“Adrià says he doesn’t listen to customers, yet his customers are some
of the most satisfied in the world. That’s an interesting riddle to
consider.”

One of the conversation’s participants, Phil, then noted that

“All indications point to Apple/Steve Jobs using the same strategy. El Bulli isn’t at all a mass market success, but the other is. Interesting indeed.”

Gastronomy and my favourite computers, together at last? That really got me going…

The key thing about both Adrià and Jobs is that they’ve taken a leap of faith, choosing to focus primarily on producing the best things they can – this, to me, is the primary goal of both businesses. Apple rarely if ever competes on price – in their view of the world, the profitability/viability of the business seems to be more of a constraint on how good they can make something, not a primary factor in considering how to build it.

This can seem expensive – Adrià’s huge test kitchen (not even mentioned in the HBS article) is an utterly ridiculous extravagance for one small restaurant out in the middle of the Spanish countryside. You can get a taste of the test kitchen (and the things that happen there) from this section of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations…

Apple. meanwhile, has taken some product ideas through many, many stages of development before deciding to shelve them entirely.

As Michael Lopp explained during an interesting session at SXSWi 2007, designers at Apple are often specifically briefed to come up with “whatever you can think of” in the early stages of product development, with no consideration of practicality or cost. They will produce around ten different designs, which are then pared down towards “the best stuff we can think of, within the constraints of shipping a profitable product”.

The key thing here, and the common thread between Apple and  Adrià is to truly believe that “if you build the best, they will come.”

As to the relative “mass market”-ness of the two, the biggest reason elBulli isn’t a mass-market success is that they’ve chosen not to be. Adrià could open a London elBulli, A New York elBulli and a Paris elBulli tomorrow, and all three would have overflowing reservation books. But a distributed restaurant empire would make it impossible to ensure the attention to detail and quality which makes the original restaurant so celebrated. And since producing “the best” is his absolute focus, expanding the restaurant would make no sense.

This is precisely why he’s branched out with Fast Good – it’s an opportunity to produce the “best possible convenience food experience” – a different set of constraints to being “the best dining experience in the world.”

“The best” is subjective, and depends partly on your market and the constraints under which you operate. But we live in a world where many companies seem to aim for “just good enough”, where “customer care” is a frustrating, maze-like mess and most products are serviceable but uninspiring. In such a world, it’s sometimes refreshing to remember that there is another way. That striving for excellence over budget streamlining; aiming for a defined audience rather than the mass-market can lead to the production of truly wonderful things, without necessarily sacrificing a sustainable, profitable business in the process.

In the vast pantheon of multinational corporations, few are more hell-bent on willfully causing international confusion and consternation than the Hershey’s empire.

Even after two years on the West Coast, as a Brit I am still not 100% sure what lies under any given tastefully-designed candy bar wrapper.

For example, let us take the American staples “Milky Way” and “Three Musketeers”. Both fine blends of sugar, fat and various unnatural syrups for sure. But for me, years of childhood wonder must be suppressed in order to remember that, in fact, what Americans call “Milky Way” is marketed in my homeland as a “Mars Bar”. Meanwhile the American “Three Musketeers” is, in the Land of Tea and Questionable Dentistry, a “Milky Way”.

(A note for the pedantic: “Three Musketeers” is not exactly the same as the British “Milky Way”. The British version has denser nougat, but there’s a definite shared design ethic going on.)

The transposition of these names is particularly, egregiously confusing, but they’re not the only Hershey’s confections to suffer from odd transatlantic translations.

I am convinced that somewhere in the Product Naming Department of Hershey’s there is a small and slightly odd little man by the name of J. Edgar Grosderriere. As a boy, J. Edgar had an unremarkable and perfectly happy early childhood; a close-knit group of young schoolfriends; loving and supportive parents. Unfortunately, around the age of 8, J. Edgar’s class began studying the French language. With a distressing inevitability, J. Edgar’s classmates quickly improved their French-to-English translation skills. In just a few short months, J. Edgar was forever re-christened “Hugeass” and his daily life plunged into a maelstrom of misery and torment.

Bereft of confidence in the face of his ridiculous moniker, J. Edgar has never known the love of a good woman, preferring to spend much of his time sequestered away in laboratories full of chocolate. As a result he’s developed a few eccentricities, the worst of which is the tendency for his sexual frustration to spill over into his work.

