the gateway meat

Last week we picked up some amazing pork from Heritage Farms, including what has come to be known as “The Gateway Meat” – Bacon.  Haven’t been sold on the benefits of local, pastured meats yet?  Bacon is your gateway.  There are T-shirts that say so.

Often, the distinctions made between commercially raised meats and the local, pastured meats that we sell are in terms of nutrition and values.  Pastured and grassfed meats, from small-scale local farms, are better for you.  Production is better for the land, animals are treated with respect.  (More details in our Grassfed Primer).  But there is also a distinction in taste and nowhere is this more true than with Bacon.  Remember, fat means flavor!  All bacon is fatty, but the quality of fat from pastured pigs is different – the flavor is richer, the texture smoother. 

on the road with farm truck

Each week our members receive brown bags filled with fresh cheese, bread, vegetables and meats from area farms, and as you can imagine there’s an awful lot that goes on behind the scenes to make that happen! We thought it might be fun to start recording our travels, so that you can get a better sense of where all this food is coming from.  We consider ourselves incredibly lucky to get to travel around our region visiting farmers and picking up delicious food and we’d like our members to get a sense of what those travels are like.  Each week, we’ll write a quick post about where we were, who we were with and what we picked up to share with you over the past week or so.  It’s just another way of connecting us all to our foodshed.

On the road with Free Range Farm Truck, March 19-30
Monday– Drive to Half Moon Gardens greenhouse for red lettuce.
Tuesday– Meet the Smyrna Menonites(Wilson Hilty and Robert Kauffman) in Bangor (they hire a driver) for 2 lambs, 2 pigs, 2 cows, and 50 lbs of cheese. Drive to Massimo’s for bread (which we do every tuesday, thurs, and saturday) and then to McLaughlin’s Seafood for haddock, scallops and shrimp and finally to a little homestead in Hampden for 5 dozen eggs.
Monday– Drive to Peacemeal Farm in Dixmont for Spring dug Parsnips, which involved driving about two miles in 5 inches of mud without 4 wheel drive. That’s how dedicated we are to our members!
Thursday- Drive to Heritage Farms in Winterport for maple syrup
Saturday– Drive to Living Land Farm where we meet Mark Allen and picked up spinach and red onions, and then to Pittsfield’s Balfour Farm where Heather Donahue hooks us up with some amazing cheese.  

Within that schedule, of course, we delivered all of those amazing products to our members who turned them into amazing, healthy meals.