Agriculture, they tell you the moment you get to Des Moines, no longer rules the local economy. Corn and pigs are no longer kings.
Maybe not, but farm traditions die hard.
Although almost half of Iowa’s pork producers went out of business between 1992 and 1997, the surviving family farmers cling to their debt-ridden, often economically marginal farms the way grand old English families hang on to their country houses, even when the roof leaks and the servants are long gone.
Hogs still outnumber people here 5 to 1. Lots of people eat pork sandwiches, made from breaded, deep-fried tenderloins, instead of hamburgers. At the Iowa State Fair, an 11-day extravaganza each August, hungry Hawkeyes flock to a huge dining hall called the Pork Tent. And Iowa still chooses a young woman every year to wear a crown and a pigskin sash that identifies her as the Iowa Pork Queen.
Pork queen? Anywhere else, call a young woman a pork queen, and she’ll likely clobber you. In Iowa, the title is a badge of honor.
Big corporate operators have taken over the bulk of Iowa’s pork production, with dire results not only for the small farmer but also for those of us who were raised on succulent pork chops and pork roasts.
Fat gives pork some of its flavor, but modern hogs are bred to minimize fat. Producers noticed that Americans were choosing chicken over beef.
Raised in close quarters inside enormous metal buildings, modern hogs foul the air for miles around, and their meat is bland, dry and tough when cooked.
“Pork, the other white meat,” the ads say. Right they are; much of it, as Edward Behr wrote last summer in his erudite newsletter, The Art of Eating, “is as lean and characterless as factory chicken breast.”
Happily, Iowa’s rich, dark soil holds onto people like Kelly Biensen, a fifth-generation hog farmer, and his wife, Nina, a pair of stubborn, well-educated souls who want to do things differently. They are retro-pioneers who produce pork the old-fashioned way, giving their pigs lots of room to move about and eschewing the drugs and hormones many use.
They have also organized a marketing group called Eden Farms, which sells pork from their farm and 85 other family farms that raise pigs known as Berkshires, which originated in England 300 years ago. The breed is well known for its flavorful meat, well marbled with fat.
Try the gingered pork tenderloin at Bistro 43 in Des Moines, and you will taste the difference. Jeremy Morrow, 32, the chef, told me that he always has Eden Farms pork on his menu, prepared in various ways. The meat is moist, tender and almost buttery, with a bright, fresh taste. You know that you have hold of a piece of pig.
The Biensens know that their pork tastes better, but for them, what is more important is that it commands a premium price. It has enabled them to escape the trap of commodity pricing.
Overproduction has driven the price of everyday pork below the amount that it costs a small farmer to produce. Biensen said that as a rule of thumb, it takes about $100 to raise a hog for market, and the price has fallen below that level more often in the last few years than it has risen above it. Most small farmers struggle to break even.
Things are bad for little guys everywhere. Glenn Grimes, an economist who does studies for the National Pork Producers Council, estimated recently that 8,000 hog farmers across the country quit the business in 1998 and 8,000 more quit last year.
“Life has not been very easy,” said Biensen, 47, who lives in a battered farmhouse surrounded by pens and barns and piggeries, at the center of his 248 acres. “We haven’t lived as well as we should. My wife has a Ph.D. in animal husbandry from Iowa State University. We could have done other things if our goal was money. But we wanted this, our own farm.”
Biensen pronounces his family name, which is Alsatian in origin, BUY-en-son. He wears steel-rimmed glasses that make him look rather professorial, and as he talked, seated at a computer in a corner of the worn family kitchen, a small, rueful smile flickered across his face.
“The big change is the cost of farming,” he told me one snowy morning in January. “In only about 40 years, we went from $300 to $500 for an acre of land, to $3,500 an acre. It has settled back to $2,500, but that’s still almost 10 times as much. Forty years ago, the biggest tractor was 70 horsepower. Now, they look like a house coming across the field.
“As a result, labor is being replaced by capital as the essential element,” Biensen said. “The big producer, with more to invest, gets bigger, and he can make a deal with the packing houses. The more hogs you can give a packer, the higher a price you get.”
At the moment, it costs about 40 cents to produce a pound of pork, which then sells for 38 to 39 cents. Eden Farms pork, however, fetches roughly 50 cents a pound from its customers, mostly clubs and restaurants in central Iowa. The Biensens grossed only $2,300 in January 1999, not long after they began. But business is growing steadily in their niche market: in December, they grossed $13,800.
Several things, Biensen suggested, account for the bland flavor of most supermarket pork.
One is the modern method of raising hogs in confinement, “always indoors,” he said, “in the same exact spot for their whole lives,” eating there, sleeping there, defecating there, through the slatted floor into vast, smelly manure lagoons. But moving in and out of shelters, roaming in open lots, the way the Biensen’s pigs do, even in cold weather, seems to yield firmer, juicier, tastier pork.
Hogs that are too lean cannot stand the cold outdoors.
A second factor is PSS, for porcine stress syndrome, which is caused by a gene often carried by breeds used for factory farming. It makes the animals more efficient: They produce more pounds of lean meat per pound. But they often produce meat that Biensen describes as P.S.E. The letters stand for pale, soft and exudative. Exudative meat loses much of its moisture as it cooks, which is why a fried pork chop can taste like leather.
Beef is graded according to its structure and fat content, with “utility” at the bottom of the scale and “prime” at the top. The more marbling, the higher the grade, but no such classification exists for pork. (All meat is inspected, but grading is a voluntary process.)
