AR-News: (CA) The Non-Carnivorous Chef

[www.APRL.org]

San Francisco Chronicle

CUISINE
The Non-Carnivorous Chef
If we won't eat it, why cook it for others?

Kim Severson
  Sunday, February 8, 2004

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Marion Cunningham, who is 82, has all but quit eating meat.

She's the woman who rewrote the "Fannie Farmer Cookbook," which tells
readers how to carve a rib roast or saute thin little slices of veal. Her
latest book, "Lost Recipes," features timbales molded from minced ham and
shepherd's pie packed with three cups of roughly chopped lamb.

The author, however, just can't stomach eating flesh any more. It came to
her over the course of several dinners with 87-year-old Williams Sonoma
founder Chuck Williams, a dear friend.

"We'd eat together and not order meat, neither one of us. But we never
talked about it," she said. "Some months back now, I finally said, 'Don't
you find it hard to eat meat much anymore?' He absolutely agreed with me.
It's just not appealing."

For Cunningham, it had a lot to do with the pigeons she feeds every
morning. "Once in a while I would allow myself to think about what I was
eating when I ate meat. One day I thought, 'Why am I eating the thing I'm
trying to save?' "

In the course of every thinking cook's life, the question of meat comes
up. The mound of chopped beef on the cutting board, the chicken leg about
to be braised - all of it came from a creature that was breathing and
very
likely feeling before it was slaughtered, skinned and sawed into hunks
called meat.

It's difficult for most of us to dismiss the hunter part of our
hunting-gathering history. Meat still tastes delicious. Even Mill Valley
chef Roxanne Klein, who made her name as the most elevated practitioner
of
raw, vegan cooking, has to fight the seduction of meat smoke that wafts
from the grills at the Marin farmers' market.

Despite a recent focus on vegetarianism and its strict sister, veganism,
only about 5 percent of the population are vegetarians, according to two
2001 studies. American cooks see beef as a birthright, figuring if God
didn't want animals to be eaten, they wouldn't be made out of meat. They
grill big slabs of aged beef and grind sausages from pork, going purely
for flavor without a thought about where the meat came from.

Other chefs celebrate flesh - even making it a career. How far would pop
chef icon Emeril Lagasse get without his tagline, "pork fat rules"? And
what of Al Roker's "Big Bad Book of Barbecue"?

A small but growing cadre of cooks cares very much where meat comes from,
making a point of sourcing beef or pigs or chickens from ranches and
farms
that treat the animals well, give them plenty of room and feed them
organic feed or at least pull the throttle back on antibiotics or
hormones. Traci Des Jardins is one of those chefs. She oversees the
French-inspired Jardiniere in San Francisco, as well as the Acme
Chophouse
at the base of the Giants ballpark, which serves beef that is slaughtered
humanely - a phrase political vegetarians will say is an oxymoron.

For Des Jardins, the process of killing animals does not bother her per
se, but she often thinks that if she had to personally kill the animals
she cooks, she would stop eating meat. On the other side are chefs such
as
the brooding salumi master Paul Bertolli of Oliveto in Oakland. He
believes he has a moral obligation to slaughter the animals he cooks and
to use every part. Although he has slaughtered pigs, he usually buys his
already killed from farmers in Iowa.

Des Jardins recently decided not to serve her signature foie gras at her
flagship restaurant. The French dish is made from the livers of ducks who
have been force-fed grain with a pneumatic tube slipped down their
throats. To animal rights activists, it's the weak link in the nation's
collective denial of how meat is produced.

Another San Francisco chef, Aqua's Laurent Manrique, spent much of the
summer and fall battling some of those activists. They picketed Aqua and
tried to stop him from opening a foie gras and duck burger restaurant in
Sonoma. At one point, in a case still under investigation by the FBI,
they
used acid foam to etch messages on car windows that read "foie gras is
animal torture" and "murderer." They even painted red parts of a sacred
Buddha statue in Manrique's Mill Valley backyard.

Manrique is a practicing Buddhist who organizes elaborate dinners to
benefit the Tibetan Aid Project. Plenty of Buddhists are vegetarian, in
keeping with the religion's principle of not harming human or animals.
But
the diet is selective. Some monks might practice, others may not. Many
practitioners in Tibet are not vegetarian. Neither is Manrique.

