I spatchcocked a chicken today! I bet not many people can claim the same thing…
And it was very tasty! Recently I’ve started to eat meat obtained only from animals that were humanely treated and not fed hormones and antibiotics. I initially made the switch mostly for ethical reasons (I read an article that I probably shouldn’t have read … but that’s not something I’m going to get on a soapbox about here) but was completely surprised to find that the taste and quality were much better than what I was used to getting from my local Target or Jewel.
I’ve been getting my meat from two different sources: Whole Foods (because they rate their meat based on how the animals were treated) and from Wallace Farms (thanks for the recommendation, Janet!), which is a family farm located in Iowa that has a distribution centers here in Illinois. And yes, it kind of sucks having to make specials trips just to do my meat shopping, but we all have our #firstworldproblem burdens to bear.
Honestly, I never thought I’d taste a difference — my palate isn’t all that discriminating and I’m not drawn to high-brow food or anything like that. I gotta figure that if I consider Kraft American singles to be pretty tasty cheese, then it’s not like I can claim to only want the finer foods in life. But – surprisingly – there is quite a difference. I suspect that if you catch your local supermarket just at the right time with the right cut of meat, it could be as good, but I haven’t had anything from Whole Foods or Wallace Farms that I even thought was just average, much less subpar. And that’s certainly happened more than once with supermarket meat.
Is it worth all the extra money? Maybe. Maybe not? I suppose it depends on your budget and beliefs and the availability of choice in your neighborhood and even whether it’s something that you think tastes better than the supermarket alternative. For me, I’m convinced that this is something I want to add into my lifestyle. It means that I don’t buy as much meat, but what I do have, I thoroughly enjoy. And one bonus for me — because of the cost, I will *never* let it go bad and not use it. I’m notorious for buying food and letting it go bad sitting in the fridge, sadly waiting for me to do something with it, but when I’m paying sometimes as much as double the cost for a cut of meat, you can bet that I’ll be going all Julia Childs on it.
So, what started out as me getting on a moral high horse, ended with me simply opting to pay more for something that I think tastes better, morals be damned. It’s a happy coincidence that both my morals and my taste buds like the same thing.
