Butcher Ben Turley presents the students with sausages at Williamsburg's Meat Hook [Photo by Joshua Bright]
Freelancing can be rough, especially in this economy. But reporting stories like this one, which ran in the Metro section of the Times this past weekend, is what makes me love my job.
For a year or more, I'd walked past Automotive High School in Williamsburg and wondered about the raggedy but lush vegetable garden bordering its majestic front. I always had another assignment or story idea to pursue, though, so never took the time to investigate. It wasn't until this fall, when I read about a fundraiser for Jenny Kessler's food politics class at Egg, that I started to do some serious research. I called Kessler and asked if I could sit in on her class, called "Land, Food, and You."
In it, as Kessler read an excerpt from a book about America's obesity epidemic, I was surprised to see how engaged her students were by the material. (After all, these are kids who are training to be auto mechanics. How interested could they be in learning about factory farming, food miles, and the sinister high-fructose corn syrup?) Kessler had just read aloud statistics on the staggering advertising budgets for soft drink companies and fast food chains such as McDonalds.
"How many commercials do you guys see for fruits and vegetables or for the green market?" Kessler asked her all-male, mostly African American class.
"A day? I see, like...two," said a student named Arthur.
"I see none," called out another student.
"I've seen one for whole grain cereal," continued Arthur, knowingly. "And I seen one with the fruits that probably everyone saw, where they're playing basketball. A tomato and shit..."
"That's Fruit of the Loom, man," broke in one of his classmates, to a round of hearty laughter.
Kessler suppressed a giggle herself. "That one's for underwear," she conceded. By now, Arthur was chortling at his own mistake. But Kessler had made her point: there's no money to be made from marketing broccoli, tomatoes, or carrots.
But there is money to be made from sustainably-raised meat, and the kids took this in on their field trip to the Meat Hook, Brooklyn's latest "sustainable" butcher shop. (The other is Marlow & Daughters.) They also learned how to make head cheese (one of the most sustainable recipes there is, in that it uses up flesh from the head that would otherwise go to waste)—and the very brave even tasted it.
Kushima Warner muscling the 160-pound arm chuck of a recently-slaughtered cow (with a little help from butchers Mylan and Turley). [Photo by Joshua Bright]
As I watched them watch the butchers, I could see why Kessler's students were so riveted: they work with their hands and so do these skillful butchers. (They also clearly loved the blood & guts aspect of butchering. One kid kept asking to see the hearts. Finally, butcher Tom Mylan threw a bag of pigs' hearts down on the butcher block. "Do you see it beating?" asked Kushima Warner, playfully. "We make scrapple with it," Mylan said. "We also trim it up and marinate it and cook it just like steak. Leave it medium rare on the inside...marinate it overnight in garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil and—oh man. They're incredible. They're also pretty inexpensive.")
On the walk over to the Meat Hook, Kushima had expressed reservations about seeing animal carcasses up close. "It may make me not want to eat meat anymore," she told me. But by the end of the butcher outing she seemed far from squeamish—not only had she tried the Mortadella, Turley's homemade head cheese, and the raw steak, she was eager to cozy up to the arm chuck.
"In my opinion, the business they've got right now is a great business," student Edward Veloz told me on the walk back to Automotive. "They know what they're doing and it's not really healthy—because we know red meat is not actually healthy, but you can actually trust that the cow is fresh and was treated well."