“We have to know where our meat comes from, what it is eating, how it was raised humanely, how it was killed humanely,” said Stewart at one point.

Watch the video:
http://www.marthastewart.com/article/how-to-butcher-a-pig

You’ve probably heard of the Colony Collapse Disorder, this phenomenon that has been affecting beehives across North America for the past few years, causing the disappearance of millions of bees. The seriousness of the crisis has been underlined by scientists. Indeed, what would become of our crops if we couldn’t rely on these pollinators? Should we expect a major food crisis?

Flickr user Tie Guy II

Author Nathanael Johnson, however, asks another question: how does this issue fit into the big picture? And comes up with this subsersive answer: the crisis might not be where we thought.

In short, Johnson explains that CCD hasn’t affected food production that badly in North America, where crop productivity hasn’t gone down. What’s more, the number of bees across the world has actually increased, as well as honey production. But this trend isn’t necessarily a good sign. The global production of pollinator-dependent crops has been growing at a much faster pace than those that don’t rely on bees, in a way that could disturb ecosystems. The culprit? Products such as cashews and chocolate, whose demand worldwide has been growing. How much can this system sustain itself without reaching a plateau, or an environmental crisis? Nobody knows yet, but according to Johnson, things don’t look to good.

The crisis they foresee is one driven not by mysterious die-offs but by market pressures plainly visible in the produce aisle. It has to do with people in poor nations developing an appetite for good cocoa and coffee. It has to do with people in wealthy countries assuming that tomatoes will be ripe and readily available year-round. Bee scarcity, in other words, is an economic problem caused by economic forces.

This article caught my attention not only because of the original thesis it brings forward, but also because I’ve been studying the new waves of specialty coffee and chocolate in North America. I had never thought that these trends could have such environmental implications, yet this is a perfect example of the butterfly effect. “Chocolate depends on pollinators, and yields from cocoa farms have doubled since 1961,” writes Johnson. This raises the same question asked by the meat slaughterers I wrote about two weeks ago: do you know what it takes to produce your food?

DIY butchering

Flickr user misterjamin

Why limit yourself to the supermarket or the butcher shop to get your meat? A number of communities around the country have taken the CSA model (Community Supported Agriculture) to a new level, allowing its members to team up and buy meat directly from the farmers. In Berkeley, CA, the local Slow Food chapter has turned its meat CSA into a social networking platform where communication between neighbours is facilitated in order to better manage orders.

In Portland, food writer Camas Davis recently launched the Portland Meat Collective, modelled on traditional CSAs. PMC also seeks to empower its members by organizing butchering courses. This summer, classes include Basic Pig Butchery, Sausage Making, Real Coq au Vin and Charcuterie. Davis describes the classes as a “community experience,” some sort of sacred ritual through which participants get to learn how to cut and prepare their meat for the ultimate act of eating. And I don’t mean that to be sarcastic. PMC students truly seem to have fun and rediscover the importance of caring for their own food.

San Francisco also has its meat workshops. Every third Sunday of the month, Holly Park Market’s Avedano’s teaches an intensive butchery class where students spend an afternoon cutting a lamb and a pig carcass and perfect their knife technique. The shop also offers a curing class and a carving class (for chickens.)

Rediscovering slaughtering

For some, eating local meat and even butchering it themselves is not enough. A bunch of gritty carnivores take responsibility for their own meat by slaughtering the animals themselves and bringing each piece back home. In this MIX magazine article, Camas Davis profiles a Portland resident who slaughters his own pork. Over the time, Levi Cole has developed his own technique, which involves letting the pig get used to him and feeding it beer to decrease stress.

Watch this multimedia story about Cole:

In this article published on The Ethicurean, Jake Lane, a student at the University of Illinois, reflects on what pushed him to take a slaughtering class and the lessons he learned from it.

“By no means am I interested in giving up meat, but I can’t countenance inflicting even more pain on comparatively innocent creatures through raising them in cruel, unnatural conditions if their ultimate fate is to suffer, no matter how briefly, to satisfy my appetite,” he writes.

“The brutality and the grossness are important, but they’re not the whole story. Books and recordings help us to withhold our empathy for the creatures that are killed — we can lie a little, make it less real. But if more people really considered what goes into raising and killing an animal for food, perhaps they’d think harder about what they’re willing to put on their plate.”

The most high-profile slaughterer is also one of the most outspoken advocates of urban farming. Novella Carpenter grows vegetables and raises animals in the backyard of her one-bedroom apartment in Oakland, CA. She almost only eats meat that she kills herself: turkey, rabbits, pigs, etc. Carpenter was a vegetarian for several years, and now speaks of meat-eating with an objective, very detached perspective.

