Press

Sales of new cow manure compost from Pineland Farms Natural Meats and Coast of Maine Organic Products up 42% this year.

Pineland Farms receives great reviews of new entree products

We are excited and proud to announce that we are now working with Pineland Farms Natural Meats in our New England and New York stores to bring high quality, family farm raised beef to your table.  When we first began our conversation with Pineland Farms we were invited to spend a day exploring their beautiful and expansive farm land in New Gloucester, Maine.  Being foodies and beef lovers ourselves, we jumped at the chance to encounter the actual source of our food and the people who grow it.

About a month ago I was at my office trying to decide what to do for lunch.  My brother kept insisting I join him at Whole Foods Market Plymouth Meeting.  Tying to sell me on a salad bar, I made a yuck face and naturally resisted.  After some convincing I reluctantly tagged along hoping to maybe find something precooked.  Well I’ll spare you all the cliche ways I could express how shocked I was when we arrived.  This was no salad bar.  Sure there was salad, but there was also wings, ribs, pizza, and even brisket!  And those are only the items that caught my eye at first glance.  The entire situation was already game changing for my local lunch scene.  This kingdom of food had remained hidden from me for too long.

In a world where news reporters regularly poll the Twitterverse for the insight of average Joes, it's clear that social media is key to gauging the current zeitgeist. After all, it provides a constant, cacophonous stream of opinions on everything from pressing world events to the new Lady Gaga single. (Which, by the way, is a total rip-off. No, it's not! Yes, it is! No, it's not!) So it was a revealing cultural moment when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made headlines with his recent over-sharing proclamation on his personal page: he is now only eating meat from animals he's killed himself. The experience is helping him "[learn] a lot about sustainable farming and raising animals."

This week's review is of Má Pêche, David Chang's newest restaurant, his largest and his first outside of the East Village. You can get a fine Midtown lunch there, a good pre-theater meal, and an amazing seven-course beef dinner that runs $85 a head, with at least six people attending. This is worth doing at least once or twice in your life, especially if you end the meal not with dessert (none are served) but with a wheel of totally ripe, super-stinkyÉpoisses, along with some warm baguette.

Power lunching in Midtown Manhattan had always been a game of chicken among restaurateurs demanding exorbitant sums of cash and the expense-account elite confident or dumb enough to pay them.

Hence, the $21 tomato salad at Michael’s, the $56 veal chop at The Four Seasons, and now the beef tasting menu at Ma Peche, which can, after wine, tax and tip, easily cost $1,000 for six -- the minimum number of patrons required to enjoy the feast at lunch or dinner.

IT is a strange feeling, sitting in Má Pêche on a Friday night, well underneath Midtown in the basement of the Chambers Hotel, Modest Mouse playing at half volume on the stereo system as people drink wine and talk and stab at sticky pork ribs with chopsticks. The seats at the restaurant have backs to them. They are comfortable. There is plenty of space.

Dry-aged beef has long been a staple of high-end steakhouses. Aging beef for several weeks in cold temperatures allows enzymes and bacteria to break down the meat’s tough tissues and makes for especially delicious steaks.

For centuries, dry-aging was a common way for butchers to preserve and tenderize beef. Now, it’s shaping up to be the latest hot trend among chefs.

On a sunny late-autumn day, Pine Land Farms is a model of agriculture perfection. The dairy barns smell of straw and sawdust instead of manure. The fields are mowed to golf corse-like smoothness. Miles of white fence surround rolling hills dotted with grazing beef cattle. The only thing missing from this picture-book illustration is a strategically placed rainbow.

Our chart shows you performance of the largest sub-categories in the dairy department during the 12 weeks ended Sept. 6. We exclude brands with less than $2 million in sales. Be aware that data is for the brands as originally trademarked, and may not include line extensions. Dairy department data in the Factoids below is from Information Resources, Inc., for supermarket sales in the 12 weeks ended Sept. 6. Other data is from the National Football League.

Frozen meat and poultry both scored dollar and unit gains in the 12 weeks ended Sept. 6, 2009, according to supermarket data from Information Resources, Inc., the Chicago-based market research firm. That’s unusual, given the 1.2% dollar gain and 0.3% unit loss for the frozen department as a whole dur- ing the period.

Over the past several years, Gene Lawlor has doubled the size of his cattle herd and added hundreds of acres of leased land to his farm in Merrill, a tiny community twenty miles west of Houlton. Lawlor can expand because he has the one asset every farmer needs -- a dependable market. "We would never have gotten this large if we didn't have a ready market," he explains.