Fleisher’s Steer to Steak

The following story about the Fleisher’s Steer to Steak event was written by Alexandra Zissu, author of The Conscious Kitchen and co-author of Planet Home and The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat. Alexandra writes about green living, food, and parenthood.

There have been a number of times over the past year when I looked up and thought, This is my life?! This happens not infrequently as a reporter. I’ve often found myself in odd places or situations, or even outside my comfort zone. Occupational hazard. I certainly experienced one of these moments as I stood in a field scraping hair off of a just-slaughtered pig, shoulder to shoulder with Martha Stewart’s food editor. But despite my own trepidation, I didn’t feel bad or wrong. I was just where I set out to be.

I have spent a considerable amount of time getting to know where my food comes from and suggesting my readers do the same. At some point it dawned on me that this mainly meant talking to the people who were growing my vegetables—like my CSA (community supported agriculture) farmer of over a decade—and that I wasn’t the only local foods/eco enthusiast who was overly focused on produce. So I branched out. I had interviewed my milk guy, the people who run the “safe” fish database I rely on, and my butcher for my book, The Conscious Kitchen. Shortly after Kitchen was published, I moderated a panel at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture with the fisherman who caught the shrimp I was enjoying through a CSF (community supported fishery) share. I credit my editor, Rica Allannic, for nudging me to return to my butcher, Josh Applestone, and ask him and his wife/business partner, Jessica Applestone, if I could write their story. They agreed. Soon I found myself not only behind the meat cases at their shop, Fleisher’s, but at slaughterhouses and witnessing on-farm slaughters in fields. In the system of getting meat from an animal to your table, slaughter is the too-invisible link.

It’s one thing to want closer access to your food sources, it’s quite another to watch a gorgeous Red Devon steer go from roaming to carcass to meat in moments. The knife skills involved in removing a hide as if it were a sweater are unreal—witnessing it is almost like watching ballet. I have been, at various stages in my life, rather squeamish about meat. And I’m not alone—Josh was a vegan for many years, and Jessica was a vegetarian. But when I know how an animal was raised, what it ate, and how it died, the squeamishness goes away—for the well-raised versions, anyway. I’m OK with the following scenario: a pastured animal roaming around outside, eating well (and by that I mean whatever they root or graze or peck, plus local, not genetically modified, unsprayed (preferably organic) grain—depending on the animal) and slaughtered in a local, small facility by skilled hands, or out in a field by similarly skilled hands. There’s nothing humane about slaughter, but there are ways to minimize the stress on the animal. The on-farm slaughters I’ve witnessed while writing The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat have been amazingly low-stress. One pig was literally sleeping in the sunshine and never woke up. The beautiful steer in these pictures wasn’t sleeping, but didn’t react. Before witnessing these, I had expected something violent. I pictured thrashing. There was none of that. In both cases, other animals grazed and rooted right next to the slaughter and appeared undisturbed.

I think I had these misconceptions because we’ve gotten too far away from our roots. Some people saw slaughters on farms as kids, others (like me) grew up in cities and haven’t witnessed slaughter. It may seem a little theater-of-the-absurd to go stand in a field en masse and watch the process, but it’s not. It’s a conscious choice to reconnect with what’s behind those shrink-wrapped parts in the supermarket. Those plastic covered shapes are too far from an actual animal, too disconnected from a face, too industrial. I’ve taken friends to slaughters with me who say they’ll never eat meat again unless they know the origins and details—where the animal was from, how it was raised, and how it was ultimately killed. And that’s the point.

The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat explains what “well-raised” means and how to find those kinds of animals no matter where you live, then tells you how to cut, handle, and cook what you source. It does it with a sense of purpose (there’s the humanity aspect of eating animals, but also the tremendous eco-impact) and even humor (Josh and Jess run, as they say, the Cheers of butcher shops). All in all a mind-blowing experience—even for someone who was already eating this way—and one I can’t wait to share when the book is published in June.

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To see recipes and tips from The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat, read this excerpt on Scribd
Recipes From the Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat

To see more photos from the trip to Fleisher’s, see our Flickr album