In this era of the locavore, menus no longer merely inform diners what they’ll be eating. They also tell the story—often as elaborate as a bildungsroman—of where the ingredients in a dish were raised. Those dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes in your salad? They once lived in a field near Santa Cruz. Those baby Chioggia beets? Tugged from organic dirt in Watsonville, then transported to restaurants in a biodiesel-fueled pickup. That rosemary-rubbed hanger steak? It was once a cow roaming the hillsides of West Marin with no more hormones than its own pituitary gland could produce.
What you won’t find out as readily is precisely where the cow made the transition from cavorting weed eater to inhabitant of a restaurant’s walk-in. That omission is unfortunate, because where an animal dies is as integral to the definition of local food as where it lived.
Books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma encourage us to think more deeply about where meat comes from, educating us on the issue of grass-fed versus grain and about the benefits—both to animals and to the people who eat them—of livestock raised in verdant pastures, rather than in factory farms’ crowded, unsanitary conditions. We’ve learned to not assume that organic means small, local, or even ethical, and to ask where the animals we eat were raised and what they were fed. What we haven’t learned is to ask how and where they were killed.
That isn’t surprising. Even hardcore carnivores struggle with the act of killing. On the blog that he calls Offal Good, Chris Cosentino, executive chef of the restaurant Incanto and partner in the artisanal-salumi company Boccalone, posted a photo of himself holding fistfuls of goat entrails. An accompanying photo essay documented the disassembly of a cow that Cosentino helped butcher; he served the heart and liver at his restaurant, and its hide now graces the floor of his home. But Cosentino’s in-your-face presentation is infused with a schoolteacherly desire to illuminate the food chain, in both its savory and its less savory aspects. Slaughter, he says, is “a frightening thing. It brings on a massive rush of emotions—horror, fear, joy, pity. I cry every time I do it.”
But now, a small group of activists has taken up the cause of the slaughterhouse. Three years ago, Phyllis Faber (biologist and cofounder of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust) joined forces with business consultant Sam Goldberger (former psychologist, current antique-pipe dealer) in an effort to build a modern slaughterhouse in the Bay Area. The two believe that local meat processing plays a crucial role in sustaining the Bay Area’s agricultural viability.
“Farming in Marin and Sonoma,” says Goldberger, “is in serious danger of becoming a kitschy, unprofitable replica of a real industry. If it’s not profitable, it might as well be Colonial Williamsburg.”
Goldberger and Faber’s vision includes a new facility, called North Coast Meats, that would serve as a model for an integrated, efficient, and economically successful regional meat industry. They see it as a prototype for a new movement—let a thousand slaughterhouses bloom, if you will.
Armed with a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the two are enmeshed in feasibility studies—a massive three-ring binder, filled with floor plans, 3-D computer renderings, and exploded diagrams, outlines their dream. The plans were devised with the help of Graeme Baker and Nook Yule, slaughterhouse designers from New Zealand. It’s no coincidence that that country’s success with regional slaughterhouses is what Goldberger and Faber seek to emulate in the U.S. In just a few decades, New Zealand transitioned from a large, centralized meatpacking system—not unlike our own—to focusing on small, clean, efficient slaughterhouses dispersed all over the country.
According to Goldberger and Faber’s plan, North Coast Meats would be equipped to dispatch close to 40,000 head of cattle a year, as well as lambs. Everything from the facility’s shape—a modified wishbone that would guide the cattle along a slight curve and make as few cow-spooking 90-degree turns as possible—to the holding pens to the chutes would follow guidelines established by famous humane-slaughter authority Temple Grandin. There would be no bright lights (cows don’t like shadows) and no mezzanine level (people walking above their heads makes cows nervous). The plant would practice job rotation (to prevent repetitive stress injuries and alleviate boredom among the workers) and offer profit sharing, and would house an anaerobic digester for making biodiesel out of cow effluvia. It would have its own cut-and-wrap facility so that meats could be aged and processed onsite, then packed and sold directly to restaurants and retail shops—something that Goldberger describes as essential to the operation’s profitability, and to its ability to pay ranchers a premium. In architectural renderings, the slaughterhouse exterior looks strikingly like a winery, complete with stucco walls, arched porticos, and cypress trees. The only thing missing is a yoga studio.
| © Modern Luxury Media |