The gardener's choice: What to grow?

Chinese cabbage and daikon from last year's garden

In our garden this time of year, I grow a lot of Asian greens for a couple of reasons: first, they germinate and grow extremely fast and secondly, supermarkets and even farmers markets tend to have just a sampling. Asian markets in the suburbs have more choice, but the quality can be iffy and the veggies aren't organic.

So as the summer heat finally died down, I sowed mizuna, mibuna, Chinese broccoli, daikon, bok choi, tat soi, two varieties of Chinese cabbage, mustard, turnips, red carrots, as well as a couple of varieties of lettuce that I don't often find, like red iceberg, a heirloom. I'll be drowning in Asian greens and lettuce in about 6-10 weeks and making my own kimchi.

I thought about this approach - grow what you can't buy - when I read this interesting piece about a gardener in England, Mark Diacono, who has a new book, Taste of the Unexpected. He talks about how he decided what to grow:

I did a little research, whittling out the truly impossible as well as anything cheap and widely available. What was left formed my first wishlist: mulberries, apricots, medlars, persimmons, quinces, pecans, olives, peaches, walnuts, mizuna, Szechuan pepper, kai lan and almonds. What a menu. Otter Farm was on its way.

On top of that, he bet climate change would make it possible to grow plants more common to the Mediterranean than the UK. 

Apricots, peaches and nectarines, among others, will get plenty enough sun in England to ripen happily, but the frosts can nip the blossom and kill off any chance of fruit. I was convinced that climate change would make those late frosts fewer and farther between, so I planted.

What I liked most was this list of how to think about what to plant. So here's Diacono's 13 steps (edited a bit from the full list at the Guardian link above):

1. Drawing up your wishlist is the key step ... forget about any limitations your garden may have and think imaginatively. Let flavour be your guide.

2. Grow what you most like to eat. Make a list of all the food you love. Add to it anything you love the sound of. 

3. Grow what you can't buy. Some homegrown foods bear little resemblance to those in the shops. Grow them for yourself and get them to the kitchen within minutes and they will taste luxurious.

4. Grow something unexpected. Quinces, mulberries and salsify are three of the many that don't suit the supermarket system, and all are among the very finest food you can eat. 

5. Challenge your tastebuds. If you hate it, grow it, at least once. Chances are it'll be so far removed from what you buy in the shops, or be so fine in combination with something else you grow that you'll be converted.

6. Grow food that's expensive to buy. It makes little sense to grow the cheap stuff and keep forking out for the pricier food, but that's exactly what most people do. Grow something delicious and expensive instead. 

7. Transformers. The transformers are those harvests that ensure your main crops have any number of costumes to dress up in. They are typically long on flavour and short on volume – herbs, Szechuan pepper, Egyptian walking onions, etc. 

8. Think seasonally. It can be tempting to concentrate on the height-of-summer loveliness, ignoring the fruit, greens, buried treasure, salads and nuts from the other parts of the year.

9. Quick return. Like most things, growing is about confidence and momentum, so enjoy the taste of success early. Include some cut-and-come-again salad leaves, intense microleaves and pinch off day-lily flowers within a few weeks or even days of them starting to grow and you'll taste the difference.

10. Go for diversity. Generally speaking, a little of lots rather than lots of a little is what you're after. Go for a broad range of foods as well as a number of varieties of each.

11. Aesthetics. A beautiful plot is undeniably more compelling to be in. Foster your own sense of the beautiful, afford it importance and you'll find your patch the place you most want to be for your morning coffee.

12. Get catalogues. When picking plants go to someone who does it for a living: they know what they're doing and they have an interest in you coming back. 

13. Be realistic about your time. In the first year, bite off less than you can chew. If I gave you a tomato plant to look after you'd probably find the time; if I gave you a two-acre field you might find other commitments get the better of you. 

HT to my friend the writer Roger Atwood who alerted me. 

- Samuel Fromartz

As I start a new book, what's more important, the bread or the holes?

I've been a bit quiet here lately, in part because I've launched into a new project that I talk about here with writer Tim Carman. For those who have followed ChewsWise blog, it's no surprise that it has often taken a turn towards bread, which reflected a hobby. But about six months ago, a couple of friends told me I was already writing the book on the damn blog so why not just write a real book. So I am, not a recipe book, but a narrative about bread, thanks to Viking/Penguin.

