Where's the beef? These days, as numerous workshops at the recent EcoFarm Conference revealed, it's on the farm—right alongside the sheep, the chickens, the ducks, and the goats.

From a farming perspective, biodiversity used to mean replacing typical fenceline-to-fenceline monocropping (which you can still still see down in the Central Valley: huge tracts of dirt planted with nothing but straight lines of strawberries or lettuce) with a more photogenic mix of pollinator-feeding flowers, orchards, hedgerows, and assorted vegetables in colorful profusion, all working in sync to make the farm a happier habitat for beneficial bugs, predators, and people.

Now, however, more and more small farms (and vineyards) are getting livestock into the mix. Whether they're providing milk, eggs, meat, or labor, animals and poultry are taking their place again alongside the tractor and the compost pile as integral parts of the contemporary, sustainable organic farm.

The 2011 conference had a much more concentrated interest in horns and hoofs than in years past. At least half a dozen workshops focused on animal issues, ranging from "Ecosystem Services in Livestock Production" and "Cattle and Carbon: Rangeland Conservation & Climate Protection" to "Healthy Herds, Healthy Markets: Raising Heritage Breed Livestock and Poultry" and "Building a Local Meat Supply Chain."

Putting the proof onto the plate was Marin Sun Farms, our own local grass-fed meat company, whose in-kind sponsorship of the conference put excellent local chicken, bacon, and lamb onto the menu of Asilomar's dining room throughout the conference (which made, for the omnivores among us, a welcome alternative to the usual beans, kale, and quinoa).

Why have animals on a farm? Well, as one of the owners of Full Belly Farm pointed out, a productive, diversely-planted organic farm produces a lot of surplus food. Restaurants, retailers, CSA and farmers' market customers all want the good stuff. They'll pay for it, but it has to look and taste the best. And if you're not bathing your produce in pesticides to keep it the boring, munching, scarring bugs at bay, well, you're going to end up culling a whole lot of not-so-pretty, overripe or undersized stuff along the way.

Some of it feeds your family and your workers. Some of it can feed your compost. But if you want to turn oversize zucchini and beat-up tomatoes into usable, high-quality protein (not to mention plenty of fertilizer), well, nothing beats feeding it to pigs, goats, or chickens.

Backyard goats and chickens enjoying some sweet and crunchy discards from Star Route Farm

It's all part of the closed-loop system advocated by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian polymath who mixed biology and soil science with folk wisdom and time-tested peasant farming practices, codifying it into what we now call biodynamics. Stripped of its more arcane spiritual elements, it's more or less the same down-to-earth, interconnected system advocated by Joel Salatin, the nattily dressed farmer/author of Virginia's Polyface Farm, who gave an impassioned speech last month in Point Reyes Station. Drawing from his latest book, The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer, Salatin turned the hay-lined Toby's Feed Barn into a tent revival for smart pasturing practices and mixed-use farms. Real pork, he insisted, wasn't a "white meat;" instead, if the pig's been raised right, rooting around, living out its full pig-attude, its meat should be iron-rich and consequently rosy pink.

Joel Salatin. Photo by Stephane von Stephane

Even wineries are getting in on the act: at Robert Sinskey, in Napa, part of the vineyards' biodynamic practice involves grazing down the weeds with sweet-faced Romney sheep, whose wool is sold alongside the wine in the tasting room.

But, as much as we might hope to be going back to a more natural practice with grass-fed meat and pastured eggs, few consumers are ready to think of steak and omelets as exclusively seasonal products, dictated by water, daylight, and temperatures just as much as asparagus or raspberries. If you have backyard chickens, you know that laying slows down dramatically as the days get shorter. Grass-fed cows have to be managed according to the ecosystems of their particular pastures.

