Yep, that's a grilled sweat sock. Meatpaper's hardore.

This is a fascinating cultural artifact – Meatpaper, a magazine celebrating all things carnivorous.  As a vegetarian I expected to be more than a little icked-out, but was surprised by how informative and entertaining the content actually was.  The reading-experience (at least online) felt like I was being taken on a tour of an alien culture by earnest, avuncular diplomats who wanted nothing more than for me to gain a deeper understanding of their civilization and its passions.

For example, the article “Chris Cosentino doesn’t want to eat penis, but if he has to, he will” caught my eye for fairly obvious reasons.  The subject, a San Francisco-based chef who seems to specialize in organ meats, describes a field trip he and his kitchen staff took to a farm in order to experience a goat slaughter first-hand:

And I’ll tell you, from that day on, there were never any mistakes with meat in this restaurant. Because the cooks that watched the slaughter, they realized that there’s an animal that’s dying. There needs to be that consciousness in this industry. I felt like a hypocrite; I can go and serve meat all the time and talk about the whole-animal ethic, and yet I hadn’t done a slaughter. And it was hard. It was really hard. I don’t think people realize what it does to you emotionally. It makes you really think about what you’re doing at the restaurant every day.

I urge vegetarians and vegans to check it out.  It’ll broaden your culinary/cultural horizons and it’s a great example of dietary fanaticism without any condemnation of the alternatives.  Heather Smith’s article “Phony Baloney — Layonna Wang’s gallery of gluten” is a great example.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 14:42 and is filed under food, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.