Recent reading

This is essentially how our strattu is made.

We buy meat like this.

Not like this.

Recent reading

Fast food "meat" is probably scarier than you think.

Many environmental footprint studies are flawed. This one appears to be pretty good. It shows the carbon footprint of a loaf of bread. You might be surprised at what's the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas. Hint: it's not transportation.

UPS taxed air and we cut back on shipping air. The same logic applies when you tax food — check out the eye-popping results of Philadelphia's soda tax.

Ibérico pig immigrants, coming to America.

Recent Reading, Food Visuals

A look at the scale of modern American farming.

What 2,000 calories looks like before you eat it.

Recent Reading

A nice article on the inspiring work of Jonny Hunter and his Madison, Wisconsin-based Underground Foods. Among many other things, they make a very fine summer sausage. 

How our slate cheese boards are made: images.

Singles Day, November 11, is China's Cyber Monday. Alibaba, China's biggest online retailer found out bra size could indicate spending power. Correlation? Causation? Who cares. Data marketing is weird. 

Recent reading on meat

The lack of small, local slaughterhouses is often cited as one of the obstacles getting in the way of you and me buying affordable meat from small, local farmers. There's a bill being proposed to change slaughterhouse oversight rules in a way that would make it easier for them to get off the ground. The article quotes from some people we work with like Will Harris and Greg Gunthorp.

One argument against raising animals for meat is that it redirects calories to animals that we could otherwise eat. Except...

"...most of the feed that livestock eat is not edible by humans. Globally, just 18 percent of animal feed is made up of grains or other crops that people might otherwise eat. The rest is crop residues, grass, and waste from milling grain and other food processing. And so, despite the inefficiency of converting calories to meat, animals are able to give humans access to energy that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise."

Many more interesting points in the article Can meat ever be environmentally friendly?

Recent reading

Many Danish hog farmers are running industrial-sized confinement farms but they don't use antibiotics like we do. Here's how they do it.

What if we put salad in our vending machine and made it cost less than a candy bar? Hat tip to Betsy B.

Whose government does the best at issuing nutritional guidelines? It sure ain't ours. Maybe... Brazil?

Recent Reading, Screwed up animal husbandry edition

Imagine it was your job to Frankenstein animals? A horror story about breeding animals that sounds like science fiction except it's done with your tax dollars.

"If, thanks to an experimental inspection program, a meatpacking firm produces as much as two tons a day of pork contaminated by fecal matter, urine, bile, hair, intestinal contents or diseased tissue, should that count as a success?" The kind of problems you get when you let the meat industry regulate itself.

Foie gras is for assholes. Mark Bittman makes the totally valid point that any furor about lifting the California foie gras ban is totally misplaced. Foie gras from force fed ducks is small potatoes. It's the rest of our animal husbandry sytem in America that's cruel, and it's on an epic scale.

Recent Reading

Dry aged burger map of New York City.

Same kind of map, this time for Prime Rib. Bonus: lots of useful butcher information on the cut itself.

You've been slicing cake all wrong. 

Recent Reading

It sounds impossible, but it may be more eco-friendly to fly in a plane than it is to drive a car. 

Do you order fresh peas online? Not yet, but maybe soon. The online grocery business is booming.

This is the kind of talk about food you don't hear very often; the real business side of the good food business. Patrick Martins, our pork man, talks about meat, farming, food, and the praise of real craft.