(~3 minutes to read)
One story. Two treatments.
The topic is a news report that a UK supermarket is selling meat in touch-free packaging for squeamish people.
This article is a rant. The humour is sarcastic, some might say sardonic.
The alternative treatment is much sillier, and is based on a mishearing of the headline.
Read both. See which appeals to your nature.
Headline: Supermarket to sell ‘touch-free’ raw meat to cater for squeamish Millennials
Is it true that so many people are now so marshmallowy that they can’t touch raw meat, yet they have no qualms about eating the cooked stuff?
Or is this just yet another ploy for the big companies to extract more money from our wallets?
It doesn’t seem to me that avoiding touching meat is going to avoid the cold harsh reality that you’re preparing animal parts for eating. Apart from anything else, there’s the smell, the way the meat responds to pressure and the way that red stuff leaks out of it.
Yep—that’s blood.
Is it squeamishness, or is it fear of food poisoning that’s motivating people to avoid touching raw meat? Some of the many reports I read on this topic cited the instance of one person who reported that she had sprayed raw chicken pieces with Dettol (an anti-bacterial household cleaner) before cooking them.
Yet common-sense handling and cooking will keep you safe from campylobacter and similar bacteria.
As the household skills that generations of families acquired and passed down have become diluted through misplaced priorities or becoming busier and busier (despite having so many “labour-saving” devices that those same previous generations didn’t have), we’re losing the ability to rationalize our fears about many things, food safety included. Knowledge is power, and the knowledge that common-sense cooking kills campylobacter is the power you need to call BS on those who say that you need that touch-free packaging to keep you safe.
So maybe it really is mostly squeamishness. If you want to pretend you’re not eating animals, try wieners or sausages or ground beef or any of the other sliced and diced and ground-up animal products that abound on the shelves. But then you run the risk of eating the bits of animals you’d least like to think about, let alone chow down on.
First nations people are reputed to have used every single part of the animals they hunted. If Dances with Wolves is a reliable-enough source to cite, the warm liver was cut out of the newly-killed animal and eaten raw. That liver didn’t come wrapped for touch-free consumption, nor was it cooked to a safe temperature. There was no Dettol involved, and the hunting party wasn’t reported as going down with food poisoning.
But back to the news story. If people are squeamish about meat, perhaps they should simply give it up. It’s bad enough that too few of us (me included) have never witnessed the moment when an animal becomes meat. Perhaps that’s something schools should include in the curriculum—visits to an abattoir (or as they’re euphemistically known these days, a meat packer).
Perhaps the grocery stores should go further, and look into ways for people to not have to experience the upsetting spectacle of an egg yolk and clear albumen. After all, the yolk could’ve become a chick (not) and as for the albumen—it’s all slimy and clingy, like thin, diluted silly putty. In fact, it kind of reminds a person of “nose candles”.
Come on people (whoever you are—the story says “millennials” but that’s a sweeping generalization and likely too specific a demographic…) poop or get off the pot. Meat is dead animal. Most of it was reared in captivity, may well have spent time being “finished” in an intensive animal-feeding facility, then slaughtered and butchered.
A brutal choice of words? Maybe, but let’s call a spade a spade. I could have said that they’re relieved of their life spark and divided into convenient portions for distribution or some such BS, but any attempt to hide the fact that we grow, kill, cook and eat animals, and only acknowledge the “eat” part is hypocrisy, pure and simple.
If you’re one of the squeamish sort, why not indulge in some aversion therapy? Visit a meat-packing facility or industrial chicken farm; watch live animals become dead animals that are then “divided into convenient portions for distribution”.
Be horrified. Or not. But if you’re going to eat meat, at least understand where it comes from, and don’t try to avoid the topic with a layer of plastic.