Pertinent Quote from My Inbox

Courtesy of Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day email newsletter:

“Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.” (Alvin Toffler, futurist and author)

Image © George Bailey | Dreamstime.com

Here a "meuh," there a "meuh," everywhere a "meuh meuh"

The part of Saturday’s post about the noises that pigs make reminded me of the time last year when my French grammar professor, having gone off on a considerable tangent, taught my class the onomatopoeic words for sounds that French farm animals make.  A little Googling turned up this very useful list of animal sounds in various languages.  My favorite French ones, in increasing order of how amusing I find them, are below.  Happy Bastille Day.

Cow:  “meuh”

Chicken:  “cotcotcodet”

Rooster:  “cocorico”

Chick:  “piou piou”

Turkey:  “glou glou”

Duck:  “coin coin”

Pig:  “groin groin”

Pork Week's Blind Spot

This week was Pork Week at Salon.com, and it marks either one of the most brilliant editorial decisions ever made or the beginning of the end for Salon—only time will tell.

The four articles and one video in the series are a frequently self-congratulatory celebration of pork from pastured, organic, preferably acorn-fed animals.  There’s a personal essay about making bacon—as in, starting from the entire stomach of a pig—and what it’s like to “hold an animal’s insides in your hands, big and fresh and smelling of nothing but flesh and fat.”    There are Q&As with celebrity chefs who slam wan pork chops and hail bloody offal.  There’s hand-wringing about the proletarianization of bacon. 

There’s a short video profiling Veritas Farm in New York, where two former Wall Street workers now breed heritage pigs whose meat they sell for $10.50 per pound.  One of the owners, Paul Alward, describes the typical industry method of raising pigs:

Usually, commercially, the mother would be locked into a crate and the babies couldn’t have access.  And the first thing they do when a pig farrows is take the piglets and pull their teeth and dock their tails with a pair of pliers and you clip their back teeth out, cut their tails off, dock their tails, and give them an iron shot...the main reason to dock tails commercially is for cannibalism, and they start chewing each other, and becomes a problem.

Veritas pigs, by contrast, seem to be deliriously happy, if the video is to be believed.  They wander around the farm, their floppy ears falling over their eyes.   They lounge on piles of hay as their owners scratch their bellies.  They roll around in patches of mud, emitting satisfying baritone grunts.  I defy anyone to listen to those grunts without wanting to  go kidnap a Veritas pig and keep it as a companion for the rest of its days, just to be able to listen to the noises it makes (and to rub its ears).

It’s no wonder, given how appealing these creatures are, that the journalists narrating the video devote only one sentence—something about killing the pigs “as humanely as possible”—to the topic of slaughter.  And this is the irony of Pork Week, and of the movement that places such extraordinary value on the provenance of meat:  everyone talks about the welfare of pigs and the glory of getting in touch with innards, but few people talk about the killing. 

But I wonder:  Would it be so easy to laud free-range pork if more people witnessed the slaughter of pigs, “humane” as it might be?  I support the work of farmers who take great strides to ensure their animals’ well-being, and it is glaringly obvious that the pigs at Veritas are infinitely better off than the miserable pigs on factory farms.  But it seems to me that, as much interest as locavores take in the origin and quality of their meat, they are willfully ignoring one crucial part of the process.

On a side note, my favorite new piece of information gleaned from Pork Week is that notorious vegetarian-hater Anthony Bourdain (who has also called vegetarians “the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit”) has dubbed “bacon the ‘gateway protein’ for its astounding ability to lure vegetarians back into the carnivorous fold.”   That sounds like a challenge to me, so I bought a package of bacon at Monoprix last night.  I doubt that eating it will make me want to keep eating pork for the rest of my life, but, in case I falter, just show me some of the footage of Veritas pigs frolicking in the mud.  That ought to bring me back to my senses.

Image © Morozova Tatiana | Dreamstime.com

Mmm, Hair...