“It’s the logical conclusion of six months of life, or so, for an animal,” she explained in an interview published in Meatpaper. “The problem that people have is that they aren’t there every day. They don’t see the turkey every day. Every single day I saw this turkey. I fed him; I cleaned up after him; I picked him up and held him; I gave him water. You watch them grow and then it’s time. They aren’t children. They aren’t babies that you’re going to, like, educate or whatever. They’re farm animals, and that’s what they’re here for. This is what they do. And so you’re harvesting them like an apple or anything else you’ve been cultivating. That’s what humans do, and that’s how we are able to eat.

Like all the other self-taught slaughterers I’ve been reading about, Carpenter doesn’t enjoy the act of killing and doesn’t look forward to it, but does it because she sees it as the only way to eat meat responsibly. She follows her own routine, her own ritual, to remind herself that slaughtering isn’t a normal part of life. But whether eating meat is a responsible act is another debate that I won’t discuss here…

Want to keep reading about meat? Meatpaper is a smart, young magazine dedicated to meat, its culture, politics and poetry.

Smoked reindeer heart. Flickr user The Hamster Factor.

Meat is back. Of course, it never totally went away. Montrealers still lined up in front of Schwartz’s deli, even in the coldest temperatures, Oprah still indulged on Seattle’s Ezell chicken, and the kitchen still smelled of bacon every Sunday at brunch time. But meat had become a guilty pleasure. By eating it, we were condoning animal cruelty, climate change, food poisoning and chronic health problems exposed and vilified by years of vegetarian activism and investigative journalism. A bunch of smart-ass chefs, butchers and other food-lovers are changing all that by bringing the ethics and pride back to animal foods.

There has been a bit of controversy in the food scene here in Seattle, where I’m writing from. A couple of weeks ago, The Stranger, a local alternative weekly, published a severely critical piece about Bill the Butcher, a beloved local store chain specialized in organic and local meats. The stores aren’t as transparent as they claim, the article argues, and some of the meat isn’t really organic.
Bill, the owner, defends himself. The chain never pretended to be 100% organic, he says, and it doesn’t mean its products don’t meet high standards. “It takes a substantial investment and a period of years to get an organic certification and many local farmers and ranchers just cannot afford to pursue this,” reads an open letter published on the chain’s website.

This is just another episode in the meat saga that is well under way on North America’s West Coast. As the organic and locavore movements grow in popularity, so does the demand for meat coming from animals that have been raised ethically, fed with grass, and slaughtered in decent conditions – all within a reasonable distance. For those who could never bring themselves to vegetarianism, this is salvation. They can eat meat while keeping their conscience intact.

The return of the butcher

Flickr user misterjamin

Bill the Butcher stores aren’t the only ones of the kind. Over the past couple of years, a number of high-quality butcher shops have been popping up accross the continent. New York City has Gramercy Meat Market, Chicago has Prime Meat Market. Stores that specialize in natural and local products remain few, but highly successful – Vancouver’s Sebastian & Co. Fine Organic Meats has been a constant figure in local media since its opening three years ago.
Where was the animal raised? What did it eat? How many pounds should I get for tonight’s dinner? Your ethical butcher, who has a personal relationship with the farmers and years of experience, provides the answers that supermarkets can’t give and offers the choice farmers markets don’t have. Europeans, who’ve never really given up on their neighbourhood stores, know that going to the butcher’s is all about trust. You go to him for advice and quality products, and if he screws up, you can hold him (or her) personally accountable. North Americans add their personal touch to the formula: ethical and local meat.
The ethical butcher is young, smart, and absolutely loves his job. Think third-wave coffee entrepreneur in a white blouse.

Take Berlin Reed. His cap and numerous tattoos would easily get him a spot in hipster heaven. A vegetarian for 14 years, 27-year-old Reed rediscovered meat after taking a job at a butcher store in Brooklyn out of necessity. He has since launched a blog called The Ethical Butcher and works in Portland as a butcher and chef with sustainable meat. Reeds visits the farms that sell him animals and makes sure they’ve been well-treated and well-fed. When he talks about meat and butchery, it is with obvious love and respect. What he ultimately does is celebrate food, eating, and the relationship humankind has established with animals over thousands over years. And bringing its dignity back to a much-hated industry.

Watch this video of Reed butchering a pig:

Next: DIY butchering + The rediscovered art of slaughtering

Links:
The Ethical Butcher
A profile of Berlin Reed on Good’s website
Bill the Butcher
The Stranger’s article about Bill the Butcher

Customers can get their coffee brewed with siphon machines at Café Myriade.

