The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [129]
Every Thursday Art mounts a scrupulously planned military operation to supply Charlottesville’s white-tablecloth restaurants with pastured meat and eggs from Polyface, as well as produce, dairy products, and mushrooms from a half dozen other small producers in the Shenandoah Valley. He phones his farmers on Monday night to find out what they’ve got, faxes his chefs an order list Tuesday morning, sells and writes orders all day Tuesday, Tuesday night faxes them to the farmers so they can harvest Wednesday, and then meet up with Art in the Polyface parking lot shortly after dawn on Thursday.
I spent the better part of Thursday riding shotgun in Art’s panel truck, an old orange Dodge Caravan with a cranky compressor on the roof and a sign on the side that says ON DELIVERY FROM POLYFACE INC. FOLLOW ME TO THE BEST RESTAURANTS IN TOWN. Which seemed to be more or less the case: Most of Charlottesville’s best chefs buy from Polyface, primarily chickens and eggs, but also lots of pork and as many rabbits as Daniel can raise. We made most of our deliveries after lunch, when the kitchens were prepping dinner and relatively quiet. After Art nailed down a quasi-legal parking spot, I’d help him haul in plastic totes the size of laundry baskets laden with meat and produce. The chefs had uniformly high praise for the quality of Polyface produce, and clearly felt good about supporting a local farm, which many of them had visited on one of the Chef Appreciation Days that Polyface holds each summer. I could have filled a notebook with their encomiums. A few:
“Okay, a happier chicken, great, but frankly for me it’s all about the taste, which is just so different—this is a chickenier chicken.”
“Art’s chickens just taste cleaner, like the chicken I remember when I was a kid. I try to buy from people who are in my community and stand by their food. Don Tyson, on the other hand, stands behind a bunch of lawyers.”
“Oh, those beautiful eggs! The difference is night and day—the color and richness and fat content. There’s just no comparison. I always have to adjust my recipes for these eggs—you never need as many as they call for.”
Between stops, Art mentioned that Joel’s eggs usually gave him his foot in the door when trying to land a new account. We stopped in at one such prospect, a newly opened restaurant called the Filling Station. Art introduced himself and presented the chef with a brochure and a dozen eggs. The chef cracked one into a saucepan; instead of spreading out flabbily, the egg stood up nice and tall in the pan. Joel refers to this as “muscle tone.” When he first began selling eggs to chefs, he’d crack one right into the palm of his hand, and then flip the yolk back and forth from one hand to another to demonstrate its integrity. The Filling Station chef called his staff over to admire the vibrant orange color of the yolk. Art explained that it was the grass diet that gave the eggs their color, indicating lots of beta-carotene. I don’t think I’d ever seen an egg yolk rivet so many people for so long. Art beamed; he was in.
At one restaurant, the chef inquired if Art could find him some game birds; maybe in the fall, Art offered. Later, back in the truck, Art launched into a little diatribe about seasonality—one of the stiffest challenges facing the development of a local food economy.
“We have to battle the idea that you can have anything you want any time you want it. Like ‘spring lamb.’ What the hell does that mean? That’s not its natural cycle. You want lambs to hit the ground when the grass is lush, in April. They won’t be ready for eight to ten months after that—not till early winter. But the market’s become totally out of sync with nature. We should eat red meat when it’s cold, but people want chicken in the winter, when we don’t have it.”
A global food market, which brings us New Zealand lamb in the spring, Chilean asparagus in December, and fresh tomatoes the year round, has smudged the bright colors of the seasonal food calendar we all once knew by heart.