Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Why Cows Hate Me

I'm currently the recipient of a certain amount of gentle teasing from my co-workers revolving around what I like to eat.  Or more specifically, what I don't like to eat.  Apparently a distaste for seafood and wagyu beef are sufficient to classify me as some sort of mentally disturbed freak.  Which is funny when you think about it because there are much better reasons to classify me as some sort of mentally disturbed freak.

All right, I get the seafood thing.  Most people love it and I really don't.  Disliking seafood is a little unusual particularly when it extends to pretty much everything water related including, in all likelihood, seaweed, otters and low flying albatrosses but I refuse to accept there is anything strange in disliking wagyu beef.

Wagyu, I am led to understand (by wikipedia admittedly) is so damned delicious because of the marbling of fat throughout the meat which adds great flavour when cooked properly or something like that.  All well and good but I don't like fatty meat.  I cut the fat off any meat I get my hands on.  As far as I'm concerned you could get the same result as wagyu but cooking a regular steak in a bucket of lard and I wouldn't eat that either.

Then there is the sheer effort put into raising wagyu cattle.  Special diets, massages, loads of care and attention.  I fully approve of efforts to make food as tasty as possible but surely there comes a point when we have to admit its all a bit much for what is ultimately little more than a fifteen minute journey from plate to digestive tract.  Possibly the cows appreciate the extra attention.  It would be nice to think there was some sort of bovine status symbol attached to being a wagyu beef cow.  This may sound a little sad but the average cow's life consists of eating grass and getting killed.  Compared to that the attention lavished on wagyu cattle must seem a little special.  A slave's only source of pride is the price he brings at auction and equally a cow can only measure its worth by the care taken in preparing it for the kill and the price demanded for its meat afterwards.  Then I come along turning up my nose at all these classy cows and demanding the most plebeian of lean beef.  Cows must really hate me.  Sorry cows!

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