Hershey’s management have considered letting J. Edgar go. They’ve considered quietly rejecting all his suggestions for candy names. But he cuts such an odd figure that he evokes a real sense of pity in all who know him.

“The guy’s named Hugeass for God’s sake. How much harm can the odd strange candy name do?” they say to one another.

This, at least, is the only way I can plausibly explain the American names of my two favourite childhood chocolate products, known to me in those more innocent days as “Malteasers” and “Bounty”.

Not for the American market such benign and innocent names, oh no. Thanks to the sorry history of J. Edgar Grosderriere I must instead seek out the pleasures of “Whoppers” and “Mounds”.

Yes, “Whoppers” and “Mounds”. It is hard for me to eat these things with a straight face. Furthermore, I have discovered, it is hard to eat without a straight face – your teeth end up in weird places. Be that as it may, I have little choice if I wish to savour chocolate-coated malted biscuit or candied coconut. Because every single time as I’m opening the packaging, the product name emblazoned on the side, my head fills with bad 70s porn dialogue and “bowchikkabowbow” guitar lines.

“Oh wow. I can’t get enough of those Mounds. Now, honey, get ready to wrap your mouth around a Whopper…”

It’s based loosely on a recipe that Simon posted to london.food a couple of years back, but has been through several cycles of, uh, “maturation” (mostly simplification) since then.

The Boring Bits

• Makes 2 medium jam jars’ worth
• Preparation time: 30-40 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 1 1/2 hours

Ingredients

• 2 1/4lbs (1kg) ripe tomatoes
• Fresh chili peppers (see below for details)
• 8 cloves of garlic
• 1lb 5oz (600g) Demerera or Turbinado (brown) Sugar
• 4 tbsp (60ml) Nam Pla (Thai fish sauce), Worcester Sauce or Soy Sauce
• 1 cup (235ml) Red Wine Vinegar

You can make quite different jams with different types of chili. For a pretty hot jam (the type I usually make), stick in 4 habaneros, or 4 Scotch Bonnet peppers. You can make a slightly milder jam by using 6-8 standard red chili peppers, or 6-8 jalapenos.

Throwing it all together

First, blanch the tomatoes (bring a pan of water to the boil, remove from heat and place the tomatoes in the water for a minute or two). Then peel them. Chop them into halves or quarters.

Peel the garlic cloves and place them, together with the tomatoes, the Nam Pla (or alternative) and chilis into a blender. Blend on a medium setting until the whole mixture resembles a strawberry milkshake. Yeah, really, it will. It’s a little off-putting, to be honest, but it won’t last for long…

Pour the vinegar and the “strawberry milkshake” mix into a large-ish heavy-bottomed saucepan, and then pour in the sugar – just dump it in; there’s no need to do it in increments.

Bring the whole thing to a boil over a high-ish heat, stirring constantly to completely dissolve the sugar.

Once it comes to the boil, turn the heat to low and leave the jam to simmer. There’s no need to cover the pan (and doing so will likely increase cooking time.)

From now on, stir every 10 minutes or so to keep the mixture from sticking to the sides of the pan.

You need to leave the pan at a simmer until the mixture starts to gain a jam-like consistency. This can be a little difficult to gauge on your first outing, since the jam will be runnier at cooking temperature than at room temperature. It’ll start to look a bit “jammy” even at high heat, though, and stirring it will become more difficult.

Reaching thei “jam stage” usually takes somewhere around an hour and a half, but it can vary up to half an hour either side, depending on the water content of the tomatoes. The eventual amount of jam, similarly, will vary somewhat.

Some Jam Facts/Notes

This recipe should produce about 2 medium jam jars’ worth (I usually buy jars from Sur La Table or Rainbow). It seems to keep pretty well – I’ve had stores in the fridge for 6 months at a time without any noticeable harm (although it usually lasts a month, tops, before it’s all eaten!)
When first cooked the jam tends to be fairly sweet and less spicy – the heat will build up slowly for a week or so after cooking.

It’s fantastic served with cheeses (especially strong, hard cheese like good cheddar, and blue cheeses like Stilton), but also goes great with cold meats like ham. I’m told it works as a glaze for roasted/grilled meats, but haven’t got round to trying that yet.

