Adam Gopnik calls the table “the thing we ride down the river of our existence.” He explained to Charlie Rose this week that the title of his new book, “The Table Comes First,” came out of something that Chef Fergus Henderson of St. John once said to him in full Brit pique:

Now tell us that’s not just about the best name you’ve ever heard for a book about food.

CADE (Part 2): The Good Slaughter: A Proud Meat Cutter Shares His Processing Floor from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

 
The piece that Food Curated has done about Upstate New York butcher, Larry Althiser, is probably the best piece of meat journalism we’ve ever seen. Althiser has been a butcher for more than thirty years and Food Curated made the trip to his newly-opened slaughterhouse in an open-minded effort to really understand and appreciate what it means when a steak lands on a plate in front of you.

Even for inveterate meat-eaters like ourselves, standing in front of the butcher’s case at the local store gives us pause. Knowing that an animal was raised and slaughtered humanely is a bit of comfort and informs the appreciation of the meal that we’re about to enjoy. So in a world of processed and packed food, this is the kind of story that really brings to light what food means, how it got to you and why you should appreciate it. And the passion and humility that Althiser displays—for doing his job well and humanely—is a credit to artisan butchers and slaughterhouses.

Food Curated also spent some time with Chris Harmon, the director of The Center for Agricultural Development and Entrepreneurship (CADE) and did a great piece about the support that CADE is giving to farmers in Upstate New York.

Definitely check out Food Curated’s site for the full story and let’s hope we see more meat journalism like this.

Sure, Bob Parsons may be a cartoonish cowboying yahoo (okay, there are really no maybes about it, the guy’s a card-carrying asshole), but the reactions to the videos of the GoDaddy CEO hunting elephants in Zimbabwe are equally disturbing and endemic of a sort of lapel-pin liberalism all too pervasive.

You can dispute how honest Parsons is being about what he’s doing down there. Sure, it’s clear from the video that he’s getting his thrills pointing very big rifles at even bigger animals, and he’s come up with a rationalization to legitimize what he’s doing and skirt legality. He’s even pretty upfront about that fact that he wants to shoot elephants, saying, “They’ve been here three nights; we hope they com back for a fourth; and if they do, we’re gonna be here to greet ‘em.” But in the videos we watched, when an animal was killed it was swiftly butchered and the meat distributed to starving villagers. Why the video editor chooses AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” to play during that segment is really beyond human comprehension, but the fact remains the meat was put to good use.

And this is not some sort of waste-not-want-not argument. There is an overpopulation problem with the elephants (yes, this might be partially owing to the fact that the farmers push the crops to the edge of the elephants habitats). It’s why Kiwis eat kangaroo (an animal whose ranks was also once diminishing) and partially why Middle Easterners eat camel, and those around the Arctic Circle sup on Santa’s reindeer.

Meat comes from animals.

But once this connection is made the hate comments pour forth. At last count there were 10 pages of comments — many of them claiming that the commenter was going to stop using GoDaddy’s hosting services, posting, ironically, on a GoDaddy-run site. They are hypocrites, unless, and this could be possible, every single person unloading on Parsons is a strict vegetarian (who also happens to boycott every single company that benefits from imperialism). Furthermore, it’s also possible that this irate mob also berates every meat eater and asshole chewing on a McNugget it comes across.

But probably not.

If the villagers had killed the elephant in the video themselves, would the commenters direct the same vitriol toward them? Parsons may be parasitic, but in this case he would seem to be one of those beneficial parasites.

Careful readers of this space might know of our affinity for the poet Tony Hoagland, and his latest collection “Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty” has further stoked the flames of our admiration. One poem in particular, the poem from which the book likely takes its title, is especially relevant to our mission here: The poem, titled “Dialectical Materialism” begins “I was thinking about dialectical materialism at the supermarket,” and continues with as lovely and gruesomely jarring description of a middle-American supermarket as you are ever likely to find (if you’ve read better, please let us know). This supermarket is nowhere near California.

the complete poem, after the jump

Dialectical Materialism

By Tony Hoagland

I was thinking about dialectical materialism at the supermarket,

strolling among the Chilean tomatoes and the Filipino pineapples,

admiring the Washington-state apples stacked in perfect pyramid displays
by the ebony man from Zimbabwe wearing the Chicago Bulls t-shirt.

I was seeing the whole produce section
as a system of cross-referenced signifiers
in a textbook of historical economics

and the fine spray that misted the vegetables
was like the cool mist of style imposed on meaning.

It was one of those days
when interpretation is brushing its varnish over everything

when even the birds are speaking complete sentences

and the sun is a brassy blond novelist of immense accomplishment
dictating her new blockbuster
to a stenographer who types at the speed of light
and publishes each page as fast as it is written.

