Meat is king — just don’t worry about the details
WE were in meat. And my snort of laughter was heard in dairy. Lyttelton Supervalue isn’t large, but that’s still a carry of several aisles.
When I say we, I don’t mean to imply any bond. I didn’t know the man’s name. He was 50ish, cheerful, and had the curly hair of a standard poodle, though it was thinning in the usual places. But the important thing was he was willing to talk.
Many people aren’t. Auden wrote of ‘‘the ladies and gentlemen too much alone’’. You can see them in any supermarket. They shop in a bubble of selfabsorption, just them and the goods. They have banished from their mind the heaving crowds, the fleets of wire trolleys. They shun communion.
It is partly fear. Strangers may be dangerous. But it is mainly the influence of commerce, which stresses at every turn the supremacy of getting and spending, and the irrelevance of everything else.
So, as I say, we were in meat. It still all starts with meat. Every restaurant meal features a cut of meat, is centred on it, named for it. The accompaniments to the meat are just that, accompaniments, peripheral, the sides. Meat is king, vegetables the courtiers.
We know it ought not to be so. We have been told that meat is naughty. It stills our little hearts. It uses up the land. It does this fragile earth no good at all. The modern saint is vegetarian. Failing that he is insectivorous. But few of us choose to be saints. For meat is as old as our species.
We got to the top by being willing to eat everything. And top of that everything was the beast we had hunted and killed. It was the hardest food to get and the best to eat, the most nourishment for the smallest volume. And in a primitive world meat represented triumph. For though we were be no means the fastest beast or the strongest beast, we were by far the most thoughtful beast. And we used that thoughtfulness to gang up on the fast and the strong and outwit them and kill them and bear them back to the hut with pride in our murderous minds.
That pride still lingers in the supermarket aisle, though we prefer these days to disavow the bloody truth of bone and muscle, skin and gut. We want it sanitised and plasticwrapped and quite unrecognisable. We are what we always were but we’ve got a little queasy about looking in the mirror.
Anyway the man with the poodle hair and I were standing side by side before the shelves of meat, both of us engaged in thoughts of dinner. I glanced at him. He looked both affable and intelligent. ‘‘Give me,’’ I said, ‘‘an idea for dinner.’’
Sometimes when I do this people slither away in alarm. More often, though, at least in Lyttelton, it leads to a recipe or a joke.
The man smiled, which is the best of starts. ‘‘I’m afraid,’’ he said, ‘‘I was leaning towards sausages.’’
‘‘There is no shame in sausages,’’ I said. Though there probably is. For sausages are meat disguised. They have gone such a journey from the meat they started as, that one suspects the meat they started was not the choicest leanest muscle. But then again, perhaps Otto von Bismarck was right. ‘‘It is better for the people not to know,’’ he said, ‘‘how laws or sausages are made.’’
‘‘My favourites,’’ I said, pointing, ‘‘are those breakfast ones there. Though why they should be reserved for breakfast I can’t tell you, and neither would I be willing to vouch for how much honest pork was in them.’’
‘‘When I was a kid near Plimmerton,’’ said the man, ‘‘we sent a ram to the local butcher. Back then every butcher had a killing shed. He took some of the meat as his killing fee. The ram’s name was Te Rauparaha.’’ He looked to see how the story was going down with me. It was going down very well. It had the ring of truth from the first syllable. And by naming the ram it had acquired the veracity of a deathbed confession.
‘‘In addition to the chops and roasts, the butcher asked us if we’d like some sausages made up from what was left of Te Rauparaha. We said we would.
‘‘‘No worries,’ said the butcher. ‘Do you want them beef or pork?’’’
As I’ve said, my laugh reached dairy.