Lamb Chops? Not this girl.

Last week, we were eating dinner when Brian came in and said, "Um... I think Eunice is lambing." So we all ran outside, abandoning our meal to the flies.

AND she's a girl, so we get to keep her! Huzzah.

Look at those eyelashes. I'm in love.

180 degrees later in the circle of sheep life: on Saturday I went to Front Royal (about a 75 minute drive) to pick up Mr. Wether*, the lamb we dropped off last week who now resembles a cooler full of vacuum-sealed lamb chops.

Blue Ridge Meats, where Susan and Dean get their animals processed, is "humane certified". They don't use electric prods on the animals, they don't deny them food or water (some places do that because it apparently makes less of a mess on the kill floor), and they don't do anything to cause the animals any suffering. So I think I can enjoy a Mr. Wether burger without too much guilt.




*Wether: noun a male sheep who has had his bearings removed.

"You're right in liking meat!" - American Beef Mania continues

The I ♥ Beef! campaign, a snazzy new advertising program that's trying to bolster interest in that most American of products, is definitely not the first time the meat industry has tried to use utter absurdity to beef up (ha) their sales.

I'm not sure what bothers me most about these advertisements. The poor grammer? The perfectly manicured nails that are painted to match the color of raw steak? The fact that it calls pork sausages "tasty little mouthfuls of flavor" and claims they are "cheery eating anytime"?

However creepy the meat advertisements of yore are, the Beef Board is working to counteract that by emphasizing beef's inherent sexiness. According to their beef checkoff-funded consumer market research, 50% of Americans think Filet Mignon is the best way to say "I love you." Oh baby.

Speaking of babies... they need meats too. Meats. Plural.

The Butcher, The Baker, The Boeuf Bourguignon Maker

For a while now, I have had a hang-up about boeuf bourguignon. Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon, to be precise. I somehow came to view mastering this recipe as a vital step in the career trajectory of any serious foodie. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but it was probably somewhere between reading Julie and Julia and My Life in France.

I - and many others, I believe - have come to view Mastering the Art of French Cooking as the First Edition Foodie Bible, the embodiment of the original Good Food movement. Maybe MtAoFC was considered an entrance into the world of home cookery for housewives in the 1960's, but like a snowball rolling down a hill, it has gathered force and mass as it raced through the next fifty years. This book has weathered TV shows, newscasts, best-selling memoirs, The Julie-Julia Project, and a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, for crying out loud. A humble little cookbook it certainly is not... not anymore, anyway.

Bouef bourguignon is well known as traditional French fare, and is now even considered haute cuisine.* As such, it does not come without baggage, historically and culturally speaking. When the manuscript for MtAoFC first came across editor Judith Jones' desk, she settled on boeuf bourguignon as her test recipe. In the introduction to my own 40th anniversary edition of the cookbook, she explained with no small amount of gusto:

I ran home to make the recipe - and my first bite told me that I had finally produced an authentic French boef bourguignon - as good as one I could get in Paris. This, I was convinced, was a revolutionary cookbook...

And this from a lady who had lived in Paris for over three years.

Reading Julia Child's little love note before the recipe didn't really help settle my nerves, either:

As is the case with most famous dishes, there are more ways than one to arrive at a good boef bourguignon. Carefully done, and perfectly flavored, it is certainly one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man...

Perfectly flavored, eh? One of the most delicious concocted by man? No pressure.

I started at the butcher shop. Doesn't that sound quaint? There are a lot of reasons to frequent a butcher, which I won't go into right now, but the primary one is that it gives you the most control over selecting your meat, short of raising and slaughtering the animal yourself. I, of course, have additional ethical concerns, and I chose accordingly.

I decided to go with The Goose, an Indianapolis-based shop that specializes in local, naturally raised meat. They also have a coffee shop and sell delicious sandwiches, as well as artisinal cheeses, fresh seasonal produce, and dairy products from a local creamery. I got six ounces of bacon and three pounds of chuck roast, courtesy of Fischer Farms in Jasper, Indiana. Their cattle is grass-fed with a grain-finish, as the nice man who wrapped up my juicy-looking hunk of meat explained to me.

Back at the ranch - I hauled out the cookbook and re-read the recipe to make sure I had everything. Then I prepared all my ingredients in advance - cut my bacon into lardon and my three pounds of beef into two inch chunks, and sliced up all the vegetables I would be needing.

Of course, I had an audience.

Then it was a matter of blanching the bacon (that sounds like it should be a euphamism for something), browning the beef (ditto), sautéing the veggies, and dumping everything into a pot with a bottle of red wine, some beef stock, garlic, tomato paste, and a bouquet garni, which was provided free of charge by my friendly neighborhood butcher man. Wasn't he something?

