Eating for Beginners Read online

Every Thursday, sometime between noon and the dinner rush—occasionally during the dinner rush—an unmarked white van arrived from a company called Fancy Meats from Vermont, a cooperative of small farmers, each of whom had joined for the benefit of having their meat distributed in much the same way that Angello's distributed its products. There were fewer farms than Joe had, and they were closer together than his, but the principle was identical: less driving and less marketing by farmers, who could then spend the time tending to their animals and land. The first day I watched the delivery, standing at garde manger shelling peas, I was only dimly aware of the black-garbage-bagged forms being carried in through the dining room over someone's shoulder, some of them with cloven hooves or a head hanging out one end of the bag. Then David sent me down to the walk-in to get a few packages of bacon, and I opened the door to discover two pigs, a goat, two lambs, and a huge hind of veal.

  The animals were hanging haphazardly from the shelving in the walk-in, and I, who had never seen a whole dead animal in my life, had to throw not just my shoulder but my entire self against a cold, rubbery-fleshed pig that weighed more than I did, in order to reach the shelf behind it and grab the bacon.

  To my surprise, I had felt no revulsion at the sight of the blood-streaked animals hanging by their heels in that claustrophobic space, brushing up against the bright produce; they belonged there, after all. I got my bacon, let the pig swing back into place as I straightened up, and went upstairs to cut lardons for a warm vinaigrette.

  And now I was on my way to the place where many of these animals had lived before they ended up on the plates of appreciative applewood diners. I drove about two hundred and fifty miles north, up through Connecticut and Massachusetts, and finally turned onto a narrow winding road lined with bare trees that glittered in the winter afternoon sun. I followed it for a few miles uphill to a clearing at the top of a ridge, where I parked in front of a low white nineteenth-century farmhouse built close to the road with a wooden sign that read "Lovejoy Brook." A small, slightly ramshackle wooden building near the house was connected via a wooden-fenced cow pen to a cedar-shingled round barn a bit higher up on the slope.

  The first big snowstorm of the season was predicted for later that weekend, and I could smell it in the air. The frozen ground crunched beneath my feet as I walked to the house and entered a big kitchen with rough-hewn ceiling beams and walls lined with yellow beadboard to waist level with copper pots hanging above it.

  There were three stoves: close to the door, a pot-bellied woodburning model with two kettles on it; across the room, a cast-iron behemoth with two ovens; and next to that a regular white metal stove, the only one with burners. A black soapstone sink was framed by dark wood cabinets, and a small iron chandelier hung over a table covered with a red-and-white-checked cloth and holding a pitcher of slightly wilted white roses. Opposite the sink, an incongruously ornate gilt-framed mirror hung between two floor-to-ceiling bookcases of dark wood. Among the titles on the shelves were The New York Times Cook Book, something called Plain Cooking, several books by Buckminster Fuller, and A Veterinary Guide for Animal Owners.

  Sitting at the table was Lucy Georgeff, one of the farmhands, who looked to be in her mid-twenties and had her brown hair in braids. Leaning against the sink was Lydia Ratcliff, the farm's owner, in her early seventies with long, straight white hair, wearing a royal blue sweater and mustard-colored wide-wale cords. She had the tubes of a portable oxygen machine attached to her nostrils as she suffered from emphysema and could no longer be without it.

  "Melanie?" Lucy said, hopping up from the table. I had arranged my visit with Oliver Owen, who delivered the animals to applewood each week and was not only the other farmhand but also her boyfriend. "You made it!"

  "Hi," said Lydia in a scratchy voice. "Did you find us okay?"

  I had barely said yes and sat down next to Lucy before Lydia began talking, obviously having heard from Oliver about the subject of my book.

  First she blasted off a list of obstacles that face small farms. Slaughterhouses were closing because of all the red tape involved in meeting regulations: farmers who sell meat, whether retail or wholesale, are required to have it slaughtered at a plant operating under federal inspection guidelines, and the nearest of these was now hours away. Then there were customers who didn't pay for the meat they ordered. "Two or three thousand dollars might not seem like a lot to these restaurants," Lydia said indignantly, "but to one of our farmers it's a killer."

