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"  Patrick Martins leads pigs to slaughter. He orders their heads chopped off and split, their bellies sliced and skinned, their hooves severed at the knuckle, Cryo-vaced, and shipped. A hundred fifty hogs each week. Martins doesn&amp;#039;t work on a farm, and he&amp;#039;s not great with a knife. He works out of an apartment in Brooklyn, where, when you ring the buzzer, he throws the keys down from the fourth-floor window. He has no dirt under his fingernails, no stun gun, no bloody apron. His implements are a cordless phone, a Staples-brand calculator, a MacBook, a ballpoint pen, and Post-it notes. He is a broker of rare, indigenous breeds, and he works in the fourth-floor apartment every day, making sure that there are people to buy the pigs, because only by killing the pigs can the pigs be saved. In 2000 Martins established Slow Food USA, an organization that promotes eating locally grown foods. But he soon saw that farmers of historic American breeds of pigs, poultry, lamb, and cattle desperately needed a way to sell nationally, so in 2002 he launched Heritage Foods USA, which consists of him and four employees. Every week, Martins and a cohort, Sarah Obraitis, find out (from the farmers) how many pigs there are, then call their customers (the chefs) to find out who wants what. They also scan Internet orders \u2014 anyone can order from Heritage online. Then they sit at a kitchen table with their laptops blazing and go down the list, preparing instructions for the Missouri slaughterhouse that receives the meat from Martins&amp;#039;s network of farmers and cuts it for Heritage each week. Their system is bizarre and hard to follow and somehow perfect.  &amp;quot;Okay, who&amp;#039;s next?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Gramercy Tavern.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Six whole shoulders.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Six whole shoulders.&amp;quot; Martins has a handwritten list of the parts of a pig&amp;#039;s anatomy, and he scratches six hash marks next to &amp;quot;shoulders.&amp;quot; There are 142 pigs available this week, which means he must sell 284 shoulders. &amp;quot;And whole shoulders take the shank, so that&amp;#039;s six shanks.&amp;quot; Hash, hash, hash, hash, hash, hash next to &amp;quot;shanks.&amp;quot; They move on to other restaurants \u2014 three hundred to four hundred in all, mostly in New York, but all over the country, too. &amp;quot;Three shoulders, no shank. Got that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And then two whole shoulders.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Two whole shoulders.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;A hundred pounds of jowl. Hey, Bar Boulud didn&amp;#039;t order any heads.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes, he did.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh yeah, fourteen heads.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You said how many pounds of skinless jowl?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;A hundred. And then fourteen heads. Skin on, no jowl.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Fourteen heads, skin on, no jowl.&amp;quot;  This goes on for five hours. Heritage sells mostly pork and deals in four breeds that have long histories in the U. S.: Berkshire, duroc, Red Wattle, and Tamworth. As crossbreeding and hybridization became the norm, these purebred hogs became rare; Heritage is resurrecting them. Martins also sells indigenous turkey, beef, lamb, and poultry but in smaller amounts. He operates a one-man exchange; farmers previously had no way to sell to so many customers, chefs and retailers had no feasible way to buy, and a cottage industry was disappearing. Mark Newman, who raises Berkshire hogs in the southern Ozarks of Missouri, sells about three thousand pigs a year to Heritage; the smallest of the industry&amp;#039;s big boys sell fifty thousand a year. Just three decades ago, Newman says, forty families in his county made a living selling pigs. Newman Farm is the only one left. Martins knows he is chipping away at a big problem, but his timing is right. People want better food, and they&amp;#039;re starting to understand that the spastic trend of eating locally has limitations. &amp;quot;Why wouldn&amp;#039;t you go to the best person? Everyone thinks, Oh, my local guy, he&amp;#039;s the best. Well, that might be true but probably not,&amp;quot; he says. At dinner one night in New York, the pork is flying out of the kitchen \u2014 pink chops, charcuterie, spaghetti carbonara with fat chunks of jowl. We&amp;#039;re at Lupa, which was Martins&amp;#039;s first big account. When a splash of rosy juice from a chop blooms on my napkin, I figure out what the point of all this is: deliciousness. These breeds are worth saving so that there will be more great food in the world. That fact gets lost in all the current chest-pounding about sustainability and being a locavore. Martins believes in his mission. But not to be forgotten is that Patrick Martins loves him some pork. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6666/patrick-martins-heritage-foods-usa-1209/>