Peter Meehan has beef with grass-fed beef. In a recent blog post, he argues that all this pretension might be deadening the local food movement.
In three hilarious vignettes, Meehan brings the reader on a mini-tour of the new food scene. For example, a trendy butcher shop that eschews lamb in favor of "hogget" (a word for a sheep that's older than a lamb). Meehan writes that it sounds like a "character from Harry Potter" and "tasted exactly like what has been called 'lamb' for the entirety of my 33 years on the planet."
Meehan defends eating based on convenience from time to time and brings some much needed humor to a food scene that might be taking itself a bit too seriously, potentially at the expense of future eaters:
And I’m left to wonder: Is all this righteousness going in the right direction? Or will the snake eventually eat its own tail? What originally drew me to so many of these better-practice/better-flavor foodstuffs was the joy, the passion behind them. What I’m worried about is that as the food thing gets trendier and trendier, at some point the know-it-alls will scare off the casually interested. Maybe even their fellow foot soldiers. Is that sustainable?
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What do you think? Has the local/sustainable/slow food scene become too self-conscious, too guarded, too affected to be any fun any more? Or is that just the attitude of an elite few?
Image by Flickr (cc) user Neeta Lind
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