Sometimes the best way to save something is to eat it. That’s why Emory University ordered 1,600 pounds of “heritage turkeys” for this year’s pre-Thanksgiving feast.
The poor birds can’t be expected to buy the argument, but the college is helping save Standard Bronze and Bourbon Red turkeys, two breeds that date back to the 1800s but are in danger of dying out for lack of demand. Emory has struck a deal with Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch, in Tampa, Kan., one of the few farms that still maintain the old breeds.
Producers of heritage or “heirloom” foods are fighting an uphill battle against the agriculture industry, which selects animals and plants for mass production and broad commercial appeal. In the process, foods that fed generations have been lost, along with their DNA and their traditions.
The heirloom-food movement might be the philosophical ground where gourmands and sustainability advocates meet—perhaps over a plate of barbecued Tennessee fainting goat, a rare breed noted as much for its lean, tasty chevon as for its tendency to fall over, with its legs pointing skyward, when startled.
At Emory, chefs served 8,000 students and employees the robust heritage turkeys side by side with the Broad-Breasted White gobblers you can buy at any supermarket. Julie Shaffer, who directs education programs for Emory’s sustainable-food projects, thought the feast would be a good way to teach students about biodiversity. “Many students don’t know that there are several breeds of turkey,” she says. “To them, a turkey’s a turkey, a cow’s a cow, and a pig’s a pig.”
With the rise of the local-food movement, many colleges have jumped onto the locavore bandwagon (Emory’s goal—to have 75 percent of its 25,000 daily meals coming from local and sustainable sources by 2015—is one of the most ambitious), but relatively few colleges are doing anything substantial with heirloom foods.
Perhaps more should, says Gary Paul Nabhan, a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center who has written books about ethnic and local foods. One of his latest catalogs more than 1,000 endangered North American food plants and domestic animals. Many of those foods are disappearing because they don’t store or travel well and are therefore not favored by industry.
“The issue here is not some sort of retro thing, preserving the past in a static way,” he says. “It’s a question of having enough diversity to provide us options for the future” in an era of climate change and robust diseases. Consider the fungus that threatens the Cavendish banana, the name for the common cultivar seen in supermarkets all over the world.
He is working on a project with students at the University of Arizona to preserve the Southwest’s “mission fruits"—pomegranates, quinces, figs, and other plants imported by the Spanish more than 300 years ago.
In St. Augustine, Fla., the datil pepper has a brighter future, thanks to David S. Bearl, a chef who runs various programs at First Coast Technical College, including the culinary-arts school. According to legend, Minorcan indentured servants brought the super-hot datil to St. Augustine in 1776, and it has been tied to the land and culture there ever since. Some say that the datil is highly adapted to the regional soil, so it doesn’t grow quite the same anywhere else, nor does it ship well.
A few years ago, Mr. Bearl got a $29,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to explore the niche-marketing potential of the heirloom. Today, First Coast Technical College grows some 15,000 datil plants, which are sold or used in dozens of products dreamed up by Mr. Bearl: datil sauces, datil hot dogs, and, his most popular product, a datil summer sausage. “Every bit I make I can sell,” he says. The datil project is entirely self-supporting. Now he is working with the University of Florida to find other uncommon plant varieties he could grow.
Mr. Bearl, who trains chefs for the U.S. Navy, has even brought datils to the Obamas. He served Minorcan datil seafood chowder at the White House. “I made eight or nine gallons,” he says. “They ate it all.”
Ms. Shaffer says that Emory is interested in conserving other animal breeds, in addition to the heritage turkeys. The college is working with a rancher who has a rare variety of beef cattle brought to the Americas by the conquistadors, hoping to put on an event similar to this year’s Thanksgiving feast.
It’s not cheap. Emory paid $5 a pound for the heritage turkeys, about four to five times more than for conventional turkey. Frank R. Reese Jr., who owns Good Shepherd Farm and has been raising turkeys for 50 years, says the main reason his turkeys cost more is because slaughterhouses charge him far more, in part because his birds don’t come in standard sizes.
But is it worth it? People at Emory who ate his turkeys found meat with a much more complex flavor, and more dark meat. (An excess of white meat is a sign that a bird had trouble oxygenating its muscles, Mr. Reese says.) Industrial birds are bred to grow fast and get fat—they are so ungainly that they can’t even mate on their own—and they live in confined spaces most of their short lives. Mr. Reese’s birds jump, run, fly, and have sex without human help. The only aid they need is economic, he says.
“Our mission is preservation,” Mr. Reese says. “I made promises to the old people before me that I would do everything I could to keep these birds from disappearing off the face of the earth.”
