I don’t know if “fake” is the right word to use here, but I agree with Jamie Oliver in this case. If you want to eat meat, then you should be fully aware of where it’s coming from. You may not want to do the killing yourself, and maybe you don’t feel comfortable watching, but every time you eat meat you’re at least partially responsible for the death of an animal. Jamie’s taking that responsibility onto himself, here, and I think that’s a good thing. I don’t know if avoiding the butchering of animals makes you a fake chef, necessarily, but it definitely makes you a bit of a fake carnivore.
Fair enough; I can get behind that argument.
Small anecdote: I drove a refrigerated truck for a time, and one of my more common pick-ups was a beef processing plant in Southern Washington. I used to pray that I could be in and out as quickly as possible because the stench was absolutely unbearable. If that smell couldn’t put me off meat, nothing ever will.
Of course not. But it probably means you shouldn’t be performing life saving surgery.
And Askia already made the point about the feces analogy.
I say again…it’s not simply the point that if you eat meat you should kill it. It’s that if meat is your profession you should understand it. If you want to be a professional. How an animal is butched effect the end product. A chef who wants to understand the different cuts of meat, and so on, could probably learn a lot from going through the whole butchering process. At least once.
(Er…I mean he should see an animal through the whole butchering process. Although going through it himself might hold many lessons too.)
But only for a very short time…
Unless I’m very much mistaken, isn’t all meat muscle? There are different kinds of muscle (skeletal, smooth, cardiac, and a few I’m forgetting, IIRC), but all meat is muscle tissue.
(This isn’t counting things like eyeballs or hooves as ‘meat’. Maybe this is where the confusion is coming from.)
Organ meats aren’t muscle. Liver, kidneys, haggis, monkey brains, sweetbreads, etc.
Why?
Benefitting from the slaughter of animals but not wanting to kill the animal is no different from being willing to benefit from medical procedures but not wanting to participate. I don’t want to change the oil in my car, but I’m still going to drive the car; is that wrong? I really do not want to work in mines, but I’m still going to use metallic objects. How’s that different from using meat even though I don’t participate in the extraction?
I have the freedom to choose what I eat and it sure isn’t problematic for me. I have no problems with food whatsoever.
As for people allegedly in denial about meat, I have to admit I have never in my life encountered a sane human being who did not know that meat comes from animals.
I completely blanked on all of that, and I even like liver!
Bah. I must have had liverwurst for brains.
(Mmmm… liverwurst and brain sandwich. ;))
Hmmm, I’ve put flopping, live fish on a board to be gutted. Does this qualify me to eat meat? Or am I still a fake, never having slaughtered mammal or avian (well, maybe avian if eggs count)?
Everybody knows that meat comes from animals, but not everybody knows what that means–how animals are raised or slaughtered. Many people are actually quite ignorant, often deliberately so because they are psychologically or morally uncomfortable with what happens.
I think people should also know where oil and metals come from and what that entails for the environmnet, the people who work in the industries, their communities, etc. I’m not talking about detailed information, nor thinking of this primarily as a way of limiting consumption, just basic facts everyone should know about how their world works. We should make a basic effort to be aware of how all of our actions and decisions affect and are affected by those around us.
People who work in almost any job, especially if they are at a high level and work in an area they take pride in and care about, do owe it to themselves and their customers to develop a fairly detailed and personal knowledge of most aspects of the field they work in. I wouldn’t refuse to buy wine from a person who knew nothing about wine, but I’d have much more respect for a liquor store owner or worker who knew not only about wine but about how grapes are grown than one who had the opportunity to learn these things and refused. (And would prefer to buy from the more knowledgeable person, all else being equal.)
The chief ingredient in haggis is oatmeal. So while there are organ meats (and a good dollop of mutton fat) in haggis, it hardly belongs on a list with liver, kidneys and monkey brains. It’s a dish, not an organ.
Well, yeah, but I couldn’t remember exactly which organ meats were in haggis (lungs? I know there’s stomach in there somewhere) so I just dumped the whole thing in.
