Animals and home cooking

New takes on farm to fork

By Culinate staff

December 29, 2011

Three recent articles have highlighted our increasing awareness of the connections between animal welfare, meat eating, and home cooking.

On the Atlantic’s blog, rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman (with help from hunter Tovar Cerulli and butcher Joshua Applestone) explored why people shun meat — and why they often return to eating flesh and other animal products. As Applestone noted, “I realized I didn’t have a problem with meat. I had a problem with the inhumane practices of the commercial meat industry.” (For the pro-vegetarian counter-argument, see Marc Bekoff’s response.)

By way of tackling that meat industry, the San Francisco Weekly noted on its blog that a new meat company named Belcampo is opening for business with an innovative farm-to-fork model: “Within the course of the next year, the new company is aiming to bring pasture-raised meats from its farm to its own slaughterhouse in far northern California, then shipping them south to its own retail stores in the Bay Area. Only a few small enterprises in the United States are trying anything similar.” (The company is one of the many sustainable-food enterprises organized by Slow Food Nation coordinator Anya Fernald.)

Finally, over on Grist, the activist chefs Kurt Michael Friese and Tamar Adler described some inventive ways for getting Americans to learn to cook again. As the post noted, “Cooking food from scratch at home is one of the best ways to eat sustainably without breaking the bank. It also enables eaters to easily support food producers who use environmentally sound, ethical, and humane practices.”