Today I’m doing the last little edits on the chapters of Eating for Beginners (now set to come out next July, by the way) in which I write about spending time at the small Vermont farm where I met Lucy and Oliver, helping them tend to cows, sheep, goats and veal calves. One of the big complaints the farm’s owner had was that so many small slaughter houses have closed due to expense and the time wasted trying to deal with the USDA’s regulations. She sells her animals whole, but they still have to be taken elsewhere to be killed. It was Oliver’s job to get the animals from farm to slaughter house, which meant hours of driving every week since the closest slaughter house was two hours away from the farm.
In an amazing act of serendipity (aided by Twitter, which I’m finding to be a great way to get alerted to articles I might not find on my own), just as I was thinking about meat and nothing but meat, I discovered this article about a new trend in slaughtering, the mobile unit. Among other things, I learned that in 1976 there were 1665 slaughter houses in the U.S. and now there are 630, a decrease of more than a third. But what I really like about it is hearing farmers talk about their business and why they’re so happy this new invention exists. It reminded me of all the time I spent on farms doing research, and how much I enjoyed every moment of conversation in barns and fields and around tables after a long day of work.
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Tags: local food, locavore, Eating for Beginners, editing, mobile slaughtering, locally slaugherted meat, slaughter houses
July 23, 2009 at 5:15 pm |
Another nice farm supplier for folks in northern Vermont is Applecheek Farm: http://www.applecheekfarm.com/
Happy eating!
July 23, 2009 at 6:40 pm |
The Island Grown Farmers Coop out of Bow, Washington, I believe, is an inspiring model for the mobile slaughter unit. They utilize a legal requirement that USDA inspectors be REQUIRED to inspect any authorized slaughterhouse NO MATTER where it resides. That’s big. Now, the University of Vermont dept o’ Agriculture has a mobile flash freezing unit which is fantastically expensive but sits there unused. It’s great for freezing lots of stuff quickly, but ahead of it’s time. You see, access to slaughter is one thing, where and how to freeze the product on the farm is quite another. To my mind, the ideal would be for the eaters to pick up, or have their meat delivered on the day of slaughter. Mobile slaughter units are great, but this farmer can’t freeze the kind of volume that would make membership in a mobile processor coop worth it. Eater participation is just so fundamental I can hardly stand it.