Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Happy Meat

Maybe I don't need to drive up to Oregon every year...
What's New: Meet the new (meat) CSAs: by Carol Ness, Special to The Chronicle

Meat and poultry raised the old-fashioned way - on the pastureland of small Bay Area farms - is becoming easier for consumers to buy, thanks to an idea borrowed from the produce world: CSAs.

Instead of a weekly box of radishes and radicchio from your friendly local farmer, Bay Area households are picking up monthly boxes of steaks, stew meat, pork loins, lamb chops, whole chickens and sometimes goat, all raised by Northern California farmers and ranchers, mainly on grass.

The new kid on the block comes from Clark Summit Farm in Tomales, where Liz Cunninghame and Dan Bagley raise pigs, chickens (for meat and eggs) and cattle on their hilly acres.

Last Wednesday, some 30 members of the new Clark Summit Meat Club picked up their first monthly 10- or 15-pound boxes of just-packed, frozen cuts at three pickup spots - in San Francisco, Emeryville and Tiburon.

Clark Summit is the third active meat CSA in the Bay Area. Point Reyes' Marin Sun Farms and the Sonoma County Meat Buying Club, based in Petaluma, started their versions earlier this year.

The very first such venture, the Bay Area"

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