There was cornbread rising in the bakery department
and in its warm aroma I believed that I could smell
the exhaled breath of vanished Iroquois,
their journey west and
delicate withdrawal into the forests,

whereas by comparison
the coarse-grained wheat baguettes

seemed to irrepressibly exude
the sturdy sweat and labor of eighteenth-century Europe.

My god there is so much sorrow in the grocery store!
You would have to be high
on the fumes of the piped-in pan flutes
of commodified Peruvian folk music

not to be driven practically crazy
with awe and shame,
not to weep at the scale of subjugated matter:

the ripped-up etymologies of kiwi fruit and bratwurst,
the roads paved with dead languages,
the jungles digested by foreign money.

It’s the owners, I said to myself;
it’s the horrible juggernaut of progress;

but the cilantro in my hand
opened up its bitter minty ampoule underneath my nose

and the bossa nova muzak charmed me like a hypnotist
and he pretty cashier with the shaved head and nose ring
said, Have a nice day.

as I burst with my groceries through the automatic doors
into the open air,

where I found myself in a giant parking lot
at a mega-mall outside of Minneapolis,

where in row E 87
a Ford Escort from Mankato
had just had a fender-bender with a Honda from Miami;

and these personified portions of my heart, the drivers,
were standing there
in the gathering Midwestern granular descending dusk

waiting for the troopers to fill out the accident report,

with the rotating red light of the squad car
whipping in circles above them,
splashing their shopped-out middle-aged faces
with war paint the hue of cherry Gatorade

and each of them was thinking
how with dialectical materialism, accidents happen:

how at any minute,
convenience can turn
into a kind of trouble you never wanted.

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Smith’s seminal chart-topping album, “Meat is Murder,” which came out on Valentine’s Day in 1985. On the title track the famously vegetarian Morrisey bemoans the slaughtering of “beautiful creatures,” the fanciful frying of flesh, the joyful carving of calves and the festive slicing of holiday meat-treats. As for that farmstand bacon the Butcher had for breakfast on Sunday that “smelled just as good as it looked? “Kitchen aromas aren’t very homely /It’s not “comforting”, cheery or kind /It’s sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder.”

But 1985 was a long time ago — back in the day of feed lots and slaughterhouses. Back when the average consumer thought of meat as something that arrived on the earth ground or cubed and wrapped in plastic. The original Times (UK) review of the album called “Meat is Murder” the Smiths’ “most disturbing song to date” and “enough to make anyone think twice as they survey the freezer cabinet in [the chain supermarket] Sainsbury’s.” But now we are educated, aware and compassionate. Are we still killers? Everywhere (okay, mainly in New York and San Francisco and possibly a few pockets in LA where they don’t drink human blood for fun) conscientious carnivores are answering Morrisey’s rhetorical question: “Do you know how animals die?” with a proud and resounding, “Yes We Do! (And we think this makes it okay to eat them!)”

We even give them names.

Would Morrisey feel any different if he knew the Butcher’s bacon had been purchased from the local farmer market and carved off the ass of a free range, grass fed, heritage swine from less than 100 miles away?

Not likely. Because he is not one of those faux vegetarians who, in the organic locavore whole-animal-utilization craze have found all the rationalization they need to dust off their steak knives. Or go wrist-deep in a gallon of pigs blood as the case may be. Morrissey would likely tell all those spareitarians, flexitarians and weekend tree huggers that anyway you choose to slice that happy heifer, it’s still murder.

Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, told the Times Online that it was this song (and not apparently Morrisey’s constant nagging) that finally pushed him into the herbivorism. “All Morrissey’s ‘You shouldn’t be eating that’ just washed over me, but the lyrics of the song just got to me. I’ve been a vegetarian ever since and so is my wife.” (Because, before the song, what? He thought that meat grew on trees?)

But even those who were so swayed by Morrissey’s bellowing “MURDER” have to chuckle a little bit at the heifer angst. Because we can all laugh at ourselves. Especially if we are Morrissey

Blogger Tim Farris has discovered that there are a few problems with the way food (and many other products American consume) are labeled. He refers to an excellent article in Meat Paper, on the truth (or more accurately, lies) behind meat labels, and both writers make copious and somewhat sensical references to Upton Sinclair’s 1909 novel “The Jungle.” Most of us know by now, that “All Natural” is essentially meaningless. It might mean only that there isn’t a prosthetic bone in your porterhouse, for all the oversight there is on food labeling. Another favorite meaningless label is “Free-range.” It means only that there is a door open somewhere leading to the outdoors (and maybe a six-foot square pen). Do not get the impression that the animals are running through fields and stopping to chomp grass as if on some Disney farm. The best and most obvious way around these labels is to buy your meat from someone you know and trust — maybe a farmer you can talk to at the green market, or a local butcher, if you can find one. This will save you the trouble of having to deal with troglodytes at the supermarket who eye you as you pick up your plastic wrapped “Angus” and stroll past Clorox’s “all natural” Green Works products.

