Why aren't some of Minnesota's best restaurants sourcing local meat?
The worst parts of veganism, the glory of small farms, and a plea to restaurants
I am sure that the year in 1800, there was a girl somewhere in this country who kissed more cowboys in one year than I kissed last year–and I am also sure that in 2023, no single woman kissed more cowboys than me.
My dating profile used to read chefs, doctors, lawyers, cowboys, leaving more than one man’s first message to be something like, “Well that list ain’t about the money so what’s it about?” It wasn’t about money. It was about: you work long enough hours that you won’t gripe about my long hours and/or you either know something about food or can keep up. Mostly, I dated chefs, with the second category being cowboys. This is not a dating tactic I recommend to most people, except those who must for some strange reason spend most of their time thinking about food. But… the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the accountants, whatever, got tired of me going on and on about food. And I got tired of sitting across from them at tables in restaurants with fuckall to say.
So, slowly, I dropped the doctors and lawyers and just wrote “chefs and cowboys” and then I dropped that and said: “I’m looking for a man who can hunt a goddamn duck,” and then that morphed into, “I am not kidding I will make all the money and I am looking for a man who can build me a house in the woods, cook some food, raise like 20 sheep, and then like maybe open a restaurant where everything comes from our land.”
It was a dream, sure, but it’s a dream I still have.
If you knew me a few years ago, this might feel like a strange evolution. Vegan and strong in my ethics, I personally didn’t think anything you would say could change my mind.
It’s a thing that I am proud of–the ability to have my mind changed when it feels unshakeable. It’s a lost trait that makes me both a good partner and a good activist in whatever form it takes. But it also means I can sit across from people and really listen to them, looking for places I am wrong, not looking for places I am right.
The ability to change my mind is also a trait that had me standing in a field somewhere in this country as the sun set with a chef who used to be a butcher who used to be a farmer in my working cowgirl boots (I have ones I wear in the field and ones I wear on the dance floor) while he told me a story about the farm we were standing on.
I respect the anonymity of my chef ex-boyfriends and ex-dates in such a way that I won’t tell you where we are in the country at this moment in time, because if I did, you might be able to place him, name him. So we’ll pretend we are in Maine, but I did not go to Maine in 2023. We were both talking about the end of the hyperlocal farm to table restaurant, how it used to mean something different than it means now. Now, people call themselves farm to table when they source a not insignificant amount of their food through conglomerates or out of state (and I don’t mean directly touching states, I mean the south from the north).
Now people don’t use the word farm to table, they use seasonal, but most diners see seasonal and think farm to table, right? Most, almost all, of the time it is not.
He was doing something kind of wild. He was turning a larger restaurant around, pulling back from out of state purveyors to local ones one at a time, relying on deep relationships with farmers he built when he worked at smaller restaurants. The restaurant was sourcing with intention, and as restaurants in their region that used those farms died as restaurants do, they picked up more of that product, relying less on out of state product from a long-growth strategy, but also making promises that only a large and very successful restaurant can keep: if they raised more pigs, they’d take them.
That’s my type of guy. Not just chef or cowboy, but that kind of chef or cowboy. The one who gets his hands dirty. The one who wants to remove their reliance not just from Sysco trucks but conglomerates of “a small collection of local farms” their boots never touch. My boots have touched the ground on some of those farms–and some of them are far better than others. Some of them, to be frank, are poorly run and produce poor quality meat.
Sitting across from him, I hadn’t been vegetarian in my philosophy in a long time, but the taste of meat repulsed me. I had little bits here and there, but I hadn’t eaten meat in so long that to chew the amount meat requires you to chew felt disgusting to me. Vegan activists will say this is my conscience, but it’s not–it’s similar to eating quinoa or a beet for the first time. I felt like a goddamned baby.
My palate is refined and my taste preference is pretty damn clear, but on meat, I knew absolutely nothing.
By “I wasn’t vegetarian,” what I mean is that vegetarians are not vegetarians. Not really.
The milk, eggs, and dairy that you consume is a part of the meat system. No cow giving you your dairy lives out a long life–and acting like you are morally superior to people eating meat because you do not eat flesh does not mean that you are not complicit in death.
And so, what I was searching for, before I put meat in my mouth again, was my own conscience. I was trying to understand when I thought death for food was okay or all right. If it was or if I was just happy to eat cheese again.
Going back to being vegetarian or an omnivore after being vegan is sometimes an unlearning–and for me, with a teeny tiny online following, it came with the loss of friends and death threats.
I still get them from time to time, graphic and horrible things said to me about how someone hopes my babies are stolen for me and I am milked or that I am put in a sow crate. People I loved and cared deeply for once have gotten combative with me in ways I never imagined, totally unable to see my point of view, my personhood. It was always something I prided myself in as a vegan: I could see your point of view, your personhood.
