Commercial meat production focuses on a few hardy breeds of cattle, pigs and chickens. Many rare, "heritage" breeds are in danger of dying out. Sarrazin and Faison say biodiversity is essential to the long-term sustainability of our food supply and our environment.
It’s also the case, they said, that many of these heritage breeds have markedly better flavor than commercial breeds. Combine that with more enlightened animal husbandry, they said, and you have a superior product.
As Faison put it, “The taste of confined-animal pork versus outdoor-raised pork is night and day.”
PHOTO NOTE: The top picture at left opens to reveal a larger cast of characters. From left, they are DeBragga’s Marc Sarrazin, Lowell Saferstein (husband of and photographer for Rosie), Rosie Saferstein, Heath Cohn, Suzanne Zimmer Lowery and George Faison.
He mentioned a speech given by Britain’s Prince Charles at Georgetown University. The Prince of Wales’ theme, he said, was that "the only way we can save these rare breeds is by eating them." That is, by giving farmers an economic reason to raise them.
DeBragga is putting its money where a pig’s mouth is. "We’re now working with Amish farmers in Upstate New York to raise a rare breed called Gloucester Old Spot," Faison said. The Old Spot (it has one or two large round black spots on its white coat) is “the rarest breed of pig in the US," he said, "but it’s very popular in the UK, where it’s considered the best-eating hog."
“Chef’s get it,” Faison said. By ‘it’ he meant that “when it comes to meat, we should be eating less—less often and, especially, smaller portions. But we should eat better quality.”
The company’s clients include esteemed New Jersey restaurants such as Elements in Princeton, Serenade in Chatham, Maritime Parc in Jersey City and Highlawn Pavilion in West Orange. In New York City—the company’s base from its founding in the 1920s until it moved to Jersey City in late 2011—it sells to Le Bernardin, Aureole, Picholine, Craft and many others in the New York pantheon.
For consumers, breaking away from commodity meat will meam paying more per pound for protein. What is worth paying for? Natural? Hormone-free? Grass-fed? Dry-aged?
Generally, natural refers to livestock never given hormones or antibiotics, under what the industry calls a “Never-Ever Program.”
Natural also means the animals start out eating grass in the pasture and mature in low-density feed lots where they are given grain, water and space to move around.
“The better the animals live, the better meat they produce,” Faison said.
Unfortunately, like other product claims in the food world, there seems to be a lot of wiggle room with terminology. As an example, Faison named a well-known brand that claims to be hormone free. It probably is. But that is only half the story, he said. “Their animals are pumped full of antibiotics to deal with all the illness inherent in being raised in crowded conditions.”
The choice between eating grass-fed or grain-fed meat is really a matter of personal preference, the owners said. Grass-fed products are generally leaner, whereas grain-fed meat is more highly marbled with fat.
Dry-aging—hanging racks of prime beef in refrigerated rooms (with fans constantly circulating the air) for periods of 20 to 45 days or more—concentrates flavor and tenderizes meat, often imparting what fans of dry-aging call a "funk" taste. For the DeBragga partners, as Sarrazin put it, "We don’t say dry-aging is better. It’s different. It’s a matter of taste."
Because of the time invested in dry-aging—time when the meat takes up space and uses lots of electricity for cooling and aerating—and because the meat shrinks and compresses as moisture evaporates and it ages, dry-aged meat is always significantly more expensive per pound than beef that is not aged or is wet-aged.
Wet-aging usually involves sanitary-sealing the individual steak in plastic and keeping it under refrigeration for various lengths of time.
The role of fat in meat flavor was made clear to me in a tasting that followed the tour. After sampling three hamburgers, each made from meat with a different level of fat, to me the winner was clear.
The American-raised Wagyu beef patty with 30 percent fat was by far the best. That mix is far from the 10-20 percent fat ground beef sold at most supermarkets. I will take an incredibly tender, juicy—and, yes, smaller—burger over a big, dried-out hockey puck any day.
In the steak tasting, the richly-marbled Wagyu (a breed of cattle, raised in the US and Australia as well as Japan) again was the clear winner. A few rich slices were all I needed to feel full and satisfied.
The highest grade the U.S. Department of Agriculture gives meat is prime. This designation is usually given to young cattle between 18 and 24 months of age. It has the highest degree of marbling of fat, creating great flavor and juicy tenderness.
Faison and Sarrazin asked us to guess how many cattle, hogs and chickens are slaughtered in the US every week. We all guessed low. The correct answers, they said, are:
Cattle, 643,000
Hogs, 2 million
Chickens, 175 million
The industry prefers to use the term harvested over slaughtered, the owners noted.
Issues about our food supply are complex and wide-ranging enough to fill a book. In fact, Faison and Sarrazin recommend reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffron Foer and Righteous Pork Chop by Nicolette Hahn Niman, for thought-provoking insights into what exactly we consume every day.
As a parting gift, the pair gave me a pretty little paperback with a dangling bunch of carrots on the cover. Called On The Future of Food, it is an essay adapted from Prince Charles’ speech at Georgetown.
In the book, Charles, an avid proponent of sustainable farming, calls for “antibiotics [to be] only used on animals to treat illnesses, not deployed in prophylactic doses to prevent them; where those animals are fed on grass-based regimes as Nature intended."
“It is your future that concerns me and that of your grandchildren, and theirs too," Charles adds. "That is how far we should be looking ahead.”
SUZANNE ZIMMER LOWERY is a food writer, pastry chef and culinary instructor at a number of New Jersey cooking schools. Find out more about her at suzannelowery.com.