Meat at your doorstep
Local ranches Clark Summit Farm, Riverdog Farm, and Marin Sun Farms now do for meat what produce CSAs do for fruits and vegetables. Sign up with their meat clubs, and you can buy pasture-raised meat for a great price and pick it up at a convenient location. (They can’t deliver to your doorstep, because unlike most produce, the meat must remain frozen or chilled.) Then there’s the Bay Area Meat CSA, an online network that helps members connect with ranchers to buy and share whole animals. As with a produce CSA, flexibility is essential. You rarely get to choose which cuts you end up with, and because there are only so many pork chops in a pig, shares are not always identical. But the quality and price of the meat more than make up for the inconvenience of not knowing exactly what you’re going to get. Look at the arrangement as a chance to try out new recipes. clarksummitfarm.com; riverdogfarm.com; marinsunfarms.com; bamcsa.ning.com

Feast on a beast
Rib eye or hanger steak? Loin or cheek? No one likes making such choices at a great restaurant. But Chris Cosentino, chef of rustic-Italian restaurant Incanto, which serves sustain­­ably grown produce and meat, is now offering a menu called Leg of Beast: It features an entire beef shank with all its components—braised shank, roasted marrowbones, beef tendon with cannellini beans and sage—and, because man cannot live on meat alone, a chicory salad with zinfandel vinaigrette. The dinner is meant for a feast—and a crowd—but it’s entirely affordable. One week’s notice is required, and the $200 meal serves six to eight. For a special occasion, book Incanto’s private Dante Room and delight your guests with the Whole Beast menu, for which servers carve a roast suckling pig, a lamb, or a goat right at your table. 1550 Church St., S.F., 415-641-4500, incanto.biz

Feed your mind
Protein is essential for memory and learning, but there’s no rule that says it has to enter your body on the end of a fork. Meatpaper, a two-year-old journal produced in San Francisco, seeks to fatten your imagination with a diet of articles devoted to matters of the flesh (the edible, animal kind). Published quarterly, Meatpaper claims neutrality on the ethics of meat eating; instead, editor Sasha Wizansky explores the cultural and emotional responses to the act. A recent issue, dedicated to the pig, contains stories with titles like “Leap of Faith: The Per­sistence of Pork Prohibitions in a Swine-centric World.” Another, entitled “Why, God, Why?”, pits vegetarian bacons against one another in a taste-off. meatpaper.com

Go whole hog
If you grew up in a fam­ily of hunters, you know what it’s like to have a freezerful of meat from a single animal. Now there’s a chance for citified folk (and those who are antigun) to enjoy the same bounty. On the third Sunday of each month, students gather around the butcher block in the back of Avedano’s Holly Park Market and learn to butcher a suckling pig and a lamb. With just a six-inch boning knife, students first take turns dividing the pig into sections, then into chops, hams, shoulders, and so on. After a short lunch break for juicy housemade tacos, they pick up their knives again to go at the slightly more challenging, 70-pound lamb. It’s just as easy to do this at home, since the animals, which you can buy at Avedano’s or at one of the meat CSAs, will already have been bled and cleaned (i.e., had their guts removed), and you can dispose of the leftovers the way you would any other meat scraps. 235 Cortland Ave., S.F., 415-285-6328, avedanos.com