Lessons Learned...

Good food shouldn't have to be so much work. I'm not even talking about cooking the stuff. I'm talking about finding it and bringing it home.

By now you probably know I go to some extremes to keep my family well fed. I travel to buy "local" olive oil, pastured organic chicken, and bulk organic produce for canning. I make many of my own cheeses, breads, snacks, treats...ok, so I make whatever I can! I seek out local meat to buy and have it butchered locally as well. I try.

Every year we buy a portion of a grass-fed beef and a whole pig. They are slaughtered and custom butchered to order. I am lucky to have been connected with a young guy who raises the pigs (and also a few turkeys, one of which was ours for Thanksgiving last year), and I have supported him for the past few years. This year he changed butchers.

In the past he's gone through a small shop that kills the animal and then custom processes it to each customer's specifications. This particular shop happens to make all of their bacon nitrate-free, and it is fantastic! I don't particularly care for their plastic packaging (as opposed to the classic butcher paper), but even though it leaks when defrosting it's nice to see the meat and nice to know they don't use a ton of horrible health-harming chemicals in their products.

When I got the call from the other, much smaller, shop I was a little surprised. I gave my cut and wrap instructions, but with some requests that apparently boggled the man's mind a bit. Nitrate-free? No. Not for the bacon, not for the ham. MSG in the sausage? Yup, and it's in every mix he has. Lovely.

Now, I try to be reasonable when it comes to these kinds of things. Eating nitrates a few times a year when eating out or at a friend's house is what I consider moderation. Not in addition to several packages that I'll be feeding my small children throughout the year. And they won't stop at just one or two slices! (We rarely have leftovers after cooking a package of bacon.) Because of this, it is extremely important to me that I not knowingly feed them harmful chemicals and preservatives.

So I was a little frustrated at this point in our conversation, and not knowing much about actual butchering and curing, I told the man I'd do what I could with what he gave me, but would not eat anything with MSG or nitrates in it!

I just visited the rather rustic meat establishment to pick up our pig. When I pulled up, I was greeted with a western sign above the door, a slab of barn wood with the lettering burned into it and an animal head positioned over the center. I opened the door and almost ran right into a giant hanging skinned carcass of beef. For a second I thought I'd gone in the wrong door! The lady cutting and wrapping pieces of meat assured me I was in the right place. Whoa. So I paid the man and had my boxes loaded up.

I have since been educated. To make bacon, you have to have a whole pork belly. Pork is more tender than beef and falls apart easily, so it has to be cured in one piece (to my understanding, anyway). The butcher sliced ours raw and packaged them in little portions (which were frozen solid). Hams must be cured whole as well, and I'd told the butcher we would take ours elsewhere to do a natural cure, but he chopped them into chunks, or roasts, and froze those too. What to do?!

I drove back to the original butcher shop, the one that does natural cures and has processed our meat in the past. I pleaded my case, and they took pity on my uneducated soul. Live and learn! They are going to flavor the bacon with their natural jerky cure (since they can't throw it in a big barrel with the whole pork bellies), and will make the hams a natural cure too, as an attempt to fix this little mess! Now there's some good customer service, and I will be asking my supplier to return business to them next year! Penzey's makes some good sausage seasonings, so I'll just flavor our plain ground pork with those spice mixes as I need it.

Really, though.... The knowledge is out there, and it's not a secret that these natural products are better for our health. So why is it such a big deal and such a headache to get a decent edible product?!