NYC

 Last weekend I visited my friend Ulla Kjarval and her family's farm Spring Lake Farm (they also have a blog) in Delhi, NY. I met Ulla on Twitter and I've been buying from her farm for my Meatshare meetup group. It was wonderful to get to visit and spend time with them and their wonderful animals.

The animals were hard to spot in the tall grass and their farm really was huge, at over 300 acres. Farmer Ingimundur has been steadily increasing the amount of grass the pigs are eating, so they are mostly grass-fed, which is rare even on similar locavore-catering farms. Because of the amount of grass in their diet, the pork has a delicious savory beefy quality. 

Delicious spare ribs

Which is good, because I eat it a lot and so do they. Farmer Ingi says that because of all his contact with paleo/ancestral dieters, he has more fully embraced meat as healthy. He says he has lost considerable weight and has more energy than ever thanks to eating lots of pork belly for breakfast every day. That mirrors the experience Heath from Wooly Pigs, another pig farmer who has gone paleo with amazing results. 

One thing I'll miss about NYC is my meatshare group. Small farmers have a lot of trouble marketing their meat and I'm glad we've been able to buy so much from Spring Lake Farm. Both the farm and our group have overcome many challenges and we've learned so much in the process (sometimes the hard way). 

That's why next week I'm teaching a workshop in NYC about how to organize your own meatshare. I hope to educate the next generation of bulk meat buyers in NYC.

For the next chapter of my life I'm starting up Chicago Meatshare. And for everyone else I'm still writing that book about meatshare and how to plan one yourself. 

I hate to admit it, but I am not impressed by most farmer's markets. Particularly in NYC where an overwhelming number of them seem to have poor oversight of their vendors. Local is nice and all that, but it's certainly not by first priority and living near a major agricultural state (New Jersey), some of the local produce is pretty much what you can get at the grocery store. If you quiz most "farmers" are the farmer's market you will find most are paid vendors, not farmers, and most don't know jack about their production processes. 

So honestly, I don't bother going to the market much. Not to mention how is someone who works a normal job supposed to shop on a weekday morning and carry their eggs on the subway to work and then back home at the end of the day? 

An exception I'll go out of my way for is the New Amsterdam Market, a market curated for quality rather than location. I certainly don't buy staples here, but for treats and condiments it's fantastic. 

You can get some great pig fat at Mosefund. Rilettes at Brooklyn Cured. And great sausages and other meats at Fleisher's.

One of the newest vendors is King's County Jerky. I hosted a meetup at their kitchen in Brooklyn recently and it was super cool. They are completely transparent about their sources of meat too, which is completely local and grassfed. I can definitely endorse their tasty product. 

My other favorite is Nuts + Nuts, a fair trade cashew company. Their nuts are sourced by small quality farmers and roasted with coconut oil and other traditional ingredients. I wasn't a big fan of cashews until I had these. They are definitely richer. I wonder if it's because they are more fresh? 

I won't be posting much in the next week or replying to email because I am working on some important projects :( 

 Last month I made the move from Brooklyn to Queens. There were several reasons for this, but I already love Queens, probably more than I love Brooklyn. I never felt perfectly comfortable there for some reason. Organic food, farmer's markets, coops...what's not to like? I guess I found it boring, kind of like the suburbs.

Brooklyn gets all the buzz, but Queens is really where culinary talent is. In Brooklyn's yuppie core, getting anything salty, spicy, of offal good is awfully hard. In Park Slope an owner of a restaurant I used to go to a lot told me he wanted to serve spicy food, but he couldn't sell it. When I would occasionally get Thai for takeout, it was mediocre and cloying. 

Contrast that to Queens, which is a place where restaurants representing cuisines from all over the world serve things like bone marrow soup and spicy pork belly. All we need to go is get them to source the meat better, but that's a whole nother post.

Right after I moved to Sunnyside, a restaurant called Salt & Fat opened. It's become one of my favorites. Um, as you all know, Salt & Fat are my favorite things and unlike normal people, when I saw the sign I thought "yay, health food!" 

Since I'm a weirdo and I think bacon fat is healthy, I've now eaten there several times. I definitely recommend it and if you go get the oxtail terrine, a block of delicious braised crispy fatty umani goodness with luscious silky mushrooms. 

From an Edible Queens article that calls it "A carnivore’s answer to sticky toffee pudding" and a "meat brownie"

Also check out the Branzino. It's cooked with bacon fat and the skin is wonderfully crispy:

my own crappy pic

If you want more NYC recs check out my Dinevore Paleo Restaurant List. Create your own and add it to the list on Paleohacks!

Tis the season of sanity in the paleorealfoodblogosphere? 

First we have the brilliant Chris Masterjohn taking down a gluten is evil OMG study that's been widely cited by bloggers including me. Admittedly I didn't read it because back then I wasn't in school. Chris did and it turns out it's not a high quality or conclusive study. Oops.

Maybe gluten is teh evil, but that study doesn't prove it.

It just goes to show that we have to be just as critical of studies that support our viewpoints as we are of studies that don't.

Dr Kurt Harris finally has a post up at PaNu after a looooooong hiatus. It's mainly the work on an anonymous zoology professor and has some very insightful thoughts on anthropology.

I've posted many times before how I am infuriated by people who call Eskimos/Inuit or Kitvans "paleolithic cultures."

I've written about how many such cultures consist of former farmers (agricultural regression) and some are mislabeled hunter-gatherers when really they are horticulturalists! And also that some forest hunter-gatherers have had long symbiotic relationships with farmers and anthropologists aren't even sure if humans can survive in such forest environments without such relationships*. Prof Gumby at PaNu emphasizes the further point that many of them are in marginal environments.

I'll add a further point that even more have been decimated or otherwise affected by pathogens introduced by outsiders. Anthropologist Thomas Headland, who lived for many years with a tribe called the Agta and raised his children among them, put it poignantly:

There were less-rosy sides to the way our children grew up, too, of course. They suffered from the local diseases, especially malaria (all five of us), and two of our children had primary complex tuberculosis. (TB is the number one killer of Agta adults.) And they may still suffer some psychological trauma over the deaths of many Agta with whom they were close: the majority of their childhood playmates are today dead. (Agta life expectancy at birth averages only 21.5 years.)

Survival International is a charity that helps advocate for tribal cultures. Reading the stories on this site makes it clear that most of these tribes are in highly marginal situations politically, physically, environmentally, and socially.

As said by Headlund:

We do not object to calling these people hunter-gatherers, as long as it is made clear that they are modern-day hunter-gatherers, people who have evolved right along with the rest of us into the 20th century.

Yes, we can learn some things from them, but hopefully these hypotheses will be tested by real science. As I said before "Choosing plant foods because of their history without taking biochemistry into account is dogma, not science." Some paleo authors make this mistake, assuming that we should base our fat content of our diet on some very limited surveys of modern game or ancient bones. That's why I always recommend the books of Gary Taubes to newbies. Even if our ancestors ate low fat, that doesn't mean high-fat is bad or that low-fat is good. Hopefully Taubes' newest easier shorter book Why We Get Fat will bring sanity about fat to more and more people.

Unfortunately, some paleo folks are too arrogant to accept modern science. They are stuck in anthropology, which I love, but that's just part of the picture.

As a bonus, Denise Minger has a good post up on stupid vegetarian studies.