The Slope

Back when I thought I'd never not be a vegetarian, people used to ask me, "Well, why don't you eat only organic, free-range, ethically raised meat?" My answer was that to do so would be to start down a slippery slope. If I justified eating certain kinds of meat, it would then be very easy to start justifying eating other kinds of meat, and finally to start eating meat indiscriminately.

I've tried to avoid this fate since I had my first escargot in May. I've tried to be thoughtful when choosing the animals I eat. I've tried to steer clear of conventional meat. I swore to myself I wouldn't go to McDonald's, and I've kept that promise.

Still, in recent weeks, I've felt myself, well, slipping: some kosher-but-not-organic chicken here, some conventional supermarket bacon there, lots of farmed-salmon sushi in lots of places.

I didn't really realize how far I'd fallen until one day last week, when I made a lunchtime trip to the prepared food section of the Galeries Lafayette, home to a seemingly endless number of enticing culinary displays. I wandered past the couscous stand, the soup bar, the caviar kiosk. My stomach growling and my senses overwhelmed, I eventually chose the dim sum stand and took one of every kind of meat-filled dumpling I saw. Well, why not? I asked myself. I'd never had non-vegetarian dim sum before, and these looked delicious.

Reader, they weren't. The rice flour dough was gluey and gummy, the fillings greasy and rubbery. For the first time in my life, I truly appreciated what people mean when they talk about bad Chinese food. Furthermore, I truly appreciated what people mean when they talk about bad meat. The chicken was indistinguishable from the pork, which was indistinguishable from the beef. Each dumpling contained a bit of a carcass from a different factory-farmed animal, and each bit of carcass took flavorlessness to new heights.

In short, the whole meal was a terrible, terrible mistake. And while I know that everyone makes mistakes, I'm having trouble getting past this one.

When I was a vegetarian, the worst that happened when I made a mistake was a stomachache, or a hangover, or a burning feeling of embarrassment that would start to fade after a few days. As a meat-eater, I still make the kind of mistakes that lead to these consequences. But now I also make the kind of mistake that, in one go, contributes to the systematic torture and slaughter of several sentient beings.

I feel as though I'm always reading about conscientious omnivores, locavores who personally ensure that every morsel of meat that crosses their lips comes from a beast that was raised ethically and sustainably. But these people—if their existence isn't just an urban myth—have far more moral strength than I do.

The world of meat is tempting and deceitful, and I am far too clumsy, too flawed, to navigate it without occasionally stumbling. And, because the moral price is so high when I do stumble, I think I'll breathe easier when I back away from the slope and return to even ground.

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

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

Side Effects

Meat and cheese:  Is there any combination more straightforwardly indulgent—or more treacherous?

I tried the cholesterol-laden pair twice last week and lived to regret it both times.  The first time was at Le Bistrot du Boursier, which, according to Gridskipper, has some of the best tartiflette in town.  I’d wanted to try the dish of potatoes, bacon and onions smothered with melted Reblochon cheese ever since I’d first heard of it, and I wasn’t disappointed. The potato medallions were pleasantly waxy, the diced onions soft and nearly caramelized, the cheese intensely scented but mildly flavored.  The real point of interest, though, was the cubed smoked bacon—tangy, chewy, sweet.  I couldn’t help seeking it out with my fork.

The tartiflette was delicious, and I finished it, but almost immediately began to feel as though the fat in my bloodstream was congealing and sinking to the bottom of my arteries.  I crossed two arrondissements on foot to try to walk it off, but the heaviness and drowsiness lingered.  I was too full and sleepy to be of much use once I got home, but the tartiflette wouldn’t let me sleep—I woke in the middle of the night, my stomach still slightly queasily full.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but a couple of night later, at Joe Allen in the Marais, I glanced at the American menu and decided it was time for my first hamburger—or, more precisely, a bacon cheeseburger.  I wasn’t all that impressed by the bland ground beef, whose texture I found boring, but the marriage of bacon and cheese kept me eating until the burger was gone.  And, as with the tartiflette, I soon felt as though I had been hit with a sledgehammer.

I have the kind of constitution that has always allowed me to eat more in a single sitting than is advisable, but too much meat affects me differently.  I can’t say I’ve noticed many general physical changes since I started eating meat—I haven’t gained or lost weight, as far as I can tell, and I feel neither more vigorous nor as though I am being slowly poisoned.  But in the short term, meat does things to my body to which I am unaccustomed.  After my first steak dinner, I felt a sort of tingly sensation that I can only attribute to having more iron in my system than I’m used to.  Meat can make me so full that I cannot fathom eating dessert—an entirely unfamiliar sensation.  But nothing punishes me so brutally as the combination of meat and cheese.  The unbearable heaviness that lasts for hours, the sluggishness, the insomnia…I had expected the omnivorous life to keep me up at night for moral reasons, not corporeal ones.

