“Oh no! Food with eyes!”

“I can’t eat dinner that’s looking at me!”

“Gross!”

I get it. I empathized. Years ago, I had the same damn reaction. But as someone whose job it is to take a deep look at how, what and why we eat what we do, this response also disturbed me.

In college, I met my first hunter. I was a suburban kid, a lover of animals, the kind of tender ronie who stopped strangers to pet their dogs. I thought my hunter friend was a monster. My logic was comically flawed: Why would a human choose to kill an animal? Had he never seen a Disney movie or cuddled with a Labrador? And yet, I’d grown up enjoying bacon, burgers, steak, chicken. I’d eaten the passenger load of Noah’s ark a few times over. But here’s the thing: Having never even set foot on a farm, I thought of those foods as products at the grocery store, not animals.

Sure, I knew it came from animals. But never having to see the actual animal, or connect with it, that was just an intellectual fact. Not an emotional one.

The friend in question shot deer, mostly. He explained to me that deer were overpopulated, and hunting is how he had grown up. He and his family didn’t do it for trophy. I’m sure part of them did it for sport. But they ate all of the meat, all the parts. They stewed the bones. Nothing went to waste.

Still. Bambi killer.

And now I realize. He was the most authentic, honest omnivore on the planet. Compared to him, I was the sadly common meat eater who buried his head in the sand.

Hunters should be the most respected people on the planet. Not trophy hunters, obviously. Anyone who hunts animals for the prize or wall display is a gross, gaudy, gold-plated link on the evolutionary chain.

But 90-plus percent of us in America eat meat. Why don’t we want to eat meat with eyes? Why does it shock us, and turn our stomach?

Because we’ve become too detached from the process. Most of us don’t fish, hunt, or ranch anymore. The food industry protects us from emotionally difficult action of killing an animal so that we can eat. We only see it as a glistening, beautiful product under a sheath of cellophane. It’s a product, no different than buying an iPad. There’s no photo of a pig or a steer that says, “And here’s Babe, the animal that died so that you can eat!He liked tummy rubs and mud!”

What’s the big deal about that? Why should we bother to look our dinner in the eye?

Because as omnivores, if we care about ethics, I’d like to think we have a moral responsibility to be attached to the animal. We need to reconnect to the meat-making process. When we’re removed from the process, we don’t have to think of protein as a former living thing. The industry removes the moral, ethical and emotional part of meat eating, and just leaves the pleasurable part (eating).

And that leads to a couple of negative outcomes for us. First, a disinterest, or outright ignorance, of how our food animals are treated and whether or not they had a decent quality of life. Do some light research on CAFOs (Contained Animal Feeding Operations) and you’ll quickly see why that matters.

Second, it leads to over-eating and waste; to ordering a triple cheeseburger and only eating half because we have no respect for or tangible knowledge of the animal that gave its life. In 2014, America wasted enough food to fill the Empire State Building 91 times. Ninety-one.

And, finally, to get a little mystical—it takes out the spiritual side of eating. For millions of years, we had to hunt our food and connect with it—see its alive eyes, its animated spirit—before bringing that to an end. That imbued our mealtime with a connectivity to life, death and our natural environment.

Without that connection to our food animals, meals are just pleasure and sustenance. I’d argue that without the toil, the hunt or the gather, eating is only a fraction as meaningful and fulfilling as it could be.

This is a theme I’ve hit on in these pages before. But it’s one that “ceviche with eyes” reminded me of. And it’s worth repeating. As eaters, we should want to connect to our food. Even if it’s just eating food with the eyes still on the plate.

Eat food with eyes. It’s not gross. It’s real.

Eat Food With Eyes

The post Eat Food With Eyes appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

The idea stems from my recent interview with local rancher Jack Ford about the fact that San Diego doesn’t have a local USDA-approved slaughterhouse.

That means, by and large, we San Diegans can’t eat our own meat. We’re talking ethically raised meat. Hormone- and antibiotic-free meat. Delicious, healthy meat. Animals that were cared for, given a good life, and killed by expert ranchers in the most humane way possible.

And yet we can’t eat it. On a gut level, that seems wrong, doesn’t it?

As someone who cares about food, ecology and local culture, I want to groupthink a solution. It’s one of the action items for the Berry Good Food Foundation, for which I’m an advisor.

In order for meat to be sold at restaurants or retail, the animals must be loaded into trucks and driven hundreds of miles to the nearest USDA-approved slaughterhouse in Riverside, or Modesto. During the drive, the animals get so stressed out that their meat gets tainted from cortisol. Ford reported his pigs would lose 15 percent of their body weight (or more) from the stress.

