Two new books fight back on behalf of meat lovers

Published 30 March 2008 in Winnipeg Free Press:

Carnivore Chic: From Pasture to Plate, a Search for the Perfect Meat
By Susan Bourette
Viking Canada, 288 pages, $35

The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers
By Scott Gold
Broadway Books, 355 pages, $27.95

Reviewed by Michael Stimpson

Vegetarians -- particularly the animal rights activists among them -- have succeeded in adding guilt and shame to diners' helpings of pork, beef and poultry. Two new books fight back on behalf of carnivores.

Toronto journalist Susan Bourette's Carnivore Chic is a rambling memoir of her quest for tasty meat that she could eat with a good conscience.

New York writer Scott Gold offers a funnier and more in-your-face defence of meat consumption in The Shameless Carnivore, the better of these two books.

Carnivore Chic has its origins in the week Bourette spent a few years back as an entry-level worker at the Maple Leaf packing plant in Brandon. There she saw a "horror show" for slaughtered pigs and poorly paid workers alike.

The twofold product of that experience was a magazine feature and a decision to go vegetarian.

But, despite the support and encouragement of a vegetarian spouse (or "partner," as she prefers to say), she couldn't stick to the vegetarian meal plan. She returned to meat's comforting embrace after five weeks on the vegetable wagon.

The book's opening chapter on the Brandon experience is followed by reports from various locations in North America, including a Newfoundland moose hunting camp and a Texas cattle ranch.

As memoir, Carnivore Chic is only fitfully entertaining and mildly interesting.

The book isn't helped by how its author seems so unlikable at times. She makes a point of mentioning how she took her spouse's $500 hat and her own $200 moisturizer along with her on a trip to a remote Alaska community where she took part in a whale hunt.

In Newfoundland she makes the condescending assessment that a fellow moose hunter looks like a "chainsaw killer" and any discerning woman "would run at the sight of him." How sweet of her to make that judgment of someone she hardly knows at all.

In the end Bourette concludes that she can continue in her carnivorous ways with a clear conscience so long as she shops ethically and doesn't consume gluttonously. Hard to argue with that, unless you're part of the animal-rights crowd.

Before delivering that conclusion, however, she makes a statement that seems more dubious.

"One thing I've discovered," she writes, "is that each successive generation seems to stake out its identity by rejecting the foods their parents held so dear."

Really? Have young Greek Canadians stopped eating moussaka? Have the young folk in Winkler given up on traditional Mennonite dishes? Or isn't it mainly the $200-moisturizer crowd that feels the need "to stake out its identity" in such a way? Just asking.

South of the border, Gold has been operating a Shameless Carnivore website for three years, heaping scorn on the PETA people and extolling the virtues and pleasures of meat dishes.

His book is part memoir of his "Month of Meat" -- 31 animals (from chicken to snail to yak) in 31 days. It's also part cookbook, with recipes from the Month of Meat.

And it's part rebuttal to those who have been trying to shame and scare carnivores into vegetarianism.

That last component is probably the best part of The Shameless Carnivore. He makes convincing arguments for meat as part of a healthy diet, but pleads for moderation. Carnivorous gluttony is unhealthy and "gives all carnivores a bad name," he declares.

Gold's chapter on "the ethics of carnivorism" neatly (and a bit glibly) presents an argument as to why the PETA people are morally off-base in their contention that it's morally wrong to kill animals for meat.

In a nutshell, he says virtually every food decision affects other living creatures. Couldn't the carrots and lettuce on your plate have been food for a starving bunny? And who's to say the carrot plant's life wasn't worth sparing?

He describes the Month of Meat as a celebration of the pleasing range of tasty critters on our planet. "Biodiversity? More like biodiversilicious!" he enthuses.

The Month of Meat furnished him with many comical stories about tracking down hard-to-find meats in New York City (Got guinea pig?), not to mention his struggles in the kitchen.

In the final analysis, the New York evangelist for carnivorism has put out a better book than the travelling Toronto journalist. Gold's book is funny, engaging and informative.

Dig in.