My favourite use for it is the use which first introduced me to the recipe: Take two slices of toast, melt Stilton over each one, and then spread a thin layer of the jam on top.

There were a couple of problems with just following the recipe, though. Firstly, VeganYumYum’s page wasn’t so much a recipe as a suggested modification to a recipe – specifically one from the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which I don’t have. In any case, trying to follow a recipe whilst also following suggested modifications is kinda tricky (as we discovered). The original recipe was also vegan. Now, I have no real problem with vegan food, but I find Soy Milk to be kinda revolting, and on the rare occasions that I like to bake, I’m a bit of a traditionalist about it. I may try the vegan cupcake thing in future, but not this time around.

So the end result was that we found a “Full fat” Vanilla cupcake recipe and set about modifying it according to the Mojito idea.

What follows is a single recipe which (eventually) worked.

Since this is a recipe involving lime juice and a lot of dairy, there’s an important caveat: in general, combine dairy ingredients (milk, butter) with as many other ingredients as possible before adding lime juice as flavouring. This is because citrus will cause the milk to very rapidly curdle into a useless and disgusting-looking mess. Mixing the dairy product with everything else before introducing the acid helps to eliminate this effect.

The Boring Bits

• Serves 6-12
• Preparation time: 15-20 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 20 minutes

Ingredients

Cupcake Batter

• 1/2 cup (113g) Unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup (60 ml) milk
• 2 tsp Dried Spearmint
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tbsp fresh lime juice (about half a lime’s worth)
• 2/3 cup (130g) Granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 cups (210 grams) all purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• zest of 1 lime

Buttercream Frosting

• 1/2 cup (113 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 cups (230 grams) confectioners sugar (icing or powdered sugar), sifted
• 2 tablespoons milk or light cream
• 2 tsp Dark Rum
• 1 tbsp Fresh Lime Juice

Throwing it all together

For the Cupcakes

Prepare a muffin tin with paper inserts, and go ahead and pre-heat your oven to 350F (175C).

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. An electric whisk is slightly less work than a hand-whisk or fork, but any will works fine.

Add the eggs and beat well so that the mixture is combined.

In a separate bowl mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt).

This next step captures the essence of the original vegan recipe, sounds really odd, but works pretty well. Bring the milk gently to boil in a small saucepan, add the spearmint and remove the heat. Let it stand to infuse for 5 minutes. Minty milk is not a pleasant thing on its own, but it’ll work well as part of these cupcakes.

You should now have 3 separate items – butter mixture, dry ingredients and milk. Now add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, a handful at a time, whisking after each addition to combine the ingredients. Finally, add the milk and whisk again until the mixture is smooth.

There’s no lime – an essential part of a mojito – yet! The reason (curdling) for waiting was outlined above, but you should be okay now, so go ahead and beat in the lime juice and zest.

Distribute the batter amongst your paper insert cups, and shove them in the oven for about 20 minutes. When I tried these they didn’t particularly brown, but you can test for done-ness with a skewer or a knife inserted into one of the cakes – if it comes out clean, you’re good.

Leave the finished cakes to cool completely before you top them with the frosting (because warm cupcakes melt butter-based frostings, leading to an unappeitising mess).

For the Frosting

Cream the butter, either with an electric whisk, hand-whisk or fork until it’s smooth and creamy.

Beat in the sugar in small amounts, stirring constantly, so that the mixture stiffens. Once all the sugar is well-blended with the butter, add the milk or cream and combine it well, continuing to beat for another 5 minutes or so, so that the topping becomes almost fluffy.

Finally, add the rum followed by the Lime Juice. Beat immediately and well (again, mitigating any curdling effect).

Top the cupcakes with the frosting and serve with appropriate joviality.

I was worried that a serious steak-craving would set in around ten days, but the whole thing has been so painless that I didn’t even notice how long it had been.

There are still adjustments to be made, for sure. I’ve invested in a vegetarian cookbook, simply because my entire frame of reference for meal preparation over the past 8 years (ever since I had a kitchen of my own and the curiosity to experiment in it) has been based around meat dishes; more often than not some kind of “standard” meat-and-two-veg combination.