To that end, the photo above is of a loaf I've been working on lately -- ciabatta. You will see many recipes for ciabatta (Italian slipper bread), but here's my take: aside from the generous water content, the recipe's not the most important thing. What's crucial is the way you flop out the dough to either create a marvelous network of airy holes or  a denser and unsatisfying loaf. In one batch of dough, I made both. Conclusion: It wasn't the dough but the way I manipulated it. Needless to say, the picture above (shared with yeastspotting) was the success story. Now let me see if I can replicate my own technique and then dissect it enough to write about it.

- Samuel Fromartz

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Images: Atlantic ocean, Block Island, RI, south shore; Block Island east shore; line-caught porgies; sourdough bread from Tartine recipe.

Flatbread, a Perfect Summer Bread

Image: Flatbread with chickpea, potato, spinach stew 

I wrote a story that ran today in the WaPo on a wood-fired baking class at King Arthur Flour. Here's the companion recipe on flatbread.

Summer is a great time to make this yeast-free flatbread, which takes minutes to cook on top of the stove. The recipe calls for chapati flour, a very finely ground whole-wheat flour that is available in Indian markets. You can use regular whole-wheat flour, but it must be sifted to remove any large particles of bran.

MAKE AHEAD: This dough is best made in the morning for use later in the day. The balls of dough can be refrigerated in a lightly oiled resealable plastic food storage bag for 2 or 3 days; let the dough come to room temperature before rolling. The flatbreads can be wrapped in aluminum foil and reheated in a 400-degree oven for about 5 minutes.

Makes 12 flatbreads

Ingredients:

3 cups (400 grams) whole-wheat flour or chapati flour, plus more for the work surface (see headnote)

Scant 1 1/4 cups (265 grams) water

2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil, plus more for the bowl

1 1/2 teaspoons (8 grams) salt

Directions:

Combine the flour, water, oil and salt in a bowl until they come together into a mass. Let sit at room temperature for 20 to 30 minutes while the flour absorbs the water.

Lightly flour a work surface. (All-purpose flour can be used for this; if using whole-wheat flour, make sure it has been sifted to remove any large bran particles.) Transfer the dough to the work surface and knead for about 5 minutes by pushing down on and spreading the dough and then turning it over on itself, being careful not to rip the dough. It should be smooth and elastic. Form it into a ball and place in a clean, oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let the dough rest for 8 to 12 hours.

About 45 minutes before you want to bake, spread out the dough on a lightly floured counter and form into 2 logs. Cut each log into 6 equal pieces. You should have 12 pieces of dough that weigh about 2 ounces each; evenly distribute any leftover dough as needed.

Shape each piece into a ball. Let the balls rest for 30 minutes at room temperature under plastic wrap.

 Place a cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat; cover with a lid. (Alternatively, invert a wok over a burner for cooking on the underside of the wok.)

Liberally flour a work surface. Flatten a dough ball and dust it lightly with flour, then use a rolling pin to roll it out as thin as possible (7 to 9 inches in diameter), rotating the disk to keep it even.

When the skillet is smoking lightly, gently lift a disk of dough. Place it in the skillet and cover immediately. Cook for 30 seconds to 1 minute, then flip the dough. Cover and cook for 30 seconds. (If using an overturned wok, simply place the bread on top of the wok and flip it when ready.) The breads will bake in 2 minutes and should be blistered and dark in spots.

Remove the flatbread and cover with a towel or aluminum foil to keep it from crusting over. (Dot it with butter and fold it in half if you like). Serve warm. These can be made in advance and stored in a resealable plastic container.

Recipe adapted from Jeffrey Hamelman, a master baker and bakery director at King Arthur Flour. Thanks to Yeastspotting for including this post.

Billions of Bugs Fly By in the Sky

NPR had a fascinating story today about how many bugs live up in the sky -- "a vast teaming highway invisible to you," reported Robert Krulwich. Laby bugs at 6,000 feet, beetles and fruit flies at 3,000 feet.  We're talking a lot, like 3 billion passing though a single mile of air space in a month. I've posted the audio above but the web link to the story has a nice animation as well.

