The Butcher and the Vegetarian

I had a lot of fun with this book. As a somewhat ambivalent meat eater and a foodie who struggles with the question of how I can enjoy the world of food to the fullest without genuinely loving to eat meat, it was a pleasure to read the story of someone in a similar predicament.

Like TAW, I've been learning to cook meat as someone with considerable experience in vegetarian cooking. I'm a bit squeamish sometimes, and also deeply satisfied when I do manage to get it right. Like her, I also feel a bit like a space alien as I watch the strong emotions meat evokes in people.

Because this is a book about a subject that strikes so close to home for me, it was inevitable for me to feel a bit dissatisfied when it didn't give the same weight to aspects of the issue that stand out most dramatically for me. There was only a sentence or two about the relationship between meat and class, or the fact that people with wealth and power have traditionally eaten lots of meat while, until relatively recently, most other people couldn't afford to eat meat on a daily basis. That's changed with the advent of industrial meat production, but it was with us for so long--perhaps from Paleolithic times, even--that it's still with us in force, in the strong emotions that meat evokes, which this book describes so extensively.

There's been an interesting twist to this dynamic lately, as nearly everyone can afford $1 meat-based meals at McDonald's, but affluent people have been instead choosing organic and sustainable meat on a more limited basis. I've spent many years listening to people's comments at the farmers' markets about the fact that my booth doesn't offer any meat. The people who are most contemptuous usually seem the most out of place among the relatively affluent, educated farmers' market clientele. I wrote in my last post about the only time I'd ever seen a farmers' market vendor robbed. The guy who robbed her had been at my booth earlier in the day asking about my food, and said, "I can't eat that. I've got to have meat."

Speaking of meat, I had a success story the other day. I got some stir fry meat from Skagit River Ranch, which is sliced extremely thin. I haven't had much success with it in stir fries because the pieces are too long, but I made gyros sandwiches that filled me with joy. I marinated the pieces in olive oil, lemon and salt, then I cooked them hot and fast, and put them on fluffy Greek pita with lettuce and yogurt sauce. Yum. I used less than 8 ounces of beef, fed 3 people, and made us all very happy.