A little bit of self-promotion: my article on Direct Trade was published in The Warehouse. High-end coffee was just beginning to reach the East Coast when I left Montreal, and I find it definitely easier to have access to good coffee in Vancouver. What a blessing! I will always remember the hour I spent with Jean-François Leduc, owner of Montreal’s Caffè in Gamba. “Isn’t this macchiato delicious!” he exclaimed, after force-feeding me the third cup of dark mixture. (I spent the most energetic hours of my life after this.) Indeed it was, and I have since then been accustomed to this creamy and salty taste.

I’m glad North America is discovering quality coffee. These huge cups of tasteless “sock juce,” as we call it in France, served in non-reusable cardboard cups, are nonsense. Coffee should be savoured during a good conversation with a good friend, or while looking at passers-by, or while reading a good book. Coffee gives you the opportunity to sit back, take a break for a few minutes and enjoy your surroundings. So here’s my article:

It’s early in the afternoon and I’m enjoying one of the last warm days of September, sitting on the terrace of Café Myriade. I’m savouring a cup of thick, black Tanzanian coffee that the barista recommended for the brewing technique I selected.

Located in the heart of the new Quartier Concordia in downtown Montreal, Café Myriade’s competitors are numerous. No less than four coffee shop franchises and a few other independent ones can be found in the blocks surrounding Concordia University, in addition to those located inside of the school’s buildings.

Café Myriade is nonetheless packed. Puffy-haired twentysomethings line up at the counter to order their daily latte while a few teachers discuss school politics between two sips of espresso.

Celebrating its first birthday in October, the café owes its success to the high quality of its products. After years of making do with mediocre coffee, Montrealers have finally caught on to a West Coast wave from cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver that has seen coffee enthusiasts become increasingly scrupulous about what goes into their cups.

The trend has led to an emergence of quality shops and online bean retailers like Citizen Bean and Utopia, as well as the popularization of barista competitions. Even Starbucks tried to capitalize on the opportunity by introducing the revolutionary Clover coffee machine in selected stores in an effort to rebrand itself as a quality chain. In Montreal, the lead has been taken by small, local businesses owned by genuine coffee lovers.

“In Montreal there were so many coffee shops, but nowhere to drink good coffee,” explains Caffè in Gamba owner Jean-François Leduc.

This former lawyer, who discovered what espresso is all about during a trip to Rome, opened his Mile-End café two years ago. Leduc greets most of his customers by their name and strikes up conversations with those he does not know. Each beverage is prepared with equal dedication and seemingly effortless gestures, from the single espresso to the latte and its flower-shaped foam. Customers do not necessarily know much about what they are drinking, he says, but they have learned to appreciate good coffee – and to ask for more.

Specialty coffee is often compared to wine because of the knowledge and attention it requires in each step of its production, from growing to roasting to brewing. The intricate process is even recognized internationally through the prestigious Cup of Excellence award and an annual rating program.

“Coffee to me is more difficult than wine,” explains Vince Piccolo, owner of Café Myriade’s main supplier, Vancouver-based 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters. “If you buy a good bottle of wine and bring it home, you can’t really screw it up. With coffee, you can screw it up a hundred ways.”

49th Parallel, like other roasting companies involved in the high-end beans trade, have chosen not to use the Fair Trade certification that has become so popular in the coffee world. Instead, they follow another set of guidelines dubbed ‘direct trade’ by Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea.

Although this decision has been perceived negatively by some, it is motivated by practical reasons. Fair Trade does not differentiate yields according to quality. Farmers receive the same price for a pound of average beans or a pound of exceptional ones, even though the latter are more expensive to produce. They therefore have no financial incentive to invest in the techniques, equipment and knowledge necessary to produce the beans sought by speciality roasters and retailers. Fair Trade, having not seen price increases in years, is not adapted to this high-end market.

“Buying Fair Trade coffee isn’t enough,” explains Leduc, who uses and sells Intelligentsia’s beans. “If it still tastes bad, you’re still not satisfied.”

Direct trade roasters understand the attention required in farming exceptional coffee and travel extensively to meet the farmers themselves, instead of relying on intermediary buyers, in an effort to build long-lasting relationships based on trust and respect. The entire production process, from growing to labelling, is as transparent as possible. As for the buying rate, direct trade can cost roasting companies upwards of 50% more than Fair Trade.