Which makes me think, how effective can pesticides really be? The buggers are out there -- I mean, best to figure out a way to deal with them, without spraying chemicals, because frankly we will never be able to spray enough, because more will arrive, and then evolve to live with the chemicals and then lift off again and end up in another field thousands of miles away. But enough of my soapbox. Just listen to the piece.

What do you do with a whole Salmon?

Washington SeaSA, my little venture buying sustainable seafood direct from fishermen for a group of about 10 families in DC, is now in year two. Latest on the menu: sockeye salmon from Bill Webber, who fishes the flats off the Copper River in Alaska. This followed an  oyster shucking party, with the farm-raised bivalves from Rappahannock Oyster Co. They were excellent.

I first met Bill last year, when I made the trek up to Alaska to see the fishery. It didn't take me long to ask Bill if he'd ship direct to us and he said he would, as long as we met his 50 pound minimum. Which is why I corralled up my friends. It wasn't a hard sell. 

Bill sends us whole fish, headed and gutted. He also bleeds the fish on his boat, which he argues makes for a much fresher fish. Blood begins to decay once the fish dies and that in turn degrades the flesh, so if you remove the blood -- with a special pressure tube he developed -- you can slow down the clock. He then ships the fish to us in a chilled pack and I drive out to Alaska Airlines' cargo dock to pick it up.

Now, when you buy salmon in the store, you only get the fillet. Getting the whole fish is a different story. I fillet the salmon on our kitchen counter (with an excellent sashimi knife I got from Japan). Aside from the fillet, I'm left with the rich belly meat, which is the bacon of salmon and is excellent fried in a pan. (What can I say, pork belly, salmon belly, it's all good). Then there's the carcass which usually has about a pound of meat on it. These "waste products" amount to a lot of food.

So what do you do them? 

With our last fish, I made stock, layering sliced onions and thin fennel stalks and drizzling them with olive oil. Then I placed the 2-1/2 pound liberally salted carcass on top, covering and then sweating the fish on a low flame for 20 minutes. I then added water and a cup of dry white wine to cover, simmering it for another 20 minutes. Finally, I took it off the heat and let the fish sit for an hour to release its essence. This follows Rick Moonen's method in Fish Without a Doubt: The Cook's Essential Companion, which is now my go-to fish book. Like many chefs he does not recommend using salmon for stock, which is a shame.  Salmon stock is bursting with flavor and isn't oily. But it helps if it's very fresh.

Once the stock cooled, I strained it, and then removed the meat from the bones, ending up with a big container of salmon delicately flavored by the fennel. I ate salmon salad sandwiches for several days, though you could also make salmon croquettes, as another friend did with the remnants of her stock.

Since we had eaten our fill of fresh salmon over a couple of days, I took a remaining fillet and cut thin paillards --  angled cuts 1/4 inch thick -- a wonderful technique I also got from Moonen's book. I salted them, wrapped them up in plastic wrap and froze them (a typical Japanese home-cooking method). These can be taken out and cooked immediately in a toaster oven or in a broiler. They cook in about 4-5 minutes if frozen, or about a minute on each side if defrosted or fresh. So it's a really fast dinner.

With the stock on hand, I was thinking paella but was short a few ingredients. I went ahead anyway since I wanted to use the stock.

I sauteed a fennel bulb, an onion, half a red pepper, 2 slices of bacon, a clove of chopped garlic and an Italian sausage I had laying around. When the veggies were soft and the meat brown, I added just over a cup of arborio rice and sauteed it for a minute. Then I poured in a cup of simmering stock, with a generous pinch of saffron, stirring now and then. As the stock was absorbed by the rice, I added more. What I wouldn't have done for a dozen mussels or clams!

Halfway through, I oiled up three of the frozen paillards and put them in the broiler. They sizzled while the paella continued to cook in the stock.

With everything nearly done, I sauteed a bunch of rainbow chard and garlic from the garden and out came the dinner -- a thoroughly satisfying plate of pseudo-paella, broiled salmon and sauteed chard.

Using the whole fish is a bit of work, or rather it takes time to prepare. But once you have the fish, you realize all the possibilities at hand. Now, if I could just get salmon roe in Bill's next shipment.

