For the first time I’m stumped for a catchy name for my next podcast.  It’s about Oriana Kruszewski, the Asian pear lady at Green City Market, one of those bundle-of-energy people who loves telling you about what she grows even more than selling it.  So anybody have an idea for a name, in the same not-too-punny but interestingly allusive vein as The Last Brisket Show or There Will Be Pork or Duck School?  (Doesn’t have to be a movie reference…)  If I use yours, I’ll come up with some kind of appropriate prize.  If you want to know more about Oriana, read Mike Sula’s piece from a couple of years ago.

The foraging podcast has passed 5000 views at Vimeo, mostly thanks to BoingBoing.

See it here.

The delightful Josephine, LTHForum poster currently on a year’s something-or-other in New England, has a great post about the moral fiber-building aspects of jonnycakes.

The Kansas City Star reports on people who eat raccoon. This will prove to be significant later.

Meanwhile, never hurts to have a link to the latest podcast.

Elastomoule financiers.

One thing that’s cool about doing these podcasts is that you never know where they might get some attention. It doesn’t surprise me that the one about Texas barbecue has gotten more views than any other, because there are plenty of barbecue fanatics out there, and it got a fair amount of linkage.  But I found one BBQ board where it hadn’t been mentioned yet, and posted about it there a couple of weeks ago.  A small bump in viewership, maybe 20 or so, resulted.

Then suddenly yesterday it shot up— and 145 people watched it in one day.  37 more have watched it today— as of about 7:30 AM.  The result is that it’s been pushed over 2000 Vimeo views, a first-time milestone for Sky Full of Bacon. (It’s actually at 2100 right now.) UPDATE: Over 200 today.

The thing is, I have no idea where this traffic came from.  Vimeo will show you referrers (where the person watching it arrived from) but these viewings haven’t registered yet.  And a Google search didn’t turn up any link I didn’t already know about. I’m guessing it’s from somewhere that picked up on it at that most recent BBQ board, but I don’t really know.

So a few hundred new strangers will have watched it this week, and I have no idea who they are.  Cool.

And if you haven’t watched it… watch it!

Sky Full of Bacon 03: The Last Brisket Show from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

UPDATE: The answer, apparently, was posted by mistake in the Shokolad thread below by one “G Smithey”: “A University of Texas fans website that talks about Barbecue often, more than it does women, posted the link.”

So I found a source within the Obama campaign— I know this sounds like more tongue in cheek, but this is on the level— and mentioned that my Obama-foodie post had turned up at the HuffPo.  Here’s what my source (let’s call them “Deep Dish”) said:

“He’s so not a foodie. All he eats is salmon. He’s a boring eater, he’s so disciplined. That’s why he stayed so trim while David [Axelrod] gained [number of pounds redacted] during the campaign.”

So there we have it. Not a foodie, an Omega-3-powered salmon eating health fanatic. Foodies, just another group who projected their hopes onto Obama….

“Who’s ready for a hot dog?  Mister President?  Madame Secretary?”

UPDATE: Michelle Obama goes to Blackbird! And a reader of these posts who apparently has an office overlooking it snaps some very paparazzi photos. And look what I won at the LTHForum Christmas party raffle…

Just a reminder, there are weirdly eclectic foodie holiday gifts available via my Cafe Press stores.

The Sky Full of Bacon tote bag will make you the coolest kid at the farmer’s market or the local Whole Foods:

Click here to order.  And there’s a bunch of stuff eternally available at the LTHForum shop, of which the top item, unquestionably, remains the Pork Clock, as hangs on the wall at Smoque:

What’s at the very top?  Bacon!  How prescient…  Click here to order that.

To jump to the most recent Sky Full of Bacon video podcasts, click on Video Podcasts under Categories at right.

I just received an email with some tragic news which ironically underscores one of the points of the two mulefoot videos— that the survival of a breed is at risk without a wide range of farmers raising them, which necessitates a market for their meat which can support a wide range of farmers.

Arie McFarlen is the woman who acquired the breed from R.M. Holliday, who had kept the last purebred herd. She in turn sold the breeder pairs to farmers such as Mark Kessenich and Linda Derrickson, seen in the video. 

Dear Friends of Maveric:

It is with the deepest and most profound grief that I write this message. At 5:30am November 19th, 2008, we awoke to our beautiful 100 year old gambrel barn engulfed in flames. Trapped within the barn was my beloved stallion, several rare Mulefoot hog sows with their litters of piglets, an extremely rare Wessex saddleback boar, a favorite guinea hog boar and all of my dearly loved cats. Although we made attempts to rescue our animals, we were unable to save any from the barn.

We were able to run pigs from their pens near the barn to the pastures and get them away from the heat & flames. Many animals in these pens were burned and have suffered smoke inhalation. Though it is several days after the fire, we are still losing animals we have been nursing and trying to save.

The fire burned with such intensity that it caught a large tree and our new barn on fire as well. The firemen were able to save our new barn, but our gambrel was a complete loss. The fire marshal reported that the fire was burning in excess of 2000 degrees due to the way the metal items in the barn melted and puddled. The fire was apparently caused by a failure in the main power breaker. When the power transformer began to melt, we lost power to the whole farm. This also left us without water, as our well is pumped by electricity.

