Beef, but pork when done right.

I'm really touchy about meat though. I tend to try and limit consumption, both for dietary, environmental and ethical reasons.

I've actually had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about my views on the whole beef thing this week because I've eaten a lot more of it than usual due to random dining coincidences, and because my mother and I have embarked on a holiday cooking adventure.

Basically I think beef is fabulous, great, tasty, all of that. But being very familiar with farming and livestock and all, there are many "no nos" for me when it comes to purchasing and cooking beef. In general, I stay away from veal all together. I don't find the conventional american methods of raising veal humane, and many european countries have made the practice illegal. Although there are some places that raise veal humanely, it's very tricky to find them and make sure that something marketed and packaged as pasture-raised was in fact raised in an honest-to-god pasture eating honest-to-god grass.

Which leads to the other beef and other livestock animal problem of being almost entirely corn-fed, and sometimes soy too. After searching fruitlessly for weeks, I finally gave up trying to find true grass fed beef in my old town. You can't do it. It's not there. No grocery store carries it, and the only real butcher caters to hunters and their "exotic" game needs and freezes and cuts their stuff for them and w/e. Not only does real grass-fed pasture raised beef taste better, it's just more humane and safer, annnnd better for the environment. Magin that! It takes much more land to raise grassing cattle, but the land is covered in grass and trees rather than mud, and there isn't a gigantic concentration of cattle in one small area. Additionally, less land is needed to farm soy and corn which are both essentially nutritionally worthless and don't have much environmental benefit either. So sorry, subsidized soy and corn farmers. Not to mention, cattle aren't supposed to eat corn anyway. It makes them sick. Very sick. This is part of why there's such high incidence of cattle being pumped full of hormones and anti-biotics. They wouldn't need it otherwise. Cattle have a very highly developed and wildly efficient digestive system--for processing a forage diet ie dominated by grass. Not corn meal and chicken doo-doo. And really, who wants to eat meat from a sick animal anyway?

/rant.

Anyways.... lol. Beef is nice. Pork is wonderful when done right. Especially when you can get some pig skin in there. It's Mr. Bourdain's favorite for a reason. Then I probably favor the wild game type things that my cousin hunts/catches and brings home and eats. Venison, duck, various types of fish. Yum. less