Adventures with twice-cooked pork

In some Chinese cooking recipes for pork, you're to cook it twice. Once boiled (or some other slow-cooking method) and once grilled. I am not sure about the science behind this, but the taste is really good.

I tried this with pig ears in June, and I'd tried it with some fatback in my wok. This summer, I had access to a barbecue, and so I decided to give it a go with some spare ribs. My butcher likes to cut his spare ribs thick as a brick, including a few healthy layers of meat and fat on top.

To make this, I decided to boil the meat with some random herbs (random because you could use any herbs, really): thyme, laurel, and rosemary, together with some pepper and coriander. Once the meat had been in boiling broth for about 1.5 hours, I took it out, let it cool for a few hours - because I had a few hours, but cool is cool enough - and broiled it on the grill.

While broiling, I covered it with some thyme syrup that I'd made by making thyme tea and adding lots of brown sugar over heat.

I served with home-made chips and grilled eggplant. It was as good as it looks.

Grilled pig ear (BBQ) - and a côte de boeuf

On a recent (and one would say rare) sunny day in Paris, I headed over to a cousin's house to prepare a BBQ. I had decided to make 'côte de boeuf' and pig ear. The beef piece is out of the rib but without bone - though you can buy it with bone as well. In France, it is considered to be the most noble piece of the beef and was a bit of a splurge.

The pig ear, on the other hand, cost less than 2 euros. I boiled it for an hour before letting it cool and marinating it in a mixture of soy sauce, ketchup, and olive oil. Once it had been sitting in the marinade for about 30 minutes, I threw it on the grill until it was nice and grilled all over. 

The rule here is that you can't overcook a piece of cartilage. The longer it's cooked (boiled+grilled), the more tender it will be. In the end, it's crunchy and chewy at the same time, and quite fatty to boot. Delicious, in other words.

The idea of making this came after I made twice-cooked pork for my parents a few weeks earlier. I used pork belly (poitrine). After boiling the the meat for an hour with some star anise, I let it cool overnight and sliced it thinly. I then grilled it in a wok, set it aside, and made stir-fried vegetables to serve with it. It was amazing.

I don't have anything good to report about the beef, which I sadly overcooked. Here's a photo that shows just how nice a piece of meat it was: you can tell from the marbling and the nice color. The butcher also removed a nice layer of fat from the outside, which, along with the marbling, is a good sign that the cow's been outside, eating grass and getting cold - instead of inside, eating god-only-knows-what.

Eating beef pear - really!

One of the nice things about getting to know your butcher is that he'll sell you the "butcher's pieces" as they are known in France. These are little-known muscles that make great eating. The "pear" (la poire) is one of these muscles. It is a little round muscle, weighing in at a little more than a pound, with short fibers, and shaped like ... a pear! Right, that was tough.

It is very tender and makes great steak or fondue meat. As you can see, the butcher mangled it a bit, but that was on purpose as he removed all of the nerves from it. This makes me think that I should make a post about my butcher - soon.

I just grilled this puppy in a heavy pan, and put some salt and pepper on it when it was done, which is to say nice and rare. Delicious!

The absence of marbling might lead one to expect a dry piece of meat, and you'd be ill advised to overcook it on that account alone. However, if you keep it rare, it is a very delicate and tender piece of steak.

In pink, the part of the beef that "pear" comes from.

I'd be curious to know if it's even possible to get these cuts of meat in the US, where it doesn't seem that anyone goes through the trouble of identifying them, although perhaps it's what's called "round steak". I can remember that when my family first moved to the US in the late 1980s, and for years after that, the lack of correspondence between US and French meat cuts was a topic of conversation among French expats.

Pink slime, it's what's for dinner!

According to recent news stories (here and here), the USDA has approved the use of so-called "lean textured fine beef" or "boneless lean beef trimmings", aka "pink slime", in school meals.