Without a little study and inspiration, I’m worried that this habit will continue and I’ll end up eating 1001 different combinations of (variously marinated tofu)-and-two-veg. That would get dull quickly.

And no, so far I’ve not even been tempted by anything meaty. The only time I came close was in the office cafeteria the other day, when I wandered past something involving duck leg. “Ooh, duck!” said my primitive lizard-brain, but then I looked closer and remembered how mass-farmed/catered duck always offers the promise of succulent, flavoursome bird-meat but provides the reality of tough stringy “generic protein”. Bleuch. At least tofu doesn’t have sinews which get stuck in your teeth…

And I feel so much healthier having cut the meat out! Over the past year I’ve found myself feeling more and more lethargic and out-of-sorts. But in the last three weeks, my energy levels have increased hugely. I feel less dopey, no longer suffer from weird painful hunger-pangs at odd times and feel so much more satisfied when I do eat.

And no, vegetarians are not necessarily anaemic or protein-deficient. But I’ll cover that stuff in another post.

So, yeah, good riddance to American meat. I don’t exactly what it is about the industrial farmsteads, slaughter-houses and packing plants, but something really bad is coming out of the whole process. If I ever eat meat in America again (ie. if a steak-craving springs up at some point), it will be from an organic supplier who personally knows the farmer who grew it.

In other news (I’ll also post more about this later), I should have the keys to my new SF apartment (the “perfect location” of posts past) next week, and I’ll probably be moving my furniture up the week after that. Roll on life in the city!

Surprisingly there are very few recipes for mushroom and stilton soups available online, and most of the ones there are seem… wrong. This one borrowed a few basic ideas from Phil Vickery’s recipe, but dispenses with the “wild mushroom” crap.

I’ve no idea why food writers and celebrity chefs the world over will only touch a mushroom if it’s some fancy-schmancy “wild” variety. Bog standard closed-cap mushrooms aren’t highly exciting, it’s true, but they have a wonderful subtly complex flavour and, to my mind, actually work better in a soup like this where the stronger flavours of mushrooms like shitake can end up fighting with each other, and with the other principal ingredients.

The Boring Bits

• Serves 2-3
• Preparation time: 5-10 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 10 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 pint (570ml) vegetable stock
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 small onion
• 4oz (110g) stilton cheese
• 7oz mushrooms (200g)
• a large dollop of sour cream
• 1 tbsp thyme
• black pepper

Throwing it all together

First, prepare your vegetables. Dice the onion, slice the mushrooms and peel then roughly chop the garlic cloves. Stilton isn’t a vegetable unless you count the blue bits, but dice it nonetheless.

Add the onion and garlic to the stock in a medium saucepan, and bring to the boil.

Once it’s boiling stir in the stilton until it begins to melt. Simmer gently for about a minute, stirring until the cheese has blended into the stock.

Now add the mushrooms, and season with black pepper. Leave at a simmer for another 6 minutes or so, stirring in the thyme when you have about a minute left to go.

Remove the soup from the heat and stir in the sour cream (feel free to provide your own idea of how much a “dollop” is).

At this point, you have a choice which provides you with two very different soups. It’s possible to serve this as-is, allowing you to savour the whole chunks of mushroom. But you can create a very different soup by sticking the whole lot in a blender (probably on the “liquefy” setting) and reducing it to a thicker, more uniform whole.

I personally prefer the colour and texture of the blended version, but the choice is yours.

Serve with whole-grain bread, and opine loudly about how any “wild” mushrooms you’re likely to buy in the shops are probably grown in the same sheds as the simple, versatile ones you’re enjoying right now.

At the centre of this plan is my “Meat List” – quite simply a list of all the meat-based dishes that I really like; the things I might miss if I turn my back on a carnivorous lifestyle forever.

The plan itself is quite simple – to eat as many of these dishes as I can over the next month or so, for two basic reasons. First, in the event that I do cross over to the Veg Side for good, I will have said a fond farewell to the things I’ve enjoyed in the past. Secondly, and more importantly, it gives me a real chance to work out honestly how much I actually enjoy being a meat-eater.

Phase 2 of the plan comes in January when I’ll stop eating meat again. And then comes the interesting part of the experiment. I’ll either find that after a couple of months I really can’t live without meat, or I’ll decide that I don’t miss either the meat, or the previously-explored ethical quandries it entails.