Addendum: Here's another tip. Fire up your grill. Cut the stalks off a fennel bulb. Rub a fillet with olive oil and season it with salt . When the fire has burned down to medium heat, lay the stalks over the grill and lay the fish on top. You'll have fennel perfumed salmon. The salmon should flake when done, but still be visibly moist inside. Remove from the fennel, then drizzle more olive oil, lemon and/or fresh oregano on the fish and serve.

- Samuel Fromartz

The Fight to Save a DC Park

I never thought I'd be involved in a fight to save a city park but here I am.

The Marines are progressing with plans to move and expand their facility in Washington D.C. They are looking at one option of taking over Virginia Avenue Park where I happen to participate in a community garden.

Needless to say, the 60 or so families in the garden are not happy, nor are those who use this open space to run their dogs, walk, or bike. In large part, this park has become a wonderful community resource because of the garden. Over several years, gardeners have worked to restore the park, which was a previously run-down lot.

While I see the value of bringing more vibrant development to this area, it should not be at the expense of the community nor at the cost of open space in DC. Indeed, this open space could serve as an anchor and attraction to new development.

If the Marines choose the park for their development, it will extend their barracks and facilities down 8th St. SE and nearly connect with the Navy Yard, making for a large nearly contiguous military facility on Capitol Hill South. As currently envisioned, the new development could approach nearly 1 million square feet.

As one person said to me, while sympathetic to the security needs of the Marines to move their current barracks, "I don't want Quantico on Capitol Hill." 

To promote other options, the Save Virginia Avenue Park has a facebook page and a petition, which we encourage people (especially DC residents) to sign, "friend," and Tweet. We want a good neighbor in the Marines. We just don't want to lose a park.

Thanks to our friends at Roadside Organics for the video.

- Samuel Fromartz

Traveling on Zambian Time

Time is kind of a loose concept here in Zambia, especially when transport -- of whatever sort -- is involved. We were planning to visit farms about three hours away from the city. Pick-up time was 7 a.m. We hoped to attend some meetings starting at 11 a.m.

My friend arrived about 7:30, then we had to go downtown to pick up another person. Traffic was horrendous and took us nearly an hour. We didn’t hit the road until 9 or so, with traffic clogging the two-lane roads. We stopped to get a spare tire fixed because we were heading out to the bush. Then we stopped for a bite. Then to see a conservation farming project on the side of the road. We finally pulled into the town we were heading for at 1:30 p.m. and the person we were meeting was not there -- he was out at a meeting with farmers.

So we piled back into the car, drove about 20 miles down a dirt road to a small town. There we texted him. (Yes, mobile coverage is probably better here than the US). As it turned out, we had passed him on the road so had to wait for him to catch up. Then he led us down even narrower dirt roads for about another hour, until we came to the farmer we were going to meet. But he wanted us to see his corn fields, so we climbed back in the cars, went down an even narrower dirt farm road, following his tractor (the only mechanized equipment for about 1,000 farming families). We road the 4-wheelers through shallow streams, past a 5-year-old boy herding cattle with a stick, and then to the field. By the time we arrived, it was 4:30 p.m. 

So what do you do traveling down dirt roads for hours at a time, dodging pot holes? Well, if you're my friend James Luhana, a Zambian who works on a US AID project, you buy a knock-off Luther Vandross compilation from the boys at a gas station and pop it in the CD player. Then you proceed to sing along with "Nights in Harlem," as well as every other cut on the Mp3. James amazingly knew every word. So there we were, music blaring, roaring down a dirt road past village huts, with James laughing and singing.  

 

We were the only ones with vehicles. Most people walk, or if they are lucky have a bicycle. Women strap infants and young kids to their backs. I have not seen one stroller my entire stay in Zambia, even in the cities. But I did see a family of four riding together on one bicycle.

Transport is difficult, which is why those who can manage to buy a tractor are better off. They can make money not just tilling fields for other farmers, but hauling -- whether grain sacks, people or beer. (I'll be writing about this in more depth for this Worldwatch project). 

When it comes to transport, you see many novel things, like those two goats lashed to the back of a bicycle that a farmer was taking down the road. Yes, the goats were alive.

How Do You Prevent a Garden Pest, The Elephant?

