The United States of Arugula (28 page)

Just about every homesteader, Niman included, kept a few goats around. Goats were the ultimate hippie livestock, both because they evoked the humble peasant cultures that the counterculture romanticized and because they were easy to care for.
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They were small, they were cute, they were
intelligent, they happily foraged on poor-quality land, and they required no special trailers or equipment to transport—a VW bus or Volvo station wagon would do the job fine. Female goats also happened to be prolific milk producers, and this milk could be used in a number of ways—as a beverage, to make cheese, and to nurse the other animals. In a happy convergence of zoology, animal husbandry, and hippie rhetoric, the goat was known as nature’s “universal mother,” its naturally homogenized milk palatable to humans, calves, piglets, and lambs, all of whom could digest it with no ill effects.

Up in Sonoma County, Laura Chenel was especially taken with goats. Having logged time in the early seventies at the University of California’s two freakiest campuses, Berkeley and Santa Cruz, she was propelled by the back-to-the-land movement into the town of Sebastopol. Growing vegetables appealed to her well enough, but raising goats moved her in a way that she never expected. She felt an instant kinship with the animals—a feeling, she says, “that I belong to the goats, that I am in their tribe.” When her goats started producing more milk than she knew what to do with, Chenel decided to try making cheese, holding down a waitressing job to underwrite her study. Making chèvre was a way of honoring her herd, something she needed to do, she says, “for the goats’ sake, and for the sake of all the people who love goats.” Still farther up, in Humboldt County, Mary Keehn’s life traveled a similar path, starting when she caught a wild doe, as the female of the species is known, and named her Hazel. A few mating seasons later, Keehn, too, had a surplus of milk and was experimenting with goat-milk cultures in her kitchen.

In the seventies, there was still no commercial goat cheese produced in the United States; it was all imported from Europe and sold mostly in specialty shops to discerning customers. Outside of countercultural and Francophile gourmet circles, goats were unpopular, warily regarded as barnyardy, pungent, possibly unhygienic beasts. (It didn’t help that the French word used to describe the little disks in which chèvre is often sold,
crottin
, literally translates as “animal turd.”) So when Chenel decided to turn her cheese-making hobby into a business, she faced an uphill battle. She spent three
months in France on a fact-finding mission, learning the ropes of goat-cheese production from local farmers whose families had been making chèvre for centuries. Upon her return, she found that the markets of the food-forward Bay Area were reasonably receptive to giving her
crottins
a chance, but usually on the condition that she “demo” her wares in-store.

This proved harrowing. “The word ‘goat,’ I’d say that was the first hurdle,” she says. “I’d be standing in some supermarket with tasting samples, having people say ‘What’s that?’ I’d say ‘Goat cheese,’ and they’d go
‘Noooo!’
and back away in the opposite direction. There was a lot of rejection.”

Fortunately, Alice Waters was more accepting. In 1980, her first full year of commercial production, Chenel showed up at Chez Panisse with
crottins
in tow. Waters was so impressed that she placed a standing order for Chenel’s chèvre, the big break that freed Chenel from her waitressing job. Waters’s salad of baby lettuces topped with vinaigrette and a baked disk of “Laura Chenel’s Chèvre,” as it was acknowledged on the menu, not only became a standby of Chez Panisse’s menu but was widely imitated—so much so that Chenel’s modest little garage operation would eventually grow into one that sells upward of a million pounds of cheese a year.

Mary Keehn’s operation in McKinleyville, Cypress Grove Chèvre, took longer to catch on, but once it did, Keehn remained true to her counterculture roots, expanding her line to include a lavender-spiked goat cheese called Purple Haze and another product, a “cheese torta” interspersed with layers of pesto, tomatoes, and pine nuts, called Fromage à Trois. The latter’s label features a
Joy of Sex
–style illustration (circa the original 1972 edition) of a bearded, naked fellow entangled with two equally clothesless ladies. Its slogan: “Fromage à Trois: You’ve always wanted to try it!”

