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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Is it possible that meat is now openly enjoying a renaissance--that it's finally cool to be a carnivore? If so, it has been a long time coming. Meat-eaters, having already ceded the moral ground to vegetarians (no one has ever really come up with a persuasive rejoinder to the claim that a warm-blooded, pain-feeling creature's life shouldn't be taken for your supper), have more recently had to accept that their diet is probably the source of much of the world's heart disease and much of its obesity. That diet is also sustained by an industry that is just flat-out evil: the factory farms, the egregious economies of waste in fast food, the ghastly genetic manipulations of chickens and turkeys, the pigs raised in no-room-to-move confinement, the reckless use of antibiotics and growth hormones (as well as the frightful possible consequences--early breasting in children, difficult-to-defeat superbugs), the contamination of fields and rivers by noxious excrement runoffs from feedlots the size of small nations, the tricks and shortcuts adopted by supermarkets (cheap animals fattened on cheap grain, butchered by high-pressure hose, and packaged at their bloated maximum weight). And yet, at a time when things could not seem worse, there is a generation of people (in their forties or younger) who are thinking hard and philosophically about their food and are prepared to declare: Enough! I'm a meat-eater and proud of it! Three books by authors from three backgrounds--a farmer, a chef, and a pig-slaughtering, bacon-loving descendant of butchers--are remarkably alike in their gleeful chauvinism about being carnivores.
The farmer is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a British food celebrity. He is forty-two, principally a journalist and television host by trade, who wears inexpensive horn-rimmed glasses so familiar to his British audience that they are now a piece of instant anti-branding branding. The look, like his dress (muddy Wellington boots, soiled linen jacket, the mess of the occasional apron) and his long, sometimes washed, hippyish brown hair (often pictured dangling in his face and over the dishes he is preparing), conveys a no-nonsense disregard for appearances and petty courtesies and an earnest commitment to a higher truth.
This literary persona--the thinking man's amateur--was created for him by accident, in 1989, when he discovered that it was probably the only thing he could be. Unemployed after earning a "useless" degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford, Fearnley-Whittingstall had accepted a friend's invitation to apply for a job chopping vegetables at the River Cafe in London. The restaurant was between identities: no longer what it had started out to be (a canteen for the Richard Rogers architectural firm, next door--one of the chefs is married to Rogers) but not yet the dining destination it has since become. For twelve months, Fearnley-Whittingstall was in culinary heaven. He had never learned so much so quickly. He discovered the seasons, and their bounty, and was paid to make food from it: could things get any better? They couldn't, because he was fired. He was told that, actually, he wasn't good enough. He was disorganized, and incorrigibly messy: he was Pigpen in the kitchen. For Fearnley-Whittingstall, it was a heartbreaking moment--he'd discovered both his calling and his inability to follow it. In a variation of the pedagogical imperative (those who can't, teach), he concluded that if he couldn't make a living in the kitchen he might be able to make one writing and broadcasting about it. He embarked on a new profession, and was increasingly surprised by the passion of his convictions. He was now a man more and more committed to what...
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