20,000 Meals

Family Dinner Values

“The kitchen is the best room in the house for teaching green values.”
                    -- Laurie David


Last night I attended an enjoyable talk by Laurie David -- best known as the producer of An Inconvenient Truth -- whose new book The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time shares many of the same values that we hold here at 20,000 Meals. Ms. David, a warm and engaging speaker, is on a mission to restore the family dinner to its rightful place at the center of family life. 

The evidence is certainly on her side: Study after study has confirmed that if you want healthy, well-adjusted kids who do well in school and stay out of trouble, the single most important thing you can do is make sure that your family sits down to a meal together on most days. Ms. David sees the preparation and sharing of meals as an irreplaceable vehicle for creating a sense of family history and connection, and instilling shared values.

One of the values she is passionate about is the importance of caring for the planet, and the book includes a chapter on bringing “green” values to the kitchen. She believes that they  “should permeate everything we do in the kitchen -- shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning -- without paralyzing us in the process. Being green is not about perfection...it is about connecting the dots so we understand where things come from and what impacts result from our use of them.”

The Family Dinner includes tips for cooking with kids, ideas for enticing people to the table, and lots of games and conversation starters to make them want to stay there. It also offers dozens of family-friendly recipes and meal ideas, many but by no means all of them vegetarian (Ms. David identifies herself as a “meat reducer,” and reminds us to eat less meat and spend the saved money on “better” -- i.e. greener -- meat.)  Although some of the recipes are more or less standard, the book includes a number of ideas that sound like great new additions to the family dinner repertoire.I haven’t had a chance to try any yet, but I intend to spend the next couple of weeks cooking my way through them. I just can’t decide whether to start with Oven Grains, Greens and Cheese, Please or Apple Cider Chicken with Caramelized Apples and Onions.

Desperately Seeking Sirloin

Late one afternoon this fall I drove into the vast, all-but-empty parking lot of a local community college. My contact had called an hour earlier to say he was running late, and now the sun was sliding toward the western hills, washing the scene in citrine light and streaking it with long shadows. Ahead of me, I spotted  the white pick-up truck and trailer I had been instructed to look for. I parked a few spaces away and stepped out of the car; as I did so, the truck’s denim-clad driver emerged from the cab. We introduced ourselves briefly before he jumped into the trailer and lifted the lid of the large chest freezer waiting there. Then he handed over the goods: two heavy white bags filled with plastic-wrapped packages. My first meat CSA delivery.

That I came to be buying the food I feed my family from a stranger in an empty parking lot is a commentary on the challenges of obtaining local, pasture-raised meat at a reasonable cost. In my last post I explored the environmental and health benefits of going grass-fed, but it turns out that this is not always so simple.

If all you care about is a good burger, grass-fed ground beef is actually pretty easy to get - even Safeway sells it these days, as does Trader Joe’s  (although Safeway’s meat department manager was unable to tell me the origin of theirs, and the package at TJ’s identified it as a product of New Zealand, which must give it the carbon footprint of a T. Rex). However, beyond hamburger the options narrow, and things get a lot more expensive, as I learned during a year-long quest.

Whole Foods, of course, carries a respectable selection of pastured beef, lamb and pork - much of it raised on farms several states away - at a premium price. In fact, the selections seem to run to the more expensive cuts, such as New York strip steak at $20.99 a pound. As my family is without a generous trust fund, I'm afraid the prices simply rule out WF as a regular source of animal protein.

The butcher at my local grocery store, which carries a limited selection of pastured meat, told me he could order whatever I was interested in - at prices a couple of dollars per pound lower than at Whole Foods. The catch is that I would need to place my order each week before the whole carcasses are separated into different cuts.  Although I can certainly manage ordering in advance for special meals - Christmas, for example - as a regular thing it seemed to require an awful lot of advance planning, especially for someone who can’t reliably get a grocery list made every week.  Also, just as with Whole Foods, most of this pastured meat hails from far-flung farms, so even if I could manage such feats of organization,  I still wouldn't be fulfilling the "buy local" part of my mission.

A growing number of pastured-meat producers are starting to sell their wares direct to the public at farmers’ markets. At my regular market in San Mateo, Holding Ranch, a Northern California family-run operation sells pastured beef, pork, lamb, chicken and eggs.  Their products are delicious, but the prices are pretty steep -- too much for me to be able to justify more than an occasional purchase.

One option for the dedicated loca-carnivore is to “buy the cow.” A growing number of  ranches will sell an entire carcass (or a half or quarter of one) at a price that usually ends up somewhere between $3 and $6 a pound. This idea has a lot of appeal, for reasons both practical and nostalgic. When I was a little girl in  rural Pennsylvania my parents would sometimes purchase an entire lamb, which they would keep, portioned and packaged, in a giant chest freezer in the garage, along with venison from my father’s occasional hunting expeditions. However, the key part of that memory is the giant chest freezer; our only freezer is the narrower half of a Kenmore side-by-side and our garage is packed solid with boxes, bikes and furniture we "might use someday." So, no half a cow (or pig or lamb) for us, at least not right now.

Last spring I concluded that the solution might be to join a meat CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. Meat CSAs operate in essentially the same way as traditional, produce-based CSAs — that is, the consumer agrees to purchase a share of a farm’s output for a given period of time, say six months or a year, and receives regular deliveries of whatever is ready for consumption. While not as common as produce-based CSAs, meat CSAs are becoming easier to find through such resources as the American Grassfed Association and Local Harvest. I was just beginning to research my options when Holding Ranch launched its own CSA program. After reviewing the price sheet, I signed up right away.

I chose the Mixed Package #2, at $744 for a six-month subscription. On the second Thursday of every month I receive 13 pounds of grilling, slow-cooking and ground meat, mostly beef but also some pork and lamb. The price works out to about $9.30 a pound - quite a bit more than one would pay for simple ground beef, but a big savings off the normal price for cuts such as rib-eye, filet mignon and rack of lamb. If I had chosen a larger package size, or signed up for the full year, the per-pound price would have been even lower.

That first delivery was in mid-September. As I thanked ranch owner Hunter Holding and drove away from the parking lot that afternoon, I couldn’t wait to get home and find out what was in the package.