It didn’t come as a shock to me because I know what vegans say about ex-vegans behind their backs. Nasty, horrible things not indicative of a group of people looking to reduce suffering, which most of them really, really are. But also, tactically, the things they say when you stop being vegan mean you really have no more connections to the vegan philosophy and are less likely to go back. The immediate shunning, the wretched insults, the loss of friendships. If it is a movement, and they say it is a movement, why would anyone go back to a movement like that?
Veganism used to be my whole life. I turned down my favorite thing in the world (really bougie food) to live that value. Still, vegans will say I was never vegan if I am not anymore, like it is impossible for people to change their minds.
I used to have over 100 books on farming. I left this collection of books in New York, but not the things I learned. I read everything on regenerative farming I could find, because the vegan world calls it bullshit. I wanted to be able to back up why it was bullshit. And then, at a certain point, after reading propaganda from both sides (and to be clear, there is propaganda on both sides), I just started reading the science and then I started looking at where vegan food companies sourced their ingredients from, as well as the farms.
Monocrop after monocrop came up in my searches, something that vegans say animal farming supports. And it does, at scale, in factory farms. But vegans eating Impossible burgers will always support monocrops–and some people who eat meat (myself included) don’t.
I started to think holistically about the earth and about death, asking hard questions of if an animal’s short life was worth the food we get on our plates. And look, I’m going to answer that question with a yes, but only if the life of the animal was beautiful.
Vegans who say the death is never worth it? I get it. But vegans who tell you that the life of the animal is never beautiful? On that, they are sometimes wrong.
I stopped being vegan when I met a woman at the farmer’s market (we were both shopping, she wasn’t a vendor) and got a little combative with her about her telling me that the chickens she raised had good lives in line waiting for greens. She put her hands on her hips and said plainly, “They are raised on acres of pasture with heated coops for the winter and they have the freewill to walk into my home.”
“I know you believe that,” I said, “But I really don’t think they are happy.”
Both of us were dug in and then, after we waiting 30 minutes for some of the best greens you’ll get in your goddamned life. She wrote her number on a piece of paper she got from that farm and said, “You should come.”
“Why would you invite me over,” I asked.
She told me it was because she had nothing to hide.
I went. I knew about enough how to care for animals after working at a farm sanctuary and dating men who were farmers to arrive and know that something felt different than any farm I had ever been on. The chickens roamed free on the land, fenced in with chicken wire. They ran up to me when I arrived, a flock of them at the gate waiting for someone to say hello to them. They were used to being handled, picked up, and one of them kept flapping trying to get into my arms.
She had names for all of them that she remembered, that they remembered. Her door was open and chickens were, actually, inside. About 50, nothing crazy or wild, 50 she said is what she could handle. It wasn’t her full-time job, raising and killing chickens, it was more of a way for her to feed herself and her community (way out in the country) because she didn’t trust store bought meat.
Vegans will tell you that small farms and factory farms are the same in terms of the scale of suffering, which is honestly a messaging problem, because if you step foot on these farms, you realize immediately that is not true.
The images of close ups of eyes and suffering, the cages, they don’t exist here. Which isn’t to say they don’t exist. They do. Just not on this one small farm that is hard to find and expensive to source from. I asked her how many of them get egg bound and she looked at me like I had lost my mind. “Like five in a decade,” she said.
“You’re lying,” I said, flabbergasted.
“I’m not,” she said. Image after image of egg bound hens as a reason not to buy from small farms flashed before my eyes.
“If they can’t find a place to nest, it will happen. Or if they’re really old, sometimes really young. Or if their diet isn’t right,” she said, looking at me.
“What,” she asked.
I pulled up a post from a farm sanctuary somewhere outside of New York State, a post about chickens at that sanctuary getting egg bound asking for money. She looked at me and smiled after reading the caption. She shrugged. “Doesn’t really happen here.”
“If you had an egg bound hen, would you just kill them,” I asked.
“No,” she said, kind of defensive, “I’d get her the care she needed.”
We said we would keep in touch and she handed me a dozen eggs, all different colors. “You don’t have to eat them,” she said, “But someone will love them.”
I came here looking to confirm my own beliefs and I left kind of rattled.
I became insatiable. I thought she was lying, that she must have had the hens I’ve seen egg bound and desperate. I asked people I knew with backyard hens. I asked farmer after farmer at market after market–and I asked if I could visit their farms.
Some of those farms were absolutely hellscapes for the animals on them and some of them weren’t.
I was hunting for something. Feeling something shift inside of me. It wasn’t that sanctuaries and vegans were lying, it’s that they literally had not spent any time with the small farmers they said were all the same to know any different. It is true that some small farms, most small farms I visited, are trash with overheated cows and chickens in pain. And if you don’t care about that, they might be regenerative or raising heritage breeds or whatever and that’s why you choose them, but I care about that.