Without a widely-used Direct Trade certification, the guarantee farmers are well-treated is in the cup. “Customers don’t buy coffee because it says Fair Trade or direct trade,” concludes Piccolo; “they buy coffee because it tastes great.”

Direct trade coffee packs usually display a great deal of information out of concern for transparency. This one features the types of beans used in the mix, the names and location of the farms where they were grown, the altitude of cultivation and the date they were roasted.

And now Saturday mornings are really jamming, crowds are gathering for the coffee and the banjo player, and some of your core vendors guess accurately that a lot of these folks are more interested in scented candles than in cauliflower. So they gradually switch their product mix, and that, in turn, encourages still more scented-candle buyers.

Market managers end up allowing non-local and non-organic food to be sold so that buyers can be sure that they find all the products they need.

“These markets are a fucking hayride—they aren’t real,” says a prominent Northern California organic farmer who prefers not to be identified. “They don’t offer a real market opportunity for real farmers, but the public would rather be deceived because it’s too complicated.”

A farmers market in Des Moines, IA. Flickr user WindRanch, held under a Creative Commons non-commercial/attribution/no-derivative license.

I think there needs to be a debate over what we want from our farmers markets and how it’s really suppose to benefit us. Their main goal is to provide us with healthy, local produce, but we all know that in the end it’s all about building a community. Going to your local market is a weekly opportunity to have a chat with your neighbours, meet the farmers who produce the food you eat, and get the latest updates on what’s going on in the community. Going to the market is more than just going grocery shopping, it’s a social experience and a celebration. We bring in street performers and restaurants and scented candles because we want this experience to be as fulfilling as possible.

Going to your weekly farmers market is just like going to church. Both have a primary, functional role and a secondary, social role. Incidentally, my farmers markets takes place every Sunday morning. So I would argue that we should keep the street performers in while holding the market manager more accountable and being less picky about the types of products we want to be able to buy there. If there’s no local asparagus producer, then don’t bring in the giant industrial one.

The news seems to have been perceived as positive among the media and the public.

Photo by code poet. Some rights reserved (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.)

“Wal-Mart had been the company that the left loved to hate, because it seemed to have too much power and to use it in non socially constructive ways, squeezing suppliers or keeping wages down,” wrote Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Bloomberg.com. “Today Wal-Mart reminds us that a new kind of capitalism is possible in which big companies can use their power constructively, for the good of society and to move on issues that are still largely unaddressed by government.”

Am I the only one to be skeptical? It’s not because Wal-Mart goes green that it should be hailed as a model for a new capitalism. In my opinion, Wal-Mart is still hurting local economies as well as the urban fabric, and the eco-labelling program will not necessarily improve the food industry’s ethics. Even if we know that the food industry has some serious issues to address, we seem to keep our focus on the environmental side. The organic and local movements are so strong right now that it sometimes seems that it’s all that matters. In fact, going organic or making sure that the food was produced in an environmentally-friendly way might not be enough to improve the global food situation.

“Even if you stick an organic label on Walmart, the system remains the same,” wrote Dorothy Woodend in a review of the documentary Food Inc. in The Tyee. ” The same distribution chains, the same scale of practice, the same billions upon billions of Stonyfield plastic yogurt containers shipped around the country, all so that people can buy more shit with a clean conscience.”

When will we be ready to truly change our habits instead of reading a label for a second?

Is there really an urban agriculture trend?

Joe Nasr: Beyond the general trend, there are specific professions that can contribute each one from their own side. That itself is maybe a trend. Five years ago certainly we would have had a far smaller show, because so many of these projects are brand new.

What is the part of responsibility of professionals and city governments?

JN: Some of the examples that we’re showing cannot happen easily. The Egglu, the urban chicken coop, cannot be used legally in Toronto. You can display it, but you can’t have chicken in it. This is just one of many examples in which governments can shift to becoming an enabler. That reflects on some of the professionals and what they can or cannot do.

In Canada, are city governments usually open to hearing new ideas?

June Komisar: Yes, they are. Toronto has a food policy council, and it has been instrumental in pushing forward certain initiatives. One is to provide access to a larger variety of food in the carts. Different departments work together to try to make certain things happen. The fact that they have a food policy council means that certain initiatives can be brought forward.

JN: In Montreal, the city is well known as an enabler of the community garden movement. In Vancouver, they’ve developed new guidelines to enable or even encourage developers building condominiums to integrate food production in them. Governments are starting to realize how they are often hindering, limiting the development of it, and starting to figure out what they can do about it.

JK: This Artscape Wychwood Barns, this was city property.

