Anthony Bourdain and a Name Change

For all of you burger lovers out there, I urge you to read chapter 9, titled "Meat", in Anthony Bourdain's new book Medium Raw.



It starts off with:


I believe that the great American Hamburger is a thing of beauty, it's simple noble charms, pristine. The basic recipe - ground beef, salt and pepper, formed into a patty, grilled or seared on a griddle, then nestled between two half's of a bun, usually but necessarily accompanied by lettuce, a tomato slice, and some ketchup - is, to my mind, un-improvable by man or God.


From there, the shit hits the pan, literally. Tony writes about the constant risk of E-Coli contamination. The way in which the multi national food industry, in an effort to make ever increasing profits produces ever increasing crap in place of food, bleached meat anyone? It's disgusting and while on the topic please read:

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser and Ominivors Delema. Micheal Pollan.

This is my sermon; the modern industrial food complex shamelessly abuses animals, constantly poisons the public and reaps profits on the backs of uninformed manipulated consumers. Cargil is the largest privately held company in the America, $116 billion in yearly revenue, would it be too much to ask Cargil and companies like them to have some honour, to have some soul, to show some honesty in what they do.

And yet here I am writing a burger blog and there is my dilemma. I like food, I like to eat, I like to eat meat and I like burgers. Becoming a vegetarian myself is outside the realm of possibility, My DNA is too strongly coded to the taste of meat. I agree with Tony and Micheal Pollan, there are options. There are ethical ways to treat animals, before you of course kill them, but there are ethical ways to kill as well. Don’t get me started on shooting cows full of hormones and antibiotics. Antibiotics required by the way to protect cows from disease caused by the way they are being treated. This is kind of like beating someone over the head with a baseball bat and then offering them a Tylenol.

So what do I do? I stop eating burgers from places that can not guarantee that their meat was fresh ground, preferably on premises, preferably natural. I do not trust frozen, even organic frozen. Guess who owns all the big name organic labels out there? Yup, the same ones that feed us other crap. I'm not entirely sure, but pretty sure that as my good friend Bill once wrote: a rose by any other name is still a rose. In this case, organic or not it's still shit.

From now on, no more crap burgers, I’ll try, and by try I mean I may like any addict slip up once in awhile, but I will try to focus exclusively on places that source their meat from small local producers that treat their animals and their livelihood with honour.

I will be changing the name of my blog. A couple of reasons; One, few people are able to figure out what 2abpsslcpooassb means. So just for the record, it’s a burger blog people, remember the Big Mac….that’s as close as I get to spilling the beans. Anyway, given my born again beef outlook, the association with MD’s has to end.

And BTW Chapter 10 is pretty funny as well, it's about Tony's daughter and MD.

So the new name, for the millions of you out there following this blog (anonymously) is:

“Handsome Burger”.

Why Handsome burger? I don’t know. I kink of like the way it sounds.

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