Hi All

First off I'd like to thank the pig for being such a wonderfully flavorful creature, hooray pig!

After reading the (second) linked article I followed the link to the initial article that seemed to start this whole thing. E&P got a nice write up about their business, and about a wonderful hobby! But as I see it they appear to be far from victims. I just don't believe these guys are stupid.

After reading the article it appears to me that these two guys have grown a rather lucrative business. I don't believe that there was anything in this article that wasn't released as a calculated risk to themselves, and their company. I would suspect this was an effective marketing campaign for they're soon to be public released pork products.

Poor guys? I don't buy it at all>>> porcine propaganda I believe!


All that aside...best of luck to these guys! it looks like their off to a great (calculated) start to their (soon to be) legitimate business

DAN

So all this is real, no matter that there are some who find it freakishly outlandish to imagine that raiding maybe the most famous chef in town could possibly have anything to do with Sula's story a week or two earlier.

While every "journalist" would like to think that their stories have far-reaching implications, it takes a real ego to link these two events. Sula was very quick to declare himself the center of the USDA's universe when it wasn't even clear what the Frontera "raid" was. Turns out to be a tempest in a thimble - and possibly less when real facts are presented.

Also, a little research would have disclosed that the USDA regulates interstate activity. It's the local health departments that regulate food preparation that's local in nature. Sula still doesn't have an accurate version of what happened but he was more than happy to assume that a conspiracy was in place well before he had real facts.

Mike G wrote:Twitter had nothing to do with it, though an actual journalist actually employed by an actual paper paper that's been around since the LBJ administration did, therefore... the Internet is bad!

Yes, an actual journalist (and a good one at that) living in a report-now, research-later world. The piece was in Reader's "Blog" section, a heading which otherwise respectable media outlets seem to believe relieves them of normal journalistic restraints. As if the reading public really differentiates between an online Chicago Tribune or Reader "article" and a Chicago Tribune or Reader blog post by the same authors that write for the paper. Gotta compete with The Dining Diva somehow I suppose.

The food processing facilities with whom I've done work would not call what's been described here as a "raid." They'd call it a visit. Just saying. Not a whole lot of fuzzy's when you've been "raided" by the feds.

David Hammond, curious about what you've written. If the source was different...say you interviewed an USDA inspector who had just shut down a pork processing plant that supplied artisanal meat to the Chicago area....and that source in your opinion may have been careless with what she said for attribution....would you similarly feel compelled to pick up the phone and confirm a second time that the conversation was on the record?

Mike G wrote:

My thinking was more that the USDA was sending a message to the supplier that E&P and Bayless had in common. "We can't stop you from supplying meat to E&P, but we can take away two of your very best customers (Bayless and Sherman) if you don't stop."

Which would be a serious violation of their regulatory authority, and possibly merit prosecution of the agents involved if they're trying to use their authority to run a farmer out of business.

I didn't realize it would be illegal if this is indeed what happened, but for sure it would be an abuse of power and very very wrong. Stands to reason it would be illegal too, as it should be. I guess my presumption was that the USDA has such broad latitude to intimidate within the law that they weren't violating any actual statute.

auxen1 wrote:David Hammond, curious about what you've written. If the source was different...say you interviewed an USDA inspector who had just shut down a pork processing plant that supplied artisanal meat to the Chicago area....and that source in your opinion may have been careless with what she said for attribution....would you similarly feel compelled to pick up the phone and confirm a second time that the conversation was on the record?

Yes, conscience would dictate that I do that.

So what you're saying is... the poor little food multinationals are the victims of a campaign run by the mighty home charcuterie cartel?

D4v3 says what I would have said, if I hadn't done a million things today in the meantime. I do think they wisely apply different rules here and there (I've often joked that there are two sets of health regs for restaurants, the regular and the Chinatown one). Bully for that. On the other hand, I could name one well known place that, when I talked to the guy a year ago, felt he was being pushed out of the charcuterie business by the health dept. and wouldn't be in it much longer. So all this is real, no matter that there are some who find it freakishly outlandish to imagine that raiding maybe the most famous chef in town could possibly have anything to do with Sula's story a week or two earlier.

Wow, the health department, the USDA and now the artisanal pig farmers and charcuterie producers are all in on a conspiracy, or are they different conspiracies, and how does Chinatown play in this, and do you think they have no respect for Christmas, or is it really some sort of conspiracy to destroy Christmas????

Sorry, I can't participate in this discussion any more, I have to go fill the bathtub with water, turn the lights out, close the shades and eliminate any evidence that I am here before I tear up the carpets and rock myself to sleep playing my saxophone. Maybe I will feel safe then. Probably not, but I will feel better. Mods, please remove this post and every other post I have ever made.

