Fellow Meatopians,

Like me, you are probably excited by the prospect of eating a whole animal – or at least trying to. It’s a daunting task when just presented with a piglet; but Amstel Light Meatopia, presented by Whole Food’s whole-animal gauntlet is something more akin to Noah’s Ark. I’ve spent the better part of the week trying to figure out who gets what animal, and where they should all line up next to one another. (Because they obviously should; I want a “murderer’s row” of meat cooks, all stepping up to the most challenging of all forms of meatsmanship. Whether it’s April Bloomfield barbecuing a whole mulefoot hog from The Piggery, or Sean Brock on Ossabaw duty, cooking the famous pata negra pig over a fire built partially of carbonized pig bones, or Seamus mullen overseeing the slow searing of slender lambs and sheep from Tamarac Tunis farm in Vermont, these chefs are all trying to do the impossible. They’re trying to cook lean loins and tough, fatty bellies in the same oven for the same amount of time, and hoping, miraculously, that they both come out cooked right.

But of all the meat cooks facing a challenge, the biggest one will surely be faced by a non-cook: Pat LaFrieda, his irascible but loveable father, and his sinister cousin, all teamed up with culinary guerilla Mike Cirino. These guys aren’t cooking a 40 pound goat, like Aaron Sancehz or Floyd Cardoz; they’re not even doing a 200 pound hog, like Shane McBride of Balthazar. No, they’re doing an 850 pound steer.

Let me write that again. An 850 pound steer.

Can you picture how big an animal that is? That’s how much the animal will weigh after it’s butchered; that means that when alive it weighed as much as a car. It weighed more than half a ton. And these guys, inspired by the boundless spirit of Meatopia, are going to cook the thing, taking snout-to-tail cookery to its logical extreme. If that can’t get you to come to Meatopia, I don’t know what will.

People periodically ask me, as a self-appointed meat guru, how I feel about all the pain and suffering inflicted on animals. The answer is easy, and has two parts. One, I feel bad about it. Two, I try not to think about it most of time. The reason is that I am far too promiscuous an eater to limit myself to meats I know lived well. This came home to me at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, an immense event run by Danny Meyer, New York’s most famous and respected restaurateur.

The Big Apple Barbecue Block Party is an incredible event, and frankly it’s the inspiration for Amstel Light Meatopia, presented by Whole Foods. (That, in case you were wondering, is Meatopia’s full and proper name.!) Fourteen of the top barbecuers in the country, including a number of living legends within the barbecue community, show up and give out what must be thousands or even tens of thousands of portions of meat. Chris Lilly’s ineffable, injected pulled pork is delicious when you get it as a sandwich; but when you can pick it right off his cutting board, fresh out of the smoker….I mean, that has to be some kind of pork satori. Likewise with the salt-and-pepper beef ribs, a dish after my own heart, which were served by Blue Smoke, Meyers’ own restaurant. Barbecue is a weird food, in that it takes anywhere between four to fourteen hours to cook, depending on the cut, and then is only really great for 15 minutes. It can be kept warm for hours after that, and be 90% as good, but it’s really at its best for about as long as it takes a piece of lasagna to cool. Strange.

Barbecue takes so long to cook because it was invented as a way for poor people to break out cheap, tough cuts of meat. Because of this, barbecuers traditionally have zero interest in the quality of the meat they use. Both commercially and in competition, the meat tends to be commodity beef and pork. (Chicken is usually a little higher in quality.) That’s ok from a taste point of view – I never had point-cut brisket that wasn’t deliciously fatty and supple when cooked properly – but it leaves you in the dark when it comes to time to consider your conscience. For instance, one company that will never work with for Meatopia is Smithfield, whose animal-welfare practices, despite a full-court PR press, are still widely consider loathsome. (The horriffic pig-torment videos you may have had the misfortune of seeing were at Smithfield facilities.CK) When you eat BBQ, it’s entirely likely that the food you are enjoying came to a bad end.

