Conscious Choice Seattle: Take It or Cleave It

Photo by Richard A. Huston

Meatless, not tasteless

“Some of the best cuisine on the planet is meat-free.”

So says David Foecke, co-owner of Madison Valley’s all-vegetarian gourmet restaurant Café Flora.

“We want to demonstrate that those who are moving away from a meat-based diet are actually moving toward a more delicious and joyful cuisine,” he explains.

Foecke himself hasn’t eaten meat for more than 20 years. The environmental impact of meat production was a primary factor in his making that decision.

Judging other people for their dietary choices, however, isn’t on Foecke’s agenda.
Café Flora isn’t about lecturing or even converting its diners; the restaurant, as Foecke explains, strives to showcase gourmet vegetarian cuisine.

“We want to show our guests what they may have been missing,” he says. “Whatever their position on other facets of the issue, a choice to reduce meat consumption can be the most alluring choice.”

In Foecke’s experience, most of Café Flora’s guests actually do consume meat or fish in their diets, at least occasionally. Yet, he says, “they are just as delighted with their meals as our vegetarian guests, and sometimes are not even aware that Café Flora doesn’t serve meat.”

—Silja J.A. Talvi

Café Flora is at 2901 E. Madison Street Seattle, WA 98112. Phone: 206-325-9100

May 2005 | Cover Story

Take It or Cleave It

Knowing what we know about meat and slaughterhouse conditions, is it possible to be an ethical meat eater? Our answer will surprise you—and certainly make you rethink. It’s all in the knowing

By Silja J.A. Talvi

First published in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” exposed readers to the ugly reality of the nation’s meatpacking industry. As Sinclair revealed, urban meatpacking plants had become little more than horrifically cruel environments for animal and human alike. Animals were being torn and sliced apart while still conscious, while the men on the fast-paced killing line were losing fingers, limbs and lives to the process.

The meat itself, mixed with rodents and animal feces (and even human body parts from the injured laborers), was a jarring thing for Sinclair’s readers to contemplate. The reaction was swift: Governmental regulations that cleaned up the quality and contents of meat were quickly put into effect.

Sinclair later wrote that he had intended for the book to impact people’s hearts, but felt as though it only impacted their stomachs. In his time, the idea of certified organic meat was still decades away from coming into consideration, much less into the marketplace.
Outside of what Jews and Muslims believed in and practiced (the more strict rules of kosher and halal animal slaughter), the idea of “compassionate” killing was an unfamiliar concept. The ensuing decades of corporate growth and dominance over the meat industry haven’t done much more to support that idea, either.

These days, the demand for meat has resulted in an overabundance of factory farming (and fishing), squeezing small ranchers out of business and threatening the world’s wild fish populations. Lower-grade supermarket meat is most often of unknown origins, and most certainly laden with antibiotics, chemicals and hormones.

As books like Howard Lyman’s “Mad Cowboy,” Gail Eisnitz’s “Slaughterhouse” and even onetime George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully’s “Dominion” have demonstrated, the day-to-day conditions for animals and slaughterhouse laborers are real-life (and death) horror shows.

Throughout, Americans’ obsession with fast food—as brilliantly documented by Eric Schlosser’s best-selling “Fast Food Nation”—has made people fatter and sicker all the way around.

“It is impossible to be humane, to really care about the long-term health of your body and still eat meat and dairy,” says Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). “We are not natural carnivores ... and we should respect our fellow animals, not steal from them, torture and kill them.”

As a result of the media-savvy activism of groups like PETA, both the animal-rights and vegetarian movements have gained tremendous ground in the past decade, to the point of spawning several high-profile celebrity media campaigns advocating an anti-meat, anti-animal-experimentation and anti-fur platform.

Today, more Americans are self-declared vegetarians or vegans than ever before, many of whom have found a comfortable home in the Puget Sound area. Owing to the region’s progressive political bent and a preponderance of vegetarian restaurants and natural food stores, Seattle is only surpassed only by San Francisco as the most “vegetarian-friendly” spot in the nation, according to a recent PETA award.

Meat-eater majority

Yet, the fact remains that most Americans (and Seattleites) still eat some kind of meat or fish on a regular basis. Indeed, as our nation has grown richer in material wealth, its citizenry’s appetite for meat has grown more voracious. The modern-day availability of low-cost fast food has made it possible for people to eat meat twice and three times a day; for many, a meal is not really a meal unless there is some kind of meat, chicken or fish involved.

It is a fact that gourmet cuisine, here and elsewhere, is largely reliant on some kind of animal product for its demonstrations of culinary artistry and versatility.

“I have never grappled with the ethics of eating meat,” says Jerry Traunfeld, the nationally renowned executive chef of The Herbfarm in Woodinville. “The fact that animals eat other animals is a part of the natural world. I also believe eating is one of life’s most basic pleasures and I don’t wish to deny myself something that I enjoy eating.”

But Traunfeld has a qualifier: “I do believe in moderation and balance.”

Proportionately, The Herbfarm does not serve a huge amount of meat, as Traunfeld explains.

“[Meat is] usually just one course of nine, which includes many meatless and seafood courses. Usually it’s game birds, like duck or squab, or grass-fed lamb.”

