Best Food Writing 2013 (27 page)

He formulated this thought: “Not allowing animals to express their instinctive behavior is working against nature.” It stayed with him.

Harris Finds a Market at Atlanta's Woodfire Grill

When Jenni was 11, Harris sat her down and said he needed to talk to her about her future and the future of the farm. He had been reading about organic farming and wanted to try it. Things weren't going to be like they were in her granddaddy's days.

The next year was a disaster. Without any topsoil to hold the grass in place, it washed away in the rain and dried up in the summer heat. Harris had to buy hay just to keep his cattle fed, and he lost money. The thousand acres turned brown and rangy—an eyesore amidst the verdant row crops that surrounded the farm.

“The weeds were eating up my ass in the pasture,” Harris recalls. Cattle wouldn't eat the foot-high stalks of pigweed that had taken tenacious root, but sheep would. So Harris bought a herd and took his first step away from the cattle monoculture his father had built.

While Harris still shipped calves off to western feedlots to make ends meet, he increasingly finished them on pasture and hay and took them to local slaughterhouses to be ground for hamburger. He marketed this ground beef relentlessly—handing out samples in food stores and fairs.

He realized that any real customer base for his product wouldn't be folks in southwest Georgia who wanted to stock their freezers, but rather Atlantans involved in the burgeoning “good food” movement. So he signed up to attend a dinner that Atlanta's Slow Food chapter was holding at Woodfire Grill, one of Atlanta's A-list restaurants.

“What did they call that group? A ‘convivium?'” Harris chuckles.
“Man, I was dreading it like a trip to the dentist. That dinner was $45! I had never eaten in a restaurant nicer than a Shoney's and just pictured those people as a bunch of arrogant stuffed shirts.”

Instead he found his target audience and his impetus to keep pushing. Julie Shaffer, then the local Slow Food leader, says, “It was so encouraging to find someone in our state who was trying to farm animals in such a humane and sustainable way. I felt proud to know him.”

Harris saw there was a market for more than frozen hamburger. Atlanta chefs and regional Whole Foods markets wanted grass-fed steaks. He toured the state looking for a slaughterhouse that could process the animals economically, skillfully and humanely. It didn't exist.

So he secured more than $2 million in loans from banks, Whole Foods and a Georgia Department of Agriculture outreach program and set out to build his own processing plant. He hired Temple Grandin, an animal scientist whose autism helps her better understand animal psychology and create less stress for them at slaughter.

“People ask me how I can care about animals and be involved in killing them,” says Grandin. “What I believe is we've got to give animals a decent life—one that's worth living.”

Grandin insists it doesn't take her mind to see what makes cattle happy. “Let those girls out of their stalls in spring, and they just start running all over the place, udders bouncing along.”

Harris completed the slaughterhouse in 2006 with the plan to process his own cattle to the tune of 30 a week.

“Those were the dark days,” says Harris. With such a small production, he couldn't keep his costs down enough to make his beef even remotely competitive with the conventional product.

“In one year I went from being comfortable, never having taken a loan, to thinking, ‘I've really screwed this up.'”

So he worked out deals with more than a dozen nearby cattlemen. If they'd agree to take their pastures organic, he'd pay more than they could earn from the feedlot brokers. He stepped up production fivefold.

Harris Returns Family Farm to Prosperity—and Its Past

The trip from the old Harris homestead to Bluffton leads past a flock of aggressive, curious turkeys that come running from their roosts
when they hear the Jeep's engine. These aluminum-sided shelters line up like row houses and they can be moved about like hotels on a Monopoly board, letting the turkeys root for grubs and beetles and fertilize the ground before they arrive at the next destination.

“You might want to cover your nose,” Harris warns as he drives past the bone yard. Thirty head of cattle are slaughtered every day, and their bones—still pink and slick with the bits of meat and tissue that would get processed into so-called “pink slime” elsewhere—come here to dry. They will eventually get ground into bone meal for the compost used in his one-acre organic vegetable garden.

Like many old farming towns in the South, Bluffton today presents little more than a collection of homes in various states of care and decrepitude. There are no longer any schools, and the town post office is scheduled for closure. Turn off the main drag with its water tower and long-neglected park, and you come upon the town cemetery where the elder Harrises lie. After that, it's row crops—peanuts as far as the eye can see.

What pulse remains may be due in large part to Harris. White Oak Pastures sells nearly $20 million of naturally raised meat annually and employs 85 people who pump their $2.3 million in annual salary into the local economy.

His business acumen and his environmental stewardship have earned accolades. He was selected as Georgia's Small Business Person of the Year by the US Small Business Administration in 2011. The Georgia Conservancy named him as its 2012 Distinguished Conservationist of the Year for his efforts in promoting sustainable and organic farming.

When Harris first switched to sustainable farming, “some people down in this area probably thought he lost his mind,” says Butch Wiggins, president of the Bank of Early, who loaned Harris the money for his abattoirs. “I don't think they think he's crazy now.”

Harris turns into a craggy pasture, and as the Jeep hits an unseen pit, Harris jerks the glass of shiraz in his right hand, which sloshes close to the rim without spilling. “That was close,” he laughs. He has clearly had practice.

Most of the 100 or more mama cows and calves stand in a companionable cluster as they munch on rye grass and red clover.

