Photograph by David Licht

Burned at the Steak

Rant & roll: Carnivore culinary control gets the ax

By Christina Waters

AS MUCH AS it pains me to report this–some of you are still eating red meat! I know, I know. It’s almost Cro-Magnon, but there it is. Beef is still what’s for dinner in many philistine homes, homes where Coors Lite is the beverage of choice, where Kools are still smoked, and where the television has been on continuously since Gerald Ford was in office.

Let’s call these the Households of Darkness. The corpulent residents of such households–let’s not even use the word home to describe these troughs of ignorance–still order bacon with their eggs and dress up for a trip to McDonald’s.

Picture them. Obese, clad in polyester, they are well on their way to adult-onset diabetes. Apparently too fat to leave the house, these unfortunates haven’t yet gotten the word about cholesterol. They’ve heard about it, but they don’t quite get the connection between the C word and sudden death by stroke or heart attack.

All that butter, all that animal fat goes directly to the arteries, where it sits. It sits and waits for other globs of animal fat. Then when there are enough globs they form a fat blockade and prevent the flow of blood to important areas, like the heart and the brain. In short, the meat-eating bubba gets stupid and dead quicker than the rest of us.

Why, then, are people still eating meat? First of all, there’s that Genesis thing–you know, where God gave man dominion over the animals. Many a Republican likes to sling that quotation around as sort of a Judeo-Christian carte blanche to destroy every living thing that isn’t nailed down.

Actually God was giving humans permission to take care of animals–not to slaughter and eat them. Furthermore, in the first book of Genesis, God also gave Adam and Eve every manner of plant as their food. Not pork ribs and rack of lamb. Not bacon bits and Vienna sausage. The Garden of Eden was a veritable vegetopia, and only after the unfortunate incident with the serpent was the first bratwurst created.

THEN there’s this masculinity thing surrounding the consumption of red meat, the bloodier the better. Today’s insecure carnivore male actually believes that real men don’t eat quiche. Many a sagging ego (itself a metaphor for another sagging entity) has been propped up by a bacon cheeseburger from Burger King (430 calories, 10 grams of saturated fat).

Hey, it was “dominion,” guys. Not “domination.” Given that menus refer to carcasses euphemistically, there isn’t even an honest respect given to the animal being consumed. “Chateaubriand” is really “dead cow,” French or no French.

That we are squeamish about eating red meat is evident in the distance that is placed between the product we consume and its actual source. An ex-New Yorker confessed to me several years ago at a gathering in the Santa Cruz Mountains, “I was 20 years old before I found out that beef didn’t come wrapped in plastic.”

Those quarter-pounders you’re wolfing down (590 calories, 11 grams of saturated fat) contain the flesh of what was once an 800-pound creature. That delicate foie gras is actually a vital organ of a beautiful and intelligent bird. It always sounds less cruel in another language, doesn’t it?

How many of us would even consider eating baby back ribs if we first had to catch, kill, and butcher the pig itself? At least the ancient Romans were honest. They brought the entire pig to the table and pulled it apart with their bare hands. Barbaric, but direct. One visit to the stockyard, any stockyard, would cure most of us of that hankering for a big ole juicy steak. (And what is this need for quantity? Steaks are invariably listed on menus in terms of their weight, as if eating more is a sign of power, or machismo. Eating a steak the size of Anchorage is only a symptom of one thing: gluttony.)

Now I might cut some slack here if we were living in North Dakota, where fresh vegetables are an endangered species, where grown women have never even seen an artichoke, and everything comes from a can or a box. But this is California, where perfect, fresh, organic vegetables outnumber even cell phones.

I’m convinced that people continue to eat red meat because they’re lazy and because they’ve convinced themselves that they are immune to statistics. If we weren’t intended to eat meat, God wouldn’t have made Rolaids.

It’s quicker and easier to just swing by Burger King-where a Double Whopper with cheese runs a terrifying 1,020 calories and 25 grams of saturated fat-than to buy unprocessed vegetables, noninstant rice, and maybe some fresh salmon, and actually prepare it yourself.

Fast food is really fast grease, and everybody knows it–including the disgustingly overweight people who frequent places like KFC and McDonald’s. As for not believing the statistics, even if you only watch TV you’re aware of the health dangers (never mind the environmental ones) of eating red meat, which just recently was linked–again–with colon cancer.

It’s amazing how meat-eaters think that vegetarians are weird. Is it weird to be lean and healthy? Is it weird to respect our bodies and not poison them with decaying carcasses of fellow living creatures? Is it normal to stuff ourselves with what George Bernard Shaw called the “scorched corpses of animals”?

It’s gotta be a self-esteem issue for those of limited reasoning ability. I may be a loser, the carnivore thinks, but at least I’m better than this dead critter I’m eating.

And then there’s the snob value, the arriviste factor of meat-eating.

Only peasants would willingly eat a meatless meal, bubba believes. The ability to put a chicken in every pot and a steak on every plate continues to be a sign of status. Savvy vegetarians in the West figured out that the way to combat the snob appeal of beef was by giving even greater status to designer produce. Portobellos now have as much clout as Porterhouse, heirloom tomatoes can command prices once reserved for carpaccio.

THIS IS A GOOD sign. Because the reasons to remove red meat from your life are many. Ethically, it’s unconscionable to pamper your pets and still be a partner to the slaughter of cattle, sheep, bunnies, and pigs. We share this planet with others. They don’t kill us, and we can survive quite nicely without killing them.

