Here’s an interesting reason family farms and restaurants that serve great deli food are getting harder to find in South Carolina.  Do you know that you can’t hang cured meat like hams or jerky or salami above your meat or deli counter in South Carolina? You have to put your meat in a cooler.  You might remember years ago going to a great Italian deli and seeing their cured meat hanging above the counter.  If you go to Italy, you can still see this – even with the EU’s penchant for regulation. Perhaps you remember the country hams and the country sausage hanging as it cured in the butcher shops of our small Southern towns or your grandfather hanging his own jerky.  

I was talking with Chef Cutrone of Fratelli in Baxter.  Now Cutrone is the kind of guy who makes his own Bolognese sauce – and I can testify that it tastes like it does in Bologna.  He said his traditionalist Italian uncle refuses to eat his deli meats because they taste inferior to him. This is not because the products are no good – they are the best Cutrone can find - but the cooler actually messes up the flavor profile.  

A restaurateur in North Carolina got so angry about this stupid regulation that he was able to get the law changed in North Carolina.  Why don’t we do that here in South Carolina?  We talk about supporting organic family farming and generating markets for local foods, but the State blocks a thousand year old tradition and skill set.  Here is the Nanny state gone mad!  

If you wonder why anyone would run for office in this day and time, just look around at folks like Cutrone who are prevented from serving you the very best food possible and then look at the politicians who run with the backing of big business and lobbies that advocate for mass production of preservative soaked and insipid products where the manufacturer (not an artisan) has to have a lab dedicated to putting back an imitation of what is taken out.  

It is the big box store and chain store mentality that has eroded the integrity of our localities and our identities.  Big developers are such a ready target because they are such a destructive bunch.  They weasel into our town boards and county councils and State government and persuade them that the tax base will grow if they provide infrastructure and tax incentives to grow a web of absentee owners instead of the consistent tax base of steady small businesses that make a community a community. Someone has to stop these folks.  We had a Governor who was trying, but his own party hog tied him and his own bad choices lost him the high ground.  The Republicans sabotaged their own man and an agenda they said they supported – that they ran on.  There is a rotten smell in South Carolina – and it ain’t hanging meat.  It is our future they are hanging up to dry.  

I want to help you by enabling Chef Cutrone to feed you the finest and the best food he can craft.