satellite technology, and multi-layered mapping software can serve our need for 'best use' of this American land. It is the job of our government, the USDA, to steward our land and carefully assess its productive capacity and conservation value for the benefit of present and future Americans. Land-use planning, food-security planning, water-shed planning--such foresight could provide greenspace corridors, organic farming zones, gmo-free areas, and targeted areas of intensive food production nearby large cities.

The government already tinkers quite significantly with American agriculture- incentivizing overproduction of corn and subsidized commodities, casting a blind eye to pollution, run-off and erosive technologies. Our hope for change revolves around the needs of farmers and the people they feed. The sustainable foodsystem our nation requires will speedily arise from a thoughtful federal land-use policy based on sane expectations of the land. The data-based, land-based, future-based expectations will yield a landscape of lasting fertility and flourishing rural economies peopled by farmers, entrepreneurs, families and organic delight.

Yes! We can serve our country healthy food!

The original of this map resides in the collections at the Prelinger LIbrary in San Francisco, California. The Library is appropriation-friendly and open to the public, a treasure trove archive. Severine and The Greenhorns are grateful to the Prelingers for their fierce commitment to rare agricultural texts, images and ephemera.


Young farmers: join the mapping project online. WWW.SERVEYOURCOUNTRYFOOD.NET

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Coming Soon Online

MarlowandDaughters.com

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Caroline Fidanza in the Study with the Knife

Have you seen this woman? Rumor has it you may be able to catch her Tuesday, January 14th in Manhattan. At 6:30 in the study of the mysterious Astor Center Caroline Fidanza will be joined by Greenmarket farmers Dan Gibson, of Grazin' Angus Acres in Ghent, NY, and Mike Yezzi, of Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, NY, to learn about the animals they raise, their production practices, and the health and environmental reasons to eat sustainably and humanely raised pork and beef. Caroline will explain the culinary advantages of pastured meats and provide some tasty samples to make the point. Good for you, good for the planet? Sounds suspicious no? Investigate with us and Slow U for forty-five dollars. Tickets available at the Astor Center or online. See you Tuesday. Terms and conditions will not vary. Please leave all candlesticks and ropes at home.

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This Just In

Marlow and Daughters has a PHONE! The new and working number is 718-388-5700. Thank everyone for you inquires and patience.

Marlow and Daughters
95 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
718-388-5700

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Happy Halloween... I mean Holidays

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TURKEY HUNTING... or Whistling?

Come sign up for your heritage breed turkeys at Marlow and Sons. They are given "the opportunity to engage in positive social interactions." And they are fed 100% vegetarian cereal. You will get one of these breeds: White Holland, Narragansett, the Bourbon Red, Black or Standard Bronze. Please order by November 1st and pick up on November 19th!

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Funds for Farmers AND Fun for Us

This event, thrown by Badass Brooklyn Based, I as like to call them, is a fund raiser for The New Farmer Development Project. It is really exciting that this program exists and has since 2000. Here is some info from their website:

The New Farmer Development Project (NFDP) identifies, educates, and supports immigrants with agricultural experience by helping them become local farmers and establish small farms in the region.

By training the next generation of regional farmers, the NFDP helps preserve local farmland and rural farm communities, strengthen farmers markets and regional food security, and expand public access to high-quality, locally-grown farm products.

The NFDP was created in 2000 as a partnership between Greenmarket and Cornell Cooperative Extension's NYC Program. The project is based in New York City and supports new farmers witin the city, New York's Hudson Valley & Catskill Regions, New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania.

Project Facts and Milestones:

-More than 130 project members have graduated from the NFDP's comprehensive agricultural training course, La Nueva Siembra.
-16 individuals and their families have started their own farming businesses with the support of the NFDP. These farmers come from countries such as Columbia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico.
-These new farmers sell produce at more than 40 farmers markets throughout the year. Many of these markets are located in immigrant neighborhoods where NFDP farmers sell vegetables, flowers, traditional ethnic produce, eggs from pastured chickens, and honey to members of their community.
-The NFDP has further developed its model through partnership with the National Immigrant Farming Initiative and the Northeast Network of Immigrant Farming Projects. See our Project Partners for more information.

