Jason picked the egg up off the ground and handed it to me. I was not going to let Matt, our CDC, be the only one to eat a raw egg yolk straight from the warm grass. I cracked it with his knife, let the white ooze through my hand and popped the yolk in my mouth. Jason made sure to remind us not to slurp it down but to spend some time with it. Some folks said it tasted like cheese or butter. Point was that this raw egg tasted like richness. It was a warm day so it felt just barely cooked. The unctuosness and the depth of flavor lasted well into the car ride home. This is not the role that eggs usually play in our society. This was not a vehicle for bacon or cheese or salt on a buttered english muffin. It was filling and delicious on its own.
Yonder Way Farm is a special place tended to by Jason Kramer, his wife Lynsey and their 4 amazing daughters. They raise pigs and chickens and have a handful of wild turkeys roaming around just for fun. We have been buying whole hogs from Jason since we opened which makes it easier for him cause he doesn’t have to worry about how he’s going to break it down and find a buyer for each part. It’s more economical for us because we end up getting to buy the chops and bellies for less since we’re happy to take on the head and the trotters as well.
As to the farm, it’s glorious. Jason was grilling tortillas outside for us when we arrived. We filled them with his bright orange scrambled eggs and ate in the barn, which they are finishing for supper clubs and events. The piglets get to scamper around their moms in separate outdoor areas until they are 8 weeks old instead of being separated and fed from a machine. The chickens have half a football field with a sheltered area to run around and forage. He doesn’t use antibiotics because he doesn’t have to, remarking that animals are smarter than humans. When they’re sick, they go off in to the corner by themselves until they’ve mended. The problem with industrial pig and chicken farms is that they don’t have room to go off by themselves. So when they’re sick, no one knows. That means that they need to be medicated not when they’re sick but to prevent them from getting sick.
As the saying goes, you are what you eat. So when you eat a L’Oca d’Oro pork chop from a Yonder Way Farm heritage hog, you’re eating mother’s milk, organic barley, oats and grasses and flowers – sweet, herbaceous, nutrient rich. When you eat a hog from (insert name of supermarket pork) you’re eating corn mush and antibiotics. I think we’ll keep doing things the way we been doing them and you might even start seeing Yonder Way chicken on the menu soon too.