ART MEAT

  

Do you eat less meat than you used to? 

I do, or at least I think I do.  

In fact I thought everybody was eating less meat, but apparently not.

 

According to a Times review by Christina Patterson’s of Rob Percival’s The Meat Paradox, the ‘average’ person in the UK ate 78.6 kgs of meat in 2013, but by 2017 it was 84.9 kg.  And apparently we’ve all been eating more meat during Covid.

Given that increasing numbers of people are supposedly vegan or vegetarian I wonder if this means that the people who do eat meat are eating more to compensate.  Or are people simply exaggerating the extent of their veganism and vegetarianism?

 

Incidentally Rob Percival is head of food policy at the Soil Association which not everybody thinks is the most wonderful institution; see Jonathan Meades passim - “It is difficult for instance to imagine that such titans of contemporary thought as Prince Charles and Mr Sting will be dissuaded of their support for the Soil Association because its founder, Jorion Jenks, was a member of the English Mistery and British Union of Fascists …”

 

Meat was on my mind as I went to the Damien Hirst exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Britannia Street, London.  There on view were various meaty (and occasionally fishy) exhibits of cows, sheep, a pig, sausages, and of course a shark, some of which I’d seen before. 

But I hadn’t previously seen a sort of replica butcher’s shop with the phrase ‘Shut Up & Eat Your Fucking Dinner’ painted in cursive script its front wall.  This is from 1997.

 

And in this faux butcher’s shop window were what looked like faux pieces of meat that might have been made out of plaster or even wax, though since the press release insists these are ‘formaldehyde sculptures’ I guess it’s actual preserved meat.

 

I’m never sure to what extent Hirst is trying to freak out the straights and the squeamish with his dead critters.  My own feeling is that if you’re prepared to eat meat you should be prepared to look at it in the butcher’s window or even the abattoir.  Of course if you’re not prepared to eat meat you might think using dead animals in art is bad and wrong.

 

The visit to the Gagosian was in anticipation of dinner at Fergus Henderson’s St John restaurant the home of nose to tail eating, which certainly used to a be place where you might spot the occasional Young British Artist.

 

I always say that St John is my favorite restaurant in the whole world and sometimes, when I haven’t been there for a while, I fear that I’m over-rating the place.  And then I go there and all is well and I realize I was right all along.  It’s good to feel right.

 

Pic from the St John website

The room isn’t the loveliest in the world and yet the ambience is terrific – and not a bad place for people watching. I’ve always found the service excellent though some Tripadvisor reviewers would beg to differ.

 

But of course it’s the food that counts – it was impossible to resist the old classic of marrow bones with parsley and caper salad, 

Photo: Caroline Gannon

And this was the special.  When you see deep fried tripe on a menu you have to order it.  It was fabulous and meaty and chewy.  Damien would have loved it, I imagine.

Photo: Caroline Gannon

There were other delights too – sliced lamb with lentils, and roast Middle White.  And sure it’s a menu to scare off the vegan: pigeon, potted pork, devilled kidneys - but fish eaters are well looked after.

 

I also – and why oh why hadn’t I done this before – I ordered one of their martinis.  It was exactly as a martini should be, only more so.

Photo: Caroline Gannon

 

DAMIEN'S DAMIENS

Someone, I think it may have been Terence Conran, once said, ‘Everybody wants to write a novel, and everybody wants to open a restaurant.’

I, of course, am guilty of the first of these, but I’ve never, ever wanted to open a restaurant, and it strikes me that the non-professionals who do it must be more or less insane.  Which brings me to Damien Hirst.

There’s a lively interview with him in the current Idler.  Much of it is actually agonized boasting – he lost so much money because he HAD so much money to lose, and he has indeed opened a restaurant or two.

Hirst says, ‘I remember there was a restaurant of mine that was losing £20,000 a month and I went there and looked at the people eating dinner and I thought: “You c***s.  I’m paying for your food.”  Possibly this is how many restaurant owners feel.