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Get Roasted

The Greenhorns is a documentary film that explores the lives of America's young farming community—its spirit, practices, and needs. As the nation experiences a groundswell of interest in sustainable lifestyles, The Greenhorns, both the vision of the film and the group of dedicated young people making it, see the promising beginnings of an agricultural revival. Young farmers' efforts feed us safe food, conserve valuable land, and reconstitute communities split apart by strip malls. It is the filmmakers' hope that by broadcasting the stories and voices of these young farmers, we can inspire another generation of optimistic agrarians.

The Glynwood Center is a working organic farm and conference center set in the middle of 2,000 acres of preserved forest glory. Their work revolves around helping communities preserve land and a strong agricultural economy. The site is stupendously beautiful with goats, chickens, orchards, rare cows and sheep, and an ancient orchard.

Join forces this weekend to raise awareness and money. I am particularly curious about workshops called: DIY Undergarments for obvious reasons and Anarchy Apiaries for more serious reasons! Alas I can not attend but Tom will be up there teaching meat curing! For more information check out the Greenhorn's blog the irresistible fleet of bicycles.

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Butch

So, uh, since I've spent three posts and an entire summer doomsdaying my way through the history of meat eating – and, since, the whole point of that tirade was to tell you something else, something wonderful, and not just make you depressed about your love of pork belly, I figured, well, I should probably tell you about that something else:

Tom Mylan is the in-house butcher for these restaurants.

You may already know this. Or you may not know this. But undoubtedly, if you've tasted this meat, you will want to know more.

I go back into the walk-in. Tom is slicing through a dark, shiny orb that turns out to be beef liver. It's Wednesday, so he's working through the two pigs and steer that arrived from Fleischer's yesterday. They arrived hanging weight meat, huge hulks of muscle and tissue and bone and skin. By now he's gotten the pigs into primal thirds: shoulder, loin, belly, sirloin and ham. He gestures to an invisible stack of pigs on the block, saying, "All this is done."

The radio is on and it's hot. Mark's coming to take meat to Bonita and we have to get those bags of it into a cooler for him. I jump in and once we've loaded the meat in half way, Tom warns, "Watch out, they're a little bloody on the outside."

Then we're back to talking beef. Tom tells me about smoking, brining, braising. I ask about the burgers. He grinds the beef twice so it sticks together, but it's still coarser than most ground beef because the holes on the grind plate are larger. That's what gives the burgers their meaty quality – there's more whole muscle in them.

Tom talks with such ease about cutting up meat that it's hard to believe he hasn't been doing it forever. Just a few years ago, Tom was in charge of the grocery at Marlow and editing the journal with Anna when he walked passed Cheffie and Andrew outside of Diner one day. They told him they were considering getting an in-house butcher so they could get hanging weight meat from Fleischer's. And he said something like, "That sounds really really cool." And they said, "Wanna do it?"

He moved in with Josh and Jessica of Fleischer's, lived on their futon with their mastiff Booboo and a giant tortoise. Every morning it was "beef leg, beef leg, beef leg." He began to collect books on the subject like a Navy meat manual from 1945 and watched educational clips on You Tube.

And it has paid off. According to Tom, getting hanging weight (100-180 pound sections) meat is the only way for a restaurant to be able to afford getting grass-fed, local, properly raised meat. There's a lot of flexibility. Tom gets together with Juventino, Sean and Dave, and they can cut any way they want, make stylistic choices that wouldn't be possible if their meat came out of Cryovac. And it's a lot more exciting to cook here. Curing lardo, rendering it, whipping it. Dealing with odds and ends. Says Tom, "Limitations, not infinite possibilities, are what make great, classic cuisine." Agreed.

Leah Campbell

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Spam Spam Spam Poetry and Spam

I couldn't help trying to find logical patterns in the raging sea that is my morning deluge of internet spam comments. There amongst the 1000 gambling and car insurance blips I banished today I found this little haiku:

For motorola cell phones

bela tarr harmonies artificial eye review
frog eye salad recipe
jack johnson if i had eyes
how long does alcohol stay in your system


ps. One of my first weeks working in the store at Marlow's we got Spammed. Drunk customers left cans of Spam hidden on the shelves. I also should say I am a bit taken with gambling and car insurance as somewhat romantically linked ideas... There seems to be some method in this madness... How long does it...

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Wait is this an ad for American Spirits? Who is that ruffian?

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Someone I Know Loves This Trashy Vampire Book

This is how the book came about:
I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book.

Who could it be?

