Feature: Slow Food Nation: Pittsburgh’s role

Photos by Ben Filio Layout design by Ben Filio and Jay Huerbin

Thomas… Photos by Ben Filio Layout design by Ben Filio and Jay Huerbin

Thomas Jefferson never saw Susan Barclay coming.

Although he envisioned the United States as an agrarian nation, a patchwork quilt of small, self-sufficient farms stitched together by their common interests in self-determination and well-being, little did he know that e-mail would hold that quilt together.

Barclay is co-leader of Pittsburgh’s local Slow Food chapter. An international organization founded 25 years ago in Italy, Slow Food “envisions a future food system based on the principles of high quality and taste, environmental sustainability and social justice,” while “working hard to preserve and protect local foods and food traditions,” according to the group’s website.

Five years ago, in keeping with Slow Food’s ideals, Barclay bolstered the local food community when she created Laptop Butcher Shop, an online market that provides farmers and producers with a place to sell their naturally raised meats. Through the use of e-mail, interested customers can order their preferred cuts of meat while adding in some they may never have tried before.

“The producers have to sell the whole animal. You have to help the farmer by buying more than just steaks and chops,” Barclay said, referring to the most popular cuts of meat.

The dedication to using the whole animal, or at least different parts of it, is an idea that’s less foreign to the rest of the world than it is to Americans.

“Europeans don’t want to buy their meat in the grocery store, they don’t trust it,” said Abdullah Salem, owner of Salem’s Halal Meats and Groceries in Oakland.

“You go into a grocery store and all the meat looks the same, it looks perfect. You can’t have meat that looks perfect, meat doesn’t look like that – we don’t use any dye, no soy products make it into our meats. It’s pure meat without coloring. If it’s off-color, it’s because the meat’s off-color,” Salem said.

While butcher shops abound in most European cities, the local butcher is hardly remembered stateside, save for the nursery rhyme about “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.” Pittsburgh, however, is an exception.

“People are very interested in focusing on local, getting closer to the Earth, and they’re realizing where their meat is coming from,” said Bill Fuller, executive chef of the Pittsburgh-based Big Burrito restaurant group.

“People feel there’s little consideration for the meat. So, what’s happening is that young people, usually former chefs, have decided to open up butcher shops,” Fuller said, explaining that they search out “really good local producers” of meats, working directly with the local community to provide a quality product.

Barclay’s Laptop Butcher Shop is a new take on an old theme. By engaging directly with the meat producers and connecting them with their customers, especially on pick-up days at Farmers@Firehouse in the Strip District, Laptop creates a rewarding community.

“A lot of connections get made,” Barclay said, “and that’s getting more difficult to do. It’s more than just about food, or just about eating, it is really about human connection.”

Salem is no newcomer to the value of a community brought together by food. His store, located on South Bouquet Street in Oakland, is an unlikely oasis for the community-conscious foodie. But diagonal from the post office, half-hidden by a yellow-and-white striped awning, resides Oakland’s only microbutchery, dedicated to quality and community.

“My motto is, ‘This is the closest thing to back home, no matter where you’re from,'” Salem said.

The welcoming atmosphere of the grocery is palpable upon entering – the air even smells warmer from the perfume of spices. In the back of the store, past the towering stacks of pita, the lunch counter and the drink cases, Salem expertly sliced the fell, or skin, from a six-pound leg of lamb with a blade that curved slightly upward, glinting silver in the fluorescent lighting.

“I’ll cut some slits in it so you can put the garlic right in,” he said, using his fingers to draw the fibers apart. He put down his knife and wiped the counter clear. “I’d say, wrap this up in foil, put it in the oven for three or four hours at 300, 350 degrees, use a thermometer to make sure it’s up over 180 and then let it sit, soak up all the juices,” he added, patting the lamb affectionately.

While independent butchers may be the newest thing in food, even knighted with the distinctive title, “microbutchery,” the idea of the neighborhood butcher is one of food’s oldest standbys.

Salem’s, which has been in business since 1986, is what its owner calls one of the last old-time butcher shops, though at one time, he says, Pittsburgh was full of them. “They all closed down because the big companies have swallowed everything,” Salem said.

Corporate grocery stores such as Giant Eagle, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart and Shop Rite have become the local purveyors of meat, along with almost every other food, edging out small or specialized markets.

“It used to be that you went to a butcher shop that would buy whole sides of meat and break it down into the cuts you wanted,” Fuller said. “Now if you want meat you go to the grocery store.”

Though Giant Eagle and larger markets employ butchers, they do not personally secure meat from local farmers and producers.

The monopoly of large chains initiated the gradual decline of neighborhood butcheries, a trend that came as no surprise to Tom Friday, the second Tom Friday to run Tom Friday’s Market since it opened in 1955.

“There used to be a lot of packing houses in Pennsylvania,” Friday said, “[but they] slowly started to disintegrate in the ’70s because of the introduction of box beef.”

Box beef is the shorthand term for beef that has been cut off the bone into a long strip loin, cryopacked in plastic, and then shipped around the United States.