Pink slime is basically recovered beef meat that has been treated with ammonia gas. In this case, "recovered" refers to the fact that this meat used to be deemed unsuitable for human consumption, in part because slaughter conditions made unhealthy by exposing it to cow feces. It is "recovered" in the sense that it's no longer used as dog food. In other words, it's recovered because it now generates a higher revenue than it used to.

If you live in the USA, pink slime can be part of your hamburger today, and you'll never know it because it doesn't have to be labeled - after all, it's just meat.

If this seems strange to you, it's because it is.

Pink slime might well epitomize the problem of industrial meat production. We have animals that are slaughtered in factories, their carcases treated with toxic chemicals, and the resulting "meat" sold to unwitting consumers. At the same time, the USDA refuses to mandate clear labeling thereby preventing consumers from making informed purchasing decisions.

Digression: why oppose labeling? those with nothing to hide will not fear labeling requirements, unless it's the cost of the label that's the problem??


To argue, as the president of the American Meat Institute, that pink slime reduces waste and is therefore a "sustainable" product is to insult the intelligence of one's audience. There is nothing sustainable about the mode of production that produces pink slime. Industrial meat production is, by its very nature, unsustainable, as argued elsewhere on this blog. While I do not doubt that producing and selling pink slime is financially profitable, its production cannot transform an unsustainable industry into a sustainable one. To invoke sustainability is disingenuous, if not outright mendacious.

Personally, I sidestep this entire problem by not eating much hamburger to start with. If I do, I buy it straight from my butcher and watch him grind it for me using his refrigerated grinder - I know exactly what cut of beef he's using to make my hamburger.

If you don't have access to a butcher, or if your butcher won't grind your beef to order, you have three choices if you want to be sure to avoid pink slime:

• grind your own hamburger
• eliminate hamburger from your diet
• shop only at supermarkets that guarantee that their ground beef is "pink slime"-free. There is a list of supermarkets in the ABC story linked above.

If your supermarket isn't on ABC's list, you could ask what their policy is on pink slime. I know I would.

The Human Cost of Animal Suffering

In a column in the New York Times, Mark Bittman discusses some implications of industrialized meat production.

He makes some interesting points, most notably that the disconnect between animal slaughter and the vast majority of meat consumers has insulated those consumers from the realities of meat production, and allowed them to abdicate their responsibilities as meat eaters.

These responsibilities, as I discussed in previous posts, include sticking to the inter-species "contract" established between livestock and humans:

• Humans provide comfort, food, veterinary care, evolutionary advantages, and a humane death to their livestock.
• In return, the livestock provide their meat, skin, milk, etc...

Clearly, this compact is not made at the individual level, but it hard to argue that as species, cows, pigs, ducks, etc... have not benefited from their symbiotic relationship with humans.

The industrialization of meat production violates all of the humans' obligations under the "contract". Animals are raised in uncomfortable conditions, given unhealthy foods, pumped with hormones and antibiotics, culled instead of cured, and slaughtered in abhorrent conditions.  As consumers, we are responsible for the way in which the products we buy are produced: with our dollars/euros/yens, we agree to participate (or not) as the final rung in the production chain. This means that by consuming industrial meat, each one of us is endorsing the violation of the inter-species contract described above.

I'd like to think that most meat consumers are willfully or unwillingly ignorant of the manner in which their meat is produced, and that is why the industry is able to operate as it does. At the same time, it is fairly clear that the industry has taken great pains to hide its practices, sensing, perhaps rightly, that knowledge might bring on scrutiny and reduced meat consumption.

Petit salé aux lentilles - salt pork with lentils

It's still winter, and so it's still slow-cooking season. This week my daughter and I tried a very easy dish: salt pork with lentils (petit salé aux lentilles). This is a traditional French dish that is often served in cafeterias and such because it doesn't have many ingredients and can cook without much supervision.

The trick is to find a good piece of salt pork, and possibly a nice thick sausage to go with it. You can use any piece of salt pork, depending on your budget or appetite. This time around, I used a piece of pork shoulder, from the top of the shoulder (palette). This is the "blade" or "blade shoulder" in the US and UK systems. If you want to make a true-to-tradition petit salé, you can also add a Morteau sausage.

