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Meat and Right
When this Chap were a Lad …
… or a Tyke (aye, it wor’ a while ago), meat were properly cooked, ’appen. (The reader will no doubt aim off for the accent, at this stage.) Even at the best dining establishments in Great Yarmouth – dwell on that, for a moment – a trace of reddish fluid on the plate was cause to send the dish back for proper cooking.
Leaving home engendered the odd change, in eating as elsewhere, and for the last couple of decades – OK, few decades – it has never occurred to the Chap that meat outside of stew should be cooked other than rare. But equally, it has never occurred to him that the state of one’s meat equated in any way to the state of ones masculinity. (Although the act of eating meat is an old indicator of red-in-tooth-and-claw masculinity.) Other males and genders were perfectly free to make their own choices, right or wrong.
But now, all of a sudden, like, the fact that a public figure chooses to eat meat nursery-style is one of huge public concern. Suddenly stances are taken, positions are held. In some quarters one must, it seems, it seems, adopt the culinary preferences of the Chief Executive or face the wrath of his adepts.
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When this Chap was a youngster, cooking meat thoroughly – that is, brown all through – was a public health issue. Meat could have germs, things a youth should not imbibe, any more than he should do unmanly things with socks. This Chap, by rights of eating such leather-textured protein, should by rights be a Charles Atlas of his kind, a veritable Tyke Fabio. Sadly…
All of which leads us back to our earlier thoughts – that our choices in caramelized or pyrolysed bovine tissue may say much less about us than about those we value – our ‘in-group’ and its vogues, from ‘walk-it-through-a-warm-room’ to ‘fix-shoes-with-leftovers’. Given our President’s pyrolytic choices, and the decline of the EPA, doubtless we may expect the carbonized atmospheric byproducts of such bovine tissue combustion to be polluting the back yards of US suburbs for the near future.