A forest of good intentions surrounds the realm of sustainable, local, pasture-raised meat. Readers steeped in the canon of sustainable-food lit are looking for it. Farmers, seeing the price per pound that it commands, want to sell it. Chefs want to advertise it on their menus—and a certain kind of diner, in fact, demands it.
Peter Mumford
William Von Schneidau doesn’t just cut the meat, he studies how it’s raised and butchered.
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Bill the Butcher Organic Meats
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12637 N.E. Woodinville Drive
Woodinville, WA 98072
Category: Retail
Region: Woodinville
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One factor stands in their way: logistics.
First, there's the problem of properly slaughtering an animal that's lived its life contentedly chomping sweet grass and staring up at the sky. Then there's the problem of dividing the 80- or 700-pound animal into consumer-friendly cuts, not to mention the problems of marketing, distributing, and selling the meat. On the consumer end, there's an entirely different problem for home cooks who are only familiar with T-bones, burgers, and lamb chops: How in the hell do you cook the rest of the animal? The forest of intentions grows so thick that everyone gets lost.
Enter the artisanal butcher, the guy who's clearing paths and setting up road signs. In the past few months three butchers have taken on the problem of working with farmers, USDA inspectors, slaughterers, chefs, and diners to make the path from farm to fork as direct and well-lit as possible.
Much has been made in sustainable-food circles about USDA-inspected mobile slaughter units, trailers that can drive to a farm to kill and perform the initial processing of animals (bleeding, gutting) on-site. Ecofoodies are trumpeting the fact that these trailers give small farmers who want to raise just a few cattle or two dozen hogs a way to sell that meat to the public. (In Washington state, the quarter-carcass is the smallest cut that farmers can sell of meat processed in non-USDA-inspected facilities.) Without these trailers, farmers have to truck their animals to Oregon or Yakima to be killed in the same facilities that handle factory-farmed meat. The transportation costs are prohibitive.
Farmers' groups around the country are gathering to set up mobile slaughterhouses, and western Washington has several groups of early adopters. The Island Grown Farmers Cooperative, based not far from Samish Bay, started up its USDA-inspected mobile abattoir in 2002, and the Puget Sound Meat Producers Cooperative just started operating a trailer out of Pierce County this August.
But killing is just the first step.
Tracy Smaciarz (pronounced SMAH-chez), owner of Heritage Meats just northwest of Centralia, is taking on the next, equally crucial step: getting the meat cut up for retail shops and restaurants. He's been involved since the beginning in helping get the PSMPC's mobile abattoir up and running, and has started working with local chefs to make this meat available to them.
Smaciarz, burly and genial, is a second-generation butcher. "I was 6 years old when I started stuffing sausage," he says. His father, a meat cutter for Safeway, started East Olympia Meats in a converted garage in 1977, drafting the entire family into his business. Throughout Smaciarz's teens and 20s, he kept attempting to avoid his fate by cooking in golf courses and restaurants, with stints in and out of the butcher shop. "In 1996, I was living in Bellevue, working for the phone company," he recounts. "I told my girlfriend my dad was going to shut down his business, and she says, 'Why don't you take it over?'" All she had to do was ask—and within three years Smaciarz was dreaming of scaling up. Open since 2006, his new facility, located 90 minutes south of Seattle, has two sides—one for custom-processing farm animals and game and one for USDA-inspected meat. Organic certification is in the works. Not only does he process meat for many of the local farmers who sell directly to customers, he's becoming a broker himself.
At a beef tasting held at Crush last year, Smaciarz met up with Canlis' chef, Jason Franey. A cutting demonstration for the Canlis crew led to a relationship—and to additional Seattle restaurants that were trying to get a hold of local, sustainably raised meat. As Smaciarz says, "I'm a voice for that farmer who doesn't know how to talk to a chef about cuts of meat. And if chefs can talk to me about what they're looking for, I can source it and cut it to their specifications."
What Smaciarz is starting to work on with Canlis is one of the central problems small-scale farmers have in selling to restaurants: volume and portioning. It's all very romantic for chefs to say they're buying direct. But they can't exactly put "Pork: chef's choice" on the menu. Chefs buy from wholesale meat suppliers because they want to have 30 pork chops that they can portion out to the precise size and weight they'll need for a Friday night. Few small restaurants have the capital and the space to buy and store a 100-pound whole pig, and even if they do, most can't sell exactly 12 chops, then switch to shoulder roast when those run out, followed by pork belly.
So the beef program that Smaciarz launched with Canlis in September provided a model of how this might work: The butcher sold Franey the steaks from eight head of cattle he'd processed for Tracey Baker of Gleason Ranch, a farmer whose grass-fed beef Smaciarz says has a bold, rich flavor with no gaminess and marbling resembling grain-finished beef. At the same time, he dropped off boneless short ribs from the animal to Dana Tough at Spur ("Tracy's amazing because he thinks about meat like a chef," Tough says) and brisket to Jason Wilson at Crush. The rest of that animal—not the offal, but the rest of the commonly used meat—was sold to the Canlis staff for their home use and ground into whole-cow hamburgers for Pike Brewing Company in Pike Place Market. (Smaciarz continues to supply burger meat to Pike Brewing Company, but remarkably the brewery doesn't advertise its beef's origins, a rarity in this supplier-obsessed town.)