American agribusiness is now fouling up the rest of the globe. The Times has run an in depth and illuminating piece about American pork giant Smithfield abusing the laws and lands of Romania. The companies talk only of dropping pork prices for the American consumer, not the environmental impact of the — in the words of Robert Wallace, a visiting professor of geography at the University of Minnesota — “livestock revolution that has created cities of pigs and chickens,” or incidents such as a swine fever (sound familiar?) that swept through the Romanian operations resulting in 67,000 hogs dying or being destroyed, “with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.”

But, says the Times story, “Smithfield’s global approach is clear”: Chairman, Joseph Luter III, has described it as moving in a “very, very big way, very, very fast.”

As you probably have heard by now, last week a cow escaped from a slaughterhouse in Jamaica, Queens, creating the Keystone-cops comical scene of New York’s finest chasing the animal in an attempt to keep the rampaging cow from slamming into buses and such. There had been a similar incident in Astoria in 2000, and after that cow was rounded up and brought to Animal Control, her sentence was commuted and she was sent to an animal sanctuary upstate. Well, it’s happened again.

The Jamaica heifer, now being called “Molly” by the media, has been shipped off to bucolic Suffolk County on the eastern outskirts of Long Island to live out her days on an organic farm. If we had this kind of incentive we’d have run away long ago.  Someone needs to make an example out of this cow and eat her.

So now because she has a name and cute little welcome signs she can’t be eaten? This isn’t “Charlotte’s Web.

Molly is simply setting a bad precedent for the other cows in the slaughterhouse—like reverse Judas cow. If they all get it in their bovine brains that running away means reprieve what will become of the meat industry?

The cow should be shipped right back to the slaughter house and butchered. This would restore the order of things. We’ll take a flank, please.

There was an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times written by a professor of history at  Texas State University — one James E. McWilliams. And damned if McWilliams isn’t a mouthpiece for agribusiness pork. But what do you expect coming from Texas State University? Also this guy wrote a book that is like the opposite of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” called  “Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.” His thesis in the op-ed titled “Free-Range Trichinosis” is basically that free-range pork invites disease by allowing the pigs out into the outdoors that harbor all the dangers we brought the pigs inside to avoid. He even tries to combat the argument that heritage-bred free-range pigs taste better. But at least he does so with humor and flair, by relating advocates of the aforementioned to a certain particular breed of hunter in Texas:

It may be objectively true that animals living in a state of nature produce sweeter meat. There are hunters in East Texas who track wild hogs, slice off their testicles so the beasts will fatten and lose their gamy taste and then shoot them months later. These gentlemen swear by the superior flavor. Don’t count on me to challenge the taste assessments of people who thrive on such blood sport. If they say it’s better, it’s better.

Mr. McWilliams, let the Butcher be the first to say that you should have your testicles sliced off until you fatten and lose your gamey flavor.

Well, here is a newsflash: Eating red meat every day decreases your life expectancy. Thank you, doctors. A new study, which followed more than 500,000 middle-age and elderly people for 10 years, found that the meat eaters were 30 percent more likely to die over the course of the study. We have a reaction: They died happy. We also can’t help but marvel at the time and expense put into a study to tell people something they probably already knew and also probably don’t care about anyway. If you want to eat red meat, you are going to eat red meat. Or you can live a life of quiet desperation, picking at sprouts and hoping that you’ve earned a couple of extra years of hobbling around on your frail bones and shitting in your pants.

Then there is this asshole Barry M. Popkin, a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. He said, “This is a slam-dunk to say that, ‘Yes, indeed, if people want to be healthy and live longer, consume less red and processed meat.’ ” Since when are processed meat and red meat the same fucking thing?

When reached for comment The American Meat Institute’s James H. Hodges said, basically, “Fuck you, study.”

OK. In all fairness. The study encourages eating more chicken and white meat (pork doesn’t count in their book—sorry Pork Council and SaskPork—but fish is good). Nonetheless, it’s still patently absurd. Eating quality red meat in moderation is part of a healthy diet

The methodology of the study, as reported by the Washington Post was thus:

For the study, researchers analyzed data from 545,653 predominantly white volunteers, ages 50 to 71, participating in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study. In 1995, the subjects filled out detailed questionnaires about their diets, including meat consumption. Over the next 10 years, 47,976 men and 23,276 women died.

The eating habits of participants in the study were self-reported, and as such unreliable. How many of the 30 percent who died counted a Big Mac as red meat? Maybe the meat eaters were just more adventurous and engaged in more risky behavior in general — honestly, what sort of person doesn’t eat any red meat? — and that’s why they were more likely to die. Maybe older participants were more likely to eat meat. Also, if you are dumb enough to eat red meat every day, you deserve to die.