Rearing animals on grass takes time, and as talk with numerous small farmers and ranchers at the conference proved, no one small farm or ranch can provide a year-round supply of freshly slaughtered meat. The answer? Co-ops and partnerships. As the workshop "Are CSAs Sustainable?" proved, a single farm limited by acreage, climate, and resources can't always produce enough variety to keep customers coming back for a box year-round. Your cool, moist, ocean-fogged farm might produce spectacular greens and kales—but what happens in July, when "greens fatigue" sets in and your members are longing for peaches and tomatoes? You can preach the virtues of chard; scrape up another loan, lease another parcel of land and increase your payroll; or partner with an inland neighbor already dripping in stone fruit and create a box that shares the wealth.

Niman Ranch does this on a large scale; Marin Sun Farms, Straus Family Creamery, and North Coast Meats on a smaller one. Partnering with other ranches helps produce a steady supply, while selling meat through a CSA, like the one described by Tyler Dawley of Barbarosa Ranchers in Red Bluff, insures not only a pre-sold market for the animals, but a chance to familiarize customers with cuts beyond the usual chops and tenderloins.

Cooperatives can also help with the biggest snag in the local-meat supply chain: getting access to a small-scale slaughterhouse, then finding a way through governmental wrapping and packing regulations scaled for the likes of Tyson Foods.

As State Director Dr. Glenda Humiston of USDA Rural Development pointed out, one of the top requests her office gets from rural communities (right after broadband) is access to small-scale slaughterhouses, particularly mobile ones that can move from community to community. Throughout the workshops, farmers with pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle on their land got up to beg for solutions, giving details of sudden shut-downs at nearby slaughterhouses (some affiliated with local ag-training universities) or wrapping/packing facilities.

No one, even the most carnivorous among us, likes to think too hard about how their main course went from animal to ingredient. But with meat moving out of the supermarket and into the farmers' market, thoughtful consumers have more and more chances to find out how their dinner lived, and to put their food dollars towards supporting land-healthy, humane practices.

For more background on the challenges of creating a local meat supply chain, read the report Where's the Local Beef? by Food and Water Watch.

Most reviews of Gristle will start with an assessment of Moby, the fantastically irritating middle-aged multi-platinum electronic musician-turned-food policy expert who edited the book. Based on what I know of Moby, I do not like him. It wouldn't be fair to hate him. Hating is a tough thing to do, even when you really know someone well enough to feel okay about doing it. While, for a long time, Moby barely registered a chirp on my pop culture radar, he first became the subject of my considerable distaste in 1999, when his mega-smash album Play came out, saturating radio station playlists, television commercials, and department store dressing rooms with "soulful" Alan Lomax-recorded blues samples wrapped in pulsing techno. The songs were inescapable and horrible. Much to my dismay, they chased me everywhere I went. More recently, in late March, weeks before this book arrived in my mailbox, I thought of Moby again when the New York Times published a Sunday Routine feature about him. Every section reads as if the author (Moby, in his first-person voice, presumably as recorded and edited by writer Lizette Alvarez) cannot help but be astounded by his own charm and cleverness. He names his favorite kind of organic tea, brags about his wretched-sounding pancakes, revels in online Scrabble victories, rattles off a vile but fiercely healthy smoothie recipe, and (on account of Calvinist ancestors) admits to a few "guilty" pleasures -- including that leviathan of vice, "mass market fiction." A friend linked to the article on Facebook, adding a highly derisive caption. A day later, a mutual friend commented on the post, sharing a shameful nugget of hearsay from yet another friend who apparently knows Moby quite well -- well enough to text with him, at least. According to this undoubtedly suspect source, when Moby texts, he dutifully concludes each message with a jaunty sign-off: "This is Moby, on the text."

While Gristle's editor might come across as a smug self-righteous cartoon, an easy target given the trappings he's prone to wearing, the message he, co-editor Miyun Park, and the host of noble experts they've gathered are pushing is real and worthy of very serious discussion. Simply put, this book -- a featherweight at 144 pages -- has forced me to re-contemplate the advantages of vegetarianism in the face of a corporation-clogged taxpayer-funded mainstream meat industry dedicated to processing artificially cheap, unhealthy, and potentially dangerous animal protein products for mass consumption, with a startling disregard for its underpaid workers and the environment.

