A FORMER VEGETARIAN'S THOUGHTS: CHICKEN & GRATITUDE

Last night, I found myself with a raw chicken again for the third time in my life. It is becoming a little less terrifying; I grasped the meat and bones with confidence, if not hunger. I skinned and pulled and as I worked, my thoughts went in a directions I didn't expect. I felt

Gratitude. I thought about the animal whose body I was turning into food, and about how I sit on top of the food chain heap and this animal did not. I thought about how this animal turns grass and grain and bugs into sustenence, something I could not do (grass and bugs, since it was an organic free-range chicken). And even though I have yet to really like the taste of its meat, I thought about lucky I am to have such a food: unlike the soy I've consumed much of my life and will no longer, chicken - having a long long history of being consumed, and healthful - is part of the natural (albeit domesticated) food chain we have evolved to eat and prosper from.

I was very nearly praying, cutting the meat from the bone. It feels so very far away from where I have known. And I suppose like moving to a new city, it will feel more like home when I can regard where I am (preparing meat) and see a history (of meals). Right now I am in a place where I have no memories.



My reading in Omnivore's Dilemma last night brought up a very interesting thought, which I'll attempt to condense: Salmon, widely regarded as a good source of omega-3s, is now being engineered to eat, as the author so frequently says, the government-sponsored "surplus of cheap commodity corn." Consequently, the abandonment of its natural diet (algae, phytoplankton) has led to a sharp reduction in farmed salmon's omega-3 content. Conversely, beef -when fed on its natural diet, grass- has a higher omega-3 content. The day will come when people seeking balanced sources of omega-3s will routinely choose pastured beef over farmed salmon. And think about how seasonal true wild salmon is. You're not eating that fresh all year. It's a real paradigm shift, right?

There is also preliminary research suggesting that the so-called "problems" with eating red meat are actually problems with what the meat ate. Modern cultures eating huge quantities of pastured red meat do not suffer the ailments we associate with our meat here, which is overwhelming from animals selectively bred for their ability to best tolerate a diet they would never select on their own. Turns out, maybe it's not about what you eat, so much as what your food ate.

Additionally, I'd never thought about meat being a seasonal food. Ever. But in looking through eatwild.com I discovered that several nearby farms only sell their beef after it's been pastured on grass all summer. Chicken is a warm-weather food. Who knew?


The answer is, everybody knew. Before we forgot.