The Carnivore Project

Wikilaity loves Bacon.

Bacon's title as the Ultimate Meat has gained the attention of Wikiality, a strange and humorous spoof wiki. Another thumbs up to Heather for her well-deserved success in the Meat Bracket...

We're all winners (except Goose)

Heather put together this tribute video which successfully trumps any idea I had. Thanks to everyone for taking part - I hope everyone is proud of what we've accomplished here on the behalf of carnivores everywhere.

The Ultimate Meat

After three months of fierce competition, we (the discerning, meat-eating public) have chosen the Ultimate Meat: Bacon (American).

Congratulations to Bacon and to Heather, the tireless champion of Bacon's culinary excellence.

Please take a moment to calmly reflect on the worthiness of Bacon, with one of Heather's earlier videos:

For the full story of Bacon's road to victory, click below to see the extended post.

Meat Bracket - Final

Welcome to the final round of the Ultimate Meat Bracket.

After weeks of effort by our meat champions and the voting public, the 32 meat gladiators have been whittled down to these final two representatives.

Read each case carefully before you vote - the world is only big enough for one Ultimate Meat.

The Case for Bacon by Heather

The Case for Roast Chicken by $ophie

Roast Chicken (Final) by $ophie

Roast Chicken (Semifinal) by $ophie

You wouldn't eat this...

So why would you eat this?

Much better to eat this.

Kangaroo (Semifinal) by Kirsty

Chicken is SO 80s

I know it will surprise most of you to realise that kangaroo really does whip roast chicken's butt when it comes to being the Ultimate Meat. In the words of a client I now never have to have anything to do with, there's a lot of heart out there for chicken. A LOT. Hell, even I love a good drumstick now and then.

But there are flaws, people. SERIOUS flaws. Let's not forget what we're talking about. The Ultimate Meat. Meaning?

ul·ti·mate [uhl-tuh-mit]
adjective
- not to be improved upon or surpassed; greatest; unsurpassed

And the thing is, chicken can be improved on. It's so 80s now, you know? Certainly Jamie Oliver's doing some lovely things with it, but the loveliness is often about the condiments or whatever people ram under its skin. Environmental and health concerns have heightened, variety has increased, tastes have improved and chicken, the meat, needs to pick up its game, even when its roasted.

Naturally I could use a theatrical presentation to elaborate on this, and convey my passion by what I’m willing to do on film or in the edit suite. Call me lazy, but I just don’t feel it’s necessary. We don’t need drama to see why kangaroo meat whips roast chicken's butt. Nope, all we need to do is look at the basics.

Its creation and its typical consumption. Pure and simple.

Meat Bracket - Semifinals

Welcome to the semifinal round of the Ultimate Meat Bracket. After brutal competition, the voting public have narrowed the meatpetitors down to a single meat from each of the four divisions.

This week, Kangaroo (Green Champion)  and Roast Chicken (White Champion) will compete for the remaining position in the finals. Voting ends on Tuesday, 13 March.

The Case for Kangaroo by Kirsty

The Case for Roast Chicken by $ophie

(If Vizu is being cranky, click here)

Meat Bracket - White Division - Divisional Final

Roast Chicken ($ophie) vs Duck (Paul)

If Vizu is being naughty, please vote here.

Meat Bracket - Green Division - Divisional Final

If YouTube is being naughty, please view the video here.

And if Vizu is being naughty, please vote here.

Democracy in action

The Meat Bracket was the top poll on Vizu last week. Well done everyone!

Our tournament was the most popular 'pollster' - as well as the 'best' one. It picked up over 8,000 'stars' (from people ranking the polls), which was almost four times the closest competition.

Meat Bracket - Red/Blue Divisions - Divisional Finals

The Red and Blue Divisions have concluded.

Thanks to some frenzied grass-roots campaigning, the twin juggernauts of Bacon and Sausage racked up over 1600 votes between them. Bacon (American) succeeded where Bacon (British) could not - toppling the mighty Sausage!

Meanwhile, with less fanfare but similar significance, Sushi defeated Shrimp, setting up next week's highly-anticipated Pork vs Posh semifinal.

The Divisional Finals for White and Green start tomorrow.

Red Division:

Bacon (American) [Heather] vs Sausage [Marcus]
(Winner: Bacon)

Blue Division:

Shrimp [Guilty Carnivore] vs Sushi [Anne]
(Winner: Sushi)

More Meat Bracket: Round 1 / Round 2 / Divisional Finals (Red - Blue - White - Green) / Rules

Meat Bracket - Round 2

Welcome to the second round of the Ultimate Meat Bracket. So far, the competition has been particularly tense, with most match-ups being decided by a handful of votes.

The Red and Blue divisions have finished their second round match-ups - see the results below! The divisional finals will start next week.

Be sure to read up on both meats carefully - every vote counts.

Second Round (White) (Feb 6 - Feb 11):

Foie Gras (Lebowski) vs Roast Chicken ($ophie)
(Winner: Roast Chicken)

Duck (Paul) vs Goose (Midwestern Jared)
(Winner: Duck)

Second Round (Green) (Feb 6 - Feb 11):

Gumbo (Lebowski) vs Spam (Lebowski)
(Winner: Gumbo)

Kangaroo (Kirsty) vs Tofu (The Guilty Carnivore)
(Winner: Kangaroo)

Second Round (Red) (Jan 30 - Feb 4):

Lamb (Dan) vs Sausage (Marcus)
(Winner: Sausage)

Bacon (US) (Heather) vs Steak (Alaskan Jared)
(Winner: Bacon)

Second Round (Blue) (Jan 30 - Feb 4):

Lobster (Hobart65) vs Sushi (Anne)
(Winner: Sushi)

Hairy Crab (Ed) vs Shrimp (Guilty Carnivore)
(Winner: Shrimp)

More Meat Bracket: Round 1 / Round 2 / Divisional Finals (Red - Blue - White - Green) / Rules

Post of the Month

In a quick plea for a little more democratic self-promotion:

The Meat Bracket has been nominated (thanks!) for the 'post of the month' over on Russell Davies' homepage. The author is cited as 'Jared et al', which is slightly misleading - the 'et al' encompasses those that have done all the real work.

Please scamper over and have a quick vote - voting ends Wednesday.

Goose by Jared (Round 2)

Duck. Duck. Duck. Goose!

Kangaroo by Kirsty (Round 2)

Tofu is made by coagulating soy milk and pressing the resulting CURDS.

I’m not even going to go into the chemical chaos that is coagulation but suffice to say the soy milk can be made by doing stuff to soy BEANS, or you can go ahead and use, more commonly, mass produced soy milk, which also comes from beans. Like the shit you get on the shelf at Tesco. Yeah, that shit.

Don’t get me wrong, I like soy milk. I like it in my porridge. But let’s not pretend that it can turn into something worthy of winning this competition.

Foie Gras by Lebowski (Round 2)

Roast Chicken by Sophie (Round 2)

Meat Bracket on BBC

The Ultimate Meat Bracket was featured on BBC Radio Five Live's 'Pods and Blogs' last night, which pronounced our noble efforts 'strange but fun'.

Check it out here:

I'm very grateful to Russell for setting