Hummusgirl's Blog

If beef and chicken have been tainted with so much because of hormones and corn fed cattle, then maybe lamb is the better meat for us because it’s been raised under more humane practices.  Maybe it’s more respected than beef or chicken because it’s not in more restaurants.  It’s rare, and when you don’t have something that often, you appreciate it more than if you had it every day.

I read in a book about meats that the reason lamb isn’t used as much in the US is because settlers realized that with more pasture land they could raise cows/cattle better than lambs.  A lot of other countries accept lamb much more heavily than we do according to wikipedia.  This strikes me as funny because lambs seem so much more innocent and image-friendly than cattle, yet India treats cows as sacred and don’t eat them, yet eat lamb. 

In America, we seem to not care where our meat comes from and offer no sacred ceremonies to the animals we kill, yet take great pride in putting animals in a celestial light, while not holding up our end of the bargain that we don’t treat them right.

I cooked lamb because it’s widely accepted in the rest of the world, but not here.  It turned out really well.  It tasted silky, yet the chicken I made was pretty tasteless and tough. 

If we feed corn to cattle, chicken, and pigs here, maybe if we do decide to industrialize sheep/lamb, we could feed them beans or chickpeas.  Then they’d be like a Middle Eastern tradition. 

So I was in a family pizza style restaurant the other day and had to have a bacon cheeseburger because I didn’t want fast food style beef.  I wanted real beef.  So I felt like a real American when I ate it because vegetarians are pretty scarce in this country so when you are one it must suck to see the bias meat has with the USA.

I had a McDonald’s burger a couple days later and while it was still good, it wasn’t as thick and tasty as the family restaurant and I respect my meat when it’s all natural. 

In this country, it seems that meat is both respected and feared.  We want it because we’re kind of designed for it, but too much of it can be a bad thing.  When you bite into that hamburger, you forget about the bad parts of your day and focus on  the fact that have manged to take part in a sacrifice that’s not really accepted anywhere else in the world.