Photograph by Jessica Darmanin
In Paris, the food elite was shocked when Alain Passard, whose restaurant l’Arpège boasts three Michelin stars, scrapped meat from the menu to create a vegetarian oasis. In between waxing poetic about “the freedom of inventing a new universe” of vegetable delights, Passard has argued for the need to “replant the earth.” “The people who are into foodie culture now use the environmental credentials of their food as a source of status,” says Johnston. “That puts low-income shoppers, or even middle-income shoppers, in a difficult position, because they don’t have the economic or cultural capital necessary to participate in high-status eating.”
Such a display of conspicuous conservation apparently needs its own nomenclature. Hence the adoption of labels like “flexitarian,” voted the year’s most useful word in 2003 by the American Dialect Society, which defined it as “a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat.” Dawn Jackson Blatner, a Chicago dietician, first heard the term then. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m finally something. I’m not just a lazy vegetarian. And I don’t have to feel like I’m secretly eating pork chops in a closet.’ ” Since then, Blatner’s 2009 book, The Flexitarian Diet, has earned her celebrity status. She has toured the offices of the “People magazines of the world” as an ambassador of “this minimizing meat movement.”
Cookbook authors Tara Mataraza Desmond and Joy Manning, a reformed vegan—she realized she missed eggs and bacon too much—grabbed attention with Almost Meatless, which offers such not-quite-vegetarian recipes as cod cakes cut with corn. Mark Bittman, a New York Times food writer, is another foodie who has scaled back on meat but hasn’t given it up. Bittman found fame with his cookbook, How to Cook Everything. He has since changed his mind, publishing How to Cook Everything Vegetarian; Bittman himself is vegan until every night at 6 p.m., when he permits his appetite anything it wants.
As with any sort of privation, cutting down on consumption has elevated meat’s status. A more discerning attitude may be transforming the way we consume meat, with the emphasis on quality and connoisseurship rather than quantity and endless choice. Such a reappraisal of animal protein as a complement to the meal rather than its focus has for some turned its role into something more akin to that of wine at dinner. Important, sure, but better savoured than swilled.
That brand of “mindful” meat-eating has made butchers into culinary stars and charcuterie into the new sushi. “What’s emerged alongside flexitarianism is an interest in butchery and nose-to-tail eating,” says Johnston. At his London restaurant, the St. John Bar & Restaurant, Fergus Henderson serves dishes that include generous heapings of offal. Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef famous from TV’s Hell’s Kitchen, has raised his own livestock on his most recent show, The F-Word, slaughtering pigs and turkey for service on the series finales. In Toronto, the model has been taken up by the Black Hoof. “If you’re going to kill the animal, you might as well have enough respect for it to use every part,” says co-owner Jen Agg. Specializing in homemade charcuterie, a rarity in the city, the Hoof keeps its own hogs. “I’m looking forward to the challenge of raising our own pigs and looking them in the eye and understanding that the walk from farm to table is an ugly walk for the pig,” Agg says. That kind of visceral awareness, too, will tend to promote meat moderation—if not exactly the kind Sir Paul is after, then something not far off.