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Meating the Demand

Carnality and pollution, historically meat's foremost negative connotations, have been represented in all forms – perhaps the most interesting of which is fine art (S. Twigg 1983). Take, for example, the carnal leitmotif of the butcher shop in Flemish and Italian paintings of the 16th century. Scholar Barry Wind writes that the burlesque characters of "these paintings exploit the meat stall as a metaphor for wantonness." In Bartolomeo Passarotti's "Butcher Shop," the licentious expressions of the butchers played on "vulgar colloquial connotations of the word butcher shop, 'beccheria,' which seems to have been used synonymously with sexual encounter." The implied pollution in these paintings is the moral and spiritual decrepitude of the leering, wayward butcher.

But pollution of another kind was on the horizon. The late 18th and early 19th centuries marked a period of rapid change for the West as the Industrial Revolution transformed the way people lived and ate. Innovations in industry were charged with notions of progress and prosperity – meat, formerly a rare luxury, would be available and affordable to all. This kind of ubiquity could only be made possible by a systematic overhaul of the process by which animals became meals. Engineering advances proferred machines that sped the preservation and dissemination of meat. These machines required the labors of hundreds of thousands of workers, and the entire apparatus ran on the vast capital investment of business organizations.

As Upton Sinclair's The Jungle showed, the sullied reality of packing houses was gruesome: "Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast."

The shock of Upton's novel did less to inspire aid for the oppressed working class (as he had hoped), than it horrified meat eaters around the country. The public uproar spurred the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, which were both signed on June 30, 1906. This cemented the Food and Drug Administration as a law enforcement institution in the name of consumer (read: citizen) health.

This is the system we've inherited. Industrial production has become industrial overproduction. Government subsidies keep the cycle going, driving prices continually up. South Korea gives proof that not everyone agrees with what the FDA pardons, that we are a world still concerned with the safety of its products. But many people are also concerned with contamination by the meat industry on an environmental level. Take one example of the industry's impact: vast quantities of water are used to irrigate cattle feedlots, then factory farm run-off returns to natural bodies of water or seeps into water supplies causing irreparable damage. The 2006 United Nations report called the meat industry "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

Even as global demand for meat increases, consumers are more and more removed from the pollution that the meat industry generates. So many of us just don't know. That's why Mark W. Rosegrant, director of environment and production technology at the nonprofit International Food Policy Research Institute champions "a stronger public relations campaign in the reduction of meat consumption — one like that around cigarettes — emphasizing personal health, compassion for animals, and doing good for the poor and the planet." Because it's the remove, the lack of awareness, the total obscurity by which meat arrives on the dinner table, that carries us from Passarotti's colloquial and smutty (but personal) butcher shop to Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 piece, "Meat." Meat, an abstracted mass. A product. A profit.

Leah Campbell

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Week Two: A History Doomed to Repeat Itself

I had one week to grasp the hominid's carnivorous history. Tom suggested I start with a tome on the shelves behind the bar at Marlow & Sons called Larousse Gastronomique, written by Frenchman Prosper Montagné and prefaced by Escoffier, "king of cooks and cook of kings." Inside its decaying covers I found an encyclopedic pastiche of butchery's past, which began with the kind of scene depicted in ancient Greek bas-reliefs – a man with outstanding posture slitting the throat of some hulking animal. Within half of a page, however, this history had so noticeably morphed into nationalistic prose nostalgic for the heights of French butchery under Napoleon's reign as to make me doubt its veracity.

After all, this is the kind of armchair anthropology that makes me physically uncomfortable – the kind that touts France as the last in the line of civilization's evolution, the natural height of human cultivation. And meat, a symbol for the physical domination and incorporation of other animals, is the perfect language to write such a history in. In Eating Meat: Evolution, Patterns and Consequences, Vaclav Smil writes, "There is little that is neutral about meat." And Larousse's truth is anything but neutral.

But truth – ultimate, un-biased and objective – is not the aim of this post. Which is to say, these things happened, and may have happened. As I read, I realized I couldn't put together a complete and neutral chronology of meat-eating any better than Larousse. But I did begin to see parallels between ancient practices and modern values. As Tom said in the walk-in, "You can tell a lot about a culture by the way it cuts up its animal." And we can think about the state of meat processing today in light of these histories.

In Egypt, sacrifice brought royalty closer to the divine. Take, for example, this zealous charge by Thutmose III in his Coronation Inscription: "... that I might supply with food his altars upon earth; that I might make to flourish for him the sacred slaughtering-block with great slaughters in his temple, consisting of oxen and calves without limit" (J.H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt; Part Two, § 149). Without limit! Ancient political sovereignty gorged on meat. For centuries, meat was the essential foodstuff to invigorate marching armies. And just as an Egyptian ruler had to prove his power in meat, so do our politicians, as we saw in last week's post. This is the context in which right-wing radio show host Michael Savage called Obama the "Tofu Messiah."