I didn’t think that the list of body parts I’d be consuming would include hair, but it seems I was mistaken.  I’ve become addicted to a Lebanese candy known as sha’er banat (“girl’s hair”), a box of which has been sitting on a table within arm’s length of my work computer.  It looks like a haystack (much more than any of the cookies that Americans call haystacks), and it tastes like sugar, slightly burned around the edges, with a hint of pistachio.  Its texture is somewhere between what I would imagine a unicorn mane to be like and the contents of a magnetic sketchpad.  It puts regular cotton candy to shame, and I’ve never been happier to have coworkers who make frequent trips to the Middle East. 

Chicken-Craving Heart of Darkness

When people used to tell me that chicken was their favorite kind of meat, I always inwardly rolled my eyes.  There’s nothing sexy or enigmatic about chicken.  It always seemed so boringly inoffensive to me, so conventional.  I chalked up others’ love for chicken to their predilection for blandness, their lack of gastronomic adventurousness, their underdeveloped palate.

My own first personal encounters with chicken didn’t do much to change my opinion.  Early in my meat-eating days, before my taste buds had really adjusted to the flavor of meat, I ordered a couple of unimpressive chicken Caesar salads.  Their cold strips nestled on beds of lettuce exuded only the faintest savor of meatiness.  Why, I asked myself, would anyone want to eat this Meat Lite?  I continued with my prosciutto and my boudin, convinced that chicken was a waste of my time.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, my roommate took me to a sandwich stand a stone’s throw from the ivy-covered walls of the Cimetière de Montparnasse, on the rue d’Odessa side of Café de la Place.  There, we ordered poulet-avocat-tomate sandwiches from a kind-faced man named Joseph, and he set to work with ingredients arranged beautifully in baskets around him.  With a serrated knife, he thinly sliced half of a crimson plum tomato and a quarter of a ripe avocado.  He pulled some of the soft inner mie from a flour-covered pain pavé and stuffed the crust with the tomato and avocado, a big handful of arugula, some dried cranberries, and slices of moist grilled chicken breast.  After adding a slug of olive oil, he pressed the blade of his knife against the ingredients to tuck them in snugly and wrapped the loaf in white paper.

It was the best sandwich I’ve ever tasted.  I'm still thinking about it.  I wish I could eat it every day. 

Luckily for French chickens, I can’t—Café de la Place is 18 Métro stops away from my apartment and 12 from my office, which makes Joseph’s stand a weekend-only destination for me.  But my persistent desire for the sandwich disquiets me.  I was not supposed to like meat so much as to want to eat it all the time.  I particularly did not intend to fall in love with chicken, the meat of the people.  Yet here I am, constantly craving that juicy white meat with glistening brown skin against a backdrop of chewy bread, cool and creamy avocado, grassy arugula, sweet and tart cranberries.  I try to believe that the sandwich would be just as good without the chicken, but, excellent as the other ingredients may be, it’s not true:  The chicken is the very soul of the sandwich, and it is delectable.

So I extend a sincere apology to the chicken-lovers out there whom I prematurely judged:  It would seem that, at heart, I am one of you.  What remains to be seen is whether my craving for the chicken sandwich will outlive my trial period of eating meat.

God Bless American Beef?

I began this project operating under the assumption that European meat was bound to be better than the American kind, but at least a few fellow expatriates beg to differ. My coworker Chris, who hails from Florida but hasn't been in the States for over a year, gets a starry look in his eyes when he starts talking about American beef. "It's juicy, it smells good...it's just so damn good, I don't know why," he says.

I know why, and it puts a damper on my desire to try U.S. beef: American beef tastes distinctive because it comes from corn-fed animals. At the risk of mentioning Michael Pollan far, far too often (although, if we're to be honest, it's probably already too late), the part of The Omnivore's Dilemma that's stuck with me the most is the fact that cows are not built to digest corn. In fact, eating corn makes cows sick, so cattlemen who feed their animals corn also must pump them full of antibiotics to fight digestive trouble. Corn makes young cows grow quickly, and it gives meat a nice marbled texture, but it's certainly not in the best interest of the cow or the consumer.

