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Organic sausage

Served curbside, bursting with local, seasonal goodness.

Every once in a great while, you will still spot the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, the glistening, 27-foot motorized hot dog (currently sporting Pontiac Firebird taillights), as it makes its all-American rounds - an earthbound comet, looping back in from the '50s.

Lord, it was a sight; still is a sight. I'd charge after the thing in rowhouse Mayfair when I was a kid, heart racing, blissfully unaware - and deeply uncaring - about the actual contents of an Oscar Mayer (or any other) picnic wiener.

It is a different moment now, of course. Contents matter (and food miles and farmworkers' treatment and the fate of the sea and the habitat of the songbird). And so we have a different truck for a different time.

May I introduce the Renaissance Sausage truck, the sketch of a jaunty cutlass on the side, neatly skewering an airborne sausage.

This is not quite as thrilling as the Wienermobile. But at the curbside - say, on Thursdays, at the afternoon farmers market that sets up at 22d and Fairmount - pulses quicken at the sight; the truck is peddling the latest in happier meals, sausages bursting with local and seasonal and organic goodness.

Take your pick from the blackboard menu - the rather tame Asian number, its loosely ground chicken sourced from Eberly Poultry's free-range, organic birds in Lancaster County, topped off with a crunchy, mango slaw; or the Mediterranean job, pastured lamb from Jamison, the world-class producer in Latrobe, Pa., nicely set off with fresh hummus and tangy-tahini-dressed cucumber, red onion, and feta salad; or a Veggie contender, full of beans and wheat protein and local produce and herbs that Renaissance owner Dan Semko often barters for, trading his sandwiches (on Wild Flour rolls baked in Holmesburg) for the bounty of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers at various weekly farm markets.

He offers, as well, the ubiquitous Italian pork (from Leidy's in Harleysville) sausage, informed with fennel. But if I'm after Italian pork sausage, frankly, it's hard to pass up the fuller-flavored links at Sonny D'Angelo's or Fiorella's on Ninth Street, or for that matter, the homemade pork sausage that butcher Paul Bovo grinds at the Narberth American Family Market.

Semko himself wasn't always a purist. He and his pal Bret Cavanaugh from his Lambertville days used to pay for their music festival weekends selling food out of the back of a 1974 VW bus.

So it's with the zeal of a convert that he pitches his new product: "Sausage might be the most bastardized product out there. But it doesn't have to be the mystery meat you get on South Street anymore."

No, indeed. And the Renaissance truck (it's Semko's one-man business now, Cavanaugh having hit the road weeks after the launch) has taken on the air of a missionary van. During a stand at Third and Spring Garden, Semko clued in customers who were startled to learn that meat, too, and not just produce, could be raised organically.

He makes the sausage in a commercial kitchen at 15th and South, using a Hobart grinder and sausage stuffer. And if the texture is an appealing medium grind, and the meat is clean-tasting, and the concept undeniably righteous, you might want to go elsewhere if you're looking for that naughty, fatty, spicy guy winking next to the pile of sizzling peppers and onions.

Semko was doing marketing for drug companies in Manhattan until a year ago. And when he writes, he hasn't quite lost the corporate accent. His product is "familiar, yet unique," he noted in an e-mail: "Familiar in the sense that Philadelphians are well versed in the consumption of forcemeats by way of a mobile vending unit, yet unique in the sense that we source only the freshest ingredients our local farms have to offer."

He is also quick to concede that he's jumping on a popular bandwagon, offering a link missing link in the upgraded truck brigade - lunch trucks that have lost their blue collars. Los Angeles and New York have set the pace, with prowling Korean taco trucks and artisanal ice creams churned in Brooklyn.

But new-wave trucks are starting to show up in Philadelphia - a gourmet cupcake truck (with sort of OK cupcakes), the cherry-red Hub Bub truck pulling Stumptown Coffee espressos on 38th Street near Penn, Honest Tom's tacos near Drexel (and on occasion near the Logan Square fountain).

Next up? Jose Garces' much-anticipated Guapos Tacos truck, sequined with 40,000 bottle caps, being readied to rove the after-hour streets of the city.

Renaissance has got plans of its own. It has a big following already at the Sunday farmers market that sprawls into the cobbled streets at Headhouse Square, Second and Pine, in Society Hill.

But earlier this week, Semko got clearance to set up at Bryn Mawr's more modest Saturday farm market, visible under pavilion tents in a parking lot just off Lancaster Avenue.

He could be there as early as this weekend, "LOCAL" and "ORGANIC" emblazoned above the windshield of Renaissance's 1986-vintage Chevy Workhorse, talking up the sausage's farm country pedigree, the cutlass raised against faraway, factory-farmed meat.

And no, it's not going to be like getting a visit from the Wienermobile. But on the Main Line - where it is unnecessary to explain that meat, too, can be organic - one expects that more than a few hearts may pick up the pace.

Renaissance Sausage
609-658-9945
www.renaissancesausage.com/

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