It was the Romans who outsourced slaughter. The higher classes disdained the "gross practice" of butchery, and a class of butchers took up the lowly job. Even though these butchers provided the essential service of preparing the sacrificial carcasses, their work was considered uncivilized and degrading. In return for tainting themselves with the flesh of animals, the butcher halls were made as monumental as the Aqueducts and Baths. This was a life in paradox.

And something of the Roman paradox remains. We depend on meat, but we want its journey to our plate to be out of sight, out of mind. We extend the process by which it gets to us to the point of near total ignorance. I recently read that chopsticks were first used in the eleventh century B.C. because a Chinese rule of etiquette banned knives from the table since they reminded diners of the slaughter of the animal. Today we continue to pass the death of domesticated animals down the line. Most butchers no longer kill the animals they prepare – that's done at slaughterhouses. PETA would have us go so far as to no longer kill, and therefore raise, animals at all. They recently announced that they would give one million dollars to anyone who could grow meat in a petri dish that could be sold at competitive prices by the year 2012. Any takers?


Leah Campbell

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Beef Knuckle: Would a Cut By Any Other Name Smell As Sour?

So, last week we cut our teeth on shoptalk. I spent three hours with the man named Tom in a walk-in stocked with recently delivered hanging-weight meat. Tom, a former vegetarian, runs the meat program for all four restaurants. As he deftly carved up the side of a cow, I asked questions, and he let loose a deluge of information informed by his experience as a butcher. It was before my time, but the 1984 Wendy's commercial with the crotchety, beef-obsessed old lady rang in my head.

"Where's the beef?" Well, here it was, all around me.

I learned that there are only four pieces of skirt steak, one of the most commonly used cuts of meat, on a single steer. I learned that there's only one two-pound hanger steak on an entire cow. And I learned that sirloin tips used to be called beef knuckle before the industry changed the name to make it more marketable. In Tom's collection of books on meat, which range from a 1919 vocational manual to Pork & Sons, the change in nomenclature occurs in the mid-80s. I found this brochure from Beef Innovations Group, which avows "A product's name can enhance its appeal." Tom and I agreed Beef Knuckle would make a good name for a frat boy, but not so much for an appetizing entree.

Mostly, I learned how very little I know about meat. I'm not alone in my ignorance. After talking with Tom, I'd say I know more than most Americans about the meat they chew. I'm thinking again of the adage, "Where's the beef?" And, as it turns out, the question is so…well, dated. The beef? It's everywhere.

Beef is a major player in our American cultural landscape. And that means it's in the political brew. On January 7, 2008, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton went on the ABC News morning show just before the New Hampshire primary. Echoing Walter Mondale's sharp criticism of Gary Hart in the primaries of 1984, she said of Obama's campaign:

"You know, all of a sudden you start to ask yourself – wait a minute, I mean, what is the substance here? What, as famously was said years ago, 'where's the beef?' You know, where is the reality? And I think that's a fair question…Voters are going to start asking themselves the tough questions that I think all of us have to ask."

Clinton could have just as well still been talking about beef. Unpacking the sound bite reveals a startling irony. Do we really equate beef with reality and substance? Because it seems that reality and substance have long been divorced from the American consumption of meat. So much so, that a better question for 2008 might be "What is the beef?" As the ingredients in our food become unrecognizable, knowing what's for dinner is no easy feat.

Mark Bittman's Wednesday article "Putting Meat Back In Its Place" hits a worthwhile chord – eating less beef seems like a good thing to do today. But his advice falls short. The "tough questions" go beyond how much meat to eat. How were the animals treated? How did they live, and how did they die? The tough questions involve asking where our meat comes from, seeing – as Anna pointed out in a previous post – the international ramifications of our meat industry, and, simply, learning what meat is. After all, how many people know what part of the animal their favorite cut of meat is from?

These questions beg for answers. In a time when Americans eat an average of 1/2 pound of meat a day, I think you'll find, as I did, that there are many more hours to spend in the walk-in.