In Gristle, each contributor handles a brief chapter with a one word title focusing on a single negative aspect of factory farming's effect on people, animals, and the world -- an issue to house arguments supported, in turn, by facts. It's a tidy assemblage of frill-free prose and grim, gray-scale visual aids. There's a uniformity to the writing and presentation uncommon to a collection of such far-flung perspectives, but the diversity nips any argument that Moby's cast of contributors are all cut from the same animal rights activist cloth.

There's Brendan Brazier, Canadian Ironman triathlon competitor, weighing in on health. asserting that, "leaving farm animals out of your diet is a simple decision with life-long benefits." Whole Foods honcho and dedicated libertarian John Mackey talks taxes, revealing that Americans currently spend 8% of their incomes on food, whereas, one hundred years ago, they spent over five times as much -- a change brought about, in part, by government subsidies that distort markets "tremendously." Christine Chavez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, human rights activists and granddaughters of Cesar Chavez, write about the abysmal working conditions in factory farms. Paul and Phyllis Willis, the manager of Niman Ranch Pork Company and a community activist respectively, discuss how factory farms tear up communities: In just two decades, Iowa has seen an 84% decrease in the number of farms raising pigs, yet almost five times as many pigs. That means bigger farms, and less farmers. Lauren Bush, C.E.O. and co-founder of FEED as well as the niece of George W., focuses on the environment, and Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappe and her daughter Anne address global warming, offering up a specific morsel I actually remember stewing over in my youth: 16 pounds of grain and soy are required to raise one pound of steak.

I have written before about my own experiment with vegetarianism. I never ate much meat as a kid, largely because my parents didn't. I stopped altogether when I was 13, in 1993. I tasted fish again in 2001, and poultry a few years later. Before long, I was a full-bore bone-gnawing omnivore, even more adventurous and meat-centric once I began writing frequently about food for amusement and income. Reading Gristle sent me back to a time I often struggle to remember -- the moment I decided to stop eating meat -- and about halfway through the book, I wondered why I had. There was a time not long ago when I saw the meatless phase of my young life largely as a drawn-out gesture of gentle rebellion against my cultural surroundings, a politicized substitute for dying my hair green. I was only vocal and remotely militant about vegetarianism for a few years, and yet I remained a vegetarian for many more. Did I stick to my diet out of habit? Was I trapped by a desire to maintain consistency? Making sense of the flights of logic generated by my 16-year-old mind always requires major effort, but in this matter, I was probably never so stupid. Meat -- as most of America knows it, and has known it for decades -- might not be murder, but it is a huge unholy mess.

Growing up, I always liked animals, particularly cute ones like pigs and sheep, but I didn't stop eating them because they blinked, breathed, and made noises. The philosophical heft of my decision didn't approach Moby's. Once, as he describes in the aforementioned New York Times piece, "the most pretentious person [he] has ever met, Moby outlines his reasoning in the introduction. Essentially, he followed the golden rule as extended to animals, with Blaise Pascal's Gambit wading in: "I took the logic of ["betting" on God's existence as opposed to non-existence] and applied it. . .I decided that it's probably a better "bet" to extend compassion as far and wide as possible as opposed to restricting the lengths to which I would extend compassion." Me, I just had a vague aesthetic aversion. Meat seemed heavy, dirty, and unclean. There were just icky inklings, though I soon found facts to back them up. In Gristle, those facts come off as particularly devastating.

Gristle rather delicately avoids directly damning all carnivorous acts. For all its polemics and pamphlet-esque tone, this book is, at its core, optimistic, hinging on the idea that, if people really know the facts about where the meat they eat comes from, they'll change their ways. They'll eat less meat, and make sure that the meat they do eat comes from truly reputable, responsible farms -- even if it's expensive or inconvenient to do so. Maybe they'll even eschew it entirely. In the introduction, Moby writes, "if enough people find out about the hidden ramifications of industrialized farmed animal production, we'll eventually see a shift away from supporting these destructive industries, which would lead to a healthier, cleaner, and more humane world."