JN: Yes, it’s a new city park. But to get to it, it took eight years of planning and a lot of debate. A city councillor was supportive of it and was committed to make it happen, as well as a number of groups. The neighbours were very divided on different visions of what to do with that park, it was a very difficult project to make happen. The city played a crucial role even if most of the funding was private donations.

JK: Cities are looking towards each other for ideas: what has worked in this city, what has worked in that city…

Is it easier to transform the infrastructures and buildings that already exist or is it more efficient to build something from scratch to grow food?

JN: It’s easier when you don’t have to deal with existing conditions, but at the same time, the power of this movement is that it’s about transforming existing cities more than anything. That means dealing with existing roofs, existing backyards and existing older buildings that need a new use. This is were some of the richer, most exciting examples are. Including the vast amount of underused roofs and so on, these exist, these don’t have to be invented. That’s a question of figuring out how to make some urban agriculture work on these existing roofs rather than creating new roofs.

JK: Not withstanding the historical value of buildings, which can be really important. Buildings have embodied all the energy, all the materials and labour that when into building them in the first place. It keeps the urban fabric lively.

Is it safe to grow food in the middle of the city?

JN: This is a very common question that we get. It depends on what you grow and where you grow it. There’s some conception that food growing away from the city is necessarily safe, but it’s actually grown with a lot of pesticides, so it’s a question of how you grow it. In the city itself it depends if you grow close to a street or in the backyard, that alone makes a difference. What you grow does as well; some plants are more susceptible to hold various pollutants and others are not. It’s not inherently safe or unsafe, it’s much more contextual.

JK: In certain urban conditions where there is either no soil, or where making it clean would be prohibitively expensive, or the land doesn’t actually belong to the people who want to do the growing, they created things like these big growing bags. In some of the Detroit community gardens and in Cuba, they have huge raised beds.

How many people can a rooftop garden feed for example?

JN: There’s a lot of research that still needs to be done. We don’t really know yet how many rooftops can be used and using which techniques, so if you take that alone there’s huge uncertainty. Real investigation needs to be done on the types of roofs, what would be appropriate on these types of roofs, what kind of access can we arrange in respect with insurance, liability and regulations, as well as how to access them, who would get up there… A lot of these things have to be sorted out, so the potential is enormous. But we don’t know what it amounts to, because there’s a lot more that needs to be found out.

JK: One of the questions is how do you extend the season, especially in Canada, where it’s cold. We went to a presentation by some spin farmers from Saskatchewan who are very strategic about when they start their planting. They say as soon as the snow is gone, they’re in the ground with hardy vegetables. Spinach will start to grow even when it’s extremely cold still. If you’re strategic about what vegetables you plant, you can really extend the season.

Do you think architects and urban planners have a responsibility to educate the public about issues like this?

JN: Anyone who has access to a backyard can do a little bit of gardening, anyone who has access to a balcony can put a couple of pots. But when things are to become more serious, that’s when I think there’s gonna be more and more need for technical expertise and that technical expertise needs to be shared. There can be an important role by professionals, not just to develop techniques, but to help communicate them. Some of it may not be very complex, some of it may be simple. For example Alternatives developed a manual to go along with the containers they created. That’s a good example of where you have a technical development, but more importantly accompanied by communication.

JK: I think the design of houses or buildings is always evolving. We live in a 19th century house that was designed without a bathroom. You think about how house design has evolved so much, possibly in the future every house will have some sort of southern orientation, will have a greenhouse area off the kitchen or something like that. It’s always an evolving design process that responds to the needs of the time that they’re in.

Does it come from a need from the public or the will of architects? Where does it start?

JN: There’s a spreading belief that new solutions are needed for the food system, and within this movement design professionals are starting to say wait, maybe we have some role in this. At the same time you have more and more projects, like the Wychwood Barns, which are is being set up and then need designers to help make them happen. Some are working on projects after projects and are developing an area of expertise. Just like you have some housing specialists and some transportation specialists, you’ll have some food or food production specialists. It will come from professionals themselves, being interested in these issues, but also because there’s a market for their projects. And as it becomes better known, it doesn’t become just a specialty, but rather a skill that’s added to everything else designers do.

JK: Five years ago when I started teaching at Ryserson, no student would put a green roof on a building, they didn’t even think of it. And now, we don’t even have to mention it as a possibility, it’s just a given. If you can, you put a green roof on your building. And I have a feeling in a couple of years, it will become a given that that green roof is a productive green roof.

JN: Planners had started being interested in food issues a few years earlier, so now it’s become accepted in their field. Designers have started more recently but are now catching up very fast.