Traunfeld notes he tries to purchase meat “that is an excellent quality, raised as locally as possible, and as naturally as possible.”

That’s a sentiment shared at Crush, a new and intimate gourmet restaurant in a Seattle neighborhood bordering Madison Valley and the Central District. Here, vegetarian dishes are definitely more the exception than the norm. With dishes like Roasted Duck Leg Confit, Slow Braised Short Ribs, Seared Scallops and Grilled Quail, there is no question that head chef and co-owner Jason Wilson’s carefully designed menu draws heavily from beef, fowl, fish and shellfish. Before opening Crush with co-owner and wife Nicole, Wilson worked at Stars for four years, briefly in San Francisco, then opening the Singapore restaurant in 1996 and Seattle’s Pacific Place location in 1998 as the executive sous chef, becoming the executive chef in late April 1998.

But the source of those animal products, as Wilson explains, makes all the difference in both the quality and the intent of the culinary experience. As a result, Wilson buys natural and organic products from small farms and grass-fed cattle ranches. He is always willing to spend the extra dollar for fresher, more natural and healthful ingredients.

Food and your life source

“What we’re doing is being vessels for this food,” says Wilson. “We’re taking food and turning it into a person’s life force. For that, you simply want the best source for that life force possible.”

Wilson is an accomplished chef who comes from a family line of hardworking butchers. He doesn’t mince words about the current state of mass-market meat production. Mad-cow disease, as he points out, is a “manmade disease,” the result of the practice of feeding animal parts to grass-grazing animals.

The practice of raising animals for food is “too ingrained in our culture” to simply go away, says Wilson. But, he adds, “the way in which we kill is important. If the trend were to treat animals as they were intended to be treated, we would all be better off.”

Wilson shares this opinion with professional colleague Ethan Stowell, head chef and owner of downtown’s spacious Union Restaurant, widely considered to be one of Seattle’s top restaurants. In addition to the local reputation, Union has won accolades and recognition as one of the nation’s “top-spot” restaurants from the likes of Travel + Leisure, Esquire, Gourmet magazine and Wine Spectator.

Among the new generation of top American chefs, Stowell and his culinary team are a force to be reckoned with. Union’s rotating nine-course meals—with the optional pairing of a tantalizing selection of wines—are an extraordinary and daring phenomenon to behold. Of those nine courses, very few are vegetarian.

During one night earlier this year, the Union menu included Seared Ahi Tuna Salad, Celery Root Soup, Roasted Bluenose Bass, Braised Rabbit Leg and Roasted Duck Breast. (Stowell has always expressed his willingness to accommodate vegetarian diners, but with the caveat of advance notification.)

Knowing the sources

Meat and fish do form a central part of the menu, explains Stowell, but these products are selected and cooked with due care and consideration.

"I think you need to know the source of any product, whatever it is,” explains Stowell matter-of-factly. “Whether it’s meat, dairy, fish or vegetables ... you should always know where [that food is] coming from, and that it comes from a quality source."

Even animal-rights/vegetarian advocates like PETA’s Newkirk see the value in this—but with expressed reservations.

“Any step that is truly in the right direction is good,” says Newkirk, who is on a national tour to promote the release of her new book, “Making Kind Choices: Everyday Ways to Enhance Your Life through Earth- and Animal-Friendly Living.” “But it shows the power of meat addiction over us when in instead of dropping meat (and dairy) because it is linked to heart disease, cancer and stroke—and because it is cruelly obtained and wasteful of energy, water resources, land use and more—we just try to make it a little better.”

Newkirk likens this to the desperation of a smoker who switches to filter or non-addictive cigarettes, but who still smokes as a part of his or her habit.

“It shows a lack of discipline and choice of tongue and stomach over heart and head,” she says.

It would be easy to dismiss Newkirk’s concerns as unnecessarily alarmist if the science weren’t already there to back her up. It is, in fact, widely acknowledged within the medical field that vegetarian diets can help prevent or even reverse the process of developing heart disease, which has become the number-one killer in the United States.

Consider, too, that roughly 70 percent of the grain grown in the nation—and half of all consumed water—goes toward the meat industry. Today, more than 10 billion animals are raised every year in the United States for the purpose of food production.

In turn, those animals excrete enormous quantities of urine and feces, which are handled by manure lagoons and “sprayfields” that pollute the air and run off into water sources, threatening the well-being of humans and the fish supply in the process.

The environmental impact of raising meat is a serious issue, as both Crush’s Wilson and The Herbfarm’s Traunfeld agree, but also provides the answer to being an ethical meat eater.
“We need to make a statement about what kind of food we are willing to eat,” says Wilson. “We have a responsibility to ourselves and to the planet.”

Traunfeld reiterates how people who enjoy meat can responsibly stay with it: “The solution is to farm with sustainable practices, slaughter animals humanely and eat meat in moderation, not give it up entirely.”

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Silja J.A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist and featured columnist for Evergreen Monthly.

Crush is at 2319 E. Madison Street. Phone: (206) 302-7874. The Herbfarm is located at Willows Lodge in Woodinville. Phone: (425) 485-5300. Union Restaurant is at 1400 First Avenue. Phone: (206) 838-8000. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is online at www.peta.com.

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