Honestly priced food or irresponsibly priced food

Written to Dookie by Green Day

I asked Joel how he answers the charge that because food like his is more expensive, it is inherently elitist. “I don’t accept the premise,” he replied. “First off, those weren’t any ‘elitists’ you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that, with our food, all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.”

The past two week's lunches at Fazenda Alfheim have been laden with pork and honestly-priced food. I returned from São Paulo last week with two exquisitely rotisseried pork quarters from one of the two-upscale São Paulo restaurant prospects. Ambrosial does not begin to do this meat justice. And judging from the feedback we received from two early taste testers, we are not alone in our assessment:

Caríssimo Rance, o leitão estava ótimo. Mais magro, com carne mais firme e saborosa.

Na terça só eu comi, o pessoal lá em casa já havia jantado. Comi a perna, excelente, ainda quente do forno. Aí o leitão repousou na geladeira até sexta no almoço, quando voltou ao forno de casa para aquecer e ser servido. Pedaços dele foram disputados “à tapa” pelos presentes, não sobrou nada, só um monte de ossinhos.

Fui intimado a voltar lá e comprar mais.
...

O leitão estava ótimo! Carne super magra…comemos à noite e foi super leve.

As an aside, pork is healthier than beef, about equal as a source of protein, but lower in total fat and saturated fat, and recently took the lead over its main competitor, chicken, in the battle to be the leanest white meat.

On Saturday, we decided to try our hand at preparing our pork, i.e. sans chef extraoridnaire. To that end Lone dug out my most-excellent apron, while I leafed through our new, not to mention only, pork cook book, Pork & Sons, by Stéphane Reynaud, to gather a sense of the possible, i.e. given the dearth of ingredients in the house. In fact, we were unable to muster the ingredients for any single dish, but after perusing a couple of recipes, I opted to roast the ham using an improvised basting sauce, which I threw together using a very, very, very cheap red wine, 5 liters for R$5.00 (€1.92 or $2.86), olive oil, mustard, thyme and basil from Provence, Lone's home-grown rosemary, sage, garlic and carrots, and salt and pepper to taste. I roasted the ham in the oven at 215 degrees Celsius for two hours, basting every 30 minutes, the first two times with fresh basting sauce and the last two with the sauce from the dish itself. While clearly biased, both Lone and I concluded that this dish ranked right up there with the pork prepared by Beto and our first São Paulo restaurant prospect, rare air indeed given the chops of the two chefs in question.

A couple of weeks ago we implemented a Friday afternoon planning session with the employees…a bit bookish, but it does give us a chance to review what we accomplish each week, our priorities for the week ahead and any other issues that might arise and/or require collective treatment. It also gives us all a little non-work face-time, and because we start at 14:00, we still finish early on Fridays, a practice that has been greatly appreciated given the relentless 34 °C daily scorching that we have experienced of late. When the temperature passes 30 °C, usually before 10:00, the daily chores really do becomes chores. The piglets certainly agree…and have taken to daily, collective jet cooling…resting until the late afternoon when they begin to act, well, piggish again.

This weekly exercise has also helped Lone and I gauge where we are and what's next. We have concluded that we need still more help if we are to meet our goals for the coming year. To that end, we have begun to look for a fourth employee, though one who commutes from Vargem Grande to Alfheim rather than lives at our fazenda. We have two potential candidates in our sights and have taken contact with the first. 7-9-13!

On Wednesday, November 25th, we gathered the cattle for their twice-annual hoof-and-mouth vaccinations. We also took this opportunity to treat them for berne or cattle grub (Dermatobia hominis). Given the sorry state of our corral (read: useless), the work required us to rope and wrestle the cattle to the ground. Once secured (my job given both my mass advantage over Clair and Dirlei and the fact that I couldn't lasso a barn door if it were two feet in front of me), we squeezed the berne from the animals' bodies (not for the feint of heart), treating them afterwards with neem, iodine and calendula cream. While tough, it was enormously satisfying to be able to take the time to treat the animals fully. Going forward we will try to spray them with neem every 21 days to reduce the number of parasites.

Finally, we had two unexpected visitors last week, the first extremely dangerous and the second quite benign -even cute. On Monday, Lone nearly ran into a cobra-coral or Brazilian Coral Snake (Micrurus decoratus), one of the most venomous snakes in Central and South America. Fortunately, Clair was nearby and he did what he does: grabbed a piece of wood and killed the snake. As this photo illustrates, this was the Mini-Me version, so naturally we couldn't help but wonder where momma snake is hiding…hopefully far, far away. In an effort to encourage her to stay away, the Head Witch of Eastwick burnt the snake, dynamized the ashes and will spread them around the farmhouse grounds. Our second visitor was a frog that somehow found its way into my underwear and sock basket in our bedroom. As I was preparing to hit the sack one evening, I found him staring back at me. While conceptually open to the idea of sharing my Alans, to paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, we'd have to be talkin' about one charming motherfucking frog.