  By "our farmers" she meant those who belonged to Fancy Meats from Vermont, which was the second farmers' co-op she had run. She had owned Lovejoy Brook since 1975, after noticing its For Sale sign during a weekend visit from New York, where, after a job at Time magazine, she was working as a researcher for the financial columnist Sylvia Porter. She agreed to help ghostwrite Sylvia Porter's Money Book for a share of the royalties, and when the book hit the bestseller list in 1975 (it's still in print today, in an updated version), she made enough money to buy the ninety acres set along this gentle slope. At first she commuted, but after a few years she left New York behind and became a full-time farmer. As a teenager she had attended the Putney School in Vermont, which has a working farm and gardens and requires students to spend some of their time working in the barn and on the land. She had always, as she put it, "had a liking for farming and animals."

  She also had a head for business, and she was tough, not to mention a genius at sales and marketing. She had gotten most of the restaurant customers for her original co-op, Vermont Quality Meats, simply by calling the chefs of the best restaurants in New York and persuading them to order whole animals from her. That was in 1999, when there were no other sources of high-quality meat that came with all the parts that good chefs, especially those trained in other countries, are accustomed to cooking with and consider delicacies, and she rightly guessed that they would leap at the chance to buy it from her. When she left that co-op to start over, many of the farms left with her, along with most of the restaurants she had built relationships with, and her business continued briskly. Now one of her customers was way behind in payments, and she had a plan. "I asked Benny [one of her co-op's farmers] if he'd go down and picket with a pitchfork or something and a sign saying 'X does not pay his employees.'" She gave a good-natured laugh, and I started to feel somewhat welcome if still a bit nervous.

  Fancy Meats from Vermont was doing fine, businesswise, but it suffered from a slightly different version of the disconnect I felt at the meat counter. "There's a basic lack of understanding from chefs, who are far too accustomed to ordering meat from plants that can provide them with whatever they want whenever they want," Lydia said. "Few people are like David, who has made the effort to go see these places." David had told me the story of taking his kids to Vermont one spring during lambing season. To keep the newborn lambs warm, Lydia was temporarily housing them on the three couches in her living room. "Sophie thought it was the best thing she'd ever seen," he'd said.

  Lydia wanted someone—me, perhaps: I was beginning to realize she understood the uses of publicity as well as she did farming—to start a newsletter that would be written from the farmer's perspective one month and the chef's the next. "There's no comprehension between the two and they could work together much better than they do," she said. "Most of the veal farmers around here have never eaten veal. Or lamb."

  Suddenly she looked at me appraisingly.

  "So do you take notes or what?"

  "Oh, I will," I mumbled.

  Lucy intervened. "Are you interested in seeing some goats?"

  "Sure," I said, "but I need to do one thing first." At which point I went out to my car and wrote down everything that had just happened.

  Then Lucy and I, accompanied by two big white fluffy Maremma sheepdogs named Alba and Rocco, went across the road, where a few dozen goat kids of about eight months were milling around in a labyrinth of grassy pens. The white ones were Saanens, a mellow breed that tends to give a higher volume of milk with le
ss fat. The rest, a mixture of brown and beige and some black, were feisty Alpines, which give less milk with higher fat content. They were all adorable, especially the ones cowering in the plastic igloo-like domes set out in the grass, protecting themselves from the weather. "They hate precipitation and wind," Lucy said, patting a kid she had named Olivia in honor of Oliver. "They really like to be inside." This didn't exactly jibe with my idea of goats—admittedly based more on repeated readings of The Billy Goats Gruff than any actual experience. I thought of them as rakish and comical, which I confessed.

  "Goats are a handful for sure," Lucy agreed. "You really have to keep an eye on them. They want to test everything, but I can see how people fall in love with them because they're so interactive. They want to be petted and to get to know you." As she said this, a brown and white kid named Punk whose head came to just above my knees pranced up and butted my hand, and the first snow flurry of the season started to fly.