Thank you, now everyone please forget I ever existed and do not, under any circumstances tell them about the orange I brought back from Spain when I forgot it was in my bag. Please. I swear I ate it immediately and incinerated the rind and all my s**t for the next week to assure it would not contaminate our agriculture, Cargill, Slow Foods, and Certified Organic be praised! I love 'em all.

dicksond wrote:Sorry, I can't participate in this discussion any more, I have to go fill the bathtub with water, turn the lights out, close the shades and eliminate any evidence that I am here before I tear up the carpets and rock myself to sleep playing my saxophone. Maybe I will feel safe then. Probably not, but I will feel better. Mods, please remove this post and every other post I have ever made.

Well, they don't take kindly to Coppola references in this thread, I can assure you....

The Tribune's The Stew confirms that, apart from confusing the USDA with the Illinois Dept. of Agriculture, Sula's internet-irresponsible blog post was largely correct. Bolding added to point out where things that were said to be preposterous above are affirmed by actual government officials as true:

Mr. Bayless, step away from the bacon. And we’ll be taking the head cheese, too, thank you.

That’s basically what happened Tuesday morning when inspectors from the Illinois Department of Agriculture, motivated by a Chicago Reader story, showed up at Rick Bayless’ Frontera Grill in search of uninspected pig meat.

IDA spokesperson Jeff Squibb says the IDA confiscated an 80-pound box of bacon that bore no mark of inspection and a mess of headcheese, from Maple Creek Farm in Pewaukee, that bore a Wisconsin mark of inspection — which doesn’t fly in Illinois.

The Chicago Reader story by Mike Sula ran last month and profiled two suburban Wisconsin men (E & P Meats) who produce unlicensed charcuterie at home. The story said the men share a pork processor with the restaurants, which led the IDA to suspect they might also be "getting uninspected meat and it turned out to be correct," Squibb said.

A Frontera spokesman, Jen Fite, said the Tuesday visit was "very low-key, not a business-stopping adventure." Frontera Grill says all its meats were shown to be properly inspected and sourced, except one big box of bacon.

The IDA inspectors, however, also had a technical beef with the head cheese, a product made from diced pig head and served on sandwiches with tongue at Bayless’ restaurant Xoco on the same block.

"The [head cheese] is probably OK, I’ll say that," admitted Colleen O’Keefe, division manager for Food Safety and Animal Protection at the Illinois Department of Agriculture in Springfield. "But it’s just not legal to sell meat here that has not been federally inspected in Illinois. We think that state inspections are as good or better than federally inspected meat, but that’s just the law."...

Wow, they found something that came from the lawless wilds of Wisconsin. Note also that there's NO proof that the bacon came from or had ANYTHING to do with the supplier, yet the government blithely implies that they found exactly what they suspected from the beginning.

There were, in fact, lots of tweets and re-tweets about this. If that really matters.

Yes, conscience would dictate that I do that.

Commendable.

Mike G wrote:Wow, they found something that came from the lawless wilds of Wisconsin. Note also that there's NO proof that the bacon came from or had ANYTHING to do with the supplier, yet the government blithely implies that they found exactly what they suspected from the beginning.

Seems pretty likely they wouldn't leave empty handed after putting that manpower into the "raid" in the first place. If that one box isn't legal from the get-go, why would they just let it slide if they were already there? It's like a cop who has permission to search your house for something else finds a bag of illicit substances on the table, sure that's not what they were coming for, but are they just going to leave it there? I don't like it any more than you do, and I'm glad it's getting press (however unclear that press may have been at first), but none of us should be surprised that something even remotely questionable in the eyes of the law would get pulled like that when they're clearly trying to make an "example".

edit: Hell, for all we know, maybe the chefs had it ordered for themselves and it was never even meant for public consumption. How many of us have had things shipped to work in the past? It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility to me that they could've ordered it to divvy up when it arrived. Regardless, these cops will come and try to snatch your crops if they can. Bumbaklaat.

edit 2: Goebbels.

Wasn't the bacon confiscated because it didn't have an inspection label? That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to me.

What, did I stutter?

My point was, they spun it as a case of having found exactly what they came searching for, making it sound like the bacon probably came from the farmer in question and they nabbed Bayless redhanded, when in fact the idea that "you share a supplier with someone doing bad things, therefore you must be too!" was always illogical, there's no reason to assume the bacon has anything to do with that farmer, and it may very well just be missing the label it came with after handling by the staff (such as opening it or trimming it).

Still, I will rest easy knowing that for one night, at least, Rick Bayless will kill no one.

The IDA came looking for uninspected meat. They found meat that wasn't properly labeled to prove inspection. At the end of the day the source of the meat doesn't really matter.

If the staff lost the label, isn't that really their fault? I mean, this isn't exactly some mom and pop operation where they might be ignorant as to some of the finer points of the regulations they're supposed to be following.

Also, I don't really think anyone is making a big deal out of this other than people here. I could probably ask 20 people in my office tomorrow if they heard about this incident and maybe 3 would say yes (and maybe 1 would actually care).

LTH,

Moved from Eating Out in Chicagoland to Other Culinary Chat.

As the thread has gotten a bit heated, and circular, it is getting close to being locked.

Regards,
Gary for the moderators