Why Cooking Matters

Continuing the rant about why the American meat habit needs to change:

Not only do we eat too much meat, we also eat too much of the wrong parts. We don’t know where our meat comes from, we don’t know what the animal we’re eating ate, and we sure don’t know how to get behind the stove and take control of what we put in our mouths.

We ought to start by looking at the great food cultures of the world. The traditional cuisines of Asia and North Africa, not to mention France and Italy, are based on rice, wheat, spices and smatterings of all cuts of meat. In just about every other cuisine, protein plays second fiddle to grains and vegetables. When meat appears, it does so modestly; it takes up less space on the plate, and more often than not it’s a piece of the animal — tripe or oxtail — that Americans so willingly discard.

(via “Why Cooking Matters” on The Nation)

The best advice I ever got about meat in our diets is that, more often than not, it shouldn’t be the main attraction of a meal. It’s most healthily used as a side or ingredient in a meal. You know, sauce with meat in it on spaghetti rather than steak with a side salad. Beef stew rather than a half-pound burger.

When I was in Australia, I tried pork knuckle for the first time. Sounds a bit gross, but that’s only because Americans avoid any cut of meat that resembles an actual body part (ribs aside). It’s a smaller serving of meat that is harder to get at, and if there weren’t salad, potatoes, etc. on the plate with it, you’d leave hungry. It was quite tasty and I’d eat it again if I had the chance. But since I live in a country where all these tasty parts are deemed “gross” and tossed out by everyone but a few butchers (who are disappearing at a rapid pace), that might never happen again.