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| KING ARTHURS GOAT HERDER |
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| Thursday, 14 June 2007 | ||||||||
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 In trying to understand why so few people cook goat in the U.S., it's not enough to point out that the corporate boards of the large corporations that sell America most of its food are controlled by "ethnically blanched," businessmen who don't eat goats. Corporations exist to make money and they don't stay prejudiced forever to the color of the hand that offers it. I believe that if, or when, enough shoppers ask for goat chops, chain stores will carry them. Besides, goat used to be a common food back in the British Isles. The domestic goat, Capra hircus, evolved in Africa and the Middle East, and came to Britain with the Romans. But when the Romans left, the goats stayed. People depended on them for meat, for milk, for skins, for pulling light carts, and for clearing the brushy forests that encroached on civilization during the Dark Ages. Much later, when the English lords enclosed the commons to run sheep for wool production, the peasants were pushed onto smaller plots of land where maintaining a milk cow was uneconomical. The goat assumed a much more important role in the lives of the dispossessed country folk because a goat could live in a small yard and eat vegetable waste from the garden and weeds gathered from the roadside. As the industrial revolution gathered momentum, potatoes were the starchy fuel that filled the peasants' bellies. Herbs and greens helped with vitamins, and a little goat milk or cheese, plus the occasional ration of male kid or old doe, added protein. It was during this hungry era when goats got a reputation for eating anything, and no wonder-they were often close to starving, too. The proverbial goats pictured eating tin cans were really only licking the starchy glue that had been applied to the side to make the paper label stick. When they're free to roam, goats are very intelligent foragers, and they're picky about eating the healthiest, freshest herbs. Like many Americans, my forefathers came to the New World from Britain in a prison ship. They were dumped off in the Carolinas and did a fast fade into the Ozarks. America afforded refugee white-trash emigrants like my family a new beginning, and they seized this rare opportunity for betterment to ape their betters. In Ulster, my forefathers had kept a skinny goat in a pen outside the croft, but in America, they learned to keep a green lawn in their front yard, bordered by petunias and a white picket fence. Goat meat was a lean meat with an aftertaste of poverty, and they relished eating slabs of beef, just like the lords did who'd thrown them in the prison ships. Following the Southern defeat in the Civil War, unemployed Anglo-Mongrel Confederate veterans like my relatives went west and found work on the open frontier herding cattle, stealing cattle, and shooting each other over property rights. The romantic figure of the cowboy was born out of the mingled blood and dust. Soon the myth of the Old West flavored beef the way the mesquite smoke flavored the beans. Beef tasted like freedom. And goat meat? By the end of the 19th century, America was flooded with emigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Mexico. Goat meat took on a Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim taste. It wasn't a "white" meat. Times have changed. America's political culture has embraced multiculturalism, yet goat meat has yet to break into the mainstream. Why? Partly because of language. We eat beef, not cow. We eat pork, not pig. We'd eat horsemeat if it was called pumpkin pie. Having a name for a meat that's different from the name of the animal it came from gives squeamish consumers a chance to forget that they're eating a creature. Some producers call goat meat cabrito others call it capretto, and still others call it chevon. I asked Mark Pastore, the owner of Incanto Restaurant in Noe Valley, about the challenges of writing a menu that features goat meat. Incanto is an Italian restaurant that puts a sophisticated spin on a rustic, seasonal cuisine. Pastore means shepherd in Italian, so Mark is almost fated to serve goat. He had a smile on his face when he answered. "You want to sell me tender, young, locally grown goats? How do you think it's going to look if I have Ôneighborhood kid' on the menu?" Mark was kidding. Incanto does serve goat sometimes, but the supply of high quality goat isn't as consistent as it is for pork or lamb. Kid production can be problematic. Goats require a lot of fencing. It's not so much that goats like to escape enclosure; where goats have adequate food, space, and water, they're not inclined to ramble. The problem is that goats are vulnerable to predators, especially coyotes and domestic dogs. "Nobody's" dog never kills a goat-it's always "someone else's" dog that's responsible. And "someone else" always lets their dogs run free, so the cost of constructing tight fences is an expensive barrier to raising goats. There are more mountain lions in California every day, too, and no fence can keep a cougar out. At present, goat husbandry in California tends to be carried out on a small scale, by people like me, who can effectively fence their land and keep an eye on their herds. For a while, the goat meat industry was held back by the fact that most goats in the U.S. were milking goats, and not very efficient at converting feed into meat. Dairy goats are bony-framed animals that have grown accustomed to a barnyard setting over the last several hundred years, and they're used to bleating loudly until someone comes to feed them, rather than hustling for browse on the range. But now there is a breed of goat available called the Boer goat that was developed in South Africa as a meat goat. Boer goats are hardy animals with a good foraging ethic, and they can convert brush and herbs that are unpalatable to cows into meat. If you know to look for the characteristic red head and white body of the Boer goat, you'll notice them in pastures all around California. But there isn't yet much of the processing infrastructure necessary for a mature goat meat industry. There are very few auction yards or sales barns where small-scale producers can sell their animals to buyers, and not many licensed slaughter houses are set up to handle small animals like goats. Affordable goat meat is a chicken/egg problem. Without consumer demand for kid, there's not enough production to make the quantum leap to an economy of scale that can support the necessary "post-harvest" infrastructure, but without the sales, slaughter, and processing infrastructure in place, it's hard for goat ranchers to satisfy federal regulations, meet existing demand, or reach new consumers. To add to the complexity of the issue, many traditional consumers of goat meat need the animals to be slaughtered according to Kosher or Halal religious codes. As a small-scale farmer, I always need to be aware of trends in food so that I can exploit a developing niche before the large companies move in and breathe up all the air. Small business owners get paid for solving problems, and the challenges that face commercial goat husbandry look like opportunities to me. I'll continue raising goats and selling them to my contacts like my Palestinian gas-station-owner friend or my Mexican workers. I'll keep learning as I go, waiting for an opportunity to expand my operation and become profitable, because I know the fundamentals are in place; goat meat is healthy to eat, flavorful, and reasonably easy to produce off of range conditions, without recourse to artificial steroids, feedlots, or even grains. There are more people moving to the U.S. every day who accept and expect goat meat as a traditional part of life. Plus, there are a lot of mainstream American consumers with a healthy appetite for novelty, and they're always hungry for the next big thing, even if it's as old as the Greeks. It's about time for the food press to discover a "new" meat! In traditional cultures that are deeply rooted, food comes from the ground up. But the U.S. is a transient and fragmented society. The Palestinian gas-station owner who needs a goat only comes across a red-neck goat rancher like me through sheer luck. Mexican immigrants, Filipino immigrants, Jamaicans, Italians, Africans, and Moroccans are all here, but they're not united in such a way as to constitute a goat-meat-consuming community. So food trends in the U.S. often percolate from the "top" down, if you can accept the media as being "on top" of anything. What goat producers need is a celebrity to create demand by attracting the public's attention to goat meat. It's great that my gas station friend knows me now, but what I really need is for Rachel Ray to smell me coming and smile. "Yum-o!"  Andy Griffin, of Mariquita Farms, cultivates 32 acres of vegetables near Hollister. Years of studying philosophy at UC Davis was excellent preparation for 25 years of hoeing weeds, digging ditches, driving trucks, managing field crews, and feeding cows. Andy has been to many of the best restaurants in Northern California, usually entering through the back door while pushing a hand truck. He hopes one day to be as sophisticated and widely traveled as the vegetables he grows and sells.
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