Following in Hawaii's footsteps, Washington, Oregon and, most significantly, California have introduced statewide legislation that would make it illegal -- and highly fineable -- to serve or even possess shark's fin. (Hawaii's law calls for fines of $5,000 to $15,000 for even first-time offenders.)

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. -- the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries -- a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

Continue Reading...

Maybe I could let myself off the hook by saying something about how the culture of ramen in Japan -- fresh noodles in from-scratch broths, not the pre-hangover treat -- is one of the great Japanese culinary traditions, an object of Everyman devotion that's inspired at least one classic movie and is just now making its way to my town in a serious way. And while all that would be technically true, the fact is that I wasn't mindful and vigilant of what I was eating, which is really what this whole challenge is about: learning to value my food more.

Continue Reading...

I, too, will eat no more cheap chicken. From now on, it's only the humanely, sustainably raised stuff for me. Great! Done! Next up ... call Mom more often.

But wait. What exactly would it mean to give up cheap chicken? (And sorry, Boar's Head; I owe my childhood to your ham, but your weird, basketball-sized breasts count as "cheap chicken" in my book too.) It would mean no more McNuggets. Well, fine, they've sucked since the '90s anyway. It would mean no more 49-cents-a-pound thighs from the supermarket, or one-dollar bags of bones for chicken stock. Um, I guess I can still cook with those $20 chickens from the farmer's market. And it means no more Charles Gabriel. OK, this is going to be a problem.

Continue Reading...

The vast majority of Americans eat meat, lots of it, and we love it. We eat 50 percent more of it per person than we did in the 1950s, the height of our culinary steak-n-potatoes era. There are boatloads of reasons why we do it: It tastes good; it signifies prosperity; it's an integral part of most cultures' cuisines. Telling us we can't have it anymore is not going to make us very happy. We will punch you.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Since the photo is at least a few years old, uncredited and unlabeled, and since we kind of couldn't believe that chicken could be made to look like a mutant cone of strawberry soft-serve, we spoke to David Radford, director of sales and marketing of BFD Corp., which makes advanced meat recovery machines, who confirmed that yes, that is an accurate depiction of what mechanically separated chicken looks like.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

"But what is it?"

He smirked. "Just try it. You'll like it."

I reached and grabbed the delicate-looking thing and plopped it in my mouth. My taste buds exploded. I hope it's not meat, I kept thinking, though I said nothing. My mouth was busy having an orgasm. 

 "It's foie gras," he said, and I nodded. I don't know French, but he knew I was vegetarian.

"Goose liver," someone at the glossy black table added, helpfully.

"Sorry," he said, and 13 years of denial crumbled as I shrugged and told myself that I was ready for it anyway. I liked it. I was not uptight. I was having the best sex of my life with this man. I was wearing a new dress.

I became vegetarian after watching a PETA film about pigs going to the slaughter. The soundtrack was "Carmina Burana." I remember sitting cross-legged in our living room in Warsaw, Poland, in tears, arms and brain going numb from what I was seeing on our dinky black-and-white TV. By the time the film was over, I had made the decision that I was never going to eat meat again. Shortly after that I almost died from a form of anemia. My panicked family members reworked my menu, and I started putting on weight. We moved to a small town in Canada where I developed two ambitions: to be liked and to be skinny. I refused to eat with my family.

Continue Reading...

Salmonella and its discontents

Continue Reading...

I don't know what I expected when maman demanded earlier that morning, "Come with me to buy some meat," but it definitely wasn't this. In fact, if I were to write a memoir of the four months I spent as a student in Senegal, I would probably call it, "I Don't Know What I Was Expecting, but It Wasn't This: The Ryan Brown Story." Every moment, especially in the early days, was rife with opportunities for bewilderment. I would get into a taxi, only to have the driver stop along the way to pick up his friend -- and then drive him home first. Or I would respond to a man's "hello" on the street and he would shoot back, "Je pense que je t'aime." I think I love you. Apparently the concept of "Africa time" doesn't apply to matters of the heart.

Continue Reading...

My parents were surprised and dismayed; I came from a typical American meat-and-potatoes family -- we were Lutheran, after all. Some of my favorite foods growing up included Spam, sliced ham slathered in barbecue sauce, and hamburgers without the bun. As for vegetables? I mostly hated them, except for raw carrots, celery (preferably as a vessel for peanut butter), canned corn or canned green beans. My definition of salad was iceberg lettuce sprinkled with sugar. I especially hated onions and mushrooms, largely due to my father's insistence that I would like them if I tried them.

Continue Reading...

I think the feeling I felt at that moment could be called excitement. For years, since the day I found myself hurling invective toward people freaked out by fish served with their heads on, I've been saying that meat eaters should have to kill their dinner at least once. "Meat is animals. You can love eating it, but you're not allowed to forget that," I said, with no small amount of self-righteousness. Of course, I'd never done it myself, and I've eaten many times my body weight in meat since then. So I looked forward to absolving myself of hypocrisy and, I figured, who better to walk me though it than Shelby? He grew up on a farm. He has a tattoo of pigs and chickens circling his arm, and he has the thick, powerful hands of a man who seems comfortable with any kind of labor. He's the kind of friend who makes you stand up a little straighter because you don't want to feel like a wussy around him.

Continue Reading...

The Mongols were brutal and pragmatic and mobile. I was self-indulgent and listless, but now suddenly obsessed with their stories. When I arrived in Mongolia as a Peace Corps volunteer two years later, it was with a rucksack full of romance, too little long underwear, and a hunger. Mongolians ate horses, and I wanted to join them. I wanted to ingest some history and culture. Perhaps I did a little too much reading.

Continue Reading...

As a cook and meat eater, I don't ask myself these questions often enough, and I, too, had occasion to really think about them when I recently killed my dinner for the first time. I'll explore some of my thoughts in an essay on Friday. The flavor, I have to admit, was delicious, but the feeling was much more complicated than that.

Continue Reading...

"It may sound crazy coming from a French chef, but the inspiration behind this burger is actually McDonald's and Burger King," said Ripert, the man behind New York's award-winning Le Bernardin restaurant and Westend Bistro in Washington.

For Ripert, a great burger must be perfectly proportioned, a trait he thinks the fast-food giants have aced.

"All the elements are carefully controlled," he said via email. "The way they cut the pickles, the way they cut the tomatoes, the way they slice the salad, and the size, obviously make those burgers perfect."

Except the meat, that is.

"So what we did was we looked at their burgers carefully and studied the proportions, and then of course did the same thing, but with great meat," he said. "We're using sirloin mostly, but it's the fat content and ratio of fat to meat that is very important."

And don't forget a great bun. Ripert favored a fresh challah bun for his perfect burger.

Westend Bistro Burger
Serves: 4

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

What worries fans of small farms and locally produced food is that the closing of small processors will mean the closing of small farms. Slaughter and processing is the biggest challenge for small-scale meat; they're operations simply too costly and complex for farms to handle themselves. As it is, farmers have few options for meat processing without selling their animals to massive feedlot-meat operations, and without that piece of the puzzle, many farmers may quit. Why is the USDA considering the new testing regime? Some producers wonder if the machinations of Big Food are in play.

Continue Reading...