Ken Prusa, a professor of food science at Iowa State University in Ames, argues that moisture, not fat, is the key to flavor. Low-fat, high-moisture pork, if not overcooked, can be delicious, he says, although most top chefs pay top dollar to get pork with a higher fat content.
One problem is that most home cooks and some chefs overcook pork in their determination to kill any lurking trichinae, the parasites that cause trichinosis. But with the disappearance of pork produced from pigs fed on garbage, and major improvements in hog-rearing methods, Professor Prusa said, the chances of contracting trichinosis are nearly nil.
In any event, he added, no one need fear pork cooked to medium–160 degrees, with a bit of pink at the center. Other food technologists assert that medium-rare pork, cooked to 145 degrees, is perfectly safe. Some professional cooks here and abroad cook pork less than that.
Breed also counts. Berkshires produce somewhat smaller loins, which means fewer pounds of salable meat, but the meat has very fine fibers, which give it greater water retention capacity, and more tiny veins of intramuscular fat, which help to give it a more full-bodied flavor.
The Biensens raise purebred Berkshires and hybrids of Berkshires crossed with other breeds like Durocs, one of the major commercial breeds. The 75 percent hybrids grow faster, and the sows give birth to larger litters, while retaining the desirable characteristics of purebreds. His charges are fed soybean meal, ground corn and vitamins and minerals, but no animal byproducts and no antibiotics, which are standard for many factory pigs.
Already, he noted, Berkshire pork has attracted a wide following; Japanese customers, who are notoriously picky about meat, like Berkshire pork so much that they buy most of the production of farmers affiliated with another marketing group, American Berkshire Gold.
Chef’s selection
Chefs across this country, dissatisfied with the pork available through normal channels, also have found alternatives.
Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., turned to Niman Ranch, whose beef long had been featured on her menus, and Niman Ranch eventually hooked up with Paul Willis, an Iowa farmer. His and 36 other farms in Iowa and nearby states now supply Niman, which sells to restaurants and direct to consumers. Telephone orders can be placed at 510-808-0330.
Another top-flight producer is Four Story Hill Farm in Honesdale, Pa., 30 miles northeast of Scranton. Sylvia Pryzant, who runs it with her husband, Stephen, told me that they custom-raise poultry and pigs for chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Wayne Nish in New York, Charlie Trotter in Chicago and Thomas Keller in the Napa Valley. The Pryzants also concentrate on Berkshire hogs, fed in part on chopped fresh apples, mostly McIntoshes, and slaughter them when they are younger (12 weeks old) and smaller (55 pounds dressed weight) than is usual with the pig farmers in the Midwest.
The Pryzants moved in 1992 to Pennsylvania from the New York suburbs, where Sylvia had been working for a non-profit organization and Stephen had worked in food-service in a nursing home. He learned farming on a kibbutz in Israel. Now, she said, they watch their pampered porkers “running around in happy circles every morning.”
SOY-MARINATED PORK TENDERLOIN WITH SHIITAKE CREAM
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Marinating time: 4-6 hours
Cooking time: About 50 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
The recipe is adapted from Bistro 43 in Des Moines. Serve it with gingered sweet potatoes (see recipe) if you like.
2 tablespoons each: chopped ginger root, cilantro, basil
1/4 cup sake or white wine
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 pork tenderloin, about 2 pounds
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 cup sliced shiitake mushrooms
2 tablespoons chopped green onions
1/2 cup whipping cream 1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth
Salt, freshly ground pepper
1. Combine ginger, cilantro, basil, sake and soy sauce in blender. Puree until smooth. Place pork in large bowl; pour soy mixture over. Cover; refrigerate 4-6 hours.
2. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Transfer pork from marinade to greased roasting pan, reserving 1/4 cup of the marinade. Roast pork until internal temperature reaches 150 degrees, about 50 minutes; center should remain slightly pink.
3. Meanwhile, heat oil in skillet over medium heat; add mushrooms and green onions. Cook until mushrooms are softened, about 2 minutes. Add reserved marinade, cream and broth. Simmer until liquid has been reduced to 3/4 of its original volume. Season with salt and pepper; keep warm.
4. Thinly slice tenderloin; divide among 4 warmed serving plates. Spoon shiitake cream over pork.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories ………… 430 Fat ………… 23 g Saturated fat .. 10 g
% calories from fat .. 49 Cholesterol .. 175 mg Sodium ……. 445 mg
Carbohydrates ….. 4.8 g Protein …….. 49 g Fiber ……… 0.6 g
GINGERED SWEET POTATOES
Preparation time: 1 hour
Cooking time: About 45 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup whipping cream
3 tablespoons each: finely chopped ginger, garlic
3 large sweet potatoes, about 2 pounds
Salt, freshly ground pepper
1. Melt butter in small saucepan over low heat; add cream. Remove from heat. Add ginger and garlic. Set aside to steep.
2. Fill large pot halfway with water; heat to boil over high heat. Add sweet potatoes; boil until potatoes are tender in center when pierced with knife, about 30 minutes. Allow potatoes to cool enough to be handled; peel. Place potatoes in medium saucepan; cover to keep warm.
3. Place fine-meshed strainer over medium bowl. Pour ginger/garlic mixture into strainer; press to extract as much liquid as possible. Discard solids; add liquid to sweet potatoes. Place saucepan of potatoes over low heat; mash well until potatoes are smooth and reheated. Season with salt and pepper.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories ………… 275 Fat ……….. 14 g Saturated fat .. 9 g
% calories from fat .. 46 Cholesterol .. 45 mg Sodium …… 110 mg
Carbohydrates …… 35 g Protein …….. 3 g Fiber …….. 4.3 g
