Recent reading

This is essentially how our strattu is made.

We buy meat like this.

Not like this.

Recent Reading, Food Visuals

A look at the scale of modern American farming.

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

Michael Pollan on labeling

 "I think we should have a lot more transparency about food, not less. I think we should label food if it contains pesticides, but nobody is talking about that. It's really peculiar that if you're not using pesticides, if you're organic, you have to pay to put a label on declaring you aren't using pesticides. It should be the other way around."

For my money Michael Pollan one of the most considered food thinkers of our time. His insights are profound but also realistic, sensible. This comes from a brief interview by New York Magazine's Grub Street about his new Netflix documentary Cooked, which I'm watching now. If you haven't read his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I highly recommend it. 

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, 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, chicken edition

 

First the depressing story. A farmer that opened up their farm to reporters and was transparent about how he raises chickens. Now his only customer, Perdue, will probably shut him down for it.

But not all chicken stories end badly.  People complain about pricey food being elitist and out-of-touch. Being a merchant of that kind of food I know that can be the case (hopefully not the case with much of what I sell, since there should be a good reason for the expense). But here's an example of how higher prices have made chickens live better lives—and helped prevent antibiotic resistant organisms from growing. The story is the government asked chicken farmers to go antibiotic free. But because antibiotic-free chicken sales grew 34% last year many did it before the deadline.

Food waste, guest opinion

I recently posted an article about Doug Rauch who's creating a restaurant based on "expired food." Robert Lambert, our source for marmalades, fruitcake and fruit syrups wrote a note I thought was worth sharing. Plus I love Robert and a good rant now and then, especially when it's true.

The piece about using expired food hit a lot of buttons for me, and forced me to comment. I’ve read that as much as 1/3 of our food is wasted because of those damn expiration dates. I was at my local market last week when the woman who’d been checked out before me came back into the store and said her bag of potato chips was expired. What the fuck could possibly happen to a potato chip?

At home I actually prefer expired cream, as it thickens and gets more like clotted cream. I rarely use eggs and can keep a carton for weeks, with no ill effect. I grew up in a time before dated foods—as the man says, you simply smelled it. People now seem to think "Best if used before ____. Use after ____ and it will kill you." An English friend says she only refrigerates her ketchup and mustard in America, because her friends here would be horrified if they saw it in her pantry, but she’d never do that in England. What on earth do they think is going to happen to ketchup and mustard?

The one question I’m asked by customers more than any other is, “How long will it last?” I never know what to say—it’s like, well, it’s preserved, that’s the whole point, it will last indefinitely, that’s the function of the process. It will be good for a very long time, probably years, until it isn’t any more, and at that point anyone with any brains should be able to tell. Nothing is going to suddenly turn into poison and kill you without warning. And as the man said, all cases of food poisoning are from unexpired foods.

It really is a case of overly zealous bureaucratic safeguards making people stupider. Nature builds in all the warnings you need, and it is our responsibility to be able to recognize them. I used to make a Coconut Dark Chocolate Sauce, stopped about 4 years ago, but kept a couple of jars in the closet. I opened one the other night, and while I know you might dispute that it was ever any good to begin with, it was unchanged, and delicious, and we had it for dessert. Had it been covered in mold and smelled bad, we probably wouldn’t have.

Recent Reading

A farm should be aesthetically, aromatically, and sensuously appealing. It should be a place that is attractive, not repugnant, to the senses. This is food production. A farm shouldn’t be producing ugly things. It should be producing beautiful things. We’re going to eat them. One of the surest ways to know if a wound is infected is if it is unsightly and smells bad. When it starts to heal, it gets a pretty sheen and doesn’t smell anymore. Farms that are not beautiful and that stink are like big wounds on the landscape.

From an interview with Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farms (he was the Virginia farmer profiled in Omnivore's Dilemma and Food, Inc.). Compellingly argued in ice clear language. From one of our country's great communicators on the problems with modern agriculture. Hat tip to Glenn.

That urinary tract infection? There's good chance it came from the chicken you ate. And it's getting increasingly antibiotic resistant because the chickens are taking antibiotics too. 

More shark jumping for bacon.

The purple prose of the cheese counter.

Mitchell and Webb cheese fail:

Nitrate Cured Salami

I spent a few minutes this week talking to Francois Vecchio, the man behind the crespone, finocchiana, cacciatore and felino salamis we carry. He gave me a chemistry lesson on salami making that I thought was worth sharing.

People are often worried about meat cured with nitrates. Is it a valid concern? I’ll get to that in a minute. First let me explain how nitrate cures meat. Welcome to a brief voyage through high school chemistry with apologies to mad scientists if I get any of the specifics incorrect.

Sodium nitrate NO3 is added to salami ingredients before they’re stuffed into the mostly air proof casing. Inside, the bacteria and microbial organisms live in an anaerobic environment—no oxygen.

Their activity sucks one of the three oxygen molecules away, turning sodium nitrate into sodium nitrite NO2. Sodium nitrite is unstable and aggressive to microbes. It’s the compound that does the real work of curing, making it safe for us to eat.

While it does its job another oxygen molecule is leeched off. What’s left is nitric oxide NO. This fixes the pigment color, keeping salami red. This molecule is safe.

Even though we started the cure with NO3 we ended up with NO. While Francois adds 150 parts per million of sodium nitrate to start the cure, only 2 or 3 PPM are left. The traditional thirty day curing process eliminates the substance.

So if cured salami doesn’t have any sodium nitrate or nitrite left, why are people afraid of it?

While traditionally cured meat doesn’t have any sodium nitrate/nitrite, non-traditionally cured meat may. During the middle of the last century, in between inventing Twinkies and Cheese Whiz, food scientists deciphered the chemistry that I just explained. Until then it’d been a two thousand year process that no one understood – people just knew it worked. The scientists correctly identified sodium nitrite NO2 as the money molecule. It did the majority of the curing work. NO3 didn’t seem to do much, so they experimented with adding NO2 directly to the meat, cutting NO3 out of the game. It worked. It saved time. Meat could be cured almost overnight. It could go to stores faster. It was a huge success.

Sort of. The problem is when the cure is rushed, NO2 doesn’t disappear like it does when you cure traditionally over thirty days. It’s still present in the meat. NO2 is a carcinogen.

That’s the reason people are worried about nitrate cured salami. Meats may be cured with sodium nitrite – not nitrate – and rushed to market when the nitrite carcinogen is still present. This isn’t true for the salamis we carry.

What about the “no nitrate” meat at supermarkets?

Nitrates are necessary for curing meat. You can’t cure without them and keep meat pink and safe. But if nitrates are necessary for curing meat, how can places like Whole Foods carry meats they say are nitrate free?

The trick is celery. It’s high in nitrates. Concentrated celery juice is used in the curing, instead of the naturally occurring mineral sodium nitrate. The FDA allows it to be called “Natural Flavor” instead of “Sodium Nitrate.”