Senator travels with hunks of meat

When Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) travels back and forth from Washington, it's a long trip. But he brings a huge 40-lbs. sack of pork and beef with him anyway. He carries it on the plane and places it in the overhead bin.

From the New York Times:

“Taking meat with us is just something that we do,” Senator Tester, 55, said over a meal of beef stroganoff cooked by his wife, Sharla, in their Capitol Hill town house. “We like our own meat.”

Just as some lawmakers cannot part with their pillow from home, the Testers do not like to leave their state without its meat, which they have been schlepping around the country for years, including to a family reunion in Hawaii.

They are also known to take purple barley, grown organically on their land along with lentils, winter wheat and peas, among other crops. On a recent trip, Mrs. Tester tucked a Ziploc bag of barley into her purse.

The senator’s loyalty to his state’s beef, in particular, stems not from the hyper food-sourcing that has become a near parody of itself on American menus, but from his own taste preferences, honed from a lifetime of raising, slaughtering and butchering Black Angus cattle.

Appetizing.