Meat & Potatoes

For almost as long as I can remember my mother’s early morning question has been “what shall I make for supper?”  We usually had meat and potatoes for supper as that is what she was raised on (no rice or spaghetti in her world).  Ground beef, pork chops, chicken, fish sticks were the staples.  Roast on Sunday.  Golash on occasion.  Steak rarely because it was both expensive and we kids didn’t like it.  I still don’t care for steak.

       But now my mother is in a dilemma because she has been watching programs about how creatures are raised up which exposes the extreme cruelty of the poor chickens and pigs.  She hasn’t been able to eat chicken for several years and it is borderline for the pork.  Chatting over dinner the other night I asked her whether people in Denmark typically had meat every night.

       “We did.  Or fish. We had a lot of fish.”

       “But what about your neighbours, did they have meat all the time?”

       “We had two courses every night, my father insisted on it.”

       “But about the meat . . .”  I brought her back to the main point as I attempted to tell her that if people are to have meat every day then they do have to do efficient farming although I am naturally neither of the opinion that it needs to be such intense farming nor is it necessary for people to have meat every day.

     So what did you have for dinner.

       We agreed we could understand how people are moving towards vegetarianism since the idea of consuming the poor animals can be quite disturbing.  But more seriously, it is a concern to wonder what exactly you are consuming along with the meat (or other food products for that matter).