Yeah, yeah, at $8.99 a pound, the ground beef I’m buying at Homegrown Meats in La Jolla costs three times what I’d pay for hamburger meat at my local Albertson’s. But the Homegrown cattle are all grass-fed (which may make their meat actually good for my cardiac health), they never consume any hormones or antibiotics, and there’s no chance I’ll get Mad Cow Disease from eating their meat (which tastes just fine). Still, what I love the most about the Homegrown offerings is knowing how those cows grew up: roaming the beautiful slopes of our own Mt. Palomar, tended by local cowboy families that have practiced their trade on the mountain for almost 150 years.
The San Diego Union-Tribune just ran an informative article about the Bergman and Mendenhall families who tend the local herd. Among the highlights:
– The first family member, Enos T. Mendenhall, came to the mountain in 1860 to run cattle.
– Five family members and one employee work the 3500 acres currently owned by the blended family.
– On the most recent cattle drive (when family members moved about 175 head from the animals’ summer home in French Valley (a pasture west of the Palomar Observatory about 5,500 feet above sea level) to their winter grazing land in Love Valley (about 2,500 feet further down the mountain) a 16-year-old, seventh-generation family member was participating.
Homegrown Meats, which was opened in August of 2008 by La Jolla restaurateur Matt Rimel, calls itself “an old-school butcher shop with a modern, health-conscious twist.” The butchers say the cows leave the mountain when they’re about a year old and spend the rest of their lives at a family-owned finishing ranch, where they continue to feed exclusively on grass. They get parceled into lovely packages wrapped in white paper at 7660 Fay Avenue in La Jolla.
