Club Carnivore

With barbecue season heating up, you might be in the market for sausages and steaks. But, sorting through the marketing jargon deployed at grocery store butcher counters can make finding sustainably raised meat difficult. Enter meat CSAs.

CSA stands for community-supported agriculture, and it usually takes the form of a monthly or weekly box of produce. Customers pay in advance for the season, then pick up their boxes at a distribution point. Recently, a few innovative local food lovers have expanded the concept to meat.

Bay Area Meat CSA: Tamar Adler, a Chez Panisse Café cook, rounds up the best chickens and eggs from Vacaville’s Soul Food Farm, beef from Dave Evans’s Marin Sun Farms in Point Reyes, and lamb from Black Sheep Farm in Mendocino County. “My members write me and say that they had stopped cooking before they joined the CSA,” says Adler. “Getting their chickens and lamb chops, they became reinvigorated and reconnected to food.” From $170 for two months. Pick up point in Emeryville. For more information, visit http://bamcsa.pbwiki.com. To sign up, e-mail bamcsa@gmail.com.

Boccalone Salumi Society: Chef Chris Cosentino of San Francisco’s Incanto restaurant is known throughout the Bay Area as a salumi master and offal obsessive. His salumi is made in Oakland and sold at a new stand at Ferry Plaza, but society members sign up for three months at either the “boar” or “piglet” level. Both include salami in such varieties as orange and wild fennel—perfect for nibbling on before the fresh sausages come off the grill. From $174 for three months. Society members can pick up in East Oakland or San Francisco. Individual orders can be shipped to your home. Visit www.boccalone.com.

If you’re not ready to commit, look out for Fra’Mani sausages at East Bay Costco locations. Paul Bertolli, the former Oliveto chef, makes the products in his Berkeley factory, using only responsibly raised pigs.