All of our feed (approximately 1000 bales of alfalfa), our tools, watering troughs & feeders, buckets, piglet pens, fencing supplies, power cords, winter heaters, saddles & horse gear, construction materials for our new barn and so much more were completely destroyed.

We cannot replace our rare breed pigs. They simply do not exist. Our work for nearly ten years has been to preserve and save these breeds of pigs. We cannot begin to express our sense of loss over these animals, not just from our lives, but from all future generations.

This tragedy has made it even more clear to us that these rare breeds are in a very precarious situation. At any moment, a disaster, accident or disease could take yet another species from this planet.

Our friends have already begun to rally around us and offer support. We have received many calls and emails from the folks at Slow Food USA, Animal Welfare Institute, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and Dakota Rural Action. Because of this outpouring of encouragement, we feel compelled to persevere and insure that future generations are able to raise and enjoy these breeds, and that biodiversity amongst pigs is preserved.

The Endangered Hog Foundation has been established to help us rebuild and to help continue work with endangered pig breeds. We fully intend to carry on with our DNA research, breeding program, establishing new breeders and promotion of endangered pigs. We have already begun the process of cleaning up the debris and will begin construction of a facility to continue working with our pigs as soon as spring arrives in South Dakota. Temporary measures to provide for the pigs during the upcoming winter are underway.

*We need your help*. Our immediate needs are for physical labor to help with clean up and building temporary shelter to winter the pigs. Additionally, we need to find a source for alfalfa hay square bales, to obtain portable shelters for the pigs due to farrow in early 2009, hog equipment and hand tools.

Donations can be sent to the “Endangered Hog Foundation” in care of Maveric Heritage Ranch Co. at the address below or through the link on our web page at www.maveric9.com.

Thank you to everyone who has offered support. I cannot describe how it feels to stand in a place of profound grief and intense gratitude at the same time. We will carry on through the love and support of our friends.

Endangered Hog Foundation
Maveric Heritage Ranch Co.
47869-242nd St.
Dell Rapids, South Dakota 57022

<(‘(..)’)>
Arie McFarlen, PhD
Maveric Heritage Ranch Co.
(605) 428-5994
www.maveric9.com

More information is here.

Big big thanks to Monica Eng for a really nice link to the latest podcast at The Trib-Stew. (She links to the similar story of hers which I’ve recommended a couple of times by now.) Scroll directly below to find part 2 for yourself.

Also to Vital Info, who reminds me that I never got around to thanking MenuPages for the comments on Part 1.

Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with the podcast, but I really love those things people do where they roam around some spooky abandoned building taking pictures of its state of decay. Here’s a great one I discovered via Chicagoist, about a power plant in Dixmoor, IL (no, not nuclear) that seems to have been abandoned like the Marie Celeste.

UPDATE: Thanks to Gaper’s Block and Chicagoist and Helen at Menu Pages whose reference to lion and bear meat apparently led to a nationwide mention on the Menu Pages Blogpire. Matth, who’s posted a couple of comments, posted a longer take well worth reading on his blog here.

UPDATE 2: And Serious Eats has linked to it here with thoughts of their own. Thanks!

Helen made bemused mention of my arty switch to black and white at a couple of points. I’ve used this a few times now because to me, switching to black and white sort of steps out of the flow of the story, as it’s being told in the immediacy of realistic color, and says… “here’s what we thought when we had time to contemplate it a little more.” It seems to work well to mark the line between the hurry of making food on a schedule, and the thoughtfulness of talking after the fact.

That said… like more “artistic” decisions than we realize, I suspect, it was initially rooted in a “salvage something that didn’t work so well” moment. My interviews with Kelly Cheng at Sun Wah for podcast #2 just came out looking lousy; the fluorescent light was sort of greenish and the stretch of wall behind her was just kind of dingy and plain. So I tried different things to improve it and it turned out that simply making it black and white suddenly made the dingy, bumpy wall seem like it was full of character. It’s worked for me ever since….

UPDATE 3: In a perfect illustration of the point about how sheltered we all are from the reality of meat processing, The Huffington Post is ragging on Sarah Palin for being filmed in front of the “gruesomeness” of a turkey slaughter. Because, to borrow a phrase from Full Metal Jacket, if you eat a nice fat juicy turkey this holiday season, God miracled its ass into your oven. There’s no bigger hypocrite than someone from the city slagging rural folks about the reality they help shelter us from while keeping us well fed. (No, this should not be construed as a political comment for or against anybody. It’s a political comment for honesty about the food we eat.)

UPDATE 4: Thanks to ex-Readerites Nicholas Day at Chow (there was one about part 2 as well, which is proving impossible to find), and Martha Bayne at her blog.  And when I looked at the referrers on the Vimeo page, a bunch of them seem to have come from a post at NDNation.com, which turns out to be… a Notre Dame chat site.  I can’t access the post so I have no idea why my videos have turned up there, but thanks anyway, from a descendant of the Fightin’ Irish (my grandfather, no joke, played for Knute Rockne, and my dad went there to play football too till he messed up his knees).