 
This past weekend, I took time off from work and headed up to Kafue National Park, the largest park in Africa roughly the size of Switzerland. It was my one shot to see animals I’ve only seen in the zoo, like elephants, impalas, and lions. And we did see a lot, including a pride of lions that was only 20 feet away. Luckily, they were not interested in us from a culinary perspective.

 

We stayed at Mukambi Safari Lodge on the banks of the Kafue river, which I recommend the next time you’re in Zambia (I know, it's a long shot).

 

Anyway, on the lodge grounds, I noticed a small, sad, vegetable garden.

So, of course, I get to thinking. It rains just 3-1/2 months a year and then it is bone dry and sunny. But the lodge has the advantage of being right next to the river. The water could irrigate the garden and it would get full sun. It would be the Central Valley of California! Tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, potatoes would thrive.

So I took my idea to Linda, the friendly lodge manager, who listened to me politely.

“Yes we grow all our own herbs,” she said.

“But you could do so much more,” I replied enthusiastically.

Then she told me about the elephant. Apparently, one nearby likes tomatoes. As well as everything else they’ve tried to grow in the garden.

"We much prefer the hippos. They just graze on the grass."

“Have you tried a fence?”

“Yes, he knocked it down. Now we’re thinking of building a cinder block wall, but he will probably topple that as well.”

“Well, maybe you should spread some scat from a predator.”

“The elephant has no predators.”

“What about planting a crop that will repel him?”

“Yes, we heard cayenne repels elephants. This one seems to eat the peppers. We even tried spreading ground-up peppers on the fencing. It didn’t work.”

“Hum, interesting problem,” I replied.

So much for importing my gardening ideas to Africa. But if anyone has an effective elephant repellent for a vegetable garden let me know and I’ll pass it on to Linda.

Update: Apparently, bees repel elephants, or even the sound of bees. Researchers are trying this in Africa.

- Samuel Fromartz

Field Notes from Zambia

The biggest current problem in Zambia? A food surplus. Rains were verygood this year and there's now a bumper crop of corn hitting the markets. Prices to farmers will drop drastically, leaving smallholder farmers who grow 80% of the crop without much cash. So the government is stepping in and buying the crop. Too much food a problem? Yet food insecurity in some pockets and malnourished children? Africa kind of puts all your assumptions to a test.

Driving down the road west of the capital of Lusaka, you see small fields of cotton that are the equivalent of a suburban backyard in the US. Yet these farmers are growing for the world market. Despite the high quality of the crop, though, it's hard to get a fair price. Blame it on “market inefficiencies.” Smallholder farmers don't really know what their crop is worth, because there's no open exchange. So they just sell it to the guy who arrives on a truck and take what they can get.

On the side of the road, you can see huge corn sacks filled with black rock, with wire over the top securing the load. Why were so many people selling rocks I wondered? My driver told me they weren’t rocks. They were charcoal. The people in the country burn trees to make charcoal, which is then trucked into the city. “People cook food with charcoal in Lusaka?” I asked. As it turns out, many do, with obvious ramifications for deforestation.

Zambia is not cheap. In fact, I’ve found food prices just a bit cheaper than in Washington. A lunch of chicken kebob and rice cost around $8. Bottled water runs around $1.25. A nice vegetarian Indian meal with chickpeas, vegetables and paneer cost about $20. The equivalent food in DC would run $5 or $10 more. The only thing I’ve found that’s cheap is local cell phone service. You buy time in increments of 4000 kwacha, or 80 cents, and it seems to last quite a long time.

With 5,000 kwacha to the dollar, you start calculating into the millions for a hotel bill. I think it would be easier if the nation just lopped all the zeros off its currency and started again. But I’m probably not the first one to think of that.

- Samuel Fromartz

Tracking the trends at Sustainable Foods Institute

For a few years, I’ve attended the Sustainable Foods Institute, an annual conference at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It’s one of those rare events that brings together a cross-section of scientists, journalists, chefs, food producers and businesses to discuss the food system -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- with an eye on fixing it. 

A lot of common themes come up, but each year I find I get a valuable nugget from someone who brings up something really new, or is doing something surprising.

