Food from the Edge

Food From the Edge: Stable-to-Table Dining

by Rebecca Rothbaum, Posted Feb 8th 2011 @ 11:00AM

Kitchen gardens just aren't enough anymore. A small but growing number of chefs and restaurateurs are taking local to a new level, raising their own meat, keeping honey bees and tending goats to make cheese.

Chef Dan Barber and his acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants helped pioneer the trend. Both his Greenwich Village and Hudson Valley outposts draw from Barber's four-season farm at the Stone Barns Center for Agriculture, about an hour north of New York City. The seven-year-old farm, which also serves as an educational center (Michelle Obama and a group of school kids visited last September), provides the restaurants with everything from banana squash to veal. It's a model that translates best to wide-open spaces. In Aspen, Colorado, for instance, the Little Nell hotel's executive chef, Ryan Hardy, grows produce and raises livestock on his 15-acre Rendezvous Farms. He even makes his own cheese.

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World's Largest Gummy Worm Makes Us Squirm

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by Slashfood Editor, Posted Oct 26th 2010 @ 1:00PM

Giant Gummy Worm Photo: YouTube

With a length of more than two feet of rubbery goodness, the Vat 19 gummy worm is the perfect solution for all of you who prefer your candy mutant looking (the worm version of the irradiated ants in the 1950s horror flick "Them"). In fact, the company claims it's the world's largest worm, at three pounds (and it offers a couple days' worth of calories, 4,000 to be exact).

Don't worry about eating it all in one sitting, though (and, frankly, we don't even want to go there) -- it has a shelf life of about a year. And if you need something a little more cuddly than a huge worm, you can always opt for Vat 19's five-pound giant gummy bear.

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The Vegetable Butcher -- Food from the Edge

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by Rebecca Rothbaum, Posted Sep 28th 2010 @ 12:00PM

Artist Jennifer Rubell Photo: Logan Fazio / WireImage.com

Artist Jennifer Rubell was ticking off a list of influences -- Duchamp, Ambramovic -- when a septuagenarian clutching a bag of baby Brussels sprouts approached, asking, "Can I take these on a plane?" Unfazed, Rubell talked over the finer points of traveling with produce. "You get all kinds of questions here," she said after the woman with the Brussels sprouts went in search of the checkout line.

It was another day at Eataly, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianch's 40,000-square foot temple to Italian food in New York, where Rubell is the vegetable butcher. The idea for the job came during a conversation over dinner with her friend Batali at his restaurant Del Posto shortly before the store's opening earlier this month. He was recalling the women who work at the vegetable market in Campo de Fiori in Rome, the way they would trim artichokes by hand and toss the peels into the fountain, how it helped create a sense of place. "Somehow over the course of the night, the idea of a vegetable butcher crystallized," Rubell said.

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Mobile Slaughterhouses -- Food From the Edge

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by Rebecca Rothbaum, Posted Aug 18th 2010 @ 4:00PM

Photo: Great Beyond, Flickr

Although Americans' appetite for local, grass-fed beef is growing, regional livestock farmers face a nagging problem: a shortage of slaughterhouses. Now some of them are turning to mobile operations to butcher their animals on their own farms.

Kim Snyder is one of them. A former operations manager for American Express who turned to farming in 2003, Snyder, 42, raises livestock in a way the she believes is as humane as possible; her cattle and hogs are pasture- and grain-fed, and free of antibiotics and hormones. Yet when it comes time to slaughter them, she must load them into a trailer for a two- or three-hour trip to a butcher for what she said is a cruelly jarring end.

"It's like the last piece of my puzzle I can't control," she said on the phone from her Faith's Farm near Kankakee, Ill., about an hour-and-a-half south of Chicago. She has begun talking with others in the area about developing a mobile slaughterhouse that would travel the state. She said the idea has been met with interest by other farmers, some of whom share her philosophy as well as others who are simply looking to save valuable time lost by traveling long distances to bring their animals to slaughter.

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