So most ranchers don’t bother. And that means San Diegans can’t eat local meat. You can, but you have to buy the whole, half or quarter animal live, hire the farmer to kill it for you, then have it professionally butchered or do it yourself. Or you can buy a half-or quarter-animal through a meat co-op like Meat San Diego. Many consider buying whole animals the pinnacle of ethical meat eating: using every part and developing a direct relationship with the farm. But let’s face it: not everyone has the $300 or the freezer room for such bulk buys.

There has to be a better solution, right?

I’ve seen ethical ranchers humanely kill their own animals. I’ve eaten meat from dozens of these animals. I’ve never gotten sick. Not once.

In fact, I’ve studied both USDA-approved slaughterhouses and ethical local ranches. Knowing what I know, I’d rather serve my family meat from an animal that was killed in the dirt at a quality local ranch. Years of my own research points to it being healthier, safer meat.

And the USDA says I can’t eat it.

This is not an anti-USDA screed. It’s a pro-solution screed. The USDA does some things very right. They save lives. But I think we’re being overprotective in regards to local meat. (In fact, my argument is that in their effort to “protect” people, the USDA is actually preventing them from eating the healthier meat).

That brings me to my idea. What about an “At Will Restaurant Program?” The USDA allows restaurants or retailers to buy local meat that was killed directly on the ethical, local ranch. The restaurant would announce to diners that it serves non-USDA meat. Us diners could sign a waiver, absolving the restaurant of any liability.

Can’t I just tell the USDA that I want to eat this meat? Thanks for trying to protect my health, USDA sir. But, as someone who studies food, I’ve concluded that animals raised and killed on responsible local ranches is safer, more environmentally friendly and healthier than what you’re forcing me to eat.

“It wouldn’t work, it’s too political,” says Derek Stephens, a local meat consultant. “I think the health department does a great job. The amount of people we feed and the amount of people who get sick is impressive. Even if you sign a contract, someone’s going to find a way around that contract.”

“I love the romanticism of it all,” says Jeff Jackson, executive chef of A.R. Valentien, one of San Diego’s first champions of local bounty. “But I would be very concerned that people would make people sick. I used to work at restaurants where hunters would come up to the kitchen and drop off a deer or a wild boar that they’d just killed. It was great. But you do not have young chefs who are classically trained anymore. Very few have gone through the rigors of that classical French kitchen and really know the science. I’d worry that they’d start making salumi and people start dropping dead outside of the restaurant.”

That said, A.R. Valentien does occasionally get customers who caught their own fish, and ask Jackson and his chef de cuisine Kelli Crosson to cook it. The restaurant makes the diner sign a legal waiver, and they do. That’s completely legal.

So why can’t we all sign waivers for beef, pork, lamb, goat, chickens—everything?

“I’d totally do it,” says Jeff Rossman, chef-owner of Terra American Bistro. “As a chef I’m going to be all for it. As a restaurant owner, I’ve got to think about people shutting me down. But if there were no repercussions, I’d totally do it.”

Jackson’s notion of inexperienced chefs killing us with their mishandling of meat is a very real concern.

So how about another solution? In cities like San Diego that don’t have a USDA slaughterhouse, how about the USDA sanctions a few of our top, ethical, humane ranches to do on-ranch killings and sell the meat to retail and restaurants?

The problem with slaughterhouses on a small scale is that they’re not profitable. San Diego’s ranching industry isn’t big enough to supply the necessary break-even volume. And figuring we’re short on water and grass in San Diego, we wouldn’t want that many food animals on our local lands. In order for San Diego to eventually get a slaughterhouse—or even a mobile slaughterhouse, like the one the USDA helped fund for the New York ranching community—it would most likely have to be a nonprofit endeavor. A city service of sorts.

Maybe one of our big philanthropic people or organizations—like Conrad Prebys, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Darlene Shiley, Ernest and Evelyn Rady, the Joan Kroc Foundation or the Leichtag Foundation—will see the importance of healthy, local meat and fund the operation.

How phenomenal would it be if the Kroc family—whose fortune came through McDonald’s burgers—funded a route for local, sustainable, progressive meat culture in San Diego?

Here’s the truth. Right now, a lot of San Diego’s top restaurants are serving “illegal” local meats. They are serving “illegal” cheese made in-house. They are serving “illegal” charcuterie. I have not heard of a single person getting sick from these illegal efforts. Why don’t we pave a route to legalizing locally slaughtered meat?

I’ve been trying to navigate the USDA’s hierarchy to find the right person to speak to about this issue. I’ll have an update tomorrow hopefully.

For now, I open this discussion up to San Diego’s food thinkers. What possible solutions are there?

Let Us Eat Meat

Photo by Jaime Fritsch of Meat San Diego

The post Let Us Eat Meat appeared first on San Diego Magazine.