Opinion

“MEAT: A LOVE STORY “

My foray into vegetarianism lasted nearly a decade, with only a couple of lapses early on for a particularly attractive salami. And this one week when I repeatedly dreamed about fried chicken. But I finally went back to the hard stuff – red meat – this year, after my doc drew blood from my pale, frail arm and informed me I was anemic.

Now, I try to ease my conscience by grilling my friends and relatives before the entrée. Where did the meat come from? Is it farm-raised? Is it cruelty free?

Yes, my gourmand brother-inlaw will reliably tell me, it most certainly is! I pretend to believe him, and pretend to eat with a clear conscience. Afterward, I’ll send another guilt donation to PETA.

Turns out, I may not have to be so picky. Humanely-farmed and killed are – finally! – the hot topic in all things carnivorous.

Bookstores are packed with tomes about how to revise your dining habits without giving up the steak – from Catherine Friend’s “The Compassionate Carnivore” to “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” both by navel-gazing gastronomist Michael Pollan, and “Meat: A Love Story: My Year in Search of the Perfect Meal,” by Susan Bourette.

Like me, Bourette started off by swearing off meat completely – after a particularly stomach-turning visit to a meat-processing plant. The Canadian journalist describes the “strings of slippery yellow gristle and pools of blood . . . On the right, workers are hunched over a conveyor line of disembodied heads. Some are sawing off ears with pneumatic knives. Others are skewering heads onto spikes.”

Still, Bourette’s vegetarianism lasted only five weeks and 37 hours. There must be a middle ground, she thought, a way to “have my meat and a clear conscience too.”

Luckily, from grocery-store chains to fast food to small-farm owners, many companies seem to be banking on the idea that bettertreated meat can mean a better bottom line.

Steve Ells, CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, was featured in a recent Newsweek profile; his company has been selling naturally-raised chicken, pork and beef for years now, and soon plan to start using dairy products that come from pasture-raised cows.

Of course, there’s a lot of detective work to be done yet about the various federal and state-approved terms for this new trend; what, exactly, equals compassion? “Humanely farmed” is a vague and relative term. If a chicken spends her entire life in a cage the size of a shoebox – but you don’t de-beak her, as per the traditional style – is that humane enough? What does “cage-free” mean, exactly? Or “freerange,” for that matter? I want exactmeasurements and specifications; I want descriptions of a typical day in the life of the animals I eat.

(And please, spare me the line about how it doesn’t matter how we treat them if we’re just going to kill them anyway; we’re all going to die, but I’m betting you’d object to spending your allotted time on this planet in a dank cell standing in your own waste, too.)

The best, and weirdest, development in compassionate-carnivorousness has come from PETA, who have offered a $1 million reward to “the fi rst person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.” The idea isn’t total science-fi ction; technology for lab-meat bioreactors is in development already, albeit on a small, wildly expensive scale (Slate reports that “a Dutch team’s labgrown pork would cost $45,000 per pound – provided they could make an entire pound of the stuff.”) The real question is, would you eat it? Would I eat it? If I have any sort of loyalty to my convictions, I’d have to quelch the kneejerk revulsion and say yes.

Problem is, I’m betting people like Bourette – and the various nhunters and ranchers she profi les in her book – will refuse to get past the idea that the joy of killing must be inextricably linked to meat’s savory goodness. But there’s a glaring inconsistency here. Millions of regular-Joe meat eaters in this country, who hunt for their sustenance in the butcher’s section, still espouse this philosophy, while being completely isolated from the slaughterhouse horror-show. It’s us against the animals, they claim – yet don’t want to hear about the unfair fi ght that goes on every day behind those processing-plant doors.