So without further ado, here (in no particular order) is the list in full:

• Proper English Fish’n'Chips (sorry guys – no matter how hard you try, America cannot provide this)
• A really good steak (I’m thinking Argentinian or Brazillian steakhouse)
• Calf’s Liver (Hopefully still on the menu at Carluccio’s in Islington)
• A good beef lasange
• Bacon Butties (“sandwiches” for any Americans in the audience)
• A full English fry-up (including black pudding and pigs’ kidneys)
• Bangers’n'mash
• Steak and Kidney Pie
• A ‘Double Double’ from In’n'out
• A proper English roast dinner (Christmas should see to that)
• A Chicken Tikka Masala
• Whitebait
• Oysters (May not be possible really – wrong season)
• Corned Beef Sandwiches (I know, eww, but they got me through childhood and student days)
• Peri-Peri Chicken (I’ve missed Nando’s quite a bit)
• Peking Duck
• BBQ Pork Ribs

There are many more items which could go on the list, but that pretty much covers my favourites.

And with that, I’m taking a sorely needed vacation back in Blighty. Coming up in the New Year – the no-doubt amusing story of my move 40 miles north, lightly sprinkled with meat-free shenanigans.

Merry Denominational Religious Celebration and a Gregorian New Year to you all.

That might seem like a strange sentiment given the content of this blog so far but here’s the thing: I’m not really a hippy; probably more of a pragmatic idealist. I know how I’d like the world to be, but I understand that it’s unlikely and I prefer focussing on what I can do right here and right now, rather than on the general state of humanity.

The problem with your real “I’m a world-changer me” nutters is that they pursue their beliefs about wrong and right with an almost religious fervour, thrusting leaflets into your face at Muni entrances and preaching every-which-where about the dangers of capitalism.

Each to their own, but as an opponent of the American christian right will tell you, religious fervour can be a dangerous thing. It changes people; wraps them up in the belief that they (or their god, be he Jehova or Karl Marx) are undebatably right. And when that happens, the truth starts to slip away into middle-distance. After all, what’s a little distortion or exaggeration when you’re supporting the adoption of the One True Way?

But it’s bloody annoying, especially when it comes from those hippies.

It’s annoying because I can easily come to the same basic conclusions which they do regarding issues like meat production. But I’m a software engineer – I want to make my decisions based on reasonably verifiable facts; preferably hard data – not hyperbole.

And it’s really hard to get those facts. I’ve read “statistics” which claim that an average meat eater’s diet uses 16 times as much grain in a year as a vegetarian one. Yes, feeding cows is wasteful, but those numbers push the limits of believability.

So I’ve had to spend some time searching for information on the environmental and ethical concerns surrounding meat production in order to find just a few sources which I feel I can trust. I’ve come down to just two. Bear in mind that these are “primary sources” whose overall agenda doesn’t seem tainted by wild-eyed “Socialist-Worker”-waving fervour, and whose basic premises and facts are verifiable via other sources.

Those two sources are the Beyond Beef campaign (who came under particularly close scrutiny given their ties to McSpotlight) and Erik Schlosser’s book “Fast Food Nation”, which is ultimately a surprisingly sober and balanced overview of the fast food market.

And based on those sources and the facts that I’m pretty sure about, here are three reasons why I’m increasingly struggling to enjoy a good steak.

These are mostly US-centric, but then, so are my domestic arangements these days.

1) Meat production is Environmentally damaging

• The annual beef consumption of an average American family of four requires more than 260 gallons of fuel and releases 2.5 tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, as much as the average car over a six month period.
• The United States has lost one third of its topsoil. An estimated six of the seven billion tons of eroded soil is directly attributable to grazing and unsustainable methods of producing feed crops for cattle and other livestock.
• Cattle ranching is a primary cause of deforestation in Latin America. Since 1960, more than one quarter of all Central American forests have been razed to make pasture for cattle.
• The world’s 1.3 billion ruminant livestock emit approximately 60 million tons or 17 percent of the world’s total Methane emissions. One methane molecule traps 21 times as much solar heat as a molecule of CO₂

2) Meat production is a waste of  resources

• Nearly half of the earth’s landmass is used as pasture for cattle and other livestock.
• Nearly half of the total amount of water used annually in the U. S. goes to grow feed and provide drinking water for cattle and other livestock.
• Seventy percent of all U.S. grain — and one third of the world’s total grain harvest — is fed to cattle and other livestock.
• Asian adults consume between 300 and 400 pounds of grain a year. A middle-class American, by contrast, consumes over a ton of grain each year, 80 percent of it through eating cattle and other grain-fed livestock.