And it is also true that there is a very small (very, very small) swath of farms that do it right. But some of them do. And the blanket rejection of farming doesn’t actually help animals the way vegans think it does. Because if they tell you small and factory farms are the same, you might just go to a factory farm.
Vegans haven’t grappled with that. They think I am wrong. They think every farm is the same. But I have walked some of them, a very few of them, and I know that vegans are incorrect. Now, you can say you do not want to eat death or think the death is wrong, that is fine and valid and really fucking real. It’s also real to say you don’t think we should take things from animals, that they belong to them, I think that is a fine point of view. But that’s not what turns people vegan. What turns people vegan is not the death but the violence. And if you say that every single small farm is a hellscape for animals, you are not telling the truth. You aren’t.
The first egg I ate back from veganism was hers, cracked in a pan with just salt, sunny side up. After all these years, I hadn’t lost the ability to cook it perfectly, cut it open with a knife to reveal a runny yolk on bread I made myself with tomatoes grown by a dear friend. Something shifted in me. Something woke up. There is no way in hell her farm could supply a restaurant, not even a small one, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to feed her and her neighbors and now, well, now… me.
Standing in “Maine” with a man trying to do something uphill and so, so hard in the 2020s, I felt conflicted. The pigs had enough pasture, had giant barns with hay, had places to cool off, had medical care. But still, they are so smart. That cognitive dissonance stays with me–I am not sure it will ever leave me. All this farm did was pigs, eggs, chickens, some duck.
The main caretaker of the family farm talked to me openly and generously at length about the steps they take to keep the pigs happy. As a person who worked on a farm sanctuary and hung out around farm sanctuaries, I knew it was more than the sanctuaries did, in a way that felt belief shattering. He could see it in my face, the wheels turning, things clicking. “It’s not all like this,” he said, “But here it’s like this.”
He’s right. In the search for farms like this, I’ve found myself frustrated and a little bit pissed off and sometimes wanting to settle and eat meat that is a little less humane. But I push as much as I can to be the person vegans say does not exist. They’ll talk shit about you if you say that you only eat your definition of ethical meat, saying behind your back that you don’t. But me? 90% of the time, I do, and most of the time when I don’t it’s a mistake.
I have stepped foot on the farm I get my milk from. I have spent time in the fields of sheep where I get lamb from. I have driven to farms hours outside of the city and planted my boots in the barns.
I rarely eat meat, mostly eating local vegetarian meals, and when I do eat meat, it is usually from chefs I trust with purveyors whose names I know.
I ask the farms I get my meat from who they supply to, working backwards to find who I can trust. And when I travel, I ask people I trust where to go, people who know the places that they will eat meat from aren’t good enough for me.
Head to head if I have a choice of factory farmed meat and vegetables, I choose the vegetables every time. This also means I’m sometimes extremely annoying in restaurants, or at least, I think I’m annoying in restaurants. Asking where things are sourced before I order and sometimes choosing cuts of meat based on that and not what cut of meat I’d prefer.
When I first started doing this, I felt so in the way that I didn’t even ask, just didn’t eat meat at all. Then I started asking and here’s what happened. Some chefs acted like I was so incredibly annoying, but not all of them. And each place that didn’t act that way had something in common. They were proud of their sourcing.
After I asked it twice about sourcing for dishes at a tasting menu in Chicago, the chef asked me if I was going to ask for every dish and when I said yes, I had a handwritten list of his purveyors in front of me.
When I started asking this question at a restaurant somewhere in Wisconsin, one of the chefs handed me his old school rolodex and said, “Have fun.”
When I asked this question somewhere in New York, I received a printed and ready list of purveyors from a chef who said he hoped I would go to them on my own outside of the restaurant. I did.
And when I asked this question somewhere in the Tennessee, a chef who definitely had no time to talk to me said, “Do you just give a shit if this is coming from Tennessee,” to which I responded, “No, I care about the kind of farm.” His response was, “Give me your email.” At two in the morning, I had a list of farms in my inbox, and the next day I went back and ordered from the ones that I felt were special.
Most of the time? I do feel in the way. I do. Asking this question I always apologize. I did that once in a restaurant in my hometown and the chef said, “Don’t apologize it’s my favorite thing about you.” But most of the time, I feel like I am so, so, so in the way.
I care about it. I think chefs should care when their diners care about it, too.
Earlier this morning, I was griping about sourcing at a restaurant that really should do better and my boyfriend said, “Baby this is a tough life to live.” I thought he meant his life, #cheflife. I thought we were about to get into a fight.
He meant that he admired my hunt for the humane and the local. He called it a quest. It is. Tiny restaurants around the country are dying. So are tiny farms.
