Quote of The Day

"All good chefs are left-handed." - Gordon Ramsay

My friends J&E and B&B back in Wisconsin know that I’ve been going through BBC America withdrawal - even if I could afford cable, the local carrier doesn’t provide BBC America, so honestly, what’s the point? - so they’ve sent me DVDs and tapes of several shows on the channel.

And the only thing I love more than a good, or even mediocre, British police procedural is one of Gordon Ramsay’s shows. I couldn’t sit through more than five minutes of "Hell’s Kitchen," his show over here, but I adored "Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares" and "The Boiling Point."

Well, I think "The F Word," which J&E and B&B recently sent separate bits of, tops them both.

I know Ramsay’s overexposed, I know his usual tv schtick of raving, foul-mouthed kitchen bully is tiresome, but I love the guy. Not when he’s being an arrogant jerk (hell, I get my fill of that at school), but when he’s just being a smartass and especially when he’s cooking. I love his recipes and the way he explains them on "F Word."

I also really love the mini-vignettes they do on the show of everything from him trying to spear-fish sea bass to showing clueless Brits how to cook a proper Sunday meal in their own kitchens. Like Jamie Oliver, and just about every other British chef these days it seems, Ramsay has adopted a few causes, including sustainable fishing and humanely-reared livestock, as well as bringing back Sunday dinner as a home-cooked, family gathering. That’s why I love BBC America and read the Brit food mags Fresh and Olive every month. It just seem there’s a lot more thought in their approach to food then shouting "bam!" when you throw yet more butter in the pot.

Anyway, one of the episodes of "F Word" that I watched last night was, as Ramsay himself would say, "ex-TROUD-‘n’ry."

All season, he’d been raising two Berkshire pigs in his backyard (named Trinny and Susannah, the cheeky bastard, which will amuse anyone who’s watched the original, and far superior, "What Not To Wear" tv series, another British import). While he was raising them for meat, he also treated them a bit like pets, and gave them a lot of care and affection.

In this episode, it was time to take them to the abattoir. He did, and it was emotional for him (sincere, not put on, I thought).

And this is the key bit: they showed the pigs being slaughtered while he looked on (he said he felt he had to be there to witness it).

That would never happen on an American show. You might see Bobby Flay shaking hands with his butcher or Emeril holding up a piece of raw meat, but there’s no discussion, nevermind visuals, of how we get all those nice little packages of meat in our supermarkets. There have been studies done on schoolchildren that show most of them have no concept that their hamburger was once a cow. Americans in general seem to think that meat grows in tidy little gardens or something (that’s surely what scientists hope to do one day... read this for a truly disturbing future food ... meat sheets).

I’m not against eating meat. I think we as humans are omnivorous creatures. But I also think we owe it to the environment, to the animals and to ourselves to eat humanely-reared, sustainable meat, and most of all to acknowledge that eating meat involves killing another living creature.

On a related note, back in my journo days, when I was doing an article on why black leather is so popular in heavy metal, one of the people I interviewed pointed out that leather was an iconic fabric of bad boys and dangerous sorts for the simple reason that "you can’t have leather without death."

That’s how I feel about meat. I still eat it, but just like I won’t buy eggs from battery farms or drink milk from confined cows, I’ve given up eating meat raised under questionable circumstances. Yeah, the humane stuff is more expensive, but I don’t eat that much of it to begin with and, as was pointed out in the excellent Omnivore’s Dilemma, if the average American magically found $50-100 a month of disposable income for a cell phone (and how many of us really need one, anyway?), surely we can afford to pay a bit more for our meat.

As for the quote that kicked off this little Ramsay lovefest/meat rant, yeah, Ramsay, who is also left-handed, did say that. Well, he’s right about that, too.