3) Meat production is unbelievably cruel
No, I’m not about to start going all PETA at this point. Frankly, I think PETA are an awful pantomime of an organisation, and I find it very hard to believe a single word they publish.

Whilst I touched on the issues of killing animals for food last time, I’m more concerned (from an ethical standpoint) with the way that the meat industry finds and uses its workers.

• Every year, 29 out of every 100 meat processing workers sustains a work-related injury or illness that requires treatment beyond first aid.
• Slaughterhouses typically recruit unskilled, recent immigrants many of whom are unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, and/or unable to speak English and who are unlikely to file complaints about company policies or attempt to organize labor unions.
• In 2002, employees in meatpacking plants made, on average, 24 percent less than their counterparts in other factory jobs.

There are far more graphic descriptions of the day-to-day life of a meatpacker in places like “Fast Food Nation”. Let’s just say that the job they do for a pittance, in highly dangerous conditions, isn’t a pleasant one.

I should make it clear here – I really don’t want to put anyone else off meat, unless I’m inadvertantly helping them along to a conclusion they were already making for themselves. But the issues above (and countless more surrounding and intersecting with them) are what have driven me to consider vegetarianism for the first time in my life. And I should also point out that, had I never moved to the US, I might never have made this decision – whilst the meat industry in the UK isn’t all happy, fluffy farmsteads and ruddy-cheeked rural folk, it’s not quite the over-the-edge conveyor-o-cheap-protein which the US meat industry has become.

Finally, whilst a lot of the reasoning quoted above focuses on red-meat (particularly beef) production, there are similar (if less severe) issues with production of almost any other kind of meat. Now, I could switch to only buying meat from verifiable, organic small-farm sources, I’m sure. But honestly, it wouldn’t be long before the more factory-farmed sources started slipping back in, whether in restaurant meals, or in “picking up a quick meal at Safeways, ‘cos it’s right there.”

Next time on “I’m not a hippy, I just play one on Yahoo! 360″ we’ll look at how an omnivore turns into a herbivore, and what he decides to do before he gets there.

“Could you become a vegetarian?”

It’s a topic of conversation which has come up with friends from time to time over the years, especially, say, in the middle of a steak dinner. And my answer has always been “no”, followed by various reasons (not quite excuses, but close) for that being the case.

But I’ve been examining some of those reasons recently.

1) “I could never live without steak. or Bacon.”
All well and good. I do really like good steak. But to say that I couldn’t live without it is rather overstating the case, quite simply because I’ve never tried. It’s an untested hypothesis, and I can’t really keep saying it without backing it up with hard proof. “I tried living without steak and couldn’t” – now there’s a position worth having.

As for bacon, well, the fact of the matter is that I’ve been forced to (more or less) live without bacon since I moved to the US, because Americans don’t understand what good bacon is (hint: there’s a picture at the top of this post). Americans think that this crap can pass for bacon. Poor fools.

Proper, European-style back bacon is well nigh impossible to get Stateside. Supermarkets have never seen such a thing, and even quality butchers are often sorely lacking. The only reliable source I’ve found is the Rain Tree Cafe in San Francisco, who do a very agreeable Irish Breakfast with proper bacon. But my visits there are few and far between. And “bacon butties” (look it up) are right out.

2) “Hitler was a vegetarian”
Okay, I’ve never actually used that as a serious argument. Maybe, just a couple of times, it’s proved highly effective in winding up overly-preachy “meat is murder” types who think they’ve single-handedly saved the Universe by going vegan.

I’m a bad man.

3) “We’re omnivores. We’re supposed to eat meat.”
It’s very true that we’re omnivores – we have the multi-purpose teeth and the digestive system for it. But the argument is disingenous all the same, because the human being as an animal is not built to be a predator. Take away our low cunning and our opposable thumbs and you’re basically looking at some fairly appealing prey. Our “claws”, such as they are, are brittle and badly adapted to violent confrontation. And our jaw musculature is not designed to deliver a killing bite.

