We now eat - demand to be able to eat - more meat than our ancestors ever did, which comes at a very high price to our health, to our environment, and to the welfare of our animals. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, America consumed around 125 (boneless) kilos of meat per capita in 2007. The current population of the US stands at 313,539,000. When I tried to see, numerically, what 125 kilos X 313,539,000 looked like, I couldn’t; the numbers ran off every calculator I could find. What I was able to figure out was that it amounts to a lot of meat. Hmm, actually, more than a lot. It amounts to a hideously unsustainable bloody pile of animal flesh that can only be raised in an intensive manner. That said, I’m not much into sensationalizing this topic, or patronizing people for their consumption patterns because, frankly, the majority of us should know better. Italy and Ireland, by the way, were about head-to-head in their per capita consumption at 90 kilos per annum. Which, ugh, apparently means that I eat (almost) my own weight in meat every year. Luxembourg was the big surprise since its inhabitants eat even more meat than Americans: a whopping 138 kilos annually. Shame on them. But, oh the irony of their demonym.

What ever way you cut it, the meat industry is one driven by our consumerist desires. The faux pas then, is our own. We need to be eating much less meat, of a much higher quality. We need to be more thoughtful about the way in which our animals were raised: what they ate: how they were slaughtered and how their bodies are transformed into the cuts we purchase. While we need to eat fewer animals, we also need to eat more of the animal: the head, the offal, the feet, the intestines, the tail. We need to address everything about the way we are and just what, exactly, makes us feel entitled to meat 3 times a day, 365 days of the year. Why, when they are told exactly what goes into it and how it is made, does a piece of soppressata gross out so many people who, otherwise, are quite happy to chomp on a hotdog? Call me a reductionist or a pretentious gastronome – fine. But, I know that as an eater of meat, it’s better for all concerned to eat Spannocchia’s soppressata over Coop brand hotdogs.

And what got me thinking about all of this? Today marks the last slaughter day of Spring 2012. This morning Riccio, Chris and Miki are breaking down three pigs in the transformation room. Then that’s it until Fall, when our phenologically-fattened herd start to forage around in their extensive forest ‘pens’ for their free and tasty diet. Sure, I’ll miss fresh pork chops and sausages every second week, but I know that there’ll come a time (usually around my birthday in September!) when it will all kick off again. It’s the anticipation that I relish, almost as much as the meat itself. I know that these pigs have been raised in a manner that respects the earth’s resources. I know that they are treated with the utmost care during their life, and when it comes to their death. I know that Riccio, scatter-brained as he is in his own life, is the most thoughtful salumi maker I’ve met. I know that this meat tastes better than good and that, in short, is why I eat it.

A presto…

And they are. Such hubristic tendencies we humans have to consistently position ourselves above other societies, both human and non. We consider ourselves to be exceptionally advanced, keying addresses into little black boxes to find our way, or temperature controlling massive buildings in extreme weather conditions. Bees do all of that too, but they don’t have a bee-sized Tom Tom or air-con unit. They have their own highly sophisticated navigation system, allowing them to gauge the angle between the sun and their food source, thus facilitating their trajectory home. Their communications too, are concise: bees pick up hormone signals from their community members and react accordingly. Hive too hot? Workers are dispatched to find water which they then spritz around the cells with their wings. Hive too cold? They form a huddle and generate heat through friction. The result? A perfectly stable 37 degrees Celsius within a honey bee hive no matter what the weather outside. Really. Quite incredible…

Bees, like humans, always produce more than they need. But our insatiability differs to a devastating degree. The human appetite for ‘more’ now threatens the ability of anyone who comes after us to meet their own most basic needs. Like a yeast cell, killed by the by-product of its own greed, we have manipulated our resources to the extent that our environment now terrorizes us. Bees, in nature, will continue to collect nectar and continue to produce honey for as long as they have flowers to frequent and space to store the spoils. But they exhaust and exploit very little in the process. Bees live in perfect symbiosis with their natural environment. In visiting more flowers - in being greedy - bees only serve to pollinate even more flowers for next year. And just who gets to visit all those blossoms to provide for themselves ad infinitum? The next generation of workers of course.

If we choose to take heed and swallow our hubris, bees offer a third-level education in community and sustainability, which, let’s face it, is kinda all the rage. However, how positively exciting that, for once, the thing that tops the chart of ‘cool’ is absolutely necessary for our survival. And what about a bumper sticker for this sentiment?

Forget Pollan… bee keep!

A presto…

A presto…

If it is possible to actually capture the essence of something, I feel that Driscoll may have done just that. Please take a look at our Vimeo channel where, over the coming weeks, we will post all of Driscoll’s films. They are too good to keep to ourselves.

And if you want to check out Driscoll’s impressive project catalogue, do. You can find him here.

A presto…

Daniela relieved me of my charges last Friday and took the interns on a foraging expedition. They rooted and picked an entire lunch (almost!) from the fields and terraces at Spannocchia. They spent all morning at it and while the bounty was good, it wasn’t enough to constitute a decent meal. So Daniela introduced eggs, ricotta, pasta and pecorino and before long, the table was singing with colourful, flavourful and substantial ingredients.

I snapped this photo of the prep table and it got me to thinking of René Redzepi, the 33-year-old chef at Noma in Copenhagen. A kneeling, gum-booted Redzepi graced the cover of TIME Magazine earlier this year, soon after his restaurant was voted best in the world. Procuring a reservation at Noma requires a very long wait. Obviously.

Redzepi employs 5 foragers (I hear his #1 is a dead-ringer for Gandalf) and deals directly with only a handful of farms in order to keep his kitchen stocked with ingredients for his team. That’s quite a feat: keeping the world’s best restaurant in foraged foods for months on end. I wonder would the interns have uncovered more delectable delights if they were ‘working’ for Redzepi and not for Daniela? Probably not. She wouldn’t even tell them what wild asparagus was incase they pilfered it from her favourite spots!