As always, you start by assembling the ingredients. In this case, I went for a slightly fancy stock, with an eye to making soup with it afterwards. My broth had carrots, onions, black radish, leaks (white and green parts), kohlrabi (chou-rave) with its leaves, pork belly, herbs (parsley, rosemary, thyme), cloves, garlic, and peppercorns. You get to eat all of the vegetables in the end, so it's not a loss... You can stick to carrots and onions if you'd like.

Next step, put the well-rinsed piece of salt-pork in a pan of cold water and bring to the boil. When the water boils, take the meat out and empty the water. Be sure to trim any excess fat off, as it won't be grilling away but rather going into the broth.

 

While the water is boiling, prep the vegetables for the broth, enlist your 4 year old if necessary

Tie all of the herbs into a bundle so that you can fish them out at the end. Note that this doesn't work as well as advertised, and I think I am going to buy one of these soon (or this). This is a good time to teach your child how to tie a knot, without the pressure of rushing off to school in the morning and without being bent over to tie a shoelace.

 

The broth ingredients, together with the clove-studed onion.

Put everything back into the pan once the salty water's been thrown out (great task for a small child).

Pour water over the whole thing, cover, and boil slowly for 2 hours or so. Don't worry if the pot is very full: the veggies will shrink over time. You should not add any salt, as the meat will provide all that you need.

 

Even though this is a stand-alone meal, you can prepare some side dishes in the meantime. We glazed some yellow turnips and and onions. My daughter has become quite the expert peeler over the last month, and so I delegated the turnips to her while I took care of the onions. As it happens, onions will sting your eyes more if you're shorter, as your eyes will be closer to the chopping board. This is therefore not a good task for a 4 year old.

Once again, this is not a dish that looks all that good at the end (so no photo), but it sure is delicious!

Pot Au Feu - with children

I'm back with more experiments in meat-cooking. This being winter, it's good to undertaken slow-cooking projects that won't be as appetizing in the warmer months (to the extent that it gets warm at all in Paris, but that's another story). 

Last weekend, my daughter and I made this very tasty French dish called a pot-au-feu, which despite its rather scary name, does not involve throwing anything into a fire. It's a slow-cooked, extremely simple beef dish that is hearty and warm and makes for great leftovers.

The premise of pot-au-feu is that if you cook vegetables and meat together long enough, you'll end up with delicious veggies, tender meat, and tasty broth, all with minimal supervision or work. Of course, it gets a little more complicated if you try to involve little hands, but that's part of the fun.

HFW has a recipe for this dish, but I didn't follow it completely, in part because my wife won't let me cook with things like beef tongue (which is a bummer, because it's yummy).

I went to the market and picked up a variety of vegetables to give the dish color, flavor, and texture.

I used the following: carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, heirloom purple carrots, turnips, parsnips, onions, black radish (that large black thing - it's white inside), and leeks.

For meat, I used cheek (leftmost below), paleron (center), which is a piece of chuck in American beef-cutting, and a saw-off veal leg bone for marrow (rightmost).

We had to peel all of the vegetables, and my daughter helped with the turnip. She managed it despite the turnip being quite big for her hands. It helps that we have an awesome (and safe) peeler. So awesome that we actually take it on vacation with us.

The heirloom carrots were a bit of a bust, seeing how they're just orange on the inside...

Once you've prepped, you boil the meat by itself for about 10 minutes, or until the foam becomes white. You remove all of the brown/gray foam as it forms and throw it out.

Once you've got your meat where you want it, you just throw the vegetables in, and simmer for 3-4 hours. You can't really overcook pot-au-feu, but you can under-cook it, so be on the safe side. Just be sure to add enough liquid to cover everything at the beginning and add some herbs to give the broth flavor.