Harris scans the perimeter to look for any cows that have just
given birth. When the time comes, they wander off to a secluded hiding spot where they can bond with their newborns. One eventually appears by the trees edging the pasture, still and wary, with a calf standing by her side. Judging by the still-visible placental matter, the calf is but hours old.

Are these happy cows? They are certainly curious and bright-eyed, with glossy coats. Miyun Park, the executive director of the Global Animal Partnership, a nonprofit charity group that rates farms based on animal welfare, says so. “I've been to farms and ranches across the country and around the world—some for profit and some not for profit. The life afforded to animals at White Oak Pastures far surpasses many of them. They're given an opportunity to be cattle and sheep and goats.”

The log cabin that James Edward Harris built is long gone. But the house where Will Carter Harris then Will Bell Harris lived is an active construction site. Workers are building a new wraparound patio with an extended roof line. It looks like the kind of porch that can accommodate quite a few rocking chairs.

“I really do not want to run a bed and breakfast, but we're going to need a guest house,” he chuckles. “This might as well be it.”

These days agritourism isn't just a matter of apple orchards and corn mazes. Visitors on their way to Florida beaches stop by White Oak Pastures—a member of the Georgia Grown agritourism association—nearly every day to load up on grass-fed strip steaks, hamburger, chickens and lamb. Jenni Harris—a dynamo who now directs marketing for White Oak Pastures—fields requests from visitors who want to tour the grounds, hold the baby chicks, poke their noses into the garden greenhouses. Or the abattoir, which she will permit.

But first the old homestead needs, much like the pasture that surrounds it, to be restored. “My parents modernized,” Harris chuckles, with more than a hint of irony in his inflection. “They put shag carpets on the hardwood floors, installed fluorescent track lighting and covered the poplar siding with vinyl. I'm trying to return it to the way it was in the early 1900s, when my granddaddy lived here.”

 

 

T
HE
I
BÉRICO
J
OURNEY

By Tim Hayward

From
The Financial Times

English food writer Tim Hayward is a busy fellow indeed—freelancing for
The Guardian
and the
Financial Times,
broadcasting on the BBC, running a bakery in Cambridge, and editing
Fire &Knives,
a quarterly journal of new food writing. But there's always time to go chasing the world's most delectable ham.

I
t's dark, very dark indeed, with thick cloud blanking the sliver of moon. The farmhouse sits squat and black on the peak of the hill, and only the headlights reveal it as we rattle up the track. There are four of us in the Jeep and we've come to see something die.

In rural Spain, pigs are still killed the traditional way as part of a family event called a
matanza
—literally “a slaughter.” The family members would gather so that when the animal was killed, there would be enough willing hands to process everything that could be preserved, as quickly as possible. Then, the store cupboard stocked until the next killing, that which couldn't be laid away was consumed on the spot—a brief celebration of plenty before returning to the hard life of the farm.

I'd come to Extremadura—along with Simon Mullins, co-founder of the Salt Yard Group of Spanish and Italian restaurants in London, and Ben Tish, the group's executive chef—to watch a little piece of cultural history played out and to participate. But we'd also come to see a slaughter more real than most will ever experience. There is a natural inquisitiveness about death. There's a moral aspect for a meat eater in connecting with the living animal that has to die for you,
and there's the challenge: how will you handle yourself? Witnessing the process has become a rite of passage for a certain kind of serious food lover, so we'd come to join a family matanza, we'd come to learn about Ibérico pigs, but, at the core of it all, we had come to see something die.

“Quique” Asparrago owns Señorío de Montanera, one of the principal producers of Ibérico hams. His family also owns Finca Alcornocal in the Province of Badajoz, deep in Extremadura. It's a fortified farmhouse encompassing a courtyard and surrounded by acres of squat scrub oak trees, around which the handsome black pigs root. The finca is way off any utility grid, and at night the arrhythmic wheezing of the geriatric diesel generator is the only thing keeping us anchored in this century. Tonight we'll sit around a fire built of vast oak stumps and drink lethally strong “gintonics,” but at six in the morning we'll kill the pig and by the end of the day it will be salchichón, chorizo, morcilla and hams.

A few pigs due for slaughter have been isolated in a pen as we walk out at dawn to choose one. The animal is weighed, a rope is tied round its hind leg and we all walk back to the farmhouse together, the pig gambolling unnervingly like a large dog on a leash as the slaughterman wrestles with the rope.

Outside the gate of the finca somebody has set up a low table, something like a picnic bench but only a foot or so off the ground. Two local women have arrived from the village, one holding a plastic washing-up bowl. They are not introduced to us and stand off from the main group. Antonio Blas is the
matarife,
or slaughterman, who has come from the Montanera factory for the day, along with a couple of hands to help out. As the pig is led to the table our little team stands, awkward, and there is an embarrassed pause.

Then things move quickly. Four farmhands grab the pig, taking a leg each, lift it on to its back on the table and then roll it over onto its side. Blas whips a short length of rope around its snout, neutralising its ferocious little tusks and giving him purchase to control the position of the head. The pig is, of course, squealing, but although we've been told that it sounds “like a child” or “a human cry,” it doesn't seem that way. It is bewildered, furious, it grunts and puffs and, to make the obvious error of anthropomorphising, it sounds indignant.