Still, Americans love their corn-fed beef. A 2002 study showed that consumers are willing to pay 30% more for corn-fed than for grass-fed beef (never mind that corn-fed beef is cheaper to produce, lower in heart-healthy omega-3s, and worse for the environment). My mother tells me that my grandfather, an Oklahoma-raised meat-loving trucker, wanted all his life to try Argentinean grass-fed steak and then was terribly disappointed when he finally did, so attached was he to the flavor of corn-fed beef.

But I can't complain about the taste of the decidedly non-American meat I've eaten. I had a lovely filet de boeuf at critical darling Le Severo earlier this week (and my companion, who just finished a year at culinary school here, proclaimed it the best steak frites he’s had in Paris). I was perfectly satisfied with the meat’s texture: crisp and caramelized on the outside, tender and juicy within. It was tender because filet comes from a part of the body that doesn't get much exercise, not because the cow had gorged on grains. It was also pricey (a well spent 30€), but that's because filet is rare—there's only one psoas muscle per cow. American cattlemen have tried to reproduce the texture and flavor of filet de boeuf in different cuts of meat on the cheap by feeding their cows corn. As a result, Americans have come to see sweet, tender meat as an everyday commodity rather than the luxury that it is.

Lest this post make it sound like I'm knocking an American tradition on the Fourth of July, let me be clear: I love America, and I love eating in America. Far more than stuck-up, self-impressed France, America welcomes and celebrates different food traditions and allows them to develop and intermingle. America also allows for freedom of dietary expression, with more options for vegetarians, vegans, and others who choose to omit certain foods for religious or ethical reasons. What's great about eating in America—much like what's great about living in America—is the diversity and liberty of the experience. I find it hard to believe that a taste of ethically and environmentally questionable corn-fed beef could make me appreciate American alimentary life any more than I already do.

So I wish a very happy birthday to America. But I also hope that, in its 233rd year, the land of the free and the home of the brave might find the bravery to try weaning itself off of corn-fed beef.

Other Omnivores: Tristan

Today I introduce a new feature founded as much on a lack of eventfulness in my own alimentary life—there are only so many new kinds of meat one can try—as on my immoderate preoccupation with what and how people eat.  “Other Omnivores” will take a look at other people’s thoughts about food and at their eating habits and preferences.   My fascination with eating is pretty equal-opportunity, and I’d like to interview eaters of all kinds:  self-described foodies and ingredient illiterates, practiced chefs and kitchen dilettantes, strict vegetarians and unabashed meat-lovers.   Everyone eats, and, as far as I’m concerned, everyone’s personal food preferences are equally valid—so let’s examine some of them.

I begin with my high-school friend Tristan.  It is time to give credit where credit is due:  I would never have dabbled in omnivorousness if he hadn’t given me the idea.  Tristan, who had become a vegetarian at the age of five after eating some bad cheese-filled chicken nuggets, decided abruptly this spring to start eating meat.  The former homecoming king comes from a family of vegetarians, but he says that the choice not to eat meat will be more powerful and meaningful if he makes it as an adult after trying meat for a year or so.  Tristan opened my eyes to the possibility of looking at meat from a different angle, and for this I thank him.

Tristan developed his knowledge of French food and wine waiting tables at Tersiguel’s, one of suburban Maryland’s finest and best-loved restaurants.  Having recently obtained degrees in English and music, he currently resides in New York, where he works at Opera News, lives in an apartment above Teany, and enjoys eating frogs’ legs, oxtail and Kobe beef hamburgers.

Following are Tristan’s responses to the “Other Omnivores” questionnaire.

Name: Tristan Kraft

Age: 22

Profession: assistant editor

Favorite vegetarian food: Morningstar Farms' Grillers

Favorite non-vegetarian food: close tie between pan seared scallops and steak with fries and hollandaise

Food you will never give up: eggs

Favorite food memory: baked ziti on my first trip home from college

Biggest food worry: mad cow disease

Would you eat meat grown in a laboratory? sure, with fries and hollandaise

Favorite Anti-Vegetarian Society of Meat Eaters slogan: obviously "wwjdfb"