Both have been dying for a long time for similar reasons: people want things that are bigger or cheaper and people don’t care about process or the community it was raised in. In many cases, big restaurants can’t source from small farms. They would have to source from multiple of them and sometimes it’s never enough. The hope of the small farm is often the small restaurant or people like me who give a damn about where our meat comes from. And so there is always something heartbreaking when chefs choose a far away farm over the local one, the one that is “consistent” over the one that cares about the earth underneath them and the community around them. The one that treats meat like a product you can get the best of, not an animal in our ecosystem.
It will never not be heartbreaking to me when a restaurant chooses protein from far away places instead of home.
Because I know what it means for small farmers. And I know what losing small farmers means for all of us. Rising monocrops, less diversity in the crops, uniform meat raised in hellish conditions, even our milk and cheese from monopolies.
I think the plight of the chef looking for the perfect cut of meat and not seeing it as an animal is also the plight of humans in restaurants expecting the same dish night after night and not accommodating for the human in the kitchen. And I think one informs the other. I think the call is coming from inside the house.
Look, Minnesota chefs, you can do that. You can say that elsewhere the meat is better but then you can't be mad when critics say that about the restaurants here and ignore you because other cities are “better”–they’re saying the same thing you are.
You can search for the best meat all over the world, sure, you can do that. But you cannot tell me that there is no farm here that goes head to head with the lamb that you sourced from elsewhere. I know because I’ve had enough of it to know that you are wrong. At a certain point, you have to own size or cost or uniformity as the reason–and then you have to own who you leave behind when that’s what you’re looking for.
Maybe other people will be impressed by sourcing from far away places, but I am impressed by the chefs who somehow make a community out of a restaurant in this hellscape of an economy.
I know they exist because I can name them. And head to head I think they are always going to be more special than someone serving what they think is “the best” because restaurants are not about the food alone. They are about who you bring along with you. Something I think lots of chefs in my city have forgotten, with active fights against workers who are saying their conditions are no longer tolerable, but also with sourcing from far away places while the farms around them die. Something I try never to forget. Something other Midwestern cities (say Madison or Omaha) do better than us.
Many seasonal restaurants source from far away, serving farces of “local” dishes that they could source locally but don’t. It’s true enough that I ask about purveyors almost everywhere I go, hoping for the days of the hyperlocal restaurant and being met with out of state ramps from time to time, a thing you can go into the woods and source for free. Which is to say I think a lot of it is about convenience. I get it. I just disagree with it. I understand why some people won’t tell me where they source from when I ask.
But some chefs? They’ll tell me their farms and call them up to ask if I can tour that farm, because they believe so deeply in their farm partners that they want to carry them up with them (Chef Tomlinson of Myriel is the person I trust the most with sourcing and has been incredibly generous with her time pointing me in the right direction—chefs at real farm to table restaurants all over the country have too).
In the morning after I went to a restaurant that served me lamb from a far away place, I went to the farmers market and I stood in front of a sheep farmer, whose family has been at this work for decades, and I asked him about the land while my boyfriend quietly told me that really right now we don’t need any more meat, our fridges full of local food.
I did not ask that farmer if he thinks that his lamb can go head to head with some fancy place in Oregon, because I already know the answer. I’ve had it. It can. And it does. My clumsy cooking on meat was enough to make it feel special. And honestly I’m really fucking bad at cooking meat.
One day when these farms are gone, I know chefs will miss them, and I know who they will blame. Me. You. Us. But I don’t know how many other ways I can say that so many of them are unintentionally killing them with the search for perfect and the push for uniformity.
I have watched as my favorite type of restaurant has died around me partly due to cost, but honestly? It’s mostly due to philosophy—that somewhere else outside of Minnesota is better. Critics say that about your food, too, that on the coasts it is better. But you don’t believe them right? Because you know yours is just as good.
To live that truth requires you to believe it is true cooking with things that come from our land, not farms with names people recognize. To live that truth requires you to show people what this land can do.
Because at the end of the day, the land we live on is the food and midwestern cooking, not the coasts, knows how to last through the bounty of summer and the goddamned winter. Rugged and rough, full of hunters and the children of farmers, I believe with everything I have that what we have here is enough.
So look, if you want me to go elsewhere to get the best food in this country, sure. Keep cooking like you are cooking and keep sourcing from out of state.
But if you want me to believe that the food from your kitchen is as good as the food in Chicago or New York or California, you have to believe it first. And it comes from the land and it comes from the food grown and raised on that land.
You have to have faith in your purveyors, you have to have faith in this state not as a carbon copy of things going on elsewhere, but for what we are best at. And I have a clear theory of what Minnesota is best at. It’s this–the promise of harvest in the summer and the creativity to get through the harshest winter with just what we have.
To be Minnesotan is to believe what we have is more than good enough.
PS: If you’re looking for a farm in Minnesota, Homestead is the one.