If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past several years, you’ve probably noticed that pork has made an insanely big comeback. You’re at a friend’s dinner party- they start with bacon wrapped scallops. You’re at your cousin’s wedding- they offer a pork tenderloin as a main course. You’re on your 2nd date- date suggests you share a pork soup dumpling starter. Pigs, apparently, are the most popular animal to kill and cook these days. It seems as though the food scene has become one big luau and we’re all here to shove the pig into the ground, cover it with hot rocks, and then rip it to shreds just before ingesting it.
You know what this means, right? That pork, in general, has become an over-saturated food item. It’s not “cool” anymore. Maybe a few years ago when it was so uncool that you could hardly find pork lard around it made sense to add it to the menus of up and coming restaurants… but now? Now it’s as overdone as a cheap Ed Hardy replica shirt found on the smelly streets of pork-loving Chinatown, NYC. I don’t want to eat pork. In fact, I never did. I’d venture to say that about 1/3 of the Earth agrees with me. With more than 1.5 billion pork-shunning Muslims, nearly a billion vegetarian Hindus, and an fair amount of vegetarians-for-the-sake-of-vegetarianism out there, it’s hard to imagine why the hell pork made it’s way to mainstream Food Network just about 24/7. And, as one of the 13.2 million Jews of the world (I know, we pale in comparison), I’m proud to abstain from the food that’s gotten so much attention just for having a high fat content. After all, it’s all that fat that’s made pork a flavor star.
So while the rest of America and Europe chows down on swine, I’ll be finding alternative flavor sources like duck, lamb, and goat. Why? Because animals like goat are the underdog of the culinary scene. They’re easy to raise, relatively “green” (meaning they don’t contribute as much harmful methane gas to the atmosphere as cattle do), tasty, and look freaking delicious hoisted over a fire. Oh, and because I don’t jump on bandwagons. I’ll let the “cool kids” wrap everything they want in bacon while I sit back and avoid obesity, sodium-related high blood pressure, and looking like the douche in an Ed Hardy t-shirt.