Ultimately, I don't know why I was so nervous. It's time intensive, to be sure, but most of the time is spent just letting the whole pot simmer in the oven for a few hours. You can even make boeuf bourguignon in advance... Julia's recipe actually recommends it as a way to let the flavors mingle.

You might even have time to bake a little dessert. Lemon-lavender pound cake, if you're me.

In the end, it turned out perfectly. The sauce was just thick enough. The beef was tender to the point of perfection, falling apart on our forks and melting on our tongues. My parents, my brother, and my friend Abbie (who I invited along) all made many yummy noises. It might have been the wine speaking, but I'll pretend otherwise for now.


*This may or may not be according to Wikipedia.

Happy Nutrition Month! Also included - Dietary Guidelines and I ♥ Beef!

That's right... March is Nutrition Month, brought to you by the American Dietetics Association. It might not be as prestigious as African American History Month or LGBT Pride Month, and it does have to share March with the likes of "Help Fight Liver Disease" Month and National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. So who knows how many people will actually hear about it. But despite sharing the limelight, the ADA has lofty ambitions, and is preparing to bring everyone better nutrition in 2011 with their theme, "Eat Right With Color".

Everyone who has anything to say about nutrition wants Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables. It's old news, really. When the USDA released the 2010 Dietary Guidelines on January 31st, no one was shocked to read that they want us to fill up on produce.

Now, I know I'm a little late to be talking about the 2010 Dietary Guidelines a month after the fact. They've already been picked over by experts and bloggers with far more insight than I - Marion Nestle is everyone's go-to girl for all things food policy related, and La Vida Locovore did a very nice job boiling down what all those experts seem to be saying. FoodNavigator.com also did a series of articles on the aftermath of the guidelines, compiled here by Marion Nestle.

Regardless. Here are my humble observations:

1. Everyone is happy that the USDA is telling us to eat more fruits and veg (at least half your plate, they say), but in our consumerism-dominated culture, telling anyone to eat more poses no problems. It's when you say to eat less that people start getting snarky, which leads me to...
2. In their own roundabout way, the USDA did say to eat less red meat. But they sidestepped it by couching it in euphamisms like "saturated fat" and "SOFAS", which stands for "solid fats and added sugars". This spares them the anger of the formidable meat industry, but just adds confusion for everyone else. 
3. Most of the reactions I read are lukewarm. The guidelines get a passing grade, but definitely not A+ material. Most responses point out that the USDA did state more explicitly than ever that obesity is indeed a problem, they did say we need to decrease our salt intake, and they did say we need to increase our fruit/veg consumption. But still a failure so far as reining in the food industry is concerned, or telling us point-blank what foods to avoid.

What I found especially interesting is that mere weeks after the USDA released these new guidelines, the UK health agency released a warning to limit red and processed meat consumption to 3 ounces or less per day, after it has been linked to bowel cancer. And they actually said "red meat" and "processed meat". How quaint, using actual words to describe things. Don't they know acronyms are the way of the future? Those silly Brits.

To add insult to injury, the American Heart Association has announced a partnership with the Beef Board (a program that markets beef, controlled by the USDA of all people), where they will endorse certain cuts of lean beef as "heart healthy". As Marion Nestle (her again!) said, at least this seems to be a slightly more considered choice than their endorsement of certain sugary breakfast cereals. Slightly.

And because everyone needs a fabulous advertising campaign, the I ♥ Beef! people are mounting a full scale assault. According to the website, "Steak is well-known as a "best match" for love, passion and romance." Who knew?

Aw....the steak is even vaguely heart-shaped. It must be true. But somehow, I don't think mowing down a 16 oz. steak is the sexiest thing in the world, so forgive me if I skip out on Longhorn for my next date.

Flexitarianism - just a red herring?

 


 When I first heard the term "flexitarian", I laughed. Another word to describe another way not to eat meat? How unnecessary. Silly, even. Little did I know that, one day, I would become one.

There doesn't seem to be an exact definition for flexitarianism out there, but the ones that exist are variations on the same theme. Flexitarian was voted by the American Dialect Society in 2003 as the year's most useful word, and defined as "a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat." A 2008 Newsweek article called it "being a vegetarian of convenience...cutting back on meat, rather than abstaining completely". As TIME magazine described last year in the article Weekday Vegetarians, "Part-time-vegetarians, a.k.a. flexitarians, choose what to eat and when." Okay, I get it now. I think.