There are also some great comments you should read, mainly in the announcement post for part 2 (be sure to read Jon in Albany’s) but also a new one in this old post.

A couple of notes about being a small, one-man media outlet in this fast-changing world, rooted in my corner of the world (Chicago foodblogging/podcasting) but surely applicable to any niche market in the new media world. If you’re mainly interested in food, feel free to scroll to the next post.

Data point #1: I commented on a blog post at a major Chicago media outlet’s food blog on either Friday night or Saturday morning. Then I thought, why did I just bother doing that? No one will approve the comment till at least Monday. (I was correct.)

Data point #2: Another major Chicago media outlet does food videos too, not exactly like mine. They host them on Vimeo too. So I checked their stats. Here they are, with a subscriber base in the six figures and celebrity chefs (okay, I have those now, but not until recently) and all the power of cross-promotion. And their videos… draw way fewer viewers than mine do. As in, the one I put up 5 days ago has already outdrawn the one they put up a month ago. As in, my most-viewed one has had six or seven times as many as most of theirs.

I point this out not to gloat but to make a serious point. For all that newspapers and magazines are going around bemoaning the impending porcelain swirl of their industry, these factoids suggest to me that they still haven’t grasped how to harness the power of new media and build an audience online. The things I know how to do that they still don’t, quite, include:

• Post frequently. Blogging isn’t even the main point of Sky Full of Bacon, the videos are, and yet I manage to get 3 or 4 posts up a week. Where oftentimes the bigger media, with contributing food blog staffs of anywhere from 2 to 10 people, manage to get… 3 or 4 posts up a week. If you can get a daily paper or a weekly magazine out, yet can’t manage to post new content online on a regular schedule, that says where your priorities still are.

• Post on an audience-timely schedule. I became acutely aware of when most people are at their computers while helping run LTHForum. It was dead till about 9:20 am, busiest from then till just before noon, dead from noon to about 1:30, moderately active till about 4:30, dead till about 7, moderately active from 7 to 9, then low but steady until past midnight.

So what’s the blogging schedule at most big media publications? I suspect it’s basically like this:
10:30 am: writer turns in blog post to editor
4:30 pm: harried editor turns from putting out fires on print edition to email box, reads and finally approves post
4:57 pm: post goes up just as audience shuts down computers and goes home

• Interact with your readers. The name of the game is reader loyalty— they have to want to come back. What makes them want to come back? Interaction. They come back to see if someone else responded to what they said. They come back to see if the writer of the original piece flatters them with attention. So how do you expect to build that if 1) you can’t even approve a comment in less than 3 days and 2) your writers are too busy on print assignments to check back and interact on the blog?

Fact is, I can’t remember on most of the big media blogs when there’s even been the least little sign that the bylined writers even read the comments. Which is why when a similar topic goes up at a big media outlet and at LTHForum, frequently the big media outlet with thousands of paid subscribers will be stuck at 3 or 4 responses when the LTHForum thread is on to its 3rd or 4th page. There may be far more readers at the former, but there’s far more positive reinforcement at the latter, and that’s what builds audience loyalty and keeps them coming back.

That’s why, even though I don’t get many comments, I take the possibility of comments very seriously, and check my blog at least a few times a day to make sure I can approve any that have appeared. And I try to respond in comments to any comment I have anything of value to say about. I am grateful for the time commenters take to write anything here and try to reward it with appreciation.

• Don’t underestimate the audience. A few people questioned, when I started doing these videos, if people would sit still for 15 or 20 minutes on these subjects. It’s odd, 15 or 20 minutes is, of course, shorter than any food TV show, but the perception was that online video needed to be 2 or 3 cute, snappy little minutes at most; the idea of spending 20 minutes going somewhat in depth into a topic (and a restaurant, and the life of the guy who owns it) seemed like something nobody would watch.

Yet here we are about five months later and as the viewership stats at Vimeo demonstrate, there’s a much stronger audience for 20 in-depth minutes on the people and philosophy and technique behind something than for 3 quick little minutes on the technique alone. There’s a much stronger audience for something that represents a single podcaster’s quirky personality and way of looking at the world than there is for something that plays like a skillfully-made but rather generic food demo that just happens to have local chefs.

And I think that points to another thing about our new media world. Generic doesn’t sell, individual does. The sites I go back to are the ones where I feel some bond, some kinship with the blogger/podcaster/whatever, because of his or her unique personality. It’s not about getting a million vaguely interested readers with the common denominator any more, it’s about getting a thousand fanatically loyal ones because they feel they need to hear from you on the topic of the moment.

Follow these principles and the lowly individual blogger, with no more resources than his own sensibility, will and spare time, can be shockingly competitive with huge media companies in terms of audience gathered, and by some measures occasionally kick their butts. Which is an exciting thing for him, but will be tragic if it means the big media outlets sink before these lessons sink in. I don’t want a world in which the media I grew up on and still read pretty faithfully bit the dust and were replaced by EatingOutWithBigEd.com. I want a world in which they successfully made the leap from the print era to the online era by absorbing the ways in which online behavior and expectations and tactics are different.

And if any of them would like my help in getting there, they know where to reach me….