Local Meat CSAs

Our most recent Chestnut Farms meat CSA pick-up is pictured above.

What's a meat CSA? Like our winter share CSA with Belmont Farms, it's an upfront commitment to a local farm -- in exchange for $X, you will receive a share of the farm's output. It seems that the economics of meat CSAs play out differently from fruit and vegetable CSAs -- you get a set amount of meat depending on your share amount -- but the concept remains the same. The local farmer benefits from running a CSA because he or she gets direct financial support from the surrounding community in the form of committed buyers. There's a litany of benefits for the consumer as well:

* a connection to the animals through the farmer;
* knowing that the meat you are eating comes from animals that have been treated with care and respect, given a good life, and humanely raised and slaughtered;
* supporting local farmers and getting to know your food suppliers (who KNOWS Frank Perdue?);
* reducing the carbon footprint - my meat did not travel thousands of miles from farm to table; and
* IT TASTES GOOD!

I understand that there are inconsistencies to my position about meat. I would eliminate carbon footprints related to meat entirely if I chose to forgo all meat. I know that even one happy cow chilling in a green pasture emits a substantial amount of methane into the atmosphere (but from reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I also understand that cows and other farm animals, including chickens and pigs, have key roles in the cycle of life and death, growth and decay). It would be nice to live my life in a "Do No Harm" kind of way. But with my food dollars, I can show my support for farms that practice agriculture with humane, open-pasture techniques. However, it also means that occasionally, I will buy a chicken at Whole Foods named Rosie, raised in Petaluma, California, and trucked 3,000 miles to Massachusetts in a freezer. It also means that I will eat industrial meat at times (roast pork and soy sauce chicken from Chinatown, carnitas burritos from Anna's Taqueria, indeterminate pork bits chopped up into delicious stuffing for soup dumplings). And, it also means that even at fancy restaurants, I will order some prissy dish with meat or seafood that has been raised in Colorado or caught in the Pacific. I could eat at restaurants that are truly, 100% committed to local food (off the top of my head, in the Boston area, that includes T.W. Food, Craigie on Main, Garden at the Cellar) but then, my choices would be limited and I'd spend a lot dining out.

So where does that leave me? Once every month, I buy 10 pounds of meat from Chestnut Farms, located in Hardwick, Massachusetts. The farmers -- Kim and Rich -- send monthly emails reminding us about our meat pick-up and sharing stories about their daily lives as farmers. We get to share in their sorrow when half of their herd of baby goats mysteriously die, and share in their joy when one of their heifers gives birth. I have yet to visit the farm (they encourage their members to visit during open houses) but am looking forward to an excursion when it gets warmer. At our most recent pick-up, we connected with Rich about the seasonal effects on egg-laying hens, and for the first time ever, I thought about the amazing amount of energy that a hen must dedicate to laying an egg every day. One egg has so much protein (and vitamins and minerals), I'm shocked that a hen doesn't just collapse for a week after laying an egg. Instead, hens continue to lay approximately one egg a day, give or take, although their productivity declines after their first year. Chickens are really remarkable creatures.

Back to the meat CSA - the whole point of this post. Beginning December 2008, we became members of the Chestnut Farms CSA. Once a month, we get 10 pounds of their local and humanely raised chicken, beef, pork, and lamb. Half of the share will be in high end cuts, like steaks and chops, and the other half will be lower end cuts, like ground meat, sausages, and stew cuts. In December, we received leg of lamb, pork chops, loose sweet italian sausage, cured ham steak, ground beef, ground lamb, and a whole bone-in chicken breast. January brought us a lamb shoulder, ground beef, ground lamb, a whole chicken, a ham steak, beef patties, and pork breakfast sausage patties. Our last pick-up, in February, brought us garlic and cheese pork sausages, leg of lamb, chicken legs, one beef loin T-bone steak, one beef loin porterhouse steak, ground beef, and lamb stewing meat.

So far, the quality of the meat has been impressive. We've also enjoyed the odd cuts of meat that we had never cooked before. I've never been compelled to roast a leg of lamb or cook a ham steak before, but because those cuts were included in our meat CSA, we looked up recipes and learned how to roast, braise, and pan-fry different cuts of meat in ways we'd never imagined! Chestnut Farm's sweet italian sausage is delicious (we stuffed squash with it), and we had made an amazing roast chicken with one of their birds. We also fried up a delicious ham steak (and I ate all the fatty bits). Ben made yummy spicy lamb burgers with the ground lamb, and he also made a falling-off-the-bone braised lamb shoulder. I put together a bolognese sauce with some ground beef and lamb.

I encourage all of you to look into joining a meat CSA. Ben and I thought long and hard about whether to join (he thought 10 lbs. a month is a lot of meat for two people). We spent a fair amount of time researching meat CSAs. In the Boston area, another local farm -- Stillman's at the Turkey Farm -- also offers a meat CSA. You can try the local meat by buying only a small portion first. We bought some pork chops and bacon from Stillman's at the JP Farmer's Market, and loved the deeply porky taste of the chops. We also ordered our holiday turkey from Stillman's (see our Turkey Day post, below). We weren't able to try Chestnut Farm's meat before signing up for their CSA, but the rave reviews on our local Chowhound board (search for "CSA"), along with the convenient pick-up location at the site of our 2009 summer CSA, convinced us to join.