This post originally appeared on the Faster Times.
Last week, I wrote up a quick summary of Michael Moss’s chilling article about this country’s byzantine network of slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities, where no-one takes accountability for the safety of our food supply.
Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a New York City market called the New Amsterdam Market reminding me that there is an alternative to the industrial model. Founded in 2005, the New Amsterdam Market is a monthly venue (located down at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport) that showcases local produce, cheese, and meat as well as regionally-made prepared food such as porchetta sandwiches, popsicles, and Mexican-style chocolate. But what distinguishes New Amsterdam from most farmers’ markets is that it is comprised of purveyors—i.e. the cheesemongers and shop owners who sell regionally-made food for regional farmers (who often don’t have the time or desire to sit at a stand for six + hours on the weekend).
“Two Master Butchers Take on a Half Pig Under the Brooklyn Bridge,” the press release announced.
Intrigued, I read on.
On October 25th, the market “will feature farmers and meat ranchers, regional distributors, butchers, and purveyors who can trace and identify the source of every pound of meat sold to the public, even to the specific head of cattle.” In addition to purveyors and farmers selling sustainably raised meat, there would be a meat cutting demonstration by fourth-generation butcher Josh Applestone (whose Kingston, NY meat store, Fleisher’s Grassfed and Organic Meats helped reintroduce the concept of local sourcing and a revival of the art of butchering) and Tom Mylan, erstwhile butcher from [Brooklyn foodie destination] Marlow & Sons. (Mylan also helped open the nearby sustainable butcher shop Marlow & Daughters and is now working on launching another butcher shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.)
Yes, but would the Market be selling sustainably-raised, grassfed hamburger meat? And if so, would the local purveyors and farmers be able to “trace and identify every pound” of that ground beef? Could they ensure me that there would be no ammonia-doused “filler” from Uruguay or enormous squalid slaughterhouses in Omaha?
I called up New Amsterdam Market director Robert LaValva to find out.
LaValva was sure there’d be no “filler” from Uruguay, but he put me on to Jake Dickson, owner of the new Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in New York’s Chelsea Market to answer the rest of my questions. Dickson will have a stand at the New Amsterdam Market on October 25th. I immediately went to his web site and read up on his philosophy:
But most of the meat available to the US consumer leaves much to be desired. It embodies the worst of our industrial agriculture practices and what is widely available is of poor quality. It doesn’t have to be this way! There are small scale, environmentally conscientious farmers producing healthy, delicious, artisanal meats right here in New York State! These are farmers who care about the animals and the land on which they are raised. These are the people I wanted to work with and whom I continue to seek out on your behalf.
I like this guy! Furthermore, if you click on “Our Farms,” you can see the eight or so local farms Dickson buys his meat from. (There are short blurbs on each farmer, too, so you can find out how each farm produces its meat. The cows at Herondale Farm, for instance, graze the fields as long as the grass grows, after which they enjoy the alfalfa baleage and hay that is put up for the winter. A little map shows you how many miles it is from farm to market: 250.) Talk about traceability.
So I called Dickson to find out where he sources his grass-fed beef. I caught him driving back from Double L Ranch, a small facility near Albany that slaughters his meat. (He was driving the carcasses back to NYC where he butchers them on location at his Chelsea Market shop.)
“Right now I have three-and-a-half steers and eight lambs in the back of my truck,” he said. I asked him about his process for making hamburger meat.
“We try to use one steer at a time,” Dickson told me. “We never mix farms—always single farms. And 98% of the time it is a single animal as well. Our general rule is single farm, single animal.”
Dickson went on to tell me about the inconsistent quality of grass-fed beef. “Most of the grass-fed beef out there is of very low quality,” he said. “The variation in grass-fed is much wider than it is with corn-fed. It’s much harder to do well.” He cautioned that “grass-fed” has become such a buzzword these days that many producers and purveyors (and restaurants) throw it around without defining the term. To Dickson, grass-fed cow meat means the cows were “100% grass-fed and grass-finished.” Dickson is not one to believe that grass-fed cows are inherently better than corn fed, though. “They have a different flavor and a different texture,” he said. “There are good and bad variations of both.” Indeed, he sells an organic grain-finished beef from Wrighteous Organics in Schoharie, NY.
LaValva had said something earlier in the morning that stuck with me. “You read about the E. coli scares and all they [the USDA] do is talk about increasing inspections. They don’t think, ‘Maybe this whole system needs to be thrown out.’ If the meat is that cheap, it means you’re compromising something along the way. Should meat be cheap? Why not have that debate?”
What do you think? Should meat be cheap?
And how many of you have a relationship with your neighborhood butcher? (No, not that kind of relationship…)
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