Flexitarian is joining an already disginguished list of words that are slightly different versions of the same thing. Vegetarian. Vegan. Pescetarian.  Lacto-Ovo-Vegetarian. Part-time vegetarian. All of them describe various levels of eliminating flesh from your diet. Just want to eliminate red meat? Be a pollotarian, and you can still enjoy your Chicken Divan. Do you not want to eat anything that has been exposed to tempuratures above 115 F? Go raw. Don't want to eat any animal products at all, even ones that don't require said animal to be killed, like honey or dairy? Vegan, baby. But be careful... those naughty animal products can hide in the unlikeliest of places, just like the Commies.* 



AND she eats meat! The horror!

Maybe that's part of why being a flexitarian is so attractive. They're not asking you to make a full time commitment. You can start off small, just one night a week, as advocated by the Meatless Monday movement. Even by doing this small amount, the non-profit says, "we can improve our health, reduce our carbon footprint and lead the world in the race to reduce climate change." And if you like your Meatless Monday, maybe you'll consider a Meatless Wednesday. Or Meatless Weekends. Or Daily Meatless Snack Time. Think of it as the gateway drug for vegetarianism.

There are all kinds of reasons that people choose to embrace vegetarianism in one of its many forms. Health, weight loss, a tight budget, they saw it on Oprah,  "I can't eat anything with a face", and so on. I didn't start down the flexitarian path until a little over a year ago, but I didn't do it to lose weight or because some dude from Glee said it was cool. I did it because I felt like being socially responsible.

Let me backtrack. When I was a kid, my cousin became vegetarian (although he was later caught sneaking leftover turkey from the fridge after Thanksgiving), and I was treated to a series of lectures/rants on how the animal industry exploits and mistreats our gentle bovine and porcine friends. My twelve-year-old self questioned this. Why, I wondered, would you boycott all meat and eggs in order to take a stand against the industry, when you could (and should, I figured indignantly) instead buy free-range, farm-raised, organic versions that promote the values you claim to uphold? You vote with your dollar, after all. Then I got distracted by something that twelve-year-old's get distracted by (probably Jonathan Taylor Thomas or something), and I forgot about it for the next decade.

For most of my life I was vehemently against even the idea of becoming a vegetarian, being a self-proclaimed "meatetarian". It wasn't until I came to AmeriCorps NCCC and found myself more or less in charge of my entire team's $4.50 per person, per day food budget that I felt responsible for spending our money wisely, and began questioning my food choices. But  I didn't really start thinking about cutting meat from my diet intentionally until reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

The book chronicles Kingsolver's year-long attempt to become a full-blown locovore with her family. (Locovore... another crazy word, this time meaning people who only eat locally produced food.) At one point in the book, Kingsolver discusses her family's decision, made years earlier, to only eat meat that is ethically, organically, and sustainably raised. This really struck me. As early as twelve, I had thought of this, if not in those exact terms. After some deliberation, I decided to try it out, starting January of last year. The way I defined my own personal version of flexitarianism is as follows:

I solemnly swear to only eat meat that has been ethically, organically and sustainably produced. I will only eat meat products that have been fed on their natural diets, that are not treated inhumanely, and that are given space to roam and graze to their little heart's content.

There are, of course, a couple exceptions. If someone fixes me a meal with meat in it, of course I will eat it. They took the time and the effort, it's my own fault if I didn't tell them about my diet, and I'm not about to be wasteful. Alternatively, if I'm at my parents' or grandparents' house, I'm not going to demand that everyone else change their eating style to accomodate me. I could - and sometimes I do - fix something seperately for myself, but that's unusual. My family always dines together. It's an important part of our dynamic, and when I'm home, I don't mind cooking and eating something I wouldn't normally eat, in the interest of being a family and all that warm fuzzy stuff. Plus.... well.... it's tasty.

One way in which I absolutely do not waver, however, is eating out. I will not buy a meat dish if it is not explicitly stated that the meat came from a local organic farm that treats its livestock ethically. And although I'm less strident about it, I try only to eat fish and seafood that is sustainably farmed and/or harvested, although I'm not as good with that.

That being said,  it's going to be interesting to see how my semi-vegitarian leanings will pan out this year, when I'll be fixing and eating food alongside the other workers at the farm. Susan and Dean, who run the farm, are definitely not vegetarians.

Last comment: if you're one of those militant and unbending people who is thinking right now, "You can't be a little bit vegetarian. That's like being a little bit pregnant! Who on earth do you think you are?" all I can say is go bite yourself. Except I guess you can't, since you're probably a vegetarian. Too bad. You're probably delicious.

  

*Speaking of communism...the dye Natural Red 40 is made from cochineal insects, making it a big no-no for vegans. When crushed, the cochineal makes a beautiful red dye known as carmine, which has been used as a clothing dye since the 1400's and became an important export to Europe in the 16th century. I wrote a paper on it in college. Well, I thought it was interesting.