NEXT WEEK: Tom pointed me in the direction of a tome called Larousse Gastronomique on the shelves behind the bar at Marlow & Sons. Expect musings on the ancient, quasi-mystical history of butchery. -Leah Campell

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Today In The News

On my way to work today I bought the Daily News? For its front page as pictured here. Sifting its foully ink drenched pages I began to question my decision. Obviously a hilarious, effective, and important headline to anyone living in a fast food city such as New York, as well as directly pertinent to the industry and political platform (local food, know your farmer, seasonal etc.)we often perch on. I still felt a tiny wave of discomfort or unease. And I realized it had nothing to do with the proximity my brain waves were to the ultra-saturated gossip page. I started this morning, moving slowly through the hell wave that is our climate today, wondering about how I ingest information.

In my inbox when I sat down this morning was an article on South Korea's Prime Minister and Cabinet resigning in hopes to quell riots over US Beef being allowed to be imported after a 5 year stay due to fear of Mad Cow disease. The issues here run deeper, wallowing in what seems to add up to a deep rooted mistrust of the three-month old presidency of Lee Myung BakThis. The article was from the Times Online listed under the category of World News. Fair enough. Again an article aligned in some way with my concerns with the world, to make a possibly unfairly sweeping statement.

So I recognize a thread here. One from the World News section of the Times Online to the front page of the Daily News. For more investigation I moved my attention to the New York Times Online today. Here I found an even more complex system of shoots and ladders.

In the Nation Section (and I'm aware as I write this that the New York Times Online is tricky, moving an article from one section to another it might pertain to, creating a Rubik's Cube of qualified information) an article on how the aforementioned tomato crisis will most likely pull in an extra 275 million in next years budget for the failing FDA. In Well, a health blog, Tara Parker-Pope discusses the dangers of lawnmowers, without ever mentioning the environmental ramifications of a perfectly manicured and pedestrian lawn. In the BUSINESS section is an article on farmers (mostly of corn and soy etc.) expecting a harrowing harvest due to water logged land. In the Magazine/Home and Garden section a somewhat tritely in depth article on a hipster in London who "guerrilla gardens" for what seems to boil down to street cred.

Quote:Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says "tasted dirty," Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature's order; he gladly plants invasive species if they're aesthetically appropriate to the setting.

Also in Home and Garden a timely little piece about growing your own tomatoes and an interesting, if surface, instructional on how to live off the grid in your early retirement home without sacrificing your microwave. Thank you Sun. In Regional you will find out how Economic Development Corporation owes 45million dollars in water bills. In Business and World a mention of Mad Cow and the South Korean unrest, in Technology a treatise on plants and the possibility they recognize their relatives and are nicer to them. Similar to us? I'm not sure. Also a question mark on climate control, class and infectious disease in Dot Earth/Science.

Perhaps the most poignant article today is also found in Science. The dubious future of our friends the horseshoe crab, who like most ocean inhabitants are fighting for survival.

Quote:The loss of the horseshoe crab would be tragic, researchers said, not only because the creatures are fascinating and cute and predate the dinosaurs by 200 million years, but also because so many contemporary life forms depend on them. Their annual spawns draw hundreds of species of migratory birds, predatory fish, reptiles, amphibians and various other alimentary canals eager to brunch on the freshly deposited Limulus eggs. "Horseshoe crab eggs are like filet mignon around here," Dr. Mattei said. "They're a very popular item on the menu."

At first the scattering of environmental issues bugged me. Why do I have to scour the paper or the internet for what I find interesting and vital when someone else can check the golf scores in about .5 seconds. Maybe not a totally apt metaphor but you see what I mean? Then something else happened. Looking at the information I had gathered from each section it started to mean something more. I began to recognize that just as I find our earth tangibly present in most moments of every day, be it the 98 degree weather, lunch or the pop art littering the cover of the Daily News, so does the newspaper or rather the information stream. It might be quite impossible to limit these articles to one section or "streamline" them everyday because they are everywhere, in everything, informing the air around us. Our land, farm or asphalt, is our lens, our sphere, our metaphor as well as our sometimes scarred reality.

Much like the horseshoe crab, what we stand upon depends on us just as much, if not more, than we depend on it.

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Tocino Ahomado

The belly is cured with epazote, canela, clavo, chile de arbol and salt. The wood chips are Cherry and we also sprinkled it with Mexican oregano.

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Fast Food, Ed Behr, and Ponds filled with...