That’s one reason why I reached out to Whole Foods to sponsor Meatopia. If you have a Whole Foods near you, and you are really serious about getting meat that lived well and died well, Whole Foods is pretty much your best and only chance to be sure of it. You’ll pay a little more, but the chain has rolled out a major five-tier animal cruelty system, and I’m hoping that other chains follow suit. Eventually, maybe, it’ll make economic sense for even commodity meat, such as barbecues use, and I can eat my deckle with a clean conscience. But really, who am I kidding? When you put those ribs in front of me, there is about as much chance of their origin registering with me as there is of my stopping to ponder the nature of cellular degeneration, or the cause of the fall of the Hanoverian dynasty. Of course, that doesn’t make it right.

Meatopia is a disease; and the cure for that disease is meat. It’s obvious to everybody. The love of meat, on the titanic scale of our event, is a form of madness, a paraphilia, an obsession. And it’s not just mine alone. That comforts me. It’s why our sponsor-partners are helping me put on Amstel Light Meatopia, presented by Whole Foods. So I could get emails, like the one from Adam Sappington this morning, that began, “I’m testing and rethinking my approach to the scrapple.”

Consider the depth and passion and insanity and nobility of that sentence. It’s almost Lovecraftian in its obsession and unwholesomeness; which makes me love it all the more. I might have it embroidered on a pillow, or set in cursive script on a varnished wood plank. Nor was the rest of the email any less inspiring (at least to me.)

I have as of recently made scrapple and stuffed it in the pigs head and
roasted it, sliced it, and pan-fried that mother fucker in bacon fat.

DUUUUUDE!

It is truly unique to Meatopia and the journey into what this festival
means to me. I want to rename my dish if it’s not too late: “Crispy Pig
Head Stuffed With Scrapple On a Buttermilk Biscuit With Oregon Chow-Chow.”

Some details followed. I could hardly drink them in.  Many of you probably haven’t ever heard of Adam Sappington. He has a restaurant in Portland, but not one of the ones you’ve heard about. It’s not edgy or hip, nor does it have a rock and roll frisson to it. It’s in an uncool and relatively remote part of Portland. It specializes in a kind of urbanized lardcore, and I went there the first time only because I heard he was cooking fried chicken in cast-iron pans filled with beef tallow. Then I met the guy. He lives and breathes food, especially American traditional cooking, especially meat. He is a virtuoso butcher. He is, just like April Bloomfield and Michael Psilakis and Chris Cosentino and Fergus Henderson, a consummate snout-to-tail chef. And he wears overalls.

So I like Adam a lot, which is why I’m flying him all the way from Portland, despite the fact that nobody here has heard of him. I like Adam so much that he’s even cooking one of the four meat courses in the ultra-exclusive, white-tablecloth MasterCard Meatopia preview dinner. (For the record, Joey Campanaro is on beef duty, Phillipe Moussoud on lamb, and Harold Moore CK on chicken.) I know he’s not a name to conjure with among chefs, and I don’t give a crap. I think they should have heard of him, and I will take a keen pleasure in introducing him to some of his peers, people I think of as kindred spirits, like Sean Brock, and April, and Nate Appleman, who is also cut from that same cloth, and who also makes a great pan of chicken. But the best part will be introducing him to you.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about buffalo. As in, how am I going to get a 500 pound animal brought in here? How will Mike Cirino cook it? Will we need a crane? These are the sort of things you find yourself thinking about when the decide to throw the biggest meat event in history. (Well, maybe not the biggest meat event in history. President Johnson’s legendary victory BBQ at the Johnson Ranch in 1964 might exceed Meatopia in sheer biomass. But still.)

I had originally hoped to have an entire calf cooked in the South American style by my Argentine grillmaster, Ignacio Mattos. You see whole hogs cooked all the time, but how often a whole calf? Given my lifelong love of veal, and the fact that Bev Eggleston, our Grand Marshal, has now developed a new line of veal that he maintains is the most humanely-raised in the world. I thought, why not give Ignacio a whole calf to do? One of Bev’s? But then he sent me this link, and I realized that it was probably not that great an idea. The images here are not gory by any means; they are safe for work and save even for the sight of vegans. But they are, unquestionably, strange. I can’t see someone getting excited by them.

