The Sugar Mountain Farm Butcher Shop Project launches!

Pull on your galoshes and hurry on over to Kickstarter to back a really fantastic project: Walter, Holly, and their family are building an on-farm butcher shop at Sugar Mountain Farm! This really is good news, not just for those of us here in Vermont and New England, but for all who support locally and humanely grown meat with which to feed ourselves, our family, our friends, and our customers.

A Sugar Mountain Farm pig

Sugar Mountain Farm is already known for the sterling, scrumptious, and altogether superb pork that they raise, and when the Butcher Shop Project is finished, they’ll be able to process their meat in a smartly designed abattoir, butchery, and kitchen space. This means the pigs will be free from the stress associated with being transported for many miles, and this is both more humane and results in better quality meat.

I encourage you to go over to the Sugar Mountain Farm Kickstarter page and learn more about this family and their work, and please pledge a little or a lot, depending on your circumstances.

Much of the pork that I’ve used in the cooking projects which I share on this blog have as their delicious center a bit of Sugar Mountain Farm pork, and it means such a lot to me that my ingredients and therefore my food has a back-story, a provenence which encompasses growing friendships, shared passions for modern farming lives, and, in the case of Walter and his family, a genuinely remarkable generosity. If you spend even a little time reading the Sugar Mountain Farm blog, you can see for yourself how Walter shares his astonishing range of experience and knowledge without reserve.

Little Hope with piglet friends

I am grateful for each opportunity that I have to buy a bit of Sugar Mountain Farm pork for a cooking project –a thick slab of belly destined for bacon-y goodness, a few kidneys with which to cook up my beloved deviled kidneys on toast, or a jowl to make a greedy hunk of guanciale. I’m grateful because I trust these people as farmers, and I just plain like them, more and more as I get to know them. And I love the subversive and clandestine glee that I get when I meet Holly & Hope at the park & ride off Route 91 to exchange a bit of cash for meaty treats.

Hope and I are both fans of a certain genre of books, and while Holly clambers around in the van finding my wares and writes out the receipt, Hope and I exchange these great flurries of book-recommendations. This is how shopping for food should be, at least part of the time.

I can’t wait to see the finished Sugar Mountain Farm Butcher Shop!