A presto…

Anyway, with little time for the blogosphere (I am about to do a wine tasting in the vineyard…), I just wanted to share this short clip with you. Last week I took the interns to La Fabbrica del Panforte in Sovicille: a wonderful little artisanal production facility between Spannocchia and Siena. What Giovanni is to pasta, Alfredo is to panforte. We loved listening as he told us about his products and his philosophies regarding the treatment of his workers. What a great man.

In the clip, a molten mix of honey, sugar and candied cedro, orange and melon is tipped into a HUGE mixing bowl, before being wheeled off to be mixed with spices, flour and whole Sicilian almonds. The recipe is simple enough but the result is tremendously good, and highly addictive. Enjoy!

A presto…

I came across this line the other day while photocopying some of Fisher’s essays for the interns. I typed the line, as I did above, and emailed it to my friend Chris S. I included nothing more than the line and the author’s name.

Chris and I were, at very different points in our respective existences, so profoundly affected by M.F.K. Fisher’s writing that it kind of altered the course of our lives – whether or not we knew it as the time. I tried to write a blog post about M.F.K. Fisher; about her writing; about how she used words in order to allow you to taste, years afterwards, the wines and meals she had had in Aix or Marseilles. But, I don’t dare emulate Fisher. I can’t. I don’t know of anyone who can.

So I spare you a hollow or trite appraisal (next to her writing, that’s all mine will ever be) and instead I recommend you discover the writing of M.F.K. Fisher for yourself. Gobble her up, digest her words, sate yourselves. Then you’ll know why she wrote about hunger, and not wars or love.

A presto…

It seems that quite a few of you are yellow with envy over our limoncello postings on Facebook. Well, of course we’d much rather have you here to share it but until then, here’s the recipe!

LIMONCELLO
Ingredients:
1 litre of clear grain alcohol (vodka works just fine)
8 large organic unwaxed lemons
500 grams white sugar
1 litre of water

Method:
-Zest the lemons and put the shavings to soak in the alcohol for 8 days.
-After 8 days, filter the alcohol and discard the zest.
-Boil the water with sugar until all of the granules have dissolved. When the syrup is completely cool, add the delightful yellow alcohol and mix well.
-Keep the limoncello in the fridge and serve in ice cold shot glasses.

CREMA DI LIMONCELLO
Ingredients:
1 litre of clear grain alcohol (vodka, for example)
3 large organic unwaxed lemons
800 grams white sugar
1 litre of low fat milk
A little real vanilla extract

Method:
-Zest the lemons and put the shavings to soak in the alcohol for 3 days.
-After 3 days, filter the alcohol and discard the zest.
-Boil the milk with the sugar until all the granules have dissolved, then add a drop or two of vanilla extract.
-Cool the milk mixture over a bowl of iced water and when it is absolutely cold, add the lemony alcohol and mix well.
-Keep the crema di limoncello in the fridge and serve in ice cold shot glasses.

Note: After zesting them, we used the lemons to make a lemon and violet marmalade. But that recipe’s a secret…

A presto…

Every second Friday, as part of the educational component of their internship, I take the interns on a field trip. The focus of each field trip varies, though it usually involves a rad picnic on the side of gorgeous Tuscan hillside. Occasionally, we’ll ditch the picnic blanket and scout out a restaurant instead. It has been a busy week for me and so, with little time to prepare a picnic worthy any association to my name, I decided to give the Spring 2012 interns the most awesome introduction to Field Trip Friday – a visit to a pasta maker in Chianti and after, lunch at Antica Macelleria Cecchini in Panzano.

Giovanni Fabbri is an artisanal pasta producer with a uncanny resemblance to Roy Orbison. I simply can’t help but hum the lines to Pretty Woman and gurgle ‘mercy’ as he extols the virtues of low temperature drying over longer periods. However, I can’t seem to find the courage to tell this charismatic Chianti man that he reminds me of the Ray-Banned crooner. So I don’t, and he continues to talk about the complexities of gluten and how intolerances to it are symptomatic not of particular problems with our bodies, but with the industrial food systems that demand bushel after bushel of genetically modified grains in order to pump out inferior pasta. How can we expect our bodies to deal with all of these rapid changes in our staple foods? We can’t, he says. Well, certainly not in forty of fifty years. The lifecycle of grain is accelerated in comparison to ours. It doesn’t take long for varieties to become shorter, their ears heavy as a result of nitrogen fertilization, and the proteins within the endosperm bamboozled because if it. Humans on the other hand, need millennia to adapt to such significant changes in their diet: the grains change but we do not. All the while our small intestines cry out for us to STOP bombarding them with mutant grains so complex in their glutinous structure that the proteins cannot be absorbed by the usually-clever villi lining all of our insides. And so we suffer and we swell, and we vilify good bread and good pasta along with the bad, which really hurts people like Giovanni. Fabbri is emphatic about his product and the ancient durum varieties he sources in order to produce a pasta our bodies are accustomed to digesting, and enjoying. He hates bad pasta and, as if he needs to, he reminds us that our bodies hate it too.

Yikes.

After all of that, we couldn’t just settle for a bowl of soggy penne somewhere. No way. We arrived in Panzano a little after 12 with a need for meat. There’s not one vegetarian in the Spring group and that’s probably just as well- it’s hard to eat only pinzimonio when your table is laden with tonno del Chianti, porchetta, polpettini and hamburgers the size of Giovanni Fabbri’s fist. Dario advises you to come hungry. We did.

And such was the interns’ first field trip. Wish you were here?

A presto…