“It’s ready to cut into steaks,” Friday said, whistling a swift note between his teeth as he moved his hand in a steady chopping motion.

“Box beef got more popular. A lot of the work was done, it was less labor-intensive.” Stores bought into the idea of box beef, but lost what distinguished them from the less distinctive grocery stores. The survival of small butcheries was also threatened by the nature of the business.

“Meat has always been a low profit margin. As prices rose, in service, labor, utilities, rent, laundry,” Friday said, pulling at his apron, “all those little things it takes to run a business, if your volume didn’t go up with them, you were not going to be able to pay the bills, you couldn’t grow fast enough to keep up with the overhead costs.”

As he stood inside of his meat locker, leaning comfortably on a white marbled side of beef, Friday said that to stay alive in the market, “you have to have something extra good. You have to have your own little niche. Whether it’s service or quality or both.”

Though Salem is unique for its open-door welcomes and freshly dressed meats, their main niche is in catering to observers of halal. “Halal,” meaning “permissible” in Arabic, is food that is acceptable under Muslim dietary laws. For Salem, a mantra of locally and naturally raised meats is informed by his adherence to halal, and buying and processing meat locally is beneficial for numerous reasons.

For starters, because halal, like kosher, requires that animals be slaughtered without pain and that the blood be drained from it, “the meat tastes much different,” Salem said.

Not to mention that Salem’s slaughters on Tuesdays and delivers on Wednesdays in a big white van bouncing up over Oakland’s uneven curbs to unload pounds of lamb, veal and beef.

“It’s fresh,” Salem said, “if you go to Giant Eagle that stuff could be sitting for three, four weeks.”

In addition, the meat sold in Giant Eagle is “brought in from out West – Minnesota, Wisconsin, that’s where all the heavy beef farms are,” Salem said. He shrugs acceptingly, though he frowns when he talks about the practice of trucking meat across country, plastic-wrapped. Giant Eagle did not return a request to comment on the origination of their meat.

All of Salem’s meats are purchased from local farmers within the tri-state area, and slaughtered by 86 Packing, a small packing house in Washington, Pa.

A packing house is where animals go to become meat – employees slaughter and skin the animal, cutting it into fore and hind quarters to send to butchers. From there, a butcher cuts the animal down into specific cuts such as legs of lamb, eye round roasts, tenderloins and prime rib.

The South Oakland grocery is indicative of the emerging market in the United States for local, sustainable eating. But it’s sometimes difficult to convince farmers that that market exists, and that a radical change in their production, from the status quo to an organic certification, could be lucrative.

“Farmers are generally very conservative, and don’t want to ramp up production on a whim,” Barclay said, “because there’s an up-front cost and a lot of risks involved.”

The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture “has been working to promote and reinvigorate local food production, to get consumers to join so that the farmers can see the demand is there,” Barclay said.

Such work is important, Barclay feels, because as it stands, “the demand is going to far outstrip the farmers who are middle aged and older, retirement age.”

Luckily for Pittsburgh, however, the “passing of the torch” from one generation to the next is already beginning in Natrona, Pa. Jen Montgomery, the owner and manager of Blackberry Meadows farm, foresees a new era of farming. And she and her colleagues are all under the age of 35.

“Farming’s a dying breed,” Montgomery said, “and I think we’re sort of breaking the mold. There’s a younger generation realizing that a 9-to-5 is not what is fulfilling in life. There are a lot of young people our age who are interested in farming but can’t figure out how to afford to do it. We’re showing that we can make it a reality.”

Blackberry Meadows is an 85-acre Community Supported Agriculture model farm, and has been for the past 20 years.

Community members buy a share of the farm, guaranteeing themselves food during the growing seasons, and helping the farmer by when monetary need arises.

The idea of the community-supported agriculture sprouted in the aftermath of WWII, when “there was such a food and land crunch that farmers started to coordinate with their communities,” Montgomery said. That coordination has found support in Pittsburgh.

“There are a lot of people who are interested in it, and the urban agriculture movement here is really strong,” Montgomery said.

One hurdle for local producers like Montgomery and businesses like Salem’s and Laptop is how the cost of their food is perceived by consumers.

“Slow Food is considered an elitist organization,” Barclay said, “because the food is more expensive. It’s hard to defend against that. It’s true. Local food is more expensive.”

One reason for the price difference is the lack of federal government subsidies for organic foods or fruits and vegetables.

“Agribusiness has subsidies that make their food affordable,” Montgomery said. “There’s a whole myriad of things they don’t have to pay for, so the true price of food isn’t being shown at the grocery store.

“So when you look at how much our community-supported agriculture food costs, it’s actually a good deal for buying local. And economically, strawberries in December just aren’t practical. People are going to have to learn to eat in season,” she said.

Barclay gets feedback form the customers at Firehouse. “The idea of losing connections to local farmers and local food producers and losing our local food culture has finally started to sink in with people,” she said. “They realize that our food is processed and raised in ways people wouldn’t care for if they knew. People are becoming much more aware, and they want more control.

“It all comes back to eating local,” Montgomery said. “You can’t go to the grocery store and believe what you see.”