Somewhere during the past several weeks — don’t recall where, exactly — I came across some food pundit’s advice that if, as anyone with any conscience must, you feel the production of meat and chicken in this country is inhumane and unsafe but you can’t afford to eat grass-fed, hormone-free, humanely slaughtered critters every day of your life, you should use your monthly meat budget to buy the highest quality meat you can find, but less of it than you’re used to. Don’t eat meat every day, or else eat lots less of it per meal.
This makes a lot of sense to me.
One of my friends, who’s had a couple of heart attacks, a quadruple bypass, and a stroke, appears to be the picture of health. He attributes his amazing recovery and present good health to a strict vegetarian diet.
We know that red meats and dark portions of poultry add cholesterol (thereby contributing to your hardening arteries) and raise your blood pressure. We know that vegetarians are much less likely to suffer hypertension and may be less prone to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). But…total, unrelenting vegetarianism is not my style. I like meat, I like cheese, and I’m not gonna quit eating them.
However, I’m open to compromise.
Why not eat a lot less meat — maybe only a couple of servings a week — and use the money you save with that strategy to buy better quality products?
Earlier this week I tried it with a pricey little whole chicken from Sprouts.
Chicken. It’s one of my pet peeves. Like tomatoes, chicken has been stripped of flavor over the past few decades. Factory-farmed chicken is as bland and blah as soggy cotton.
Believe it or not, folks, chicken is supposed to taste like something. And not like the onions and garlic and gravy you dump on it. No. Chicken is supposed to taste like chicken. Same is true of turkey, which is about as flavorless as anything you can buy from the shelves of the food deserts we in America call supermarkets. In some European and Asian countries, you still can find chicken that has a flavor; that’s how I know it’s not just that my taste buds have gone numb in old age.
No, indeed.
In the U.S., you can find chicken with a flavor at Sprouts and, to a much more pronounced degree, at Whole Foods. Splurge a little and buy yourself an organic, free-range, no-hormone, no-antibiotic, no-torture chicken at one of these markets. Sprinkle some herbs over the top of it and bake it in a 350-degree oven or over a slow barbecue grill for 45 minutes or an hour, until it’s done.
You will be amazed.
I also discovered, by serendipity, that humanely, cleanly raised pork available at Sprouts is pretty damn delicious, too.
Meat, chicken, and fish that taste better would make a fine treat, to be consumed on special occasions and with restraint in day-to-day life.
Never have thought I could afford the fancy humanely farmed beef at Whole Foods. But…if I weren’t scarfing a piece of beef a day, I sure could.
Right now the freezer is jammed with Costco rib-eye — I buy a package of the stuff and cut each steak into three pieces, providing enough for at least 12 or 15 servings. Cutting back on the number of servings per week will extend that supply to cover a month or month and a half. Or more.
But after that’s gone?
It’s off to Whole Foods.
Images: Swiss cow. Daniel Schwen. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Hindu cow. From “Ten Questions People Ask about Hinduism …and Ten Terrific Answers!” (p. 6). © Himalayan Academy Publications, Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
Yay! I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing. When you’re spending much more on meat, you tend to want to *really* get value from it, too, so I’ve been making changes in what cuts of meat I buy, too.
For example, I prefer to buy meat that is bone-in. The bone provides a lot of flavor when cooking , even with something as simple as a pork chop. I then save the bones to make into bone broth. OK, that may sound really cheap of me, but I love having good homemade bone broth in the freezer to use for cooking. I keep a zip top bag in the freezer for chicken bones and another one for other bones (those pork chop bones, lamb shank bones, etc.) and every once in a while I’ll pull out the slow cooker to make bone broth. It usually takes a full day of simmering, an overnight cool down in the fridge so I can skim some fat, and another day of reducing even more before it is done, but it is so worth it!
The other day I made a dinner with braised greens from the garden (I needed to use up the arugula as it was bolting, and to thin the beets), cannelini beans, a bit of pork sausage, and some homemade chicken bone broth. Delicious!
Oh, yes! Home-made broth is SO good. I used to save chicken carcasses in the freezer & then simmer them with onions, garlic, carrots, & celery in a giant pot. In time, tho’, became too lazy for that.
And you’re right (IMHO) that bone-in meat has a better flavor. What’s really annoying — and i mean REALLEEE annoying — is that you used to be able to buy small New Zealand legs of lamb, bone-in. Oh, it was SO good! Far, far superior to the muttony US lamb, which now is about all that’s available. I haven’t seen a NZ lamb leg in years. And the bone…OMG. What a glorious Scotch broth you could make with it. You can’t even find a bone-in leg of lamb anymore.
I’m pretty much off the meat until I can lose another 10 or 15 pounds…but at the rate this is going, that may very well happen before next fall. Maybe not, too…but if not, I’m surely not suffering much. Eating like the Queen of Sheba and still dropping a pound or two a week. 🙂
After the desired numbers appear on the scale, I’ll ease the meat back into the diet. In the meantime…an incredibly delicious-smelling meatless 10-bean soup is simmering on the stove right now.
Whenever we get one of those fancy chickens, we always make broth from it. Totally worth the effort.
Have you ever read In Defense of Food? I finally got around to it a couple of weeks ago (really liked it!) and this is part of his advice on eating FOOD instead of food-like substances.
No,I haven’t seen it. But fortunately, having been raised in a time and place where there was no fake food, I grew up without processed and fast food and so find the stuff distasteful. One of my weirdnesses is that I’ve always eaten real food. Over the years, though, it’s grown harder to find real food in “food” markets.