February 10,2010- Where's the Beef?

Well, so much for my adventures in vegetarianism.

I have 200 pounds of beef in my freezer as of today, courtesy of one of my farmer friends who sells a few animals a year at a ridiculously reasonable price. I'm not planning to eat it all at once, mind you; I still have a big (I mean huge) round roast from the last beastie, bought more than a year ago. Several steaks, too.

Regardless of the big purchase, I believe my reading Eating Animals by Johnathan Safran Foer is going to change my eating habits. Sundays, when my sweetie and I contemplate this week's meals, I have recently slipped at least two non-meat dishes in there. And while there's beef in my freezer, I know the beastie from whom it came was treated well while it was alive, and had a decent, quick death. I know these things because I know both the farmer and the folk who run the abattoir.

Having my -for lack of a better phrase- consciousness raised by Safran Foer's well-construced prose does pose a problem: the hideous lives and miserable deaths of factory-farming mean I'm no longer going to buy chicken from a store. The cheaper it is, the less likely it was raised with anything resembling compassion, and without tons of preemptive antibiotics. Now, Green Curry Chicken can be put together quite nicely without any chicken, as I discovered this week, but chicken soup might be a bit of a challenge. So, I now have to find some local person who raises chickens and will sell them to me, dressed and ready for the oven. I'm not going to be a big nagger if you have me over to dinner, but when given a choice, I'm going to pass on chicken unless I know for sure where it came from. I also think I'm pretty much out of pork, too, for the same reasons.And don't get me started on the seafood...

But I do so love the ribs and smoked shoulders and the homemade soups and the sushi... I'm just going to have to buy my own farm, I guess. And an ocean, clearly...