Avedano's Meat Market; Local People, Local Food

I first read about Avedano's Meat Market in Meatpaper, issue one, I was not only excited about the local people, local food moto, but also, the feminist in me was incredibly proud that three women were hacking apart cows and bringing us Kobe beef steaks. For about a year, I had had the intention of visiting their meet shop in Bernal Heights and I finally did visit the small shop on Cortland Ave last week. At first, I saw many of the staples of local and humanly raised meets, such as Rosie's Chicken, as well as wild Alaskan salmon (the only type of salmon you want to eat), but then, looking closer in the smaller coolers, I was happy to find chicken and pig feet as well as some animal insides not consumed by the average Safeway shopper.

Also, and probably most importantly, the staff was friendly and knowledgeable. They engaged us in conversation about their store, about the meats they had, and enjoyed making jokes about the over sized, plush t-bone steak pillows/toys they had for sale as well. It was fun and tasty; you should visit.

Happy New Year! (yeah meat)

So, on New Years Eve in New York, I saw this lovely window and thought it was pretty much the best way to bring in the New Year. So, I thought I would share. I was walking with a few friends in the pleasant New Years Eve snow on 52nd street (just west of MoMA) and stopped in my tracks as I saw this beautiful collection of meat in the window of Gallagher's Steakhouse. Gallagher's has been around since 1964 and isbest identified by this signature meat aging room stocked with the best USDA Prime dry aged beef. Yum. Meat. Fucking freezing New Years Eve in New York...must eat more meat to prepare for next year.

The Slow Food Taste Pavilions: a Glutonous Display of Food

One of the other events I participated in during Slow Food Nation was the Taste Pavilions. My ticket for this event was a whopping $58 after getting a discount from the original $65 via the Whole Foods discount. When my friend Lora and I arrived at Fort Mason, where the Taste Pavilions were being held, however, we were taken aback by the abundant display of delicious foods and suddenly realized that our $58 was money well spent.

The organizers of Slow Food Nation convinced local architects to create designs to convert one of the Fort Mason warehouses into a series of food specific rooms or "pavilions" where visitors can taste and learn about artisan versions of their favorite foods. Taste wise, my favorite of all of the pavilions was, by far, the ice cream pavilion. There were two "flights" of ice cream scoops, and I chose the Dark Chocolate, Olive Oil, and Fresh Blueberry flight, which was most definitely the best of the flights. The chocolate was creaming and wonderfully flavorful, the olive oil subtlety sweet and extra creamy with the fat of the oil, and the blueberry actually tasted like blueberries--what a concept!

My other favorite pavilions were the Olive Oil, Chocolate, Fish, and Wine, each for different reasons. The Olive Oil pavilion was in my opinion the best designed of the pavilions: the designers used everyday construction materials such as orange netting, raw wood, and crates to create a beautifully lit space that truly transported you away from the rest of the pavilions. More specifically, the front of the pavilion was occupied by a tasting station while the back of the space was equipped with an educational space where trained olive oil experts told about how to properly taste olive oil, which is a process reasonably similar to wine tasting, just involving smaller tastes (I mean, would you really want to drink a glass of olive oil in one sitting?). This pairing of spaces made it nice to go back to the tasting part of the pavilion so that you could taste each olive oil, knowing which undertones to look for. The chocolate pavilion was great because of the variety of tasting they gave you; it was also interesting how the flavors of each chocolate changed as you ate the other pieces, your taste pallet changing with each bite of chocolate. The wine pavilion, while not a wonderfully designed space, was wonderfully fun to go to with my friend Lora who can look at an absurdly long wine list and pick out the most expensive bottles to try, and boy, were some of them amazing. The fish was also a delicious stop for the creativity of each dish and was especially tasty after the disappointing charcuterie pavilion.

And so yes, the charcuterie was very disappointing. While the prosciutto we had was tasty, but it's pretty hard to have prosciutto not be tasty. We were also given beef jerky (really?) and something that resembled pate, but wasn't. Each were fine, but none had any wow factor. Charcuterie truly was a pavilion with so much potential (just off the top of my head, why no lardo?) that was totally not taken advantage of, while also in the midst of other pavilions that were totally pushing the envelop of their respective food products.

One of the most fun parts of the night, however, was are mistaken crashing of the employee party. After the official ending of the Taste Pavilions at 9, people congregated outside the event in front of the beer pavilion, and Lora and I thought it appropriate to join them. Eventually, it went on past 10 and a lot of people had left, and those remaining started to ask us which pavilion we had worked in. After enough people asked us, we realized we were in fact crashing the staff party, which was more than fine with the good natured foodies. The great part about the party was that all the beer, bread, and opened bottles of wine not used during the event were now being given out for free for all to take, which we might have taken advantage of just a bit.

