Have you ever pushed past the Pilgrim and wondered why we eat turkey for Thanksgiving? How about: Because that's when turkey is in season.
Exactly. Just like tomatoes ripening in the summer, many animals have seasons of harvest, too. Cows and pigs mate year-round, but turkeys, goats, and sheep, for example, only reproduce at specific times of the year. Which means that, to be in tune with nature's cycles, we should only eat them at specific times of the year.
Patrick Martins would like you to know this and many other meat-related facts, rants, letters of interest, and first-person pig paeans as found in the 50 swift chapters that comprise his new book, The Carnivore's Manifesto: Eating Well, Eating Responsibly, and Eating Meat.
A founder of Slow Food USA and of Heritage Foods USA, a purveyor and supporter of small producers who raise heritage animals, Martins has something smart, pointed, and pithy to say to everyone from vegetarians (stop focusing on the wrong problems!) to purists (there really is no need to make your own ketchup when Heinz already exists) to the meat-buying public (sleep with your butcher and hey, maybe your bartender, too).
Co-written with writer, musician, and all around heretic Mike Edison — the former editor and publisher of High Times as well as of Screw magazine — Manifesto seeks to delight, alarm, and inform while making the reader increasingly hungry for real food. Slow food should be fast, the authors insist. After all, a perfect pork chop only takes eight minutes to cook and needs little more than salt, pepper, and perhaps a slosh of good olive oil.
Martins and Edison bring their self-proclaimed Magical Meat Tour to SHED on Father's Day, Sunday, June 15, from 10:30am-noon. They'll reveal more from The Carnivore's Manifesto and share some Heritage Foods ribs to eat. Edison promises to tote an instrument (think: theremin; pray: guitar), planning to regale us with songs, naturally, about meat.
Ribs, rants, and antenna-u-ated music. What more could Dad want on his day?
In other meaty matters, we're happy to share the good news that Rian Rinn and Jenine Alexander's Sonoma Meat Co. opened to the public last week in Santa Rosa. We'll be purveying some of their locally-produced excellence in our larder soon.
Also coming this summer, look for SHED to be the only drop-off point in northern Sonoma County for Marin Sun Farms' CSA program. We'll keep you posted as we get more details.
To inelegantly mash-up book titles, the Carnivore's Dilemma is no longer whether to eat meat. As Martins argues, we were born to do it. The question is: Which meat to eat — and when? By sourcing locally and eating in season, you won't ever have to ask that question again. Bring on the local butchers, the fresh CSA, and the theremins!