March 3, 2004
ON EATING BEAST FLESH
Having eschewed carbohydrates for the most part in our household, which is tough stuff, indeed, for a southern fellow, one turns, necessarily, to the available meats. Grazing foodstuffs, after all, do not a diet make.
I'm cursed here. There are only so many ways to prepare beef, and pork, and chicken. The Bride does not like fish, and so the girls do not like fish (don't ask. It's a cultural, embedded thing).
I like fish. I figure, if I can get a nice slice of something that's been swimming in the great salty blue sea, the last vestige of unpolluted earth, I'm good. Don't talk to me about catfish. Fuck that. If you have to skin it with pliers, you don't want to ingest it. Trust me. And don't get me started on farm-raised catfish, either. A farm-raised catfish is just a bottomfeeder denied the opportunity to eat its own shit. It's eating what you feed it, but it still craves its own feces. And I refuse to even discuss salt-water catfish, because I'm white.
So I still take pride in making my children fresh food for meals, and I'm larding them up with good meatstock, like lasagna, and chicken marsala, and making The Bride a low-cal version of the same. But I can't go the route of The Meat That Rots As You Watch, more and more.
I like broiling a nice red snapper fillet, or grouper cut, because the more I think about eating animals that stand in their own shit, the sicker I become.
I grew up watching my dad try to raise pigs, for crissakes. I can't believe it took this long.