I'm not positive that would help. In his chapter, John Mackey suggests that, "the only reason our abuse of animals is still tolerated is because most people aren't aware of it." While the average American may not know the details of how domesticated animals are treated in factory farms, the net of ills cast by the meat industry's participants is too huge, perfect, and ridiculous not to warrant suspicion -- especially considering how much attention a slew of best-sellers have devoted to it. Even with Moby's name attached, a wee volume from a smallish press is going to be read by the same people who already read Diet for a Small Planet, Fast Food Nation, and The Omnivore's Dilemma -- not exactly obscure texts, but not quite Oprah, MTV, and Good Morning America either. In her epilogue, Miyun Park writes:

"[S]omehow industrial animal agribusiness has largely managed to get away with oppressing workers, making us and our children unhealthy, slowly but surely destroying rural communities, contributing to global warming and global hunger, cultivating the emergence of devastating zoonotic diseases, and polluting the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the land on which we all live -- all while getting subsidized by taxpayers."

It's astonishing, and while saying "enough" to the injustice is fine, the problem isn't that the information hasn't at least begun to trickle down. The problem is that a lot of people really don't care that much. It's one thing to read about abused, confined fowl, tortured, manure-smeared stacks of swine, polluted rivers, and drug-resistant bacteria, and be horrified, but it's another thing entirely to implement a dramatic lifestyle shift. It isn't, as Brazier puts it, a "simple change."

Speaking personally, fast food restaurants -- where Americans inhale most of their factory-farmed meat -- are easy to avoid. At the same time, my favorite local ethnic eateries likely source from the same coops and lots. Grease-laden sidewalk tacos, Filipino breakfast silogs, sausages at Lao dives, Shanghai soup dumplings, Cambodian curries, and Korean short ribs don't always come with a Niman Ranch stamp. Enjoying those flavors, supporting those small businesses, and by extension, the communities from which they spring means eating meat that does harm. It's a tough call sometimes. At many area restaurants catering to diners with Slow Food-friendly values, menus proudly name the farms and ranches charged with raising the meat they serve. High-end grocery stores do the same, and they're rewarded with customers from the same relatively moneyed, socially-conscious pool. To put it mildly, the circumstances encourage elitism, and discourage a wider diffusion of responsibly raised animal products.

I take my meat-eating opportunities one bite at a time. I'm not nostalgic for the vegetarian days, but I struggle with guilt for grazing broadly, especially when I'm pretty sure I'm eating an animal whose life was miserable and brief. Eating in a professional capacity scrambles good intentions. One week, I shop at the right stores and eat very little meat, and only that which I know to be of worthy provenance, and the next, there's a new torta to taste, and taste it I must. Since reading Gristle -- an amped-up Cliff's Notes for the pro-vegetarian literature I inhaled as a teenager -- the predicament has been a little tougher. Dancing above my head like Mango, Moby is there, surveying every bite, sipping a cup of organic white tea, wagging a skinny little finger, eyes closed, his huge pale noggin shaking back and forth. You can't have the torta. No, no, no, he says softly. Sadly, I can't just smack him away.

This swine diagram in the Oliveto back office pretty much sums it up.

Next to his desk in the Oliveto back office, Chef Paul Canales has taped a diagram that captures the restaurant's reverence for pork.

The diagram shows a hog divided into sections, such as the shoulder and the leg. All of these sections are labeled "Good," except for the belly. It is labeled "Real Good."

Pork is a constant at Oliveto. The menu revolves around it. On any given day, prep chefs can be seen breaking down a hog into various cuts -- shoulder, loin, leg -- and then processing them into porchetta, pancetta, scallopine, sausage or salumi.

For an uninitiated guest to the kitchen, it can be startling to see a pig's head simmering in a stock pot or a chef hefting a hand saw on one half of a 200-pound carcass.

