Harvest 2010
By Chef Jay Pierce, Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen
Click here to see the magazine article

What is “Sustainable”? Really?
The term “sustainable” is popping up in the media and on menus, but its definition is so nebulous, that unscrupulous individuals benefit from its usage without having to qualify anything; much like the word “green” these days.  Folks love to toss off the word of the moment so that they can sound hip and/or knowledgeable and it often makes light of those who take its precepts seriously.  “Sustainable” has a plethora of meanings. Sure we can quote the Oxford Universal dictionary, 1964 edition (doesn’t everyone?), and find that is means “supportable; maintainable;” and the word “sustain” indicates: “to keep a person or community from failing or giving way.”  A path to sustainability, therefore, is a commitment to others more so than to ourselves. In the kitchen the mantra of sustainability is “waste not, want not” because “it ain’t sustainable to go broke,” as a friend often reminds me.  So my kitchen philosophy is part Escoffier, part Depression-era grandma.

Let us look at the food chain through this lens.  It begins with farmers (of plants and animals) that spend the great part of everyday nurturing the Earth and its plants and animals that become the food we take for granted.  Those labors of love are transported to the back doors of restaurants, where unseen men and women spend many hours crafting raw ingredients into tantalizing dishes.  That food is often served by someone who harbors hopes of doing something completely different as a career.  The recipient of said food is often a person who accomplishes many things in the course of a day to accumulate enough capital to enjoy a meal at the restaurant.  That capital must be distributed to all of the folks in the chain with enough going all of the way back to the stewardship of the planet with respect for the lives that depend on it (and the lives yet to come) for it to be considered “sustainable.”

I wanted to be more impactful in my part of the food chain.  I believe that the more a person knows about where his sustenance comes from, the greater the strength they draw from it.  So I set out to meet more farmers and make more informed decisions about the food that we prepare in our restaurant.  At the Greensboro Curb Market, I approached a certain farmer’s table (let’s call him Mr. B) because his sign said, “Whey-fed Pork,” (from goat cheese production).   I’d just read an article about John Besh waxing poetic on its succulence, so I figured I couldn’t afford it.  I asked if there were any cuts that he had trouble selling at the retail table; I may be able to use them in the restaurant.  Two things came up, fat and liver; so I gave myself two goals: figuring out liver pudding and using fresh fat to replace the salt-cured fatback in our collard greens.  The liver pudding never caught fire, but we still make it today; the fresh fat changed the collard greens for the better and we never looked back.  That experiment led to my asking around about more locally-raised meat.  As we started using ground beef from another farm in our burgers and meatloaf, I began to learn more about the local food economy. When I found that I could use more fat than Mr. B’s hogs could yield, I talked to other producers about using up their excess; at one point I was buying pork fat from four different farms, just to meet the demand for our collard greens.  Mr. B and I began to talk about ground pork, shoulders (a hot commodity in the Piedmont), shanks and bellies; eventually the talk turned to buying whole pigs from his farm.  This raised some concerns for me.  If I buy pieces of a pig, then the responsibility to find a home for all of the other pieces belonged to the farmer, right?  I wasn’t buying the prime cuts in the first place, I was taking advantage of what other folks had no interest in; I was helping them.  If I began buying whole hogs for the restaurant, then the responsibility fell on me, from a fiscal and ethical perspective, to use all of the parts; in other words, sustainability didn’t end on the farm.  I could get my mind around this new challenge; folks have been doing it for centuries, it just took being creative.  Bones and feet for stock, bellies for sliders, shanks for a special, liver for pudding, hams and shoulders for pulled pork, fat for the collards; I began using everything but the loins and tenderloins, which were ending up as wood-fired rotisserie specials at our sister restaurant.

None of this sounds all that special.  This country is full of culinary professionals touting their use of local, seasonal and sustainable foodstuffs; I’m joining the majority, right?  Being sustainable means more than just buying ingredients from a producer with sustainable practices, it means considering the whole animal in context and not just taking the choicest cuts with no regard for the rest of the animal.  I’m no Fergus Henderson or April Bloomfield; I’m just not that talented. I’m no culinary dilettante either, cooking nasty bits for shock value or bragging rights.  I believe in honoring the animals that we choose to eat, and respecting the blood, sweat and tears that go into running a farm and into operating a kitchen.  I believe that we’ve been misled into thinking of cooking and eating as utilitarian activities like putting gas in your car or changing the oil, things that you have someone do for you or you manage to do for yourself so that you don’t break down.  We need to remember our place in the food chain, we vote for sustainability with our dollars, our purchasing decisions.  Sustainability doesn’t stop when you buy something.  We need to celebrate the small events, like growing, harvesting, cooking and eating that make up our lives and not allow them to be reduced to mundane functions in our society.