This year, a couple of really stood one. One was the Wholesome Wave Foundation, whose mission is to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into underserved, low-income communities at an affordable price. The group does so by doubling the value of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) coupons, an especially valuable task at a time when the recession is still running deep. So if a customer has $5 in SNAP food vouchers, they can buy $10 worth of produce.

I heard Michel Nischan, the chef behind the effort, speak about this two years ago. At the time, he had a model farmers market in Connecticut where he was showing some success, with the market getting a steady stream of customers. But what really surprised me was how much the organization has grown since then, expanding into 18 states and more than 160 markets. Right now, the money to double the coupons’ value is coming from private donors, but Nischan said local government is stepping in as well.

He also disabused two widely accepted notions -- that poor people don’t want to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and there is no economic value for businesses in these communities. Instead, these communities are generating income for farmers and getting produce they might not otherwise afford. 

Marion Nestle, the food policy and nutrition guru at New York University, pointed to a graph in a keynote she gave showing a gradual upward slope in the price of fresh produce since the 1980s and a general downward trend in the price of packaged goods over the past two decades. The price signal is clear to low-income people: buy more processed food, which is linked to higher rates of diabetes and heart disease. 

Packaged goods are often made from highly subsidized crops (corn, soybeans), while fresh fruits and vegetables get no subsidies. Wholesome Wave’s program works to address that, though a major shift in the $20 billion farm subsidy program (which mostly goes to wealthy and big farmers) would have a major effect too.

Feed the World?

There were also dramatic contrasts. Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant pathology at UC Davis, gave a talk about the need for genetically modified food to “feed the world” -- a familiar talking point in industrial agriculture circles -- but she twinned it with a companion message that GMOs weren’t incompatible with organic farming. In fact, that GMO technology could produce seeds suited to an organic farming system. (A factoid: Pam and I overlapped in our years at Reed College, a school that values debate from alternative perspectives!). 

She came at this from the angle of a GMO seed breeder who is interested in reducing pesticide poisonings in the developing world and in boosting food production -- both noble goals. But her assertions on how to do so were left hanging in the air and could have benefitted from another perspective or counterpoint. I did get one, however, when the conference bused out to Earthbound Farm - the organic produce company I wrote about in my book, Organic Inc.

I discussed the issue with Stan Pura, a farmer and partner at Earthbound who has grown both organic and conventional produce (though not the corn and soy where GMOs are prevalent). After years of farming with both methods on a commercial scale, he told me he sees very little difference in yield between the two at least in many of the crops he grows.

In produce, Pura’s company Mission Ranches is breeding seeds to combat specific plant diseases, though not by using genetic engineering. Plus, he relies on familiar organic techniques such as crop rotation, keeping buffers of beneficial habitat to attract good insects (which eat the harmful ones). He didn’t think organic was harder than conventional farming, but it had to be learned, and like anything, as your learning curve improved, so did your results.

In fresh produce, Pura thought the argument that organic requires a far greater amount of land or has drastically lower yields doesn’t hold water. Nor does the argument make economic sense in the Salinas Valley, which has among the most expensive farmland in the world. If organic were so inferior and troublesome, why would Pura grow it on such valuable land?

In fact, in the spring mix salad market, organic is now 50% of the marketplace. Why? Because it can be produced at parity with conventional lettuce -- that is, at a similar cost and yield. That might not occur in every crop, in all conditions. Some crops may do worse, others better.

But in corn and soybeans, the economics of production are distorted by the $20 billion farm program. If the healthy produce were valued as much as grains, Wholesome Wave might have a far easier job than it does now shifting purchases away from processed food. The low-income customers of Wholesome Wave’s innovative program would begin to see vast change in their spending power.

And come to think of it, those farmers that Ronald is working with in the developing world would benefit as well, since they would no longer face competition from subsidized U.S. crops. Better seeds mean nothing if the farmer has no incentive to grow them. In short, what's often presented as a scientific silver bullet is far more complicated when it meets the real world.

I hope to offer more thoughts in this issue in the coming week, during a trip to Zambia to see innovative projects with small-holder farmers. 

