Early in January, I went on a road trip down to Portland, Oregon, one of my favourite places to visit in the ol’ U.S. of A. While en route, we stopped in Seattle for a day. I find Seattle to be pretty similar to my ‘hood, its sister city, Vancouver BC. They share the same dreary skies, unfair amount of precipitation, and love for an overpriced cup of joe. They also share an exciting food scene, with more and more residents feeling hungry for good, locally-sourced food.
We hit up the Pike Place Market for breakfast and while maneuvering through the busyness of the hungry morning crowd, we found a little sandwich joint called Sisters European Snacks, tucked away in Post Alley. They offer an assortment of amazing grilled focaccia sandwiches stuffed with hearty deliciousness like avocados, eggplants, cheese, and eggs. I had the aptly named “Eggspensive” sandwich, an arrangement of avocado, alfalfa sprouts, provolone cheese, and a fried egg, all sandwiched in between two slices of grilled focaccia bread. Best sandwich ever. EVER!
Sisters European Snacks - Photo by Geoff Peters
This sandwich was permanently filed in my brain - under awesome. When I got home, knowing I could never justify driving to Seattle for a sandwich run during my lunch break, I decided to make my own variant of the “Eggspensive”.
Americans tend to get more of the heat when it comes to discussions about porkiness, over-consumption, and environmental destruction. But we increasingly plumpy Canadians are quickly catching up to the laissez-faire, “bigger is better” attitude of neighbours down south. Take for example, the once booming salmon industry off the coast British Columbia, now facing the lowest [...]
Yes, it’s a tired cliche – men prefer meat. It’s the why that’s debatable. This is confirmed by the observations of Roz Zurko in her “Top 10 Favorite Meals of the American Man”. Here are her top picks for meaty man-approved meals (with recipes from AllRecipes.com):
For many men, the thought of a meatless meal often invokes the reaction of, as my meat-tatarian friend John best put it, “What the f*ck?!” after he bit into a seed burger at a local vegetarian dive that I coerced him into trying out. At its core, eating green is not necessarily about adopting a primarily plant-based diet, rather, it’s about being curious about where your food comes from and respecting the people, plants, and animals that make the grub on our plate possible. Contrary to what your neighbourhood militant vegetarian may say, eating meat can still be green, or at the very minimum, be green-er and better for you with a few modifications.
“Tasty Salted Pig Parts” aren’t the first things that come to mind when I think about sustainable eating. Chris Cosentino, founder, owner, and chef of San Francisco based Boccalone, would have me believing otherwise. Cosentino embraces what would best be summarized as a “whole animal” approach to consuming foods of the fleshy variety. He is a staunch advocate of cooking with offal – all the parts of pigs, cows, sheep, and chickens that usually don’t make it into the bellies of the general population. That is, the blood, guts, organs, skin, and bones of the animals we eat. Think outside the cello-wrapped packages plastered with bright stickers at the supermarket.
Why? Well, according to him, it’s tasty and nutritious, especially organs like the kidneys (he has a site for those interested in learning about and cooking with offal). And while Cosentino’s creations are often touted as innovative (Calf’s brain with porcini and capers, anyone?), he reminds us that cooking and eating with the whole animal in mind has been, and still is, the practice of home cooks and chefs the world over.
While in college, like many of my colleagues, I experimented with food (among other things). After paying my tuition, buying my books, and paying my rent, I had just enough to afford me the standard starving student food budget. Meat is generally expensive, especially the sustainably sourced variety, but so are a lot of packaged meat-alternatives like Tofurky. After years of on and off pseudo-vegetarianism, I decided it was an opportunity to go on a primarily plant-based diet, but this time I was going to follow five simple guidelines:
1) Don’t be a bitch about meat.
I wouldn’t buy it at the grocers, but should an animal product just happen to be in something that I bought, I’d still eat it. Eating the chicken powder in my seemingly vegetarian dumplings (they were suspiciously cheap…) is better than licking my toes in starvation.
2) Buy local, buy seasonal.
By my ghetto student pad, there were three major grocery chains that ranged in price and quality. My room mate and I shopped at the cheapest one of course, locally known as the Fairway. Although Fairway didn’t have the abundance of products that Safeway or the higher end Thrifty Foods offered, their fruits and vegetables were usually the cheapest because they sourced from local farms and mostly offered in season produce. We ate a lot of apples and carrots.
To see what’s in season now, check out the BC Association of Farmer’s Markets website. Farmer’s markets are a great place to get seasonal, local produce. Unfortunately, if you’re on a tight budget and have a big appetite, it can kick your wallet in the balls.
Men love food. Not only do we generally eat more of it than our female counterparts, food (especially meat) plays a significant role in how we produce our identities as men and how we relate to each other. As poignantly stated by one of the chefs, er, manly food cookers, in Man Cooking: Swiss Meat Roll, “Little known fact, weaving is manly, as long as you’re weaving with BACON!” Meat, cooking (particularly with fire, not an induction stove top), and our ideas about manliness are inextricably linked to one another in the defining of the masculine.
The average male body requires more protein than a female one simply by virtue of body size, we’re generally bigger, unless you’re a giant Dutch woman… But how much do our bodies actually need? According to Gloria Tsang, RD for HealthCastle.com:
The average requirement is calculated based on 0.8 grams of protein per kg of body weight. Therefore, a 165 pound (75 kg) man would need 60 grams of protein daily. In general, both healthy men and women (regardless of body size) will do fine with 60 grams of protein a day. That is equivalent to eight ounces of meat.
I’m about 170 pounds or 77 kg, so according to this calculation, my daily protein needs average to about 61 grams a day. 8 ounces of meat? That’s about the size of a deck of cards! If you’re the average guy like me, you eat far more than a deck of cards worth of meat a day, chances are you’ve eaten a Caesar’s Palace worth in one sitting. The average Canadian eats about 62.61 kg (132 lbs) of meat (inclusive of red, seafood, and poultry) a year. 132 lbs!? That’s a f*cking person worth of flesh! Nonetheless, that averages out to about 172 grams a day, nearly three times the necessary intake for the general man population without counting non-meat sources of protein. Yet despite the fact that the average man (read: not an elite athlete, ‘roid monkey, or Chuck Norris) doesn’t need any more protein for nutrition’s sake, according to Food Ethics Council, the worldwide consumption of meat is expected to be double the 229 million tonnes we consumed in 2000 by 2050, especially in heavily populated and increasingly wealthy countries like China where the population already consumes nearly 50% of the world’s supply of pork. And you thought you liked bacon…
Men are creative folks. Since time in memorial, we’ve used whatever nature has provided us to survive and thrive in this crazy world. Take for example, the case of George Vera:
A morbidly obese inmate at a Texan prison was discovered to be concealing a 9mm handgun in his rolls of flab.
36 stone [504 lb] criminal George Vera was arrested this week for selling illegal bootlegged CDs and taken to a correctional facility. Despite being searched by police officers three times, he still managed to smuggle the unloaded weapon into the facility by hiding it under his flabby bitch tits.
Police spokesman Victor Senties told The Houston Chronicle that Vera was searched when he was initially arrested, again more thoroughly when he arrived at the city jail and one more time when he was transferred to the county lock up. On all three occasions the searching officers failed to notice the firearm lodged in Vera’s folds of skin.
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“Tasty Salted Pig Parts” aren’t the first things that come to mind when I think about sustainable eating. 
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