I’m not ready to go kosher, but the unholy combination of meat and cheese has made me reflect a bit about the way I’m used to eating.  I’m used to cleaning my plate without adverse affect, but, health concerns aside, one shouldn’t be able clean one’s plate without adverse affect.  It’s easy to forget while living in the overnourished Western world, but food is precious, and it’s powerful.  If what it takes for me to learn that lesson is an encounter with animal protein’s unpleasant side effects, so be it.

Berlin, the Land of White Meat

Before I left for Germany, a handful of people told me, “Berlin is a good place to go if you’re eating meat now.”  They were right. 

To be fair, Berlin is a good place to go for a lot of things. 

It’s a good place to go for laid-back bars and biergartens serving cheap, excellent beer.  My favorite was 25.  Its German name, fünf und zwanzig, is nearly impossible for native Anglophones to wrap their tongues around.  But after a couple of €3 Staropramens and a bit of time spent playing on one of the wooden swings hanging from the tall trees on the edge of the Spree River, the pronunciation problem won’t really matter anymore.

It’s a good place to go for thrift shops and markets with infinitely kitschy and weird merchandise.  Oderberger Strasse is packed with boutiques selling Soviet-era clothes, furnishings, and tchotchkes with more entertainment value than practical value.  For items you might actually want to buy, head to the flea market on Boxhagener Platz, whose piles of new and used household items, accoutrements, and works of art contain the occasional treasure.

It’s also a good place to go for culinary treats that have nothing to do with meat.  Whole-wheat waffles topped with caramelized walnuts and cherries at a cozy coffee shop called Kauf Dich Glücklich stand out in my mind, as does fondant-coated marzipan cake (one of dozens of varieties of pastries) at the cafe at the Opera House on the Unter den Linden.

But it’s true that the main culinary attraction for a temporary omnivore spending a weekend in Berlin is the meat, and I wanted to try a couple of German classics before I left. 

First on the agenda was schnitzel, which I ordered at a restaurant called Schwarzwald.  Alongside potatoes sautéed with chewy diced bacon and a salad of translucent cucumber ribbons, I received two sizable cutlets of thin, breaded pork.  The meat was juicy and white, with a uniform texture and an anodyne flavor.  The other omnivore at the table, an American who’d spent the past semester in Berlin, swapped me some of her flatbread for a taste of my entrée and proclaimed it good schnitzel.

My second taste of meat in Berlin was weisswürst, the Bavarian fresh white sausage that is traditionally poached in hot water and then peeled before eating.   I was lucky enough to try the sausage in the context of a homemade Bavarian feast prepared by a real, live, very friendly German person named Sören.   The spread included a salty cheese spread called obatzda, whole-grain bread with pumpkin seeds, and pretzels.  The sausages were moist and without much strong flavor of their own, but they tasted heavenly with a dollop of sweet mustard.  Their skins, once removed, resembled castoff pantyhose, which was understandably disquieting.  But the sausage meat itself was mild, tender, and inoffensive.

Based on my (admittedly limited) experiences, inoffensive seems like a good word to describe German meat in general.  Whether pounded and breaded or ground and stuffed into casings, German meat has been thoroughly disguised.  Its color—white—is a clear indication that the people making it are interested not in preserving the visceral, bloody quality of meat, but in showing their culinary prowess by forming a finished product that resembles a piece of flesh as little as possible.

I tend to think of camouflaged meat as a product of fast food and of the industrialized food system—think chicken nuggets and ground meat patties of all kinds.  I also tend to think of camouflaged meat as an unqualified bad thing, a sign that diners are ignoring the true source of their food.  But Berlin was a good reminder that the practice of hiding meat’s provenance behind acquiescent textures and bland flavors is not a purely modern-day phenomenon—and not a purely detrimental phenomenon, either.  Germans have been disguising meat for generations.  And you know what?  It tastes pretty good.

The Prosciutto Sandwich

The Rue de Joinville in the 19^th arrondissement is officially open to traffic on Sunday mornings, but few motorists bother to turn onto the street:  these are the hours when pedestrians take over.  Singletons and families stroll down the middle of the lane, trailing trolley carts behind them, on their way to and from the open-air market at the Place de Joinville.

The marché is no place for anyone who’s in a hurry, or who likes their shopping uncluttered and compartmentalized.  Lines move at a snail’s pace here; shoppers squeeze between stalls and the trees that inconveniently interrupt the pavement. You try not to disturb the grapefruit stacked in pyramids on the edges of tables; you ignore the nearest vegetable vendor who’s trying to catch your eye to sell off his last bunches of mâche.  There is heckling at the market, in Arabic as often as in French; there are urchins who nimbly rush to you, hands outstretched, in the moment after you’ve paid for your fruit but before you’ve put your wallet away.  When it’s warm, like it is today, the heat only intensifies the claustrophobia and  the smell of fish.

