Eat the City(40)

Tom Mylan is no longer talking about keeping meat animals in the city. He now calls his fascination with locally produced meat “a brief period of whimsy.” Tom’s field of view has become larger, as he considers what it would take to overturn a national meat industry where the four largest beef companies control more than 80 percent of the market. “We’re looking to make the biggest difference in the way people eat meat that we possibly can,” he says.

Over the summer of 2011, the Meat Hook opened a hot dog and burger shack on the beach in the Rockaways, part of a surfer’s eating complex organized in part by the Brooklyn restaurateur David Selig, who keeps beehives on his rooftop in Red Hook.

Tom started to think about how great it would be if he had a reliable source of the high-quality, carefully raised meat he sells in his butcher shop. He had learned some best practices from books and his favorite farmers. “Everything from feed to breed affects the quality of the meat,” he wrote in an article. “Cattle born early in the year are better than those born in the fall. Too much nitrogen-rich clover or alfalfa before slaughter, and a whole beef carcass can be ruined by scatole, a microbial metabolite that makes the meat smell and taste like … scat.” Soon he found himself caught up in books, PDFs, and YouTube videos on soil microbes, breeding, glandular function, trace mineral nutrition, and multispecies stacking. He subscribed to Acres USA, Stockman Grass Farmer, and local farming newsletters from Lancaster County, the Hudson Valley, Maine, and Virginia. He wrote an application for a grant to establish a breeding, research, and teaching farm.

He is in the process of developing a twenty-year plan that he hopes will contribute to changing the way Americans eat. It starts with his pasture-based husbandry and vocational school, right now just a vision in a grant proposal. Yet in four or five years, he hopes, he will have started a program to train new farmers to develop breeds of cows whose offspring thrive on grass, grow quickly and efficiently, and turn into remarkably delicious and well-marbled steaks.

What he wants is to develop animals that will be less than half the size of the typical American thousand-pound steer and do well on grass and forage. They would be the ponies of the bovine world, descended from compact British breeds—Devons, Scottish Highlands, belted Galloways—broad, short cattle that efficiently convert grass to protein. They would reach maturity for slaughter at as young as twenty months, seven months younger than when most steer are slaughtered now.

Maybe these new cattle will be the stock from which the world-changing herds of the future are bred. Maybe he can train a generation of farmers to produce high-quality, tasty, sustainably raised meat for a reasonable price. Maybe he can sell the meat to Walmart and grocery stores and fast food chains across the country. If he succeeds, it wouldn’t be the first innovation in meat to come out of a city struggling for hundreds of years to find optimal ways to sate carnivorous appetites. “This is a mission for me,” Tom says.





SUGAR


YOU CAN’T CATCH the sweet candy smell in the air anymore. You won’t see the rivulets of sugar flowing in shades of brown and tan and old yellowed paper, and, finally, white. You don’t smell the cinnamon where the girls in hairnets packed cinnamon sugar into baby doll bottles. You won’t find Shade Man asleep on the night shift, wearing sunglasses so no one can catch him in the act. You won’t see crane operators reaching down to the holds of the boats on the East River to grab sugar as though they’re digging up earth, to dump on the warehouse floor in heaps, like mountains of snow.

Instead, at the Domino Sugar factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, paint peeling off the walls and ceilings flakes onto the floors. Unmatched swivel office chairs still huddle around an old TV. Forklifts have been abandoned in the middle of a room, their seats splitting and decaying; hoses are unspooled; doors are open. The disintegrating old factory feels like a place where workers just left for a cigarette break—and never returned. Little here suggests the centuries of labor and strife that brought this refinery to this spot on the Brooklyn waterfront.

There are coal cities and steel cities and car cities and gold cities. New York, in some ways, is a sugar city. Global geopolitics, circa 1620: Sugar, tobacco, spices, and salt move empires. Planters and mill owners on the sugar plantations of the Americas live in opulence, their homes furnished with gold, silk, and chintz, their meals accompanied by the music of private orchestras, slaves and prostitutes ready to serve at their pleasure. Far away, the Dutch have emerged as the world’s most successful seafaring traders, and Holland in its golden age of art and science also reigns as Europe’s dominant sugar refiner. The Dutch West India Company is founded in 1621 to make money for its shareholders in a new global economy increasingly tilting toward sugar. Three years later, the company’s yachts, galliots, ketches, pinks, and pinnaces begin to set anchor on Manhattan Island.

The company’s waterfront settlement was to be a modest trading post for furs and timber, as well as a transportation hub for ships on the Atlantic circuit from Europe to South America and the Caribbean. But as the company settled in Manhattan, it also captured a chunk of sugar-rich Brazil, making that sweet commodity a prime concern. And it was sugar, in the end, that lured the Dutch away from their Manhattan holdings. When the English took over their little trading colony, renaming it New York, the Dutch gave it willingly in exchange for the tropical country today known as Suriname, whose cane crops they considered more valuable.