Rinsing herbs in the sink is a good task for a 4 year old. I used parsley, rosemary, and thyme (no sage...) because it's what I had. For spices, I used black pepper and a couple of cloves. Of course, I put a couple of garlic cloves in as well.

Predicting, rightly, that the kids wouldn't be so keen to eat mushy turnip (all the veggies end up mushy, but that's to be expected), we also prepared some sautéed potatoes and carrots on the side. With the right supervision, and a sufficiently-sharp knife, a 4 year old can chop potatoes. In my opinion, it's safer with a sharper knife because there's less risk of slipping. Adult supervision is paramount, needless to say.

 

In my opinion, carrots are too hard, and therefore dangerous, for a child to chop, and so I prepared those. Spooning out lard, on the other hand, is perfect.

Learning to clean up after yourself is a fundamental cooking skill, and it's always easier if your daughter has a Cinderella obsession...

After 4 hours of cooking, you end up with a rather unimpressive dish, but it is melt-in-your-mouth delicious. In this particular case, the purple carrots lost their color and ran all over the other veggies, which all ended up with a dull purple hue - note to self: don't cook with those carrots again, unless they are by themselves or in a salad. It wasn't exactly lovely to look at, but it was mighty tasty. Serve with mustard and cornichons or pickles.

If you're like me, you'll make too much of this, and have leftovers. In the River Cottage Meat Book, HFW recommends pan frying the leftover meat in a bit of oil. I tried this and it's absolutely delicious because the fibrous meat will break down and fry fiber-by-fiber, leaving you with a crunchy treat. You can serve the leftover vegetables in the broth.

The crunchy meat is so good that I am tempted to modify the way I serve this next time: keep half of the meat in its melt-in-your-mouth soft state and fry the rest. Serve together for added texture and flavor.

Meat - it messes with water, part 2

One of things that I did not write about in my previous post is the impact of antibiotics on water systems and on water supply.

As HFW points out, livestock raised in intensive farms are often fed growth-enhancing antibiotics, which also serve another purpose: they combat the infections that befall livestock living in the cramped, insalubrious conditions of factory farms.

You might think that this is all well, except that antibiotics are deadly, in that they kill bacteria - good and bad. When livestock is pumped full of medicine, some of it passes out through body waste and finds itself in the environment, where it can have unpredictable effects on aquatic ecosystems and water quality. The same goes for the hormones routinely given to cattle in the US to boost milk production - hormones which are banned in most other industrialized countries.

Lastly, and while I am neither a biologist nor a doctor, I'll bet that the overconsumption of antibiotics by livestock could have the same impact as in humans and could lead to new and dangerous super-bugs.
All this to say that the impacts of intensive farming on water quality and aquatic ecosystems are complex and most likely significant. Further argument for staying away from factory meat.

Meat - it messes with water

As promised, I am going to revisit the environmental issues that surround animal husbandry with a particular focus on water.

Before we proceed any further, I have to digress a bit into the field of water chemistry, but don't worry, I'll keep this simple.

Water is "clean" when the ecosystem that lives in it thrives. This ecosystem requires nutrients, which at the most basic level are carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus (C, N, P). Under normal conditions, bacteria and algae will oxidize these chemicals to grow. As you might have noticed, bacteria are not known for being braniacs and so they'll eat and multiply until they run out of something, be it nutrients or oxygen.


At the simplest level, one of the ways in which water becomes "dirty" or "polluted" is when there is so much C, N, P in it that the bacteria and algae consume all of the oxygen, leaving none - or not enough - for the fish or the rest of the ecosystem. To take it slightly further, the ecosystem can be severely harmed by the intrusion of excess C, N, P, even if not all oxygen is consumed. Some organisms, like trout, require a minimum level of oxygen in water to thrive.