Oliveto Chef Paul Canales seasons pork cutlets while Sous Chef Kelsey Bergstrom cuts into a pork leg with a hand saw.

Yet if you want restaurants to be respectful of the meat they serve, extracting every ounce of flavor and using all parts of the animal, then these scenes shouldn't shock you. Many chefs run a far tidier kitchen by relying on industrial meat processors to do their butchery, delivering meat cuts that are shrink-wrapped and ready to cook.

Oliveto's experiments with whole-hog cookery started more than a decade ago, when the restaurant, under owner Bob Klein and former Executive Chef Paul Bertolli, developed a relationship with Paul Willis and Bill Niman, founders of the Niman Ranch meat company.

Willis, a hog farmer from Iowa, met Niman in the mid-1990s, as industrial hog farming was transforming the landscape of the Midwest and North Carolina. Farmers such as Willis were trying to stay in business by marketing the quality and benefits of the pork that was raised without hormones and antibiotics, with the pigs allowed to range freely. That led to a partnership with Niman and the birth of Niman Ranch.

Paul Watson, seen left, heads a network of 500 small farmers who supply pork to Niman Ranch.

Today, Willis supervises a network of 500 farmers who produce pork for more than 1,200 restaurants, ranging from chains such as Chipotle Mexican Grill to high-end restaurants such as Oliveto. His success has inspired many other farmers, including some here in California, to grow their own pigs and market them directly to restaurants.

Every Tuesday at Oliveto, a truck pulls up in the garage of the building, delivering a split carcass pig, usually from Willis. For the last several months it has been my job, along with Oliveto butcher Pablo "Tigre" Mendoza Gavito, to heft and these split carcasses (100 pounds) into the basement meat locker.

Hanging meat from hooks can be dangerous, as former Oliveto Sous Chef Curtis Di Fede demonstrates.

This can be a dangerous job. Pigs are slippery and tricky to hoist. Usually Tigre would lift from the bottom, using a small meat hook to grab hold of the carcass. My job was to grab the hind leg, attach a meat hook to the trotter, and hang the hooked carcass on the meat locker rod while Tigre hefted it from the bottom.

The first time we attempted this together, I inadvertently left my pinkie finger in between the hook and rod. My finger was nearly crushed as the full weight of the carcass came down on the rod. Luckily, I pulled my pinkie out at the last split second.

Once the pigs are in the locker, the chefs assemble a game plan for breaking them down and preparing dishes. That plan changes weekly, depending on the whims of the chefs and what dishes they haven't recently prepared.

"Technically, you want to use the loins and legs first, since those are most subject to spoilage," says Canales, who replaced Bertolli as executive chef in 2004. "The shoulders will last the longest."

Why do the shoulders last longer? As Canales notes, shoulders and other heavily used muscles tend to have high levels of myoglobin, a protein that causes the red color in meat. Birds such as ducks and pigeons have high levels of myoglobin, because they fly such long distances. As a result, ducks and pigeons resist spoilage in a refrigerator longer than chickens do.

After a hog is delivered, Tigre tends to get the assignment of breaking down the hog into its component pieces. He also can be regularly seen trimming up the loin for one of the restaurant's prized dishes, the spit-roasted porchetta.

Oliveto butcher Pablo "Tigre" Mendoza Gavito prepares sausage in the back kitchen.

Porchetta is pork rolled with spices and salt into a log and then set on a rotisserie. As it roasts over hot coals, the fat renders out of the meat and keeps it juicy and savory. Slices of this log are then served with an accompaniment, such as a diavolo sauce made with chili peppers.

By contrast, Oliveto generally takes cuts from the leg and turns them into scallopine or salami. Scraps from the leg are ground in a meat grinder and used in a ragu, a pasta sauce. The shoulders, meanwhile, are generally reserved for sausage.

