June 2025

A Rube, a Hick, … a Jay.

It’s an early 1900’s term for someone who doesn’t know that what they’re doing is wrong and doesn’t know how to behave properly given the situation. In the real early 1900’s (1905-ish) when cars were just a fleet of fancy for the rich, like yachts today, the term applied to automobiles. Jay-drivers were the ones responsible for all the accidents and deaths. Then Henry Ford happened, and all the automobile industry groups spent money to convince the public that the streets were not theirs anymore, they belonged to the cars.

The original laws governing roadway use was "all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way". Then there was Herbert Hoover, who while secretary of commerce, convened meetings to create a model traffic law that could be used by cities across the country. Other auto industry groups established a free service where reporters could send in basic info about an accident and they would receive a ready to print article that shifted the blame onto the pedestrian. And thus, the first primordial Facebook bot was born.

When you can control the narrative, you control the people.

Pork, the other white meat.

If you’re old enough, you heard this all the time growing up. It’s lean, it’s a replacement for chicken or turkey, it’s bullshit. I mean it’s not really bullshit, the National Pork Board hired advertising company Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt (… and Draper?) to rebrand pork to boost it’s sales. They also convinced farmers around the country to breed leaner, less fatty pork. Then we had to watch some rube 10 year old shake a bag of breadcrumbs and proclaim she helped make dinner.

The 80’s were a weird time. We demonized fat, we extolled sugars, we ninja’d our turtles. It’s always interesting to look back and see how the world you grew up in was shaped and manipulated by companies scrambling to make a buck. Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as both a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn't a success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis”. It’s all marketing people.

So now Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, all of us seem to dismiss pork as a viable replacement for beef because it’s supposed to be this lean, dry, overcooked slab on which you pile sugary BBQ to make it palatable. And that’s wrong. I’ve cooked in Michelin starred restaurants; I even ran a couple as the sous chef. We would get pork from local farmed in New York that raised pork specifically for the high-end NYC market. It was great. It’s nothing compared to the pork I have in my case. NOTHING!!! I shit you not, the pork I get is more tender and more flavorful than anything I had in New York. Neal Saxton of Trifecta Natural Pork is an artist when it comes to breeding pigs. He cross breeds Mangalista, Berkshire, and Duroc pigs to create the best pork I’ve ever had in my life. The Duroc breed grows quickly and has a great size for our needs. The Mangalista has a thick outer fat layer but also extraordinary marbling throughout the whole hog. The Berkshire has an undisputedly superior flavor. The meat is often as red as our beef, the marbling is delicate and abundant, and the flavor is rich and savory with a subtle sweetness.

For all of this, it’s less than half the price of beef. And my beef prices are exploding and I have to pass that cost on, so I would really love for you to learn to cook with more pork. It will extend your budget and help bring a little more stability in a ridiculously uncertain world. And I know that my price on pork is higher than anywhere else in town, but go read that last paragraph again. It’s high because it’s amazing. I could sell you shitty commodity pork for a third of the price, but I don’t know if Shake and Bake is gonna be affected by the tariffs, so you might be paying for it either way. I know my pork doesn’t need fancy breadcrumbs to be delicious.

This will be my focus for the next month or so. I want to rewrite some standard beef recipes to substitute pork and teach you all how to use this to save money. I’ll post the recipes on the website as I finish them and we’re looking into making some short cooking videos too. This will be the start of my OnlyFlanks career. Maybe I’ll look into having A.I. write my marketing emails. But then you wouldn’t get zingers like “ninja’d our turtles”, so I might keep that in house.

Happy Grilling

Friendly Nick

p.s. One last nugget of info I didn’t know where to fit in… The marketing budget for “The other white meat” campaign was $7 million. For “Beef, it’s what’s for dinner” they spent $30 million. The money spent on chicken ads… $112 million. I’m curious what we’d be eating if we just followed our taste buds. Probably Neal’s pork.