This leads to our first equation :

C, N, P + WATER = POOWATER

There are plenty of sources of C, N, P in this world, including fertilizers, among others. So this wouldn't necessarily concern our meat eating ethics except that there is a second equation:

POO = C, N, P

Those who paid attention in math will know that we can combine these equations to reach this brilliant conclusion (Nobel committee, are you paying attention?):

POO + WATER = POOWATER

That's right, when a cow, a pig, a chicken, a human etc... poos in water, the water gets dirty, and now we have mathematical proof! Thanks to the utter brilliance of the above equation - brilliant because it also works with pee - you now know why it's bad that livestock to poos in water. Aren't you glad you made it this far? Besides C, N, P, poo also contains suspended solids, antibiotics/hormones (if given to the animals), and  fecal coliform, all of which are also bad for the environmental health of water and can be directly harmful to humans.



As is often the case, the amount of damage caused by livestock poo is directly related to the amount of poo as compared to the size (and other physical characteristics) of the receiving water body - river, lake, pond, estuary, groundwater, etc...

To illustrate: 1000 cows pooing on a mile or river means an environmental disaster whereas 1 cow pooing on 1000 miles of river means some happy algae.

Anybody who's been to the country knows that livestock isn't toilet trained, and will tend to relieve themselves wherever they please, which can very much include right on your shoes. So the next question we must answer is: how does poo go from the fields to the river?

The answer is a simple phenomenon called runoff. When it rains, the rainwater runs off the ground and into rivers, carrying sticks, oil, paper, mud, and (you guessed it) poo with it. If the poo is spread out over a large grassy field, there is a chance that it'll take several rainfalls for the poo to make it to the river, but if the poo is stored in a basin (sometimes called a lagoon) that can overflow all at once into the river, you can imagine that it won't be pretty for the fish.



Unfortunately, the above does nothing whatsoever to further the cause of meat eating, and so we're now getting to the interesting part. I've tried to make it clear in the above that it's the dose of poo in the water that's the determining factor. The example I used is a thinly veiled reference to the difference between extensive and intensive farming, and, as stated in other posts, it's clear that it's only extensive farming that can lead to reduced impacts on aquatic environments.

Notice that I didn't say that there would be no impact from extensive farming, just reduced as compared to intensive. The next question therefore is: is this limited impact "worth it" and would we do better by eating vegetables instead?

The obvious answer is "yes, but". As with meat, it really depends on the vegetables (or other vegetarian fare) that we're talking about. Raising plants can have negative effects on the environment as well, to wit: deforestation, pesticides abuse, irrigation, fertilizer abuse, etc... It's not the same thing to eat a piece of tofu made from locally organically grown soybeans and to eat tofu made from soybeans raised on Brazilian factory farms that have replaced the rain forest.

I do not have access to reliable figures about the relative merits of extensive/intensive animal husbandry/farming and so I can offer no objective and definitive conclusion concerning the morality of eating meat from the point of view its impact on water. Except, of course, to say that meat raised under extensive farming conditions will best intensively farmed meat any day, and will probably beat intensively farmed vegetarian food most days as well.

Boeuf Bourguignon

In parallel to reading the River Cottage MEAT Book, I've been trying to make very good meat dishes, not least of which I like eating them, but also because it's important to respect the animal who died to feed you: prepare his/her meat in the most delicious manner and enjoy it to the fullest.

We decided to have some friends over and to make boeuf bourguignon, for which I happen to have found a great recipe online a few years ago, rumored to have originated from Bernard Loiseau's kitchen. If enough people ask, I will translate it into English - this translation is not perfect.

The thing about boeuf bourguignon is that it is truly a labor of love. You have to love the food, and the people who will eat it, and you have to love the meat. If you don't you'll never spend the time to make this delicious dish.

The first cool thing you have to do is boil some wine and flambé the alcohol. This will definitely impress whoever happens to be in the kitchen with you (in my case: my 4.5 year old daughter). 

Then you let the wine cool completely before marinating the meat, carrots, and onions overnight in the refrigerator. For the meat, I chose some shoulder (paleron) and some beef cheek. It turned out that the cheek was much more tender than the shoulder. It's also a piece of meat that many people won't eat (their loss!), and so it's a great way to participate in the total consumption of the animal.