IN BOLINAS, BILL NIMAN
stuck to education and local politics for a long time before he got into the meat business. One of his best friends was Orville Schell, a China scholar who’d done graduate work at Berkeley before moving to Marin County. Frustrated, like Niman, with the slow rate of return
on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society efforts to overhaul America’s ills, Schell joined Niman in trying to effect social change at the local level. In 1971, the two young men helped instigate a recall election in Bolinas that put them in charge of the public utility board—a position of tremendous power in the unincorporated town, since anyone needing water permits for new buildings required the utility board’s approval. Eager to preserve the rural character of the town, Niman, Schell, and their allies placed an immediate moratorium on giving out such permits, effectively putting a halt to further development of Bolinas.
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In due time, Schell also became involved in Niman’s ranching operation, moving onto the homestead and using some of the proceeds from his successful writing career to underwrite their pig business. That it actually
was
a business was something of an unplanned development. By the mid-seventies, Niman was working primarily as a building contractor and Schell as a writer, his dispatches on China appearing regularly in
The New Yorker.
Initially, they sold their pork on an informal, ad hoc basis. But word got out in the region that their pigs were of superior quality, and soon enough, they had a list of regular customers who would buy whole sides of pork from them. In 1977, momentarily flush, Niman and Schell purchased the land where Niman Ranch now sits, a larger tract than the one that Niman had initially settled on with his wife, who was killed the previous year in a horseback-riding accident. They also had cattle on the property. A few years before her death, Amy Niman had tutored for an old ranching family in the
area, who offered the Nimans some excess Hereford calves they didn’t need. Bill shepherded them back to his property in the front seat of his old 1956 Mercedes 220 S, each calf in a gunnysack, and thus was his career as a beef man launched.

Just as the Niman-Schell Ranch, as it was then called, was getting serious about its business, selling sides of beef to health-food stores, its next-door neighbor, Star Route Farms, overseen by Warren Weber, a Berkeley Ph.D. in English literature, was gaining recognition as California’s first certified organic farm. Before long, Bolinas was known as much for its funky, alternative agriculture as it was for its literary community and ferocious zoning restrictions—a circumstance that the poets Ted Berrigan and Tom Clark found all too precious. Together, they wrote a book-length satire of the scene called
Bolinas Eyewash
that includes a moment in which a caricaturishly flaky Bolinas resident reacts to a fine levied on the town by the state, saying, “I don’t have any money, but I’ll be glad to give the Attorney General some of this here broccoli.”

Niman and Schell kept forging ahead, though, applying the conviction they’d brought to Bolinas politics to food politics. Intuitively, and in keeping with the “organic” ethos of their community, they had always raised their cattle on a natural diet, letting the animals roam free and “finishing” them on a mix of grains. But as they became more serious about putting aside their other careers to focus on ranching, Niman and Schell researched the subject and discovered how profoundly out of whack commercial meat production had become in America, and how unwittingly radical their enterprise was. In the early eighties, Schell took a break from Chinese history to write
Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm
, the most incriminating exposé of the beef industry since Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel
The Jungle.

While today “grass-fed beef” is a luxury product that sells at a premium, pretty much all beef was grass-fed beef until the middle of the twentieth century. There were no feedlots where cattle ate in confinement, just pastures where they grazed. The taller and lusher the grass, the chubbier the
animals became. As such, freshly killed and dressed beef was as seasonal as tomatoes and summer corn, because farmers chose to slaughter their cattle at their peak of fattiness. “Think about bears getting ready to hibernate, eating salmon, gorging themselves, getting fat, gaining hundreds of pounds,” says Niman. With cattle, this fatty peak, before their bodies start consuming their own energy reserves, is dependent on the local climate and the life cycle of the grasses that they feed on. On a farm in old New England, the slaughtering time would have been in autumn, after the grass’s summery zenith but before the first frost set in. On a farm in old Bolinas, where the grass grew highest with the rains of March and April, the slaughtering time fell around late May or early June.

The advent of the railroad changed things somewhat, as cattle could be moved reasonably long distances to urban processing centers, making for a more mobile, less seasonal beef supply. Improvements in refrigeration technology helped the industry, too, lengthening the shelf life of butchered beef. But none of these advances extended the period during which a live steer’s muscle tissue was at its most lusciously marbled with fat. Not until after World War II did America truly enter the era of year-round, freshly slaughtered beef—a phenomenon largely attributable to postwar grain surpluses.