Legumes, green leafy vegetables, fruits, soy products, whole grains–put them all together and you’ve got delicious paths to health and longevity. Bubba will die sooner and more horribly than those who follow the meat-free lifestyles of Tolstoy, Buddha, Leonardo da Vinci, Cesar Chavez, Gandhi, and Albert Schweitzer. (Even a pig like Hitler was smart enough to give up meat.)

If you enjoy being permanently overweight and plagued by arthritis and indigestion, keep chowing down on bacon, burgers, and barbecued ribs. If you want to contribute to the death of the planet, the eradication of green space, and the pollution of clean air, then by all means make McDonald’s your favorite restaurant. And if death by heart attack sounds good, Sizzler awaits. Remember, you are what you eat. Dead meat.

Christina Waters’ last article sang the praises of meat and dismissed veganism–go figure.

From the October 4-10, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photograph by Michael Amsler

Garden variety: Doug Gosling– head gardener and exectutive chef of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center–says weeds are good for the garden and the soul.

Something Wild

Nature’s supermarket at your back door

By Marina Wolf

PICK ANY STRETCH of railroad track in any city of moderate size and you’ll find it to be a short, bleak hike–10 minutes if you stay on the packed gravel and move at a brisk clip. But walk a little slower, take some time to really look at the plants peeking out from the edges of gravel and concrete. See those spiky flowered weeds, the sprawling clumps of what looks like grass? Some of it’s good eatin’, and it’s all up for grabs.

Welcome to nature’s supermarket, open 24 hours, self-service only.

Most of us have plucked a dusty berry from a brambly ditch, or pulled apart a head of clover for the bits of nectar within, or bitten into the sour, juicy stems of sorrel. Such furtive encounters tap into our collective heritage from the earliest days of humanity, when foraging was the way we survived. Now we pay top dollar for gourmet greens while wielding a wrathful hoe at the bounty that pops up in our front yard. Oblivious to the irony, we may even plant domesticated produce in the exact same location where we uprooted its wild cousin.

There are still a few people who maintain the original “weed” connection, in one way or another. In rural Sonoma County, the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center grounds its “weed policies” in very practical principles. “Weeds are good for the garden,” states head gardener Doug Gosling firmly. Gosling oversees the two acres of bio- intensive beds, and the thriving “volunteers” (“I have a hard time with the definition of ‘weed,’ ” he chuckles) are a crucial part of the garden’s ecosystem. They keep the center’s seed bank diverse, and they also make an excellent living mulch, holding down the soil and retaining nutrients. And, of course, they’re good, dependable eating, as the menu-makers at the OAEC can attest.

“I’d say that well over 50 percent of the salads we eat, all year round, are made of so-called weeds,” says Gosling.

And why shouldn’t the weeds take center stage? These brazen green marauders are frequently more nutritious than any froufrou cultivated green stuff. Early-spring favorites–dandelion, lamb’s-quarters, curled dock–have exceptionally high levels of vitamins A and C, which would explain why people of yore placed a great deal of faith in these greens as “spring tonics” after a long winter of poor provisions.

Even into the first part of this century, New York City opened Central Park each spring to the rummagings of Italian immigrants, who loved the tender young leaves of the radichielle (dandelion).

Nowadays you don’t want to do that: most civic lawns suffer from a liberal hand with the herbicides. Fortunately, the urban landscape still abounds with foraging opportunities for those who are willing to stray from the beaten path. This has less to do with iconoclasm than with self-preservation: the beaten path has more cars and fewer buffers against them.

A road might be lined with wild food to feed an army, but without a curb, surface pollutants wash off that road right into the soil.

“There is no formula of feet away from the road to substitute for common sense,” says John Kallas, a wild-foods consultant who has been leading expeditions in Portland, Ore., since 1978.

LIKE GOSLING, Kallas expresses a certain antipathy to the term “weed.” “I get a much higher response when I call them ‘wild gourmet garden vegetables,’ ” he says laughingly. At any rate, most of his classes and field trips extend beyond weeds into the underexplored realm of eating the neighbor’s landscaping. “A lot of people plant things as ornamentals,” says Kallas, “and they either don’t know or don’t want to bother with the edible aspects.” Some varieties of roses, for example, drop their petals to reveal huge rose hips. And ornamental kale is quite edible, though you probably wouldn’t want to harvest it from a gas station, its typical North American habitat.

Foraging in any neighborhood demands that you ask permission; not only is it courteous, but it gives you a chance to inquire–nonjudgmentally, of course–about past and present gardening practices. You won’t always be able to find out, as in the case of abandoned sites and for-sale lots. But, as both experts say, unless you’ve been gardening your own land for years, there is never any way to know for sure what’s in the soil.

So with all these concerns about safety, why bother to eat wild or semi-wild foods at all? Wouldn’t it be safer and more convenient to go to the store?

Maybe. Or maybe not. As a forager, you will end up getting prickly things in your socks and biting into a lot of bitter leaves. Studying up on edible wild plants and making your first harvest in the company of an expert is a good idea, in any case. But reach beyond the thorns and you might find a a handful of greens or a hatful of blackberries more intensely flavored than any cultivated equivalent.

DOES IT FEEL STRANGE to step off the sidewalk to gather a few sweet petals from that clump of early spring violets on someone else’s lawn? It should. That’s the first step off the gastronomic “grid,” the inexorable chain of supply and demand that gives us all access to the same plastic-wrapped packages of precleaned produce.

Go on. Get your feet wet. Take the muddy ditch less traveled. Find your own food.

From the October 4-10, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.