Here are the marinated ingredients after a night in the refrigerator.

To me, one of the joys of cooking comes from sharing with my daughter. I try very hard to find things for her to do whenever she wants to participate in the kitchen, sometimes handing her a knife that's entirely too big and sharp, but she still has 10 fingers. In boeuf bourguignon, one of the garnishes is glazed onions, which you make by boiling the onions in sugar water under a wax paper cover. I got little hands to help me with making the wax paper cover.
      

Cooking the glazed pearl onions.

The next step is to saute some lardons, which are dices of pork belly (poitrine). The trick is to blanch them first (put in cold water and bring to the boil) as a way for getting rid of both some of the fat and some of the

You also need some mushrooms, best when sauteed in pig fat (saindou) on high heat. Season at the end to keep them from sweating too much.

The garnish, prior to being added to the dish.

Once the meat has cooked for 2-3 hours (the longer the better), have to separate the meat from the onions/carrots. You then puree the onions/carrots in the wine, and pass them through a sieve to extract the juice and leave the gritty solids behind.

This requires a bit of work, particularly if your sieve's handle happens to be broken.

You then reassemble all of the pieces: meat, garnish, sauce, reheat over high heat, and serve with sautéed or steamed potatoes

It's delicious, and you'll wish you'd made more of it.

The environmental consequences of animal husbandry

My second criteria for moral meat-eating is that the meat should be raised in an environmentally benign way.

The relationship of all living things with the environment is one of birth, resource consumption, waste production, death, and decay. This cycle, replayed within and across a complex web of relationships that encompasses all living things from microbes and lichens to killer whales and baobab trees, is our ecosystem and it is dynamic. This is to say that any equilibrium can be perturbed, for good or bad, by chance or design. This is the stuff that drives evolution, mass extinctions, etc...

We therefore know that the world that we inhabit is affected by our actions, both in predictable and unpredictable ways - nothing Earth shattering here, this is a banal assertion. What we see perhaps less clearly is that the environment that we consider to be "natural" is man-made to a significant extent, particularly in the US and Western Europe. This is particularly true of what we like to call "the countryside".

For example, in Les Vosges, the mountains would be covered with dense forests if it were not for pastures grazed by farm animals (see pictures). The hedgerows of Bretagne and Normandy are a man-made environment, which would revert to moor or forest if it were not maintained by man and its animals. In this way, we are no different than some other large animals; elephants come to mind. Similar examples exist in the US, I am sure, and HFW gives several examples in the UK. Below are some pictures from Les Vosges.

Would letting pasture revert to forest be so bad? After all, isn't forest "good for the environment"? isn't it better than pasture?

Well, perhaps or perhaps not: some species have conquered the pastures of the Vosges and Bretagne, and would doubtlessly find themselves challenged in dense forests. In some ways, this environment that we've created has created its own biodiversity and ecosystem, which one could argue are worthy of some form of protection.

Why do I go through all of this trouble to argue for the future of pastures, hedgerows, and the animals and flowers that inhabit them? It is because extensive animal husbandry is a prime factor in the maintenance of these rich environments. Should we abandon the consumption of meat altogether, we would remove all incentive for farmers to maintain this environment. What would likely happen is that steep slopes would be surrendered to forest (perhaps not a bad thing), but flat areas would likely be turned over to farming wheat, corn, or carrots, as there would be no financial incentive for the farmer to maintain the fractured environment, and no help from livestock.

Farming plants, unless it is done by hand on small holdings, uses mechanized equipment which is hampered by hedgerows and small parcels. Fractured pasture and fields, fenced off by hedges, low walls, or trees are much more resistant to soil erosion from wind and rain than plowed fields.

A farmer with pastures and fields, who rotates the use of his land over time to raise animals and plants (fodder and/or human food), will preserve both the rich ecosystem of "the countryside" and raise tasty meat in a way that is arguably environmentally and "ecosystematically" equivalent to one raising plants only.

Need I point out the obvious: this ain't no factory farming that I'm describing here.