The surpluses were the result of a confluence of factors. Through the early part of the twentieth century, the most common sources of nitrogen, an essential element for plant growth, were natural: manure, compost, and so on. However, the war effort resulted in a huge investment in munitions plants that manufactured such substances as ammonium nitrate, a solid nitrogen product used to make explosives. After the war—and after it was observed that grass grew faster in the areas around munitions dumps—these munitions plants were rededicated to the purpose of making fertilizer for farming. In a similar act of repurposing, many factories that had been devoted to the manufacture of military vehicles during the war were given over to the manufacture of self-propelled grain combines (machines that harvest grain), tractors, and other heavy equipment that made grain farming more efficient.

The upshot of all this was that postwar America was verily flooded in grain. Cattle farmers took notice, as did cereal-crop farmers who suddenly decided to go into the cattle business. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, these entrepreneurial farmers dedicated themselves to building enclosed feedlots where their animals, rather than relying on the vagaries of the grass-growing season, feasted on cheap corn and soybean through
all
the seasons. The result: a year-round supply of fattened-up, ready-for-slaughter animals.

The problem with this model is that cattle, as ruminants, are supposed to subsist for the first year of their lives on mother’s milk and grass. Not until they are sixteen to eighteen months old have their gastrointestinal tracts “hardened,” to use the industry term, to the point where they can digest grain with no ill effects. The commercial beef industry, however, had an economic imperative to get its animals to slaughter and its meat to market as soon as possible. As such, it became common practice for animals to be started on grain long before they were ready. This practice succeeded in fattening up the cattle and getting them to market weight in a mere twelve to sixteen months (rather than the two to three years it took for a grass-fed steer), but it also put serious stresses on the animals. Feeding on grain before they were fully capable of digesting it, the cattle often developed stomach abscesses, diarrhea, and bacterial infections. On top of this, the immune systems of the calves were weakened by the stress of being separated from their mothers and carted off to feedlots without proper weaning.

To stave off gastrointestinal-tract ailments, Schell explained in
Modern Meat
, commercial ranchers took to preemptively feeding their animals antibiotics. As the technology developed, cattle were also given “growth promotants”—hormones—to help them along to slaughtering size at the twelve-to-sixteen-month mark. And so the industry-standard beef steer was, and remains, a prematurely pumped-up, inhumanely raised adolescent animal that has an aggravated digestive system and drugs in its blood. And the more antibiotics these livestock were given, the faster their bodies developed populations of microbes resistant to the antibiotics—microbes that had the potential to get passed on to the human beings who processed and ate the
meat from these animals. To top off the Orwellian wrongness of it all, the cultivation of the grain on which these animals fed was underwritten by U.S. government subsidies and abetted by environmentally detrimental chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Equipped with this knowledge, Niman and Schell decided to revisit the ranching methodologies of the pre-grain era, throwing in some new touches of counterculture enlightenment. They set up a system in which calves were kept with their mothers for as long as they needed to nurse, and then gently weaned, placed in proximity to the mother cows but separated by a fence to keep them from charging for the teats. Only after sixteen to eighteen months, by which time the cattle’s gastrointestinal tracts were sufficiently hardened, were the animals “finished” on feed, and even then, the feed was all-natural and mixed by the farmers themselves, a sort of Niman’s Own munchie mix. The animals were market-ready at two years or so, double the industry standard, which meant higher production costs but no dependence on antibiotics, growth hormones, or subsidized grain.

Like “Laura Chenel’s Chèvre,” the phrase “Niman-Schell Beef” caught on in the 1980s as a mark of distinction on northern California menus, first at Cafe Beaujolais, a restaurant in Mendocino, and then at San Francisco’s Stars and Zuni Café, and, inevitably, at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. Niman-Schell beef not only had the all-natural and local angles going for it but also a distinctive flavor profile—many old-timers said it tasted more like the beef they remembered eating as children—and the do-gooder cachet of having been prepared in humane, eco-friendly, small-farmer-supportive fashion. As chefs from other parts of the country visited the Bay Area and asked if they could get Niman-Schell products, the two men built up a network of ranchers around the country who raised cattle to their standards, thereby ensuring a year-round supply of their brand of beef.
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It was a triumphal bridging of the “natural” and gourmet cultures.