- Samuel Fromartz

Notes From a Slaughterhouse: Proposed USDA Rules Could Crimp Local Meat

The following post was submitted by Joe Cloud, partner in T&E Meats, a small-scale locally focused slaughterhouse in Harrisonburg, Va. I wrote about T&E in the WaPo and invited Joe to post his thoughts on this blog. - SF

 By Joe Cloud

This is usually the slowest time of the year for butchering, but T&E Meats is booked months in advance, like the other small meat processing plants in Virginia. We’re working at almost full capacity to bring locally grown, pasture-raised, and humanely slaughtered quality meats to market. 

But, right now, our future is looking tenuous due to newly proposed regulations from the USDA.

Picture an hourglass and you’ll understand the local, sustainable meat crisis: there are plenty of willing consumers looking for humanely raised, quality local meats, and there are more and more farmers looking to “meat” that consumer demand (sorry – couldn’t help myself!), but the real bottle neck is processing capacity. Small, community-based meat processing plants have become an endangered species in America, done in by an ocean of super-cheap industrial meat and the challenges and costs of meeting one-size-fits-all regulations.

Although species go extinct on earth on a regular basis, every so often there is a major event that comes along and wipes out 40% or 50%. The same happens in the small business world. A few businesses fold every year due to retirement, poor management, and changes in the market, and that is quite normal. But then every so often a catastrophic event comes along that causes a wholesale wipeout.

In the small meat businesses in America, catastrophic events result from changes high up in the regulatory food chain that make it very difficult for small plants to adapt. The most recent extinction event occurred at the turn of the millennium when Small and Very Small USDA-inspected slaughter and processing plants were required to adopt the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Plan) system. It has been estimated that over 20%, perhaps more, of existing small plants went out of business when HACCP was first instituted. Now, proposed changes to HACCP threaten to take down many of the remaining local plants, making the availability of healthy, local meats a rare commodity.

This is ironic given the USDA's new emphasis on promoting local food production. The department's Know Your Farmer Know Your Food Program web site says it wants to "foster the viability and growth of small and mid-size farms and ranches, and we want to create new opportunities for farmers and ranchers by promoting locally produced foods." But the newly proposed regulations from the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the inspection arm of the USDA, will reduce local opportunities for ranchers, never mind create new ones.

The intent of HACCP is to prevent contamination of meat by harmful pathogens. It does so by instituting well-recognized, established processes and controls set by the USDA itself. At T&E, we have had a HACCP Plan in place since 1999, and it works. We undergo extensive E.Coli testing every year, and have never had a positive sample.

But on March 19, the FSIS published a Draft Guidance on HACCP System Validation, outlining new rules which would institute much more intensive testing of all meats, whether or not a problem has been identified. These requirements will cost small plants tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, every year -- a financial burden appears great enough to force many to shutter.

Now, the reason these rules are being proposed is clear: millions of pounds of recalled hamburger, e. coli food poisoning incidents and distrust by consumers and foreign trading partners of U.S. produced meat. But these problems have arisen at plants that handle thousands of animals a day in extremely fast-moving production lines.

Small plants operate quite differently. At T&E, for example, we process around 20 animals a day. I know which farmer delivered each animal, often because that same farmer wants his butchered animal back so he can sell it. We're not mixing thousands of animals of unknown provenance into piles of hamburger meat and then sending it all around the country. 

Perhaps a large plant slaughtering 5,000 animals per day can afford its own lab and microbiology staff, and can pass the cost along to the consumer. And perhaps they should, given the recalls arising from these large-scale facilities. But most small plants can’t handle it.

The USDA needs to recognize that "One Size Fits All" inspection no longer works. The risks arising from mega agribusiness plants are far different from community-based plants and they should be regulated appropriately. This does not mean lowering the hurdles for small processors. Rather it means tailoring regulations to the scale and risks of an operation. That way we can provide what the consumer wants – safe AND local food, not just the shrink-wrapped anonymous meat in the supermarket.

The USDA is accepting comments on this matter until June 19th, 2010. The original deadline was April 19. You can learn more at the Association of American Meat Processors web site, or the Niche Meat Processors Assistance Network.

Please submit a comment if you care about community-based meat processing and humanely produced meats. Your comments really do matter. Submit your comments to the email address DraftValidationGuideComments@fsis.usda.gov or to the Docket Clerk, USDA, FSIS, Room 2-2127, 5601 Sunnyside Avenue, Beltsville, MD 20705.