Next: livestock, water, and the atmosphere.

Animal suffering

I'll try to address here the first of the criteria for moral meat eating.

The first thing that we have to remember is that livestock animals (cows, sheep, fowls, pigs, and all animals that we might raise for food) are mortal.

If we accept that livestock are animals like any others, an argument voiced to argue against their organized slaughter, then we must accept that, as herbivores, they are in the middle of the food chain, destined to be some other animal's prey. As such, their destiny is to be hunted down and killed, whether by a lion, a bear, a wolf, a human, etc... Alternatively, they can die of disease, fire, drowning, or starvation. Dying from old age isn't quite an option for animals, except for pets. Old and/or weak herbivores (think gazelles, zebras, gnus...) are the easiest preys for the lion, crocodile, or what-have-yous that lurk in the tall grass. As part of natural selection, predators routinely pick-off the weakest prey. It's not philosophy, it's Darwinism.

In the wild, to the extent that such places exist, the herbivore has a fair chance at escaping his predator. Domesticated livestock meets their demise at an appointed hour. This is because we control every aspect of their life, from birth to breeding to slaughter. This control, in turn, means that we have a dual responsibility to ensure that:

1. the life of our livestock is free of the pain and suffering that befalls wild herbivores
2. the manner of death is as painless and stress free as possible

The farmer is therefore responsible for ensuring that his livestock is raised under comfortable conditions. This is to say that the animals have enough space to roam, have appropriate shelter, are protected from predators, are availed plentiful, adequate food, and are given medical care. In short, they trade their freedom for comfort. Medical care cannot include the massive preventative application of hormones or antibiotics, while space and shelter must be sufficiently roomy so that animals can follow their rooting and exploring instincts. Food must be natural, to the extent possible, not result from human transformation processes.

One might object that a cow born in captivity has not willingly entered into this bargain: comfort and death against freedom. However, HFW makes a convincing point that, on a species basis, livestock animals have entered into this bargain with humans, growing more numerous and healthy than they could ever have dreamt to be in the wild (i.e.: compare the number of gazelles to the number of cows worldwide). In this sense, a symbiotic relationship of sorts has been established between humans and livestock, albeit one that involves the slaughter of one half of the symbiosis to feed the other.

Going back to item 2 above, the farmer is also responsible for choosing a slaughterhouse where his animals can meet their demise in a stress-free manner. While this might seem unrealistic, it should be clear that there is a big difference between a place where animals are killed after a wild stampede where some might be gored or trampled to death, and one where only a few animals at a time are killed in individual pens, by a person who administers a swift death. The difference might seem artificial, but it is fundamental in my view.
It should be clear that what I described above is the exact opposite of factory farming, where animals are kept in confined spaces, pumped up with antibiotics and hormones (in the US), and fed fish or other animal meal. Further, I essentially rule out eating meat that has been slaughtered in an industrial slaughterhouse.

Of course, that means ruling out most of the meat available in supermarkets in France and US today, but that's another story.

The morality of eating meat

Eating meat is under attack. Countless vegetarians make potent, rational, and cogent arguments about the moral precariousness of eating meat. However, these arguments have never felt completely compelling or satisfying to me, and so I've kept on eating. At the same time, I've had a feeling that I couldn't quiet provide an appropriate response to my vegetarian friends. Now that I'm reading HFW's book, I feel that I can better articulate a moral position for meat eating, and so I'll try to do it here and in future posts.

While I am no great philosopher, I can see that encouraging the suffering of sentient, social animals for my selfish pleasure is wrong, especially as alternative sources of food abound. I can further see that consuming a product whose production is bad for the environment is morally fraught. I understand and respect the position of moral vegetarians, but I think it is too narrow.