Reading this recent article on the Farm Bill I realized I had heard of these waste lagoons somewhere before. Sure enough, I found mention of them in an excerpt that didn't make it into the Diner Journal's winter interview with Ed Behr. Lagoons alone are creepy places, horror film motels are always situated next to a lagoon, creatures lurk and are spawned from them, Nancy Drew seems to always be catching robbers counting their loot down by the lagoon, but this is above and beyond.

Here we are talking with Ed Behr about his influential article in The Art of Eating on Niman Ranch and Paul Willis in Iowa. This article about raising hogs naturally, without antibiotics and on pasture greatly influenced Steve Ills, CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, a fast food chain now committed to using humanely raised animals.

DJ: Have you been to Chipotle?

EB: Yes. We ate at one in Denver. There aren't any up here in Vermont. And I just didn't realize how big they are and how much pork they use. It's really significant that they are asking for good pork. It's just mind-boggling. It's honest food without meat that is evil.

DJ: Well you know I guess the question is then about grass fed beef?

EB: On my long "article-to-do" list is one on purely grass fed beef, not finished on grain. It sounds much more complicated then it seems. I like grain-finished beef. But then the big issue has to do with flavor, slaughter, hanging and all that. I worry that Michael Pollan is simplifying the issue. And sometimes it is necessary to simplify a cause to a slogan to get a large amount of populous support. And I don't know if this is the case. Getting cattle out of unhealthy feedlots is different then feeding them grain.

DJ: Well if people don't till the soil to grow the grain and the cows are out to pasture we can sequester carbon and reduce green house gasses dramatically.

EB: I'm hugely in favor of that. That's charming. But the question is and I don't the answer but how much grain do you need? How can you grow grain without massive inputs in oil? Surely it can be done. There is a wonderful organic dairy farmer, there first non-traditional organic dairy farmer in Vermont and the United States. His name is Jack Lazor at Butterworks. He bought valley land just to grow grain he loves to grow grain and he is building his own windmill to create their own power.

DJ: We are visiting Abe Collins tomorrow who is selling carbon credits on the open market and has pasture raised cows on grassland.

EB: Well there are things that can be clearly superior on grass and then it's the quality of the grass and once upon a time it was the Shepard's job but now we do all those things differently. Animals at pasture are just a beautiful thing. When we were in Italy we saw three career Shepards at work, which was really great, and amazing that there are any left.

DJ: So back to Chipotle, you had such a huge political impact.

EB: It's stunning because it's anti-industrial farming. And all of these things bear on Vermont too. Now the state mandates manure ponds which is one of the worst aspects of pig farming. And they are mandated in Vermont and I mean you have to wonder what evil things are going on in there, like when the manure lagoons bust and fishermen get lesions in their arms. But you know if you're out to pasture your manure is not going into a pond.

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Proper Ground Beef

I spend a lot of time thinking about ground beef. About an hour a day which is how long it takes me to trim and grind the meat that will become the burgers that day at Diner.

Ground beef is one of those things that people either love or fear like no other meat, except maybe bone marrow, I can think of. I've heard at least 10 people tell me about some relation of theirs, usually a dad or uncle, who eats or ate raw hamburger right out of the foam tray. Of course we all know people who would never think of eating a hamburger that was anything but well-done.

So what IS the deal with commercially produced ground beef anyway? Should you fear it? Should you eat it raw? What are "best practices" for making it? Let me tell you.

What goes into ground beef anyway? What goes into most grind is lean and fatty beef trim (the stuff they trim off large cuts to make them free of sinew and gristle or to make them look prettier) and tough meat from the fore quarter of the beef, aka arm chuck. None of this stuff is super scary sounding right? Oh, yes... arm chuck. That sounds very wholesome and mid-western how could that be bad? If you only knew.

What could go wrong? Why is important to know and trust the person who makes your burger or sausage? Turds. Blood. Hair. Filth. Dead cows. Green meat. What?

Turds, filth, hair: Slaughter houses, no matter how well run and clean, are still pretty dirty places which is fine since the animal is essentially sealed off from the gastro-intestinal content, blood, hair, etc. that may splash up onto the hanging carcasses as the slaughter men hose the above items into floor drains. Also, your steer might also have been dropped onto said kill floor. Don't forget about what it may come in contact with during transport in the back of some delivery truck. Have you ever seen the floor in the back of the average delivery truck? All that seems pretty gross. Nothing that you'd want in your meat. This is where love and trust for your butcher comes in. When your butcher is taking apart sub-primals (chances are he will never get quartered beef) he should be shaving off whatever part of the cow that was on the outside (where the turds and blood are) and throwing it away. It doesn't add-up to much waste-wise but it takes time and when a butcher is in a hurry it is seldom a good thing.

