Life is too short to eat margarine

Life is too short to eat margarine. Really and truly. One of my indulgences is to drop $3 for a brick of Somerdale English butter at Central Market. It's too expensive to use for cooking, but spread it on bread and it will knock your socks off. It's like tasting real farm eggs, or chicken that comes from an actual farm. For people raised on mass-produced food -- which is to say, almost all of us -- it's like tasting the Platonic essence of the thing for the first time. If you're me, there's very little that can give so much pleasure for $3 than a block of English butter, which makes most commercially available American butters taste pale and watery.

A couple of you today have sent me a link to today's New York Times story about how small dairies and creameries, unable to compete with factory dairies, are starting to make artisanal cheeses, butter, creme fraiche and other dairy products. And consumers are starting to wake up to how insanely delicious this stuff can be.

At the Dallas Farmers Market, at the Texas Supernatural Meats booth, you can buy Full Quiver cheese spreads, which are so good you just have to stand in the darkened kitchen some nights eating it straight out of the little plastic tub, right there in front of God and everybody. Full Quiver, as it turns out, makes all kinds of artisanal farmstead cheeses. And they have a neat story to tell:

Two years ago, Michael and Debbie Sams faced the prospect of giving up their 63-acre dairy farm near Kemp, in Kaufman County.

"Milk prices were very low," Mrs. Sams says. "That's when we would milk the cows, and the big milk truck would back up and pick up all of our milk. Some went to Blue Bell. Some went to fluid milk. We milked over 100 cows, then up to 150 at one point. There were times when we were milking three times a day."

But all that milk didn't add up to a sustaining income. So they began looking for alternatives. The light bulb went off when they read Joel Salatin's You Can Farm (Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1998).

Mr. Salatin's answer: Get smaller, not bigger.

"He was trying to say rather than being a big, commercial, huge operation, let's go back and be a small family farm and sell what we produce," Mrs. Sams says.

In that, the Samses had a natural segue.

"I had been making cheese in the house for our family for years," she says, "and my husband said, 'Should we try it?' and we did."

Today, the Samses make highly sought-after artisanal Full Quiver Farms farmstead cheeses.

Isn't that terrific? God bless Joel Salatin. The Samses, you may have guessed, do what they do in service to the Almighty:

"Farming is not an end in itself," she adds. "It is a way that we can work out our faith.

"We are not certified organic," Mrs. Sams says, "but we try to follow those practices. We definitely do not use hormones. Our cows are basically on grass. We just give them a very small amount of grain. We plant winter grass, so they're out grazing all year long."

And Full Quiver? The name, which they adopted years ago, comes from the Bible, she explains.

"It talks about in Proverbs how 'happy is the man who has his quiver full,' " she says. "The text is talking about children."

The Samses, who are Mennonites, have nine, ages 9 to 34. "We didn't have nine kids at the time. We were still in our childbearing years, and we wanted to have our quiver full."

If you have the opportunity to try cheese, milk, yogurt, butter or any other dairy product from a small local creamery in your area, by all means do (or, if unavailable, at least look for rich European butters if you have them in your area). It's really worth it as a special treat, and you'll be helping out small farmers.