  "Lydia once told me, 'Goats are a poor man's Prozac,'" Lucy said, smiling at Punk. "Not that you can be poor and have lots of goats."

  It was cold outside, and there was still a little time before we had to feed the sheep, so I went in to talk to Lydia about the goats. She was in the living room, sitting at a card table piled with papers and a telephone, her back to an empty fireplace that must have been at least eight feet wide. Next to it was a wood stove that produced all the heat in the room. There was a baby grand piano ("I used to play very badly," Lydia said dryly), the three sofas where Sophie had marveled at the newborn lambs, a large table covered with reading material including several of Michael Pollan's articles about food, and a smaller table with a fax machine on it.

  Because of her health, Lydia could no longer do the work of the farm as she did for many years. Instead she focused on the work of Fancy Meats from Vermont; this room was her headquarters. From the card table, she spent her Fridays calling restaurants for orders (I had heard David taking her call more than once during prep), calling back over the weekends if the chefs were too busy to talk. On Saturdays and Sundays she called the farmers in the co-op to tell them what was needed (besides meat, she distributed local eggs and cheese). On Mondays the animals were sent to one of two slaughterhouses—one in Albany, about eighty-five miles away, the other in New Hampshire, about ninety miles away, each requiring a two-hour drive. After being slaughtered they were left to hang (to let the blood drain out and start the aging process, which produces flavor in the meat as muscle structure begins to break down) until Wednesday. Then Oliver picked them up and started his long delivery route, covering about a thousand miles in twenty hours.

  But in spite of her physical remove from the daily workings of her farm, Lydia's heart was clearly still very much with the animals. She knew every detail of what was going on. Back in the seventies, she had started Lovejoy Brook with pigs only, but they ate so much grain at such a high cost that she looked for other ways to sustain both the farm and her interest. Along came the goats—"They got under my skin pretty quick," she said between phone calls from her post at the card table. "They're amusing, very bright, naughty, affectionate." She also raised some chickens, cows, and sheep, which not only kept things lively but cut back a little on food costs. "It's really boring to be faced with four hundred and fifty cows to milk every morning and night," she explained, her hand on the telephone receiver. "For example, in the typical dairy you don't do anything with the milk. You put it in a big truck and that's the last you see of it. We just take the milk out of the goats and feed it to the calves and that's that. So it cuts out a lot of the boring stuff. I think farming is capable of being very boring and repetitive if you're doing only one thing." From the very beginning she raised her animals without using any unnecessary antibiotics. "All this about growth hormones," she scoffed when I mentioned the issue. "As far as I know, no one around here does it. They never have."

  Nonetheless, she made that explicit on the order sheet for Fancy Meats. When the phone started ringing, she handed me a copy. I read the prices for lambs (from one- to two-year-old "mutton" down to the little ones, which she called "hothouse" lambs), goats (five to five and a half dollars a pound), pigs (ranging from "older, fatter" animals of three to five hundred pounds, good for charcuterie, to suckling pigs weighing between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds), veal ("short fores" to hindquarters, the meatiest part of the animal), and rabbits. At the bottom was a statement of purpose: "Fancy Meats from Vermont is an association of farmers whose products are grown on small family farms, processed at USDA-inspected slaughterhouses, and delivered fresh to our customers every week. Our animals are fed primarily on milk, hay, and grain: medications are used only in life-threatening situations. We do not use growth hormones. We aim to provide the best quality meats money can buy."

  Lydia was now absorbed in her phone call, and Lucy, who had been making a pie in the kitchen, suddenly appeared to ask me a question. "Do you have any wool socks?"

  I did, so I put them on and we went out to feed the sheep. A little bit of snow had fallen while I was inside with Lydia. It had stopped before it had a chance to accumulate on the frost-heaved road, but it was icy outside and the light was draining out of the sky behind our destination, the sheep barn.