If that outside is not trimmed off it IS going into your ground meat. What did you say? You don't have a butcher to love and trust? Well then you are getting nasty stuff in your meat, I guarantee it. You can talk local and organic all you want but, if you eat meat, you need to be intimate with your butcher. Otherwise you have absolutely no idea the character of the man you are entrusting your digestive tract to.

"What bout the dead cows and green meat!" There are companies that do nothing but pick up dead cows from farms across the U.S.. Where do you think that two day dead dairy cow ends up? Chances are you've eaten one.

Green meat is basically meat that is about 35% rotten and has started to turn a shade of ghostly Lunesta Moth green. It smells quite bad. OK, it smells like a dumpster full of dead rats. It is not something you would want to eat. I knew a grizzled old butcher that looked like Edward James Olmos who used to work at a packing house that made Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage. He swore that they had piles of green, stinking meat, and I quote "as big as a house" on the bare concrete floor that they would then feed into the huge industrial meat grinder that made the sausage.

You think that stuff sounds yucky, it doesn't even include the "mechanically separated" meat by-product pudding that places like McDonalds or any other huge chain uses to make their burgers. This process involves the bones of the animals to be crushed and forced under high pressure through a sort of sieve. McCorprate food companies love it because it produces a very consistent product that takes the various meat flavorings and texturizers better than real meat.

I would imagine that if you don't have a butcher you trust and you still want a burger you're going to have to start doing it yourself. So how does one make proper ground beef?

Cuts: I like a fatty burger so my choice would be something like untrimmed brisket or trim from the belly. If you want less fat I would just get the cheapest pot roast type thing. Not too lean now! Most ground beef is at least 20% fat. If you're having trouble finding a cut with enough fat ask the guy at the meat counter if he has any untrimmed cuts (i.e. they have much more fat on the outside).

Trimming: You know that you need to remove the stuff that was on the outside of the animal but how do you tell which part it is? Well, number one, it will likely be a darker shade of white than the natural color of the fat. Sometimes it will be reddish from blood splash. The best way to tell is, of course, the go old USDA blue stamp. Once the outside is shaved off you will also want to get rid of any tendons, connective tissue or gristle that will gum up your hand crank meat grinder and end up as what Aaron calls "bullets" in your cooked burger. Also cut out any glands that you may find buried in the thick potions of fat. They will look like tan cancer blobs. Don't worry, they're just part of the lymphatic system.

Cut: Now cut your meat into 1 1/2 inch cubes. The smaller you cut them the easier it will be to grind. I only had to take apart a grinder full stuffed full of meat once to learn to cut them into smaller pieces. While you're doing this remember that if you run into any gristle that is hard to cut through it will be hard for the grinder blade too. Trim it out and toss it.

Grind: Any new hand-crank grinder you buy with come with several grind plates with holes in them in various sizes from large to small depending on what size ground meat particle you want. I would recommend using a large plate and then running it through once more using the smallest plate. Trying to use the smallest plate right of the bat may result in a clogged grinder. This is only necessary with beef. Pork is much softer and doesn't need a second pass.

Other advice, tips, etc: If you plan on seasoning the meat do it before you put it through the grinder as it will be more evenly distributed in the grind just make sure that you don't over season!

Red wine vinegar helps give hamburgers a bit more punch with a touch of red wine beefiness and acid.

To get burgers to stay together on the grill let the meat warm up before you make patties and make sure to work it into a ball well.

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Half A Cow

OK kids, it's go time for big beef in Dinertown.

The side is going to yield 1 standing rib roast (aka rib steak, cowboy steak, prime rib, cote du beouf), one section of T-bone/porterhouses or a tenderloin and shell steaks.

Then there is 10lbs of top sirloin, short ribs, 1 brisket, shanks (for osso bucco) , a chuck-eye roll (roasting, braising from the fore quarter) and some odds and ends like 4 skirt steaks and 1 flank steak.

Think about maybe doing a chicken-fried steak for brunch that we could do with any cut that would be hammered by the Jakard knife (the tenderizer). Also, I have some experimental steak marinade going to see if we can make a tender bar steak using the magic of coca-cola and dried chiles.

Meditate on it and prepare accordingly. Don't say I didn't warn you...

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