The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis Book

I enjoyed a lot of this book, but overall, the tone annoyed me. The author alternates between being too melodramatic and too glib. Ugh, ugh, ugh. For example, when she decides to take the next step up the meat ladder and try cooking a steak, her reactions include "Good Lord, not a steak," and "Could I make a steak for myself, in my own home? The thought is terrifying, and yet there is an undeniable allure to it as well." Oh, cook it or don't, but get over it already. But then on the other hand, she reads The Omnivore's Dilemma and spends a few pages on the horrors of factory farming, then goes and visits a small farm where the animals are treated well and raised sustainably, and concludes with "I think even Michael Pollan might approve." Well, did you read the third section of The Omnivore's Dilemma about the sustainable "beyond organic" farm and his arguments that it's the way to go if you can't hunt/grow/forage your own food? Uh, yeah he'd approve. At least in the kids' edition, he was bragging about the vegetarians he'd converted back to eating meat when they saw that this type of farm works well for the animals, the farmers, and the planet.

She also approaches everything from the guilt/sin/shame/fear perspective, which is really one of my huge pet peeves about food and this society. Steaks represent lust because they're both carnal or something, blah blah blah. She stops short of calling desserts "sinful" but I get the feeling that's only because dessert doesn't come up much in this book. It's food, people. If you think it's wrong to eat animals, don't eat them. Otherwise, shut up and enjoy them. Do not sanctimoniously go on and on about how bad you must be because now you eat meat, oh waily waily wringing of hands boo hoo. It doesn't make you any more virtuous than if you just ate and enjoyed; in fact, it makes you an annoying hypocrite.

Also, despite being totally intimidated by absolutely everything, the author goes out of her way to do everything in the most complicated way possible. She can't just make chicken stock out of chicken parts because some cookbook tells her it's better to make it out of a whole chicken with the breast cut off. When the butcher won't do it, she does it herself. Everything has to be the fanciest, most complicated, most elaborate way possible. I understand that she has no background in meat and so has no way of judging whether a step is excessive or necessary, but at a certain point, I would expect common sense to kick in. Think about this: you're not even making soup, you're making stock! Should it take many hours of your life and tens of dollars of meat to make something whose most common use is to make rice taste yummier? Hint: no.

Anyway, after all this, she discovers that meat doesn't cure her chronic fatigue any more than being a vegetarian did. She experiments around and finally discovers that eating only raw food does, so she decides to go with that. I'm happy for her. Each one of us should eat what works for us. But she still has to get in a chapter of politics between finding the raw foods effective and concluding it's the diet for her. These people say this and those people say that, and everybody thinks they're better than everybody else, and can't we all just get along? Although I agree, it's still annoying.

Also, I'm kind of annoyed that the answer is raw food. It seems almost like the rest of the book is a trick. After all this over-the-top glorying in bacon and steak and the title of the book including the butcher and all, she ends up eating leaves and twigs? It just seems like it should be called something else then. Tofu vs. Steak: Grudge Match or What the hell should I eat? or Eating everything, then quitting or Steak, Guilt, and Sprouts or something. As is, it's a bit misleading.