Product Description

The amusingly enlightening adventure of a woman hunting for the truth about meat— and why it’s still good enough to eat.

After spending a week working undercover at a slaughterhouse and being tormented by blood, the stink, and the squeals of animals being herded to their death, author Susan Bourette decided to go vegetarian. She lasted five weeks and thirty-seven hours.

Dissatisfied with tofu and lentils, Bourette wondered, Isn’t there a way to have my meat and a clear conscience too? It’s a question that will resonate with millions of happily carnivorous Americans—we eat more meat per capita than any other nation—who are unwilling to give up steak for soy but are alarmed about mad cow disease, E.coli poisoning, and the filthy, inhumane conditions on chicken and cattle farms.

On a quest for superior meat, Susan Bourette takes readers behind the bucolic facade of the famous Blue Hill farm, north of New York City; on a long, hot cattle drive at a Texas ranch; a whale hunt with the Inuit in Canada; a Canadian moose hunt; and behind the counter in a Greenwich Village butcher shop. Humorous yet authoritative, Meat: A Love Story celebrates the deliciousness of meat and the lives of the passionate professionals who hunt, raise, or cook it. With a deft touch, Bourette explores what it means to be a compassionate carnivore.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #836817 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Meat is the new black, declares Toronto-based journalist Bourette at the onset. She became a vegetarian after having once worked four days at a meatpacking plant for less than $10 an hour before disclosing herself as a reporter. Vegetarianism lasted less than six weeks before she resolved to find meat she felt good about eating. Her quest comprises the narrative's bulk and takes her from an old-fashioned Greenwich Village meat-shop butchering tutorial to the Inupiat whale blubber harvest. In Alaska, Bourette fathoms the relationship between meat and its provenance, and teases that out in subsequent chapters describing such topics as the workings of a Texas cattle ranch and moose-hunting season in Newfoundland. Throughout, she covers the broader subject of meat, including the history of American beef and its subcultures and controversies such as the impact of agribusiness and climate change on ranchers. The narrative moves swiftly and broadly at the gain of historical and cultural perspective but at the expense of well-thought-out conclusions and scene development so that the actual experience of eating meat often gets the shortest shrift. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Canadian journalist Bourette goes briefly undercover in a pork-processing facility where she learns more than she wants to about how an industrial pig slaughterhouse really does function and what it takes to get her mom’s pork roast from farm to table. To further her understanding of people’s relationship to meat eating, Bourette travels to an Inupiat settlement in Canada’s Arctic region to witness whale hunting. Her affection for the hardy people she encounters doesn’t overcome her aversion to blubber, which she finds completely indigestible. Bourette explores an environmentally aware ranch that prides itself on organic and humane cattle raising. At Newfoundland’s Tuckamore Lodge, she encounters a surprisingly socially diverse group of dedicated hunters who hunt both for sport and for sustenance. At the periphery of the carnivorous spectrum, she meets up with advocates of the “Primal Diet,” who find raw meat just the ticket. --Mark Knoblauch

Review
“A cross between Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.”
—Library Journal

Customer Reviews

A good first step in having one's meat and being proud of it too...
I have dear friends (in Kansas City, of all places...home of great steaks) who have been vegetarians for 30 years, partly due to the horrors of how our society turns animals into table fare. Susan, the author of this unusual memoir, served a week in a pork plant (I have another friend who works in one of those, but who still eats meat) and became a vegetarian for a month, but couldn't make it stick. I did vegetarian during a five-day visit to my KC friends, but before I even got to my home from the airport I was eating a burger. So I identified with Susan...a lot. This book tries to describe two things: why most humans crave and indulge in meat, despite health risks, and how we might keep it on our menus and yet not enrich the corporations who treat livestock and fowl inhumanely. The answer is obvious: eat meat less often, but indulge in higher quality when we do, purchasing our entrees from those who raise the animals on a small scale, in pastures, and who feed them without filling them full of fattening chemicals. A fuller explanation of how this can be done by those of us not living in large cities or on large budgets must wait until someone writes a sequel to "Meat...a love story" but Susan's work is the necessary background to that effort. If you want to continue eating beef, pork and chicken dishes, but desire to feel less guilty about it, this is the book for you.

Mouth-watering but thought-provoking
I enjoyed this immensely. Like the author, I tried a vegetarian diet as an act of conscience several times but I have to admit I never felt worse ... even when I tried to follow the guidelines. Bourette's Meat puts meat-eating in North America in a cultural and historical context. It's not a screed against meat-eating though it's critical of the corporate meat industry. (The author's experiences working in a meat plant might have you skipping pork loins for some time.) Bourette's Meat: A Love Story is a call out to meat-eaters--a challenge not to give up meat but rather to eat better meats, to understand and value the origins of the meat on their tables. Bourette goes from cattle ranch and the Rockefellers' organic farm to the shop of a Manhattan celeb-butcher and a trendy butchering class. The raw-meat-eating cult has to be read to be believed--in Aspen of all places. The author went to end of the earth--on an ice floe for a whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska is just about the end of the earth--to find out why we eat meat, what meat means to us, and how we should eat it. It's pretty filling. It will stick to your ribs and stick in your mind long after you read it.

Seeing is Believing
I raise grass fed beef cattle along with pastured chickens and hogs to supply my family and a network of friends with meat and eggs so nothing in this book surprised me. Five years ago when I lived in the suburbs I ate my share of McD's BK and packaged meat from the supermarket. The difference between the meat I eat now and the stuff I used to put into my system are like day and night. I've seen my family become healthier, more energetic and become skeptical of any meat they do not personally "know" while it is still on the hoof.