"The Dalai Lama eats meat," he says by way of explanation.

For some chefs, cooking flesh can become repugnant. That's what happened
to Alex Bury, who took her training at the Culinary Institute of America
and spent time in Paris with Alice Waters.

Bury runs a vegan restaurant called Sparks in Guerneville, and caters
vegan weddings. She is the executive chef for PETA, People for the
Ethical
Treatment of Animals. She is such an activist that the FBI had her and
her
restaurant under surveillance late last year.

PETA has a hard-core vegan stand, meaning its supporters generally think
no animal products should be consumed. Until a recent political makeover
that has shoved it to a more moderate political position, PETA for some
time was considered home base for violent activists in the pursuit of
animal welfare.

Bury has attended the opera in Anchorage, her hometown, wearing a fur
coat
covered with fake blood and animal traps. One winter, she and three
friends ran through sub-zero Anchorage streets naked for carrying a sign
that said, "We'd rather go naked than wear fur."

It wasn't always that way. Some years ago, Bury was in Paris babysitting
Waters' daughter, Fanny. She had already been thinking she didn't want to
eat meat. The feeling began as a child when she was out
trick-or-treating.
She saw a skinned cat someone had tossed on a porch as a cruel joke.

"Without the fur on, it didn't look cute anymore," she said. "Overnight,
I
didn't want to eat meat."

She was on and off meat as she grew up, her parents supporting her meals
of mashed potatoes and broccoli but worrying about her health.

But she was so in love with cooking that she couldn't see how she could
not pursue her career without, as she says, cooking flesh.

"I didn't have the courage to stand up and be vegetarian against the chef
world. I wanted to be an amazing professional chef. I was dazzled by the
celebrity chefs."

Bury ended up in Paris, learning how to cook, "and I ate every damn
animal
imaginable." That included blood sausage she ordered during a dinner with
Waters. "I was trying to impress her. There's this chef thing: The
weirder
thing you ate, the cooler chef you were. Oh, it was gross."

She went back to culinary school and picked up a PETA pamphlet. A few
months later, she went to an animal rights conference and watched a video
of a slaughterhouse.

Soon working at an upscale restaurant in Anchorage, she was a vegan who
cooked meat. Then she became a private chef who cooked meat every night.
Finally, she gave in.

"I decided I no longer wanted to be the kind of wimp who doesn't do
something or say something. That's really why I went vegan. So I wasn't
part of the problem, so I didn't have to feel ashamed anymore, because I
wanted to be a stronger woman."

Her increasing political involvement added stress to her marriage to
another chef, which has since ended.

"The clincher was I didn't want to come home and have a dead chicken in
the refrigerator anymore. He could watch the videos and go eat ribs. I
couldn't."

The heart, perhaps more than the pan, is the place where decisions about
meat sit for chefs. It's a battle in the gut between flavor and politics,
between culture and conscience.

For Marion Cunningham, who has spent most of her 82 years enjoying and
promoting wonderful dishes based on meat, the heart won.

"It doesn't come out until you think, 'I'm going die soon.' It's innate,
this rejection feeling that comes."



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THE NUMBERS
Percentage of Americans reducing meat consumption: 46 percent, Vegetarian
Times.

Percentage of Americans claiming to be vegetarian: 5 percent, National
Diet and Nutrition Survey, 2001.

Percentage that went vegetarian for moral or ethical reasons: 51 percent,
same source.

Percentage of vegans who made that decision before they turned 25: 69
percent, the report "Discovering 21st Century Vegans" by Imaner
Consultants.

Number of pure vegetarians who can be fed on the amount of land needed to
feed 1 person consuming meat-based diet: 20, "Diet for a New America" by
John Robbins.

Year the word "vegetarian" was coined: 1847, formally used in Kent,
England, at the inaugural meeting of the Vegetarian Society of the United
Kingdom, International Vegetarian Union.

Year the Vegetarian Society of the District of Columbia, the first in the
United States, was founded: 1927, same source.

-K.S.







"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but
because of those who look on and do nothing."
Albert Einstein


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