There’s something different about eating beef tartare while listening to the farmer who raised the cow speak five feet to your left, but sometimes that’s what happens at Avling.
On Sunday, March 1, Avling hosted an informal “Meet the Farmers” workshop, where four suppliers shared their knowledge—and their products—with a packed restaurant and bar. A day earlier, a group of ten arrived early in the morning for a more structured workshop on building a home garden, hosted by the Avling gardening team.
It was a weekend of learning, and it won’t be the last. Three more gardening workshops are already scheduled, and plans are underway for more farmers’ nights and other instructional workshops, covering such potential topics as whole animal butchery, charcuterie making, bread baking, and more.
Following the first in a series of four gardening workshops dedicated to growing food in the city, each attendee went home with a plan, planted seedlings, and healthy dose of knowledge. Figuring out what to plant and when, what crops go together and which need their own space, and how to practice sustainable gardening isn’t simple, but Saturday’s participants all left feeling far more confident about the season ahead. Future workshops are set to cover springtime planting outdoors, harvesting and replanting in the summer, and seed saving in the fall, so don’t worry if you missed the first; there’s plenty still to be covered, and plenty of gardening ahead.
The first “Meet the Farmers” workshop, meanwhile, kicked off with fourth-generation farmer Kara Enright, whose Enright Cattle Co. supplies the beef in the aforementioned tartare, explaining the thoughtful methods she and her family employ to raise the tastiest beef as humanely as possible. “Our whole philosophy is to be as sustainable as possible and use as much of the animal as we can,” Enright says, holding up a leather bag made from the hide of one of their cows, and noting, for example, that they make soap from the extra fat. But the meat is the real star. In the tartare, it has a pleasant chew, earthy mineral notes, and a concentrated meatiness. In the charred ribeye samples circling the room as Enright finishes speaking, it’s even better: bold beef with just enough funk and sweet, tender fat explode in the bite-sized chunk cooked to a perfect medium-rare.
Jeffrey Linton of Linton Pasture Pork also joined, shedding light on how he grows his own grains for feed and lets his pigs graze all the wild plants in the farm’s large pastures to produce the best-tasting pork. Nancy Self of Tamarack Farms shared her similar take on lamb. “We approached farming as eaters,” she says, explaining how she and her husband rehabilitated nearly 400 acres of fallow land by building an old-school mixed farm with livestock and vegetables. They never spray, and they feed the sheep entirely GMO-free food. “We wanted to give these animals a natural, healthy life, and a peaceful end.” Again, the proof is in the product: bites of lamb leg that eat like a more flavourful chop—juicy with a hint of gaminess, this is deeply savoury, supremely satisfying meat.
Listening to these farmers speak, it’s impossible to ignore the realities of eating meat. But, if we choose to eat carnivorously, it’s incumbent upon us to think about how these animals live, how they die, and how their farming affects the environment as a whole. As Dave Kranenburg from Kendal Hills Farm—home to myriad forms of poultry, amazing mushrooms, and more—notes, 99.9% of the chickens we eat are raised in about seven weeks in cramped quarters, while his heritage chickens take four months to mature and roam free outdoors. There’s commodity farming, and then there’s the “ambitious edible landscape” Kranenburg is working towards. There are differences, and they’re stark. “Part of what I see as my obligation as a farmer is to educate around the choices I’ve made, and why I’m making those,” he says. “Why I think they’re good for the environment, for the food, and more importantly, for the quality of the meat and mushrooms that we’re putting in our body.”
Click here to learn more about Avling’s upcoming events.