RickJay, I think part of what you are missing here is that Oliver isn’t just a person who eats meat. He’s a professional chef who would claim to be an expert at cooking meat. All your analogies seem to miss this point.
A chef who knows nothing of butchering an animal can’t be compared to anybody using a toilet and not knowing about the sewer, or a driver not changing his own oil. If you want to be an expert as something you need to delve a bit further into it than the average Joe on the street. A good plumber needs to be aware of how the septic system works that his pipes are connecting with. A good racecar driver should know the ins and outs of his vehicle.
Oliver’s statement was a chef who has cooked 2,000 sheep should kill at least one. You seem to be interpreting it as anyone who eats any sheep should kill at least one.
Alton Brown does a good compromise of this, BTW. He has two assistants get into a cow suit. It walks around and moos while he discusses how cow muscles are affected by the cows movements and result in different cuts of meat. No bloody mess for the PETA crowd to firebomb him about, but the point gets across nicely.
Oh, and by this I mean the point about knowing the animal and how it affects flavor and cooking. Not the other point of “killing animals” is where meat comes from. 
Do you have qualms about participating because you couldn’t bear to do someone harm? Because that’s why I don’t eat meat. I couldn’t do the harm myself, whereas as squeamish as I am, I would attend surgery if it helped someone. The former is a moral issue, while the latter is preference based on being kind of a wuss. See the difference?
You’re lucky then. I couldn’t kill an animal unless my life depended on it, so I have problems eating meat. I could and have grown all manner of vegetables and fruits, so not a problem if someone else has to do it for me-- I don’t feel like I’m pawning off work I couldn’t do myself on someone else. I feel I need that kind of consistency in my worldview wherever possible. Yes, I feel like a total hypocrite for using fossil fuels.
That’s so not the point. The point is that I’m tired of hearing people decry cruelty to animals and saying they could NEVER hurt an animal while chomping on a burger. When I discuss this with my students and point out that hamburger is ground up cow muscles, they are VERY grossed out and upset, even though intellectually, they know what it is. Knowing it and understanding the full import of it is two different things.
As for cazzle’s point: I don’t have the wherewithal to plant an orchard, vineyard, or huge farm to get all my vegetables. But that’s not because I have some sort of moral or emotional qualm about it. I do have those qualms about farming and slaughtering animals, so I don’t eat them. YMMV.
Thus, a chef should also raise the livestock? :dubious:
And I really think there is hardly anybody totally ignorant of the process that puts meat on the table.
Ya know, being deliberately obtuse doesn’t help your point. If the way your food is raised makes you emotionally upset when you have to witness it, then maybe you shouldn’t be eating it. Is my point.
I think most people would be horrified if they had to witness the process, yes. How many people could stomach the idea of putting a calf in a veal pen? Or could slit an animal’s throat? What about dealing with downed animals? If you’re one of the people that could, then cool for you. If not, then you might need to think your diet through a little better, because you’re supporting it with your money.
But that wasn’t Jamie Oliver’s point, which was the subject of this thread. JAMIE OLIVER didn’t say “You’re a hypocrite if you are opposed to hurting animals but you eat them anyway.” I can see the point to that.
What Oliver said, however, was that you’re a hypocrite if you USE animal products and haven’t killed one yourself. Which is about as logical as saying that a jeweller is a hypocrite if he makes diamond rings and hasn’t mined a diamond himself.
I’ve got no problem with his slaughtering a lamb that he’s going to eat: it’s the appropriate thing for him to do.
I do have a problem with his killing it by exsanguination without stunning it. The laws about meat slaughter aren’t some bureaucratic mumbo jumbo: they’re in place to minimize suffering. By ignoring them, he unnecessarily caused suffering. Bad form.
Daniel
Hey, isn’t that what the River Cottage chef does?
I’m with Jamie on this - I do know one local cooking school takes first-year aspirant chefs to abbatoirs, free-range poultry farms and a fish-processing plant during the course of the year. Oh, and senior students have to gut their own guineafowl…