I go to the marché around noon today on a mission from a friend who has told me that I need to make myself a prosciutto sandwich with a slathering of butter if I want to experience meat in all its glory.  I put The Decemberists on shuffle on my iPod—their desperate, messy exoticism seems appropriate for the market—and start working my way through a crowd of rotund older women in headscarves, Chinese men in polo shirts, Hasidic Jews in fedoras with their daughters in full-length skirts.   I sidle past arrangements of bumpy heirloom tomatoes, gaping fish as big as your thigh, baskets of ground yellow spices, pickles, logs of cheese.  I slink around incongruous stalls selling trinkets, batteries, watches; I pass the clothing booths with plastic-wrapped pairs of jeans and heaps of colorful, shoddily-made brassieres.  

Finally I find the charcuterie stall and see, behind some suspiciously gray boudins blancs nestled in a plastic container, a dried ham that’s already been cut into. 

“What you have there, is that prosciutto?” I ask the pretty girl behind the counter, trying to pronounce the Italian word with a French accent.

“We have Savoie and Parme,” she says, and I ask for the Parme, thinking that it’s close enough—I don’t find out until I get home to Wikipedia that jambon de Parme is the French term for prosciutto.  I ask for five thin slices, and the girl carefully operates the electric meat slicer, letting delicate pink shavings fall from the slab of meat onto a square of red and white paper, which she then folds into a small rectangle.

I stop at the bread stand on the way back home and get the baker’s last remaining half of a pain pavé—that long, flat loaf with a thick crust and chewy interior—then I return to my apartment.  I feel satisfied to have made my way successfully through the market.

I want my prosciutto sandwich to be perfect, and I have everything planned out.  Once home, I slice the bread in half lengthwise and smear it generously with Président butter.  I lovingly arrange the ham on top of the butter, squeeze the sandwich shut, and wrap it in the brown paper in which the bread came.  With my sandwich, a bottle of Puits St. Georges mineral water, a bed sheet and a novel, I walk to the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, spread the sheet on a grassy knoll, and sit back.

My surroundings are ideal—calm, quiet, unhurried—but the sandwich is not what I expected.  The prosciutto has a flavor that’s salty, sweet, musky; each bite hits me with a new kind of intensity.  The ham’s texture belies its delicate appearance.  It does not respond to my teeth in the way I would like it to.  I have to pull and gnaw and sometimes get my fingers involved to obtain reasonably sized mouthfuls.  The meat’s fat is hard and disturbingly inflexible, not soft and innocuous like fat from the plant kingdom. 

The sandwich is contentious, overwhelming, messily exotic. 

But I am satisfied once I have made my way through it.

A Change of Tack, or: I Need Your Advice

I went to a party last night and met a man—the French hostess’s British boyfriend—who had been a vegetarian for the first nineteen years of his life.  “But I just couldn’t justify it anymore,” he told me.  “I wear leather shoes.”

“Do you like the taste of meat now?” I asked him.

“Not really.”  He shrugged.  “My palate’s just changed so much, you know?”

At the moment, I could see his point.  I was gnawing on some Spanish charcuteries the hostess had insisted I try—dry sausage, thinly sliced jamón serrano, bright red chorizo mottled with white fat.  The meats were certainly nice (and went surprisingly well with a vodka tonic), but they tasted mostly...salty.  “Do you like it?” my hostess asked.  I nodded politely, but I felt a little as though I were being left out of an inside joke.

That’s the feeling I’ve gotten each time I’ve tried meat so far:  as though I’m missing out on some vital understanding that comes easily to other people.  Everything—the first escargot, the smoked salmon, the moist slivers of chicken atop the Caesar salad I finally ordered for lunch on Thursday—has been perfectly pleasant.  But, each time, I haven’t been able to stave off the slightly morbid thought, ‘How exactly does the vaguely pleasurable taste of this meat justify the death of an animal?’

It’s not a question I ask facetiously or rhetorically.  I truly want to understand why some people—most people—cannot conceive of giving up meat.

So instead of stumbling around, occasionally ordering random meat-containing dishes based on my own ill-informed ideas of what might taste good, I’m trying a change of tack.  I’m asking you, dear reader, whoever you may be, to give me some advice.  What’s the best non-vegetarian dish you’ve ever tasted?  What kind of meat, in the words of the Anti-Vegetarian Society of Meat Eaters, will someone have to pry from your cold dead hands?  Let me know, via comments or email, anonymously or identified, what you think I should be eating, and I’ll give it a try.

Maybe I’ll find, as the Brit suggested last night, that my palate has changed too much for me ever to appreciate meat.  But maybe—just maybe—I’ll taste something that’ll finally let me in on the joke.