I imagine, though I’m not sure, that Hirst is talking about Pharmacy, the restaurant he opened in Notting Hill in the late 1990s.  I walked past it once in a while when it was open, and I used to think it looked like an interesting place, and it was full of Hirst's art, but it never occurred to me that I would actually want to go there to eat, and I didn’t.  Obviously some others did, but maybe not enough of them, or maybe there were other problems with the business plan.

Digging, around I find that when Pharmacy opened, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society threatened legal action under the 1868 Medicines Act, on the grounds that people might confuse the restaurant with an actual pharmacy.  This sounds pretty bogus to me – I’d guess they just wanted attention - but naming restaurants is a tricky business.

How many people have wandered into the Oxo Tower Restaurant hoping to buy a few Oxo cubes?  How many people have mistaken the Ivy for a garden centre?  How many had their hopes dashed when they went to the Gay Hussar and failed to find gay hussars?

I did, however, once eat at Elaine’s in Manhattan, and was amazed to find Elaine was actually there.

THE CEPHALOPOD AND I

 My mention and picture of the squid a couple of posts back (as seen above) caused a certain amount of idle chat among the literati and fooderati, and indeed on my Facebook page. The thing I ate was actually listed on the menu as “huge squid” – an imprecise term to be sure, but even so it did evoke something a bit more kraken-like. 

Laura Miller offered the information that “The giant squid, or any deep-water-dwelling squid, would not be especially edible because of the high ammonia content in the flesh which allows them to survive at depths where the water pressure is very high.” And she then winsomely added, “This has been your daily pedantry interlude, over and out.”        

Jonathan Gold joined in and said, “I've had relatively giant squid - crudo cut from arcturus, about 45 pounds. It was actually tender and delicious. Not deep sea enough?”

               By then Laura had recalled an article in the New York Times from January 2013 about giant squid which asked, “Would you eat the giant squid if you could?" And then actually quoted Jonathan from that article, "I have had something like giant squid -- flash-grilled arcturus tentacle at Esca in Manhattan. But I draw the line at endangered or threatened species. There are a lot of other things in the world to eat.... The arcturus was delicious, by the way."

            




Mea   Meanwhile Tammy Fraser thought the picture of my squid was reminiscent of the sliced horse in the movie The Cell, which in turn was based on Damien Hirst’s various sliced-animals-as-art.  

         And I began to wonder whether all flesh should be served that way, sliced but then partially reassembled to reveal its initial form.  Didn't seem such a terrible idea, but then I encountered a real octopus.

I’ve cooked an octopus or two in my time, admittedly not a vast number, but when I found them on sale locally I snagged a couple.  Now, I know there’s a lot of malarkey about how you shouldn’t eat octopuses because they’re so smart, and of course I’ve seen the film of an octopus opening a jar.  But aren’t pigs even smarter?    I do see the issue here – I’m not a monster - and I can understand the argument that says you shouldn’t eat any living creature whatsoever.  But trying to base the morality of meat eating on the intelligence of the thing being eaten, just seems to be asking for trouble.  

There also seems to be a fair bit of malarkey talked about tenderizing octopus. I’ve certainly seen Greek fishermen slamming them on harborside rocks to tenderize them but I’ve always felt that was just displacement activity: these guys hate their job, hate their lives, hate the sea, so they take it out on a some octopus they’ve just stabbed with a spear. 

Anyway the current thinking is that the process of freezing is enough to do the tenderizing and it seemed to be the case with mine.  I dug out a recipe that said stew it in flavored stock for fifty minutes or so and it would be fine – and it was. But this rather alarming thing happened in the course of that cooking.  Whereas  pre-cooking it had looked like a plate of fish (in the picture two above), something amorphous and without personality: once cooked it looked much more like an actually “living” creature.  That head really disturbed me. 

The only thing to do was chop it up, sauté it and serve it with a kind of risotto.  The head remained uneaten however.    Like I said, I’m not a monster.