It started the day in six tidy cardboard boxes in Farmer Steve Twombly's basement chest freezer up the Oxbow Road in Roxbury, Vermont. The mixed hardwood forest visible just beyond the green grass pastures where our beef was grown epitomized peak foliage. Steve pointed out red maples with their crimson crowns, the bright orange of the sugar maples, and the smoky purple ash trees as we watched his dog chase one of the free-ranging chickens down the road. In his driveway, he explained that the cow we'd just purchased was a mixed breed Hereford, white-faced cows (read more about the breed and its history
here) and Angus (and this breed
here).
Photography and co-photo-editor: Clancy DeSmet (also the one who inspired this whole experiment in bovine volume purchasing--aka "Beefing Up 2009")
Earlier in the month, our Angus-Hereford mix traveled from Steve's Flint Brook Farm to the Royal Butcher in nearby Randolph, VT where it was slaughtered, hung for almost ten days, and then transformed into a variety of steaks, ribs, rounds, and grounds. And then back to Steve's where we retrieved it this morning.
With a trunk load of boxed beef plus one box of bones for the dogs owners and the shrink-wrapped-frozen tongue out loose, we made the roughly 30 minute drive back to 99 Barre St. where our fellow investors were converging to divide these cuts of beef among ourselves. The cow's hanging weight was 487 pounds; Steve estimated that you end up with about 2/3 of that in meat you can eat. What you see pictured above is only 1/5 share and the photo is deceptive because the freezer is packed several layers deep.
There are many reasons why you'd want to buy your beef this way if you could. It allows you to avoid contributing to the beef industrial complex that grows cows under inhumane conditions on factory farms where they are plied with anti-biotics, hormones, and heavily-fertilized corn--often corn that is genetically modified. It shrinks the carbon footprint of your meat eating by cutting down on transportation and all the fossil fuel that goes into feed production. These cows are solar-powered--the sun makes the grass grow and that's what the cow eats. (But we certainly have to give back some of our carbon credit because keeping all this meat frozen adds to the household energy use). It's also cheaper as compared to retail--especially for this quality of meat.
It wasn't all that long ago in America when buying beef from the farmer rather than the meat factory was not uncommon. Our decision to buy beef this way is our contribution to our area's food security. It's an act of hope that we can build a food economy that harkens back to the farmer-direct traditions that served us well in the past and can be improved on in the future.
Dividing this much beef equitably really took an excellent team effort. If you're going to try this at home, be sure you do it with reasonable and friendly people. We had folks unpacking boxes, dividing cuts up into groups, checking to see that packages were roughly equivalent weights, tracking how many we had of each cut and then announcing how many of each we should take. One example--each share was entitled to 35 1 lb. packages of ground beef. Not all cut categories broke down evenly, so we placed the remainder pieces in a box as we worked through ground beef, stew meat, sirloin tips and steaks, porterhouses, rib-eyes, eyes of round, tenderloin, flank and skirt steaks, short ribs, and a few others. To make this easier to divide, we went for ground beef in place of roasts.
When we finished the first phase, each of the contributing carnivores was staring at an enormous pile of frozen meat bulging from boxes and bags they'd brought to collect their share. And yet, the remainder box was also overflowing with cuts--some placed in there because they were much bigger than the rest, some because they just didn't divide equally in number the first time through.
How to divide these? My answer: take out the Farmer's per-pound price cut-sheet and calculate the value of each remainder piece based on the packaged weight (thank goodness for the ubiquity of cell-phone calculators). We added the retail value and divided by 5. From there on out we had a five-team beef draft. Each person picked their preferred cut through four rounds, then a quick calculation to make sure we were each at or near the 1/5 value of all that remained. The draft went for a total of seven rounds.
Because I shared in the task of retrieving the meat from the farm, I was able to get the tongue--it was in a separate box and farmer Steve didn't know if we wanted it. I spoke up for it. When I was a kid, my dad always used to talk about eating tongue. We never did back then, but I figure it might be worth a try now. I guess some of you are gagging right now, but it's very much in keeping with the Italian culinary tradition of ensuring that no part of the animal who gives its life to feed us goes to waste. Same goes for the "Ox tail," which the group kindly bestowed on me for my services in devising the meat draft system.
Staytuned for lots of posts about beef dishes from here on out...