The Butchers
2636 Yonge Street
416-483-5777

I showed up at the organic meat tasting schvitzing like a pig. Which was figuratively significant because I was there to eat a pig. I was late and ran 10 blocks (ok, I walked for one block and stopped in to the Puma shop to catch my breath and look at sneakers). In the past two weeks I’ve gone out, three times for Chinese, twice for ribs, and arranged an all-chorizo dinner. Sheryl, maybe for my next assignment you can send me to a colonoscopy party.

Marlon Pather, owner of The Butchers, an upscale, uptown, organic meat market was hosting a tasting to showcase some of the products coming from Ontario’s farmers. If one has to be an embedded reporter, best to make it a bed of organic meat. Laid out on this bed was beef from Beretta Organic Farms in King City, lamb and fabulous sheep’s milk cheeses from Elisabeth Bzikot’s Best Baa Farm in Conn, and chicken from Carol Fennema’s Fenwood Farm in Ancaster. I thought it was a coincidence that Pather does business with all women farmers. But then this group of women stood up to say a few words about their product and the common denominator was their matriarchal concern for their animals welfare. Bzikot described sheep “gambolling in a pasture. Animals deserve to feel the sun on their backs and the grass under their foot.” I would like to gambol. Just once.

The suckling pig we were all there to eat was roasted whole and paraded through the room. Fed on only his mother’s milk, this adorable scamp was killed before the peak of his market value just to preserve the delicate texture of his flesh. It was worth it. The shaved meat off his back was more supple than any pork I’ve ever tasted. Me and the two other Jews in the room descended on it. Twenty minutes later he was looking a little punchy as his ribs were poking out through exposed flesh. But the tough little fighter kept holding on to the apple in his mouth. What a trooper.

A 21-day aged rib-eye from Cynthia Beretta’s farm was criminally cooked to medium-well and then served to us thickly with no forks in sight. Maybe a performance art attempt to make metaphorical pigs of us or just an oversight? I chomped the ends off of juicy, rare lamb chops from Best Baa Farm as my dining companion, a man of great journalistic integrity, told me that I’d been bought and paid for. But he works for the CBC, meaning I’ve not only bought his meal (which was free) and paid his salary (with my taxes) so we’re tied. Then he guilted the bartender into letting us have Grey Goose instead of Polar Ice.

It’s not exactly Watergate or even Rathergate but I did, as an investigative journalist, uncover a shocking truth while researching this story - I like free food. Then I went out for ice cream. Because that’s my job too.