Every Tuesday morning a refrigerated white truck with an anthropomorphic pig painted on its side pulls up in front of a house on a tree-lined street in a North Shore suburb. A Wisconsin farmer emerges and unloads three to four boxes filled with pork shoulders and bellies butchered from naturally raised pigs. He walks across the lawn and hands them off through the front door before driving on to the city to make his regular deliveries at the likes of North Pond and Frontera Grill.
“We end up giving away probably, I don’t know, 60 pounds of meat a month or more,” says Erik. “Keeps all the neighbors happy if they don’t like the smoke smell.” They haven’t made a profit yet.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Because they sell meats that aren’t prepared in a licensed commercial facility, Erik and Ehran are operating outside the law. But some laws, they fervently believe, were made to be broken. “It’s one of those things that’s kind of overregulated,” says Erik. “People have been canning and curing forever. It was invented to preserve food and keep things healthy.”
Not surprisingly, the Chicago Department of Public Health disagrees. “That person’s comment reminds me of the criticisms leveled at Upton Sinclair and others a century ago who advocated for a safer food supply,” e-mailed spokesman Tim Hadac. “True, the local market ‘self-regulates’—but it does so sometimes at the expense of consumers’ health and even lives. Every year in the U.S. food-borne illness causes an estimated 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. We in public health prefer commonsense, science-based regulation that focuses on prevention of food-borne illness before it occurs.”
Guided by Susan Mahnke Peery and Charles G. Reavis’s Home Sausage Making, Erik and a friend, Phillip (the p in E & P), began grinding out bangers, brats, and Italian sausages. They hosted parties in Erik’s backyard, catered an outside event, and even made a few sales before Phillip’s wife was transferred to Michigan, taking him out of the picture.
In May they each took a 15-hour course from their local health department and subsequently received state licensing for food service sanitation—the first step in going legit. That same month they released their first menu, consisting of four bacons, and thus began what has since become known as the monthly ritual of Meat Week.
Their recently released holiday menu offers pistachio bacon brittle, cold-smoked Scottish salmon, and a membership in a six-month-long bacon-of-the-month club for $50. But they have yet to delve into the more complicated production of aged hams and long-cured and fermented meats like salamis. They’ll need to jump over many more regulatory hurdles to get legal for that, but they’re getting ready to start practicing, converting a storage room in Erik’s basement into a cedar-lined temperature-and-humidity-controlled curing room.