As you can imagine, all this cutting and trimming results in numerous scraps that some butchers might be tempted to throw away. At Oliveto, all these scraps are further trimmed to separate meat from fat. The meat pieces are cooked down into sugo, a heavily reduced pork stock, similar to a demi-glace. The rest might be used for a ciccioli, an intensely rich concoction that is made by cooking down fatty pieces of pork, compressing them and drying them.

Outside of the pigs it breaks down, Oliveto also receives special orders of pork, particularly pork bellies for pancetta. These bellies arrive every other week from Heritage Foods USA, which originated as the online marketing arm for the Slow Food movement. Now a private company, it sells meat from small farmers who are raising and preserving heritage breeds of pigs, turkeys and other animals.

"I try to support them, because they are trying to do the right thing, by these animal and the small farmers," says Canales. "These guys have no outlet. Either they find a niche market, or they get forced out by Tyson or the big outfits."

The author trims fat off of a pork belly for pancetta.

While apprenticing at Oliveto, I had a privilege to trim and cure pancetta a few times. It is not terribly hard, as Michael Ruhlman demonstrates in this post. The slabs of pork are seasoned with salt, curing salt and peppercorns, and then hung in cold storage for a week or so.

By the time it is dried, thin sliced and then served, it is belly, belly good. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

For Oliveto, the true test of its pork obsession comes in February, with the annual Whole Hog dinners. The menu offers nearly every part of the animal, from the brains down to the trotters. Last year's menu(pdf) featured a wild boar scaloppine alla Milanese, a spaghetti with pork cracklings and a spit-roasted pork belly with Sicilian chestnut honey.

A basic summer dish at Oliveto - cured coppa and melon.

Preparations for these dinners are an all-year affair, since some types of meats - such as prosciutto and coppa - take many months to cure and dry.

I missed this year's Whole Hog Dinner, but plan to be there in February. After six months of trimming, slicing, browning, simmering and curing pork, I feel a closer connection to this noble animal, along with an awareness of how much more there is to learn.

Stuart Leavenworth has concluded his apprenticeship at Oliveto, and this is his final post for Bay Area Bites. On Monday, he starts a new job as The Sacramento Bee's editorial page editor. You can contact him at sleavenworth@sacbee.com.

Okay, Green Chile Kitchen? We're going to have a little chat, and I'm going to talk and you're going to listen, 'kay?

We've been going to and loving you for quite some time now. We are, quite possibly, your best customers. Hell, one of your checkout chicks commented to my husband, "You haven't been here in awhile!" (Quite true, we hadn't, but she noticed which was awesome!) Also, even if you don't have caller ID, there's no way you don't identify us as, "those weird people who order the same salad every time -- you know, the ones who always, always want their fifth ingredient to just be more [redacted]?"

You are a feast for us as much as you are a comfort. We revel in your fresh greens, we approve of your new and spicier guacamole, and we laud your Niman Ranchiness. (Sidetrack: Is it just me or is Niman Ranch sort of over? I mean, yes, it's undeniably good stuff, but I think the most sought-after meat names these days are not the ones that are known across the country. We're such spoiled Californians.)

So I say this with love: GET ANOTHER FREAKING REGISTER! Seriously? Waiting in line to pick up a take-out order behind all those baked witlings, who have wrapped themselves in blankets after spending the entire day in Alamo Square Park in order to smoke away every single synapse and then come to GCK, not knowing what the hell they want to order because they got distracted by a shiny object while standing in line and then try to inveigle your eminently patient checkout chicks in deep discussions about her back tattooes, all while my crispy tacos get so decidedly UNcrispy that they sog their bottoms out when I pick them up, well, there is a limit.

You always do apologize, probably both for the long wait and idiot customers, but still, can we talk about solutions here? Please?

TWO REGISTERS! One for orders made there and for those intending to eat-in, and the other to ring up and dispense take-out orders. Plus, even if there aren't enough take-out orders at any given time to merit the other register, at least the line can be filtered over to a second reg, rendering the wait shorter and ALL of our lives easier.

Seriously. I really just want this to work out.