I am just not convinced that it is inevitable that meat will be both the result of great suffering and bad for the environment. I posit that meat consumption can be moral if it complies with the following:

• the meat I (and you, perhaps) consume came to my plate without additional animal suffering, as compared a hypothetical 'wild' state.
• animal husbandry does not harm the environment any more than its absence would.
• meat consumption is total, meaning that every part of the slaughtered animal is consumed as food, fuel, leather, or other raw material, etc... and no part is wasted.
• the consumption of meat is done with full disclosure of the conditions under which the animal is raised, slaughtered, aged, and sold, so that meat consumers can understand the provenance of their meat and be responsible for their actions.

I will attempt to discuss these points individually in later posts, but before I go any further, I'll state outright that most of meat consumed in the developed world fails to meet these criteria.

HFW's Meat Manifesto

Clearly, the kind of meat you buy has several ramifications. The most obvious are taste and texture, morals, and economic.

Morality comes into play because buying intensively farmed meat means that you condone the bad treatment of animals that is commonly practiced on intensive farms. While it's possible to be a moral person and eat meat, it's not ok to willingly engage in practices that deliberately hurt another living creature. I would argue that if you can't afford to eat meat that is farmed in a way that doesn't hurt the animals, you should eat less meat. Call me elitist, but at the same time realize that most people eat way too much meat as it is.

There's an economic component, clearly, to the kind of meat you buy. Of course, it's not the same thing to purchase meat that is mass-produced by giant conglomerates as to purchase (possibly for a higher price) meat produced by a single smallholder who carefully raises individual animals in humane and even comfortable conditions. With one option you are furthering a world where the concentration of the means of production leads to the reduction of choices and a sort of tyranny of large corporations (which we accept in return for the appearance of lower prices). With the other, you are fostering competition between smaller producers who retain a degree of independence that is the best guarantee against the uniformization of culture and the preservation of regional differences that form the rich cultural fabric that sustains us as humans.

In this way, the economic component becomes a cultural preservation component. Please note that I am not making the case that smallholders are inherently better, culturally speaking, than large corporations. Rather, I am saying that the fact that smallholders must be numerous, they will provide more diversity of options and cultures than a single large corporation. This diversity will manifest itself in the types or breeds of animals that they will raise, in how they will butcher them, etc... even within a single country. This diversity is what leads to a genetic guarantee against debilitating diseases that could wipe out a too uniform livestock population, saddening everyone from PETA-types to meat lovers.

All of these considerations, together with others raised by HFW, mean that a meat eater must be educated, adventurous, and thrifty with meat, ensuring that he gets the most of the meat that he purchases so that it is a satisfying experience informed by a carefully articulated moral stance.

A presumptuous announcement and endeavor

Because nothing comes of doing nothing, and because it's time I did something other than complain or mock others (no matter how pithily) on this blog, I've decided that I'm going to re-start this great book that I've been reading and keep a journal here.

Announcing, with great presumption and pretentiousness, the start of a blogging extravaganza about "The River Cottage MEAT Book" by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (HFW).

OK, so I love to eat meat, and it's a bit of a problem, if you will, because I'm also an environmentalist and a water specialist to boot. It's hard to combine a love of meat with a philosophy of respect for the Earth and its non-human inhabitants. I decided to read this book in its entirety because I started reading it months ago at some friends' ranch in Texas and I know that it offers a different philosophy about meat eating (also, because my wife bought it for me for Christmas).

You'll have to excuse the haphazard way in which this is going to go, because I'm not much good at book reports (never was, really). What I'm going to do is read a few paragraphs or pages a night and drop down a reaction here.

HFW and I agree that there's a major problem with the way most of the meat produced in the Western world reaches the plates of the people consuming it. There's a problem with quality, there's a problem with quantity, there's a problem with preparation. In addition, there's an ecological problem: the intensive production of meat is extremely bad for the environment, and a moral problem: intensively farmed animal live miserable, sick lives in inhumane (one should say in-animal) conditions.

While HFW is a bit of a megalomaniac, aiming to change the way millions of people consume meat (no less), he's got a very good point and one worth making at length and in detail, so that we can learn enough that we'll never have to finish our plate (of meat) and be sorry that "an animal had to die for that".