Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Quick Links

2 comments:

Molly said...

I recently had dinner with my organic farmer friends, who not only raise grass-fed cattle (and organic chickens and pigs), but also run an organic dairy operation.

Dinner included some of their steaks, some root vegetables that they had put away for the winter, and a big glass of raw milk that had been pulled from the teet earlier that day. While the meat was delicious, I can't claim a palatte sophisticated enough to pinpoint why it seemed so tastey. It has a clean taste to me--a beefiness that seems, well, so wonderfully beefy.

But that glass of milk! Imagine the sweet smell of cut grass, and then imagine drinking it down, ice cold and creamy. My friends said they can always tell what they have been feeding the cows by the way the milk tastes. (Usually, they supplement bailage from their hayfields with high-quality organic grain, but the ratios aren't always the same, which I guess alters the flavors significantly.)

Also, knowing where your food comes from makes it more delicious, no matter what. You eat a little bit of the landscape with every bite--the layout of the fields, the wind blowing through the grass, the curious pigs rooting around in the field, a galloping horse. (That sounds ridiculously cheesey, but it it true.)

Patrick Brown said...

I clearly need to eat more meals with organic farmers (It probably wouldn't hurt to eat with more poets, as well).

I haven't had a glass of milk in ten years. Probably because the milk I get at our local supermarket tastes faintly of uranium.