CHAPTER 6

MEAT:PUTTING IT TO THE SIDE

This chapter is the shortest in the book. I don’t use very much meat in my cooking because I think there is already so much of it—too much. I like to feel light after a meal, and that’s hard to do after you’ve eaten a giant burger.

 

TO BE FAIR, MEAT is a food that is less frequently wasted by consumers because it isn’t cheap. The reason for its relatively high cost is that producing meat uses (and wastes) a lot of resources: water, electricity, fuel… and the list goes on. To produce one hamburger, for example, it takes the same amount of water as a 90-minute shower. One way to reduce such waste is to eat meat less frequently and in smaller portions.

For centuries, meat was considered a luxury by civilizations around the world. In some cultures, it still is, and they have dishes for different parts of the animal, nose to tail. My approach to meat isn’t much different. I look at the whole animal, consider all of its parts, and figure out how each one will taste best.

Plucking a freshly killed Mountain Meadow farm chicken over ice