  As we entered the old wooden building, Lucy said, "I can see why sheep are the representatives of sleep. When they're quiet this is the nicest place on the farm to be. They don't mind if you're here, but they won't want to come play with you like the goats." Inside, sheltered from the wind, it was silent. The sheep were out of sight in the other, larger section of the barn; the room we were in was called the maternity, where the lambs were born every March. Now it held feed troughs, which we filled with grain and bales of hay.

  When the food was ready, Lucy slid open the enormous door between the two parts of the barn and the sheep rushed to meet her, almost knocking her down as they crammed themselves through the narrow doorway two and three at a time, pushing against one another to make it to the head of the flock, a tidal wave of freshly shorn white animals. Their eyes were gentle even as they ran for their dinner.

  The hay they were eating came from nearby farms. "It's an even exchange," Lucy said. "Somebody gets their land maintained and Lydia gets hay." It was supplemented with grain because Lydia did not believe in purely grass-fed lamb from the retail point of view: she thought chefs liked the idea of it more than the actual product, which is darker and tougher than at least partially grain-fed lamb.

  "You can be perfectly humane and never put your lambs at pasture," Lucy explained when I asked about that. "It's not as good for the soil, or for the landscape—sheep's hooves aerate the soil, they don't graze very much and they do graze evenly, and they poop evenly to fertilize—but this is very humane. We also give them antibiotics when they get sick." The financial advantage of one diet versus the other was minimal: grain-fed lambs can be sold in four months while grass-fed lambs need up to ten months of growth time, but grain costs were going through the roof because so much corn was being used to make ethanol. But Lucy was more interested in talking about the environmental benefits of raising grass-fed animals.

  "Grazing done well is so good for the environment and us that I think ideally people should be eating grass-fed meat only," she said as the sheep munched away. "Which in cold climates like ours includes hay during off-grazing season." Then, acknowledging the reality of feeding animals in New England winters, she conceded, "If you have to supplement, it should be with organic grain only when necessary." Whenever she finally had her own land, she planned to farm differently than Lydia—who fed her lambs non-organic grain—but she and Oliver were at Lovejoy Brook to gain experience that would allow them to make their own ideas about raising animals a reality someday, and she wasn't the least bit judgmental about Lydia's choices, in part because buying meat from a small operation like Lydia's met one of her most basic requirements.

  "People should try to familiarize themselves with the source of their meat," she told me later when we
continued our conversation by email. "But there's such a gap between producer and consumer that, for most people, it's hard to truly know how their food was raised and processed. Given certain conditions, cows, as one example, can pollute the waterways and atmosphere and provide us with way more meat and milk than we need. But given other conditions, cows can help us keep our soils in good shape and provide us with meat rich in cancer-fighting, bone-strengthening, mind-sharpening substances."

  From the sheep barn we moved on to Lydia's cows, which lived in the upper barnyard next to the "round" barn, which was not perfectly round but twelve-sided. Lydia had designed it herself soon after buying the farm, and the two grain bins in its attic held about three tons each; along with the hay in the loft, it would be enough to get the animals through the winter.

  Right now, though, we were feeding them hay, dragging bales from the barn to a sort of round metal cage that the cows could put their heads into to grab mouthfuls. Outside the cage was a pile of leftover hay from the morning meal, where three caramel-colored Jersey calves, born the previous spring, were lying, munching on whatever they could reach. Their mothers, Belle, Louise, and Rodeo, were nearby, in a small shelter a short way up the slope with Lydia's other cow, Cricket.

  "There's just so much going on," Lucy said to me, petting one of the calves. "Something new every day, something you've never seen before. I really like the diversity of this farm, that there are so many animals." As if to prove her point, we made our way to the adult goats and the veal calves, who all lived in a small shedlike building next to the house that was still called the chicken coop even though it no longer served that purpose.

  "I'll show you the bucks first," Lucy said, pushing the door open. "They pay a lot of attention to the does and are also extremely disgusting. They pee on their beards as an aphrodisiac." I had trouble picturing this, so she explained. "They kind of arch their backs up into the air and scoot their back hooves closer to their front, and then bend their necks down. The penis is in what looks like the middle of their belly, so when they bend their necks like that, they can just squirt themselves."