At least not somebody normal.

Which brings us back to Buffalo. Originally, I was thinking of the full-size buffalo, a 1300 pound behemoth. To cook a think like that would require cranes, block and tackle, a specially fabricated iron grill, some halbred-bearing footmen, and perhaps an on-site Medivac squad. Sadly, I’ve had to rein in the idea to a mere 500 pound young buffalo. The animal comes to us from one of our sponsors, Wild Idea Buffalo, and I’ve entrusted it to the most brilliant culinary commando going, Mike Cirino of A Razor, A Shiny Knife. Mike and his partner Daniel are the lunatics who, in case you missed it, served a six course fine-dining meal on the L train last month, so if anybody can pull this thing off, it will be them. Ignacio will just do full veal rib racks and sweebreads over Argentine coals – a less dramatic dish, maybe, but one guaranteed to be as delicious as it is traditional.

I must be out of my mind. Last year’s Meatopia, at Governors Island, drew 5000 people and nearly gave me an aneurysm. There was meat of every kind, and a wildly good time in a pastoral setting you needed a boat to get to. We got approximately three times as many people as I had planned for. And I didn’t plan for much. Make no mistake. I was a figurehead in last year’s Meatopia, a Hollow Man, a “host” about as hands-on in the organizing as the Venus di Milo.

All that has changed.

In the aftermath of Meatopia 2010, I realized that we dodged a bullet. The event could easily have turned into another Altamont. This year there will be no long lines, no running out of food early, no boat rides to an Island accessible only by ferry. I am capping attendance at 3500; instead of 26 chefs, I have 45+; and those chefs will be making a lot more (and better) food than last year. Nobody should have to wait 20 minutes or more for a little plate of meat; that’s not the spirit of Meatopia. And nobody should have to wait for a boat to get to this event. So this year we are on the Brooklyn waterfront, which you can walk to or take a taxi to or ride your bike to or get to via the subway. And once you’re there, you’ll be surrounded on three sides by water, cooled by river breezes, which intermingle with the fragrant fumes of hardwood smoke. Because there is no propane at Meatopia. I’ve also hired the top culinary event producers in the business, CREaM, to do the event. These are the guys who produce events for the South Beach and New York Wine and Food Festivals, so Meatopia is officially grown up.

And I’ve done my part too. I don’t believe anybody has ever put together a roster of meat chefs like this. The Animal boys are coming out from LA, Naomi Pomeroy of Portland’s Beast (and of Top Chef: Masters fame), Chris Hastings of Alabama’s revered Hot and Hot Fish Club, and the brilliant Sean Brock of Husk and McCready’s will be there too, doing a whole Ossabaw hog from our man Bev Eggleston. Bev is just as out of his mind as ever, and will also be getting behind an amazing yet-to-be-announced Argentine grill program as well. And think of our New York Chefs: Aaron Sanchez on whole spicy Mexican goats! Seamus Mullen doing Spanish spit-roasted lambs! April Bloomfield on whole hog! Jewish banh mi from Mile End. Porchetta alla Morini. BZ Grill’s legendary pork gyros. Mangalitsa pork steak from Edi and the Wolf, in one of our many special chef-and-farm pairings. Holy god, am I excited. And that’s just the food.

Our presenting sponsor, Amstel Light, will have some of the coldest, most delicious, and healthiest of beers flowing freely. It will be available at fair cost to everybody, and all-you-can-drink for our “Carnisseur” and VIP ticket holders. Whole Foods will be a major presence, and Nate Appleman has something super cool cooked up representing our friends at Chipotle Mexican Grill. (Think house-ground chorizo tostadas, not to spoil the surprise or anything.) I am linking up various musical acts to perform, too. If you have any suggestions, write us. And keep checking back. The Meatopia Diary (I am boycotting the word “blog”) will be updated every few days or so.