Nor are our brains wired in a predatory fashion. Housecats, even after millenia of domestication, still have that killing insinct. Present them with a fast-moving object smaller than they are, be it a bird or a piece of string, and they will pounce and stab with their claws. Very few of us, on the other hand, sit in the garden of a summer and feel an irrepressible urge to pin a bird down and rip its throat out.

We’re scavangers at heart, taking what food is available, and that’s why we’re omnivores – it broadens the potential avenues of sustenance, whether they be a recently deceased mammouth, a tree full of berries or a box of Krispy Kreme donuts.

Only we’re not scavengers any more, because with our low cunning and our opposable thumbs we developed agriculture and supermarkets. We no longer have to eat what we find; we can choose. And we have the ability to choose only plant matter for sustenance.

4) “If you’re going to eat meat, you should be prepared to kill an animal yourself”
The implication of this statement, of course, being that I would be prepared to do such a thing. Only I’ve never actually put myself in a position where that’s the case. Not through any highly active avoidance – it’s just that the situation has never arisen and I’ve never sought it out.

And honestly, thinking about this now, I’m not sure that I could do it. I’m not particularly squeamish, but I just don’t believe strongly enough that humans actually have the right to take other creatures’ lives with impunity. And if that creature is, say, a 200 pound pig which is screaming its lungs out, I have a feeling that compassion would come before pork chops.

Which puts me in the awkward position of being a bit of a hypocrite, and leads me to effectively argue myself into vegetarianism.

Whoops.

All of which is to say that I don’t have any concrete arguments which should stop me from eschewing meat. Ultimately, it comes down to this: which is more important to me; the enjoyment I derive from certain meats, or the moral and enviromental reasons against meat production and consumption, which I’m becoming ever more aware of and concerned about?

I can’t fully answer that question until I’ve explored those issues in a little more depth. But that’s a job for another day.

Factory farmed, treated with anti-biotics and growth hormones, it’s not even really meat. And when it’s added to a pasta sauce or risotto, made up into a stew, minced into flash-fried burgers  or roughly cubed and wrapped in tortillas, it becomes little more than “generic protein” – something to bulk up a meal without adding anything much in the way of flavour and texture.

As for buying meat in American  supermarkets… Chicken doesn’t look like chicken. Bleached white and sandwiched in plastic, it looks like the stuff of vat-grown nightmares. Beef is a weird colour too, as though the Meat Fairy came along in the night and painted it an unnatural crimson. Everything is… just a little wrong.

That’s not to say that there aren’t great pleasures to be had from meat. Purchased from organic sources, good butchers and quality-driven restaurants, a top-notch steak or a perfect slice of calves’ liver; a non-intensively reared chicken (carefully roasted)  or a thick rasher of back bacon have the power to bring intense, mind-blowing pleasure to the diner.

I love good meat. I just don’t get to eat it very often.

Which is why I’ve developed a periodic vegetarian habit. Nothing big, really, but once in a while I consciously go a week or so without eating anything containing bits of animals. It’s a truly interesting experience, because it forces you to look at everyday restaurant menus through new eyes, and it also forces you to move away from the typical “meat+veg+veg” schtick which infects so many meal compositions. And here’s the thing – I actually feel better – more alert and more energetic – when I’m not sucking down cubed, processed bits of some poorly-treated farmyard beast.

And yes, part of what has prompted this post is the fact that I’m currently 5 days into one of my meat-free odysseys. This one was prompted by the fact that, just slightly hungover after last Saturday’s Yahoo! Year End Party, I snuck into a McDonalds for a couple of cheeseburgers and immediately felt heartily ill.

But anyway (to bring this all back to one of the major themes I seem to cover on 360 – sustainability), I’ve been thinking and reading about the environmental (and associated ethical) issues surrounding meat production recently, and various things have come to a head to make me consider seriously, for the first time in my life, whether I should think about making meat-free eating a little more permanent.

Which leaves you all free to have a good laugh at just how much of a West Coast Hippy I’m becoming these days.

More details on my meaty ethical musings and future plans regarding them will follow…