Relating this back to the Slow Food movement as a whole, Slow Food is often criticized for being an exclusive or bougie movement; due to the expensive price of the ticket for the pavilions, this point is valid. While it was a wonderful experience to taste such delicious food, the polished designs of the pavilions, the high end food products, and the well dressed visitors seemed a little removed from some of the movement's "roots". On the other hand, having such a celebration of food brings delicious food and the necessary steps to obtain this food (good, clean, fair being the moto of the slow food movement) to the attention of a greater public than it would have otherwise. In this manner, it is great that it is more prevelent to be a conscientious food consumer but I would agree with one of the speakers I saw in a panel during the weekend (which will be the subject of my next posting) who said that one of the greatest obstacles to the movement is fashion. As fashions change and flux, we do not want the slow food movement to be a fad that will simply pass with time.

Also, I should mention that Alice Waters was there. She signed my ticket. Swoon.

Another reason to know where you meat comes from...this video is just a little bit disturbing...

This is a video just sent to me by a friend Juliet who works at Current. It's pretty gruesome and horrible. I thought about how the woman, an environmental consultant from Chino, who drove by the facility every day, was so surprised that with 5 full time inspectors, employees trained to not abuse cattle, and external and internal audits that this abuse still occurred at this meat plant. It makes you think about how at Polyface farm you, the consumer, can look right into Polyface's chicken slaughtering area and how Joel Salatin declared this a greater guarantee of clean meat. This just goes to prove he's probably right...

Summer Feast: A Gastronomically Gluttonous Meating

This past Sunday night, I had the gastronomic pleasure of attending the Summer Feast, co hosted by Meatpaper and Gastronomica. And what a bloody feast it was! Bloody in two senses: when I first arrived, around 6:30 pm, at Perbacco, the restaurant was packed and buzzing with food consuming activity; my instinct to compete for food against my fellow humans kicked in and the four of us that came together strategically divided in order to help the rest of the pack get the the most diverse food and drink samplings. And bloody in that some of the dishes incorporated blood in a way I had not tasted: pig's blood sausage and pig's blood chocolate pudding with pistachio mascarpone topping.

After much glutenous consumption, my three most favorite tastes were the bacon, pistachio marshmallows, the blood pudding--both prepared by Perbacco--and the chopped liver from Serpentine. The bacon/pistachio marshmallow had a sweet and fluffy initial bite that was quickly follow up by the crunch and salt of the bacon and the fatty sweetness of the nuts. The blood pudding was just cool to me because it had been made from, well, blood and it's nice to know that you are using the most of the animal as you can. And I also just love liver. It's the anemic in me, really.

Anyways, here are some photographs from the event; the first is an image of the marshmallows, the second and third are images of the chocolate blood pudding, and the final a picture of three bites from Perbacco, the upper right of which is the blood sausage:

Michael Pollen and Grass Fed Beef

After yesterday's posting describing the new ingredients of non-grass fed beef's feed, I thought I should write a little more about why feeding cows grass is such an important thing to champion.

First of all, cows' ruminant digestive systems are well evolved to digest grass; the cow's digestive system has two stomachs, in which the food is softened first before being fully digested in the second stomach. In this manner, feeding cows food other than grass messes with their natural digestive process; one of the reasons why cows are given so many antibiotics now is because feeding them corn and other food that their stomachs aren't meant to digest causes an upset in their bodies natural chemistry, thus opening them up to infection.

Another important thing to note is that humans, among most other species without rumens, cannot digest grass. I am currently reading Michael Pollen's Omnivore's Dilemma and am reading the section where he visits Polyface Farm, which raises grass fed beef along with a whole slew of other livestock raised on their natural food. Without going into a long description of the merits of Polyface Farm, Pollen's discussion of the advantages of feeding cows grass, from the perspective of energy consumption, is one of the strongest arguments for eating meat. At Polyface farm, the cows are rotationally grazed, which means that the cows are allowed to eat in one area of the pasture before being moved to another area of the farm to eat the following day. In this manner, the cows partially eat the grass stem, but not the whole stalk. As a result, the grass grows back much faster than it would if the cows were allowed to stay on one plot of land for an extended period of time and ate the grass stalks to the ground. Because of this constant trimming and growth cycle, the pastures at Polyface Farm, and at other farms that rotationally graze their livestock, produce more biomass than the same plot of land would if corn were raised in its place. One of the strong arguments against eating meat is that great amount of food energy wasted every time an animal eats another animal (a 9 to 1 ratio), but in the case of cows that are grass fed, they are eating biomass from which we cannot glean food calories. In addition, the energy to grow grass comes from the sun, which means cows are, in essence, converting the sun's energy, through the venue of grass, into food energy that we can consume. And, importantly, grass fed beefy is mighty tasty.

Cows are now eating chocolate for feed!

My dad sent me this video today from the Wall Street Journal about the effects of the rising costs of corn fed cattle. The most alarming bit of information I found to be the fact that some farmers are substituting chocolate (yes, chocolate, as in Mars) for corn feed. Chocolate (as a major part of one's diet) isn't healthy for humans who have omnivorous digestive systems suitable for the consumption of a much great variety of foods; why do cattle farmers think that cows, whose digestive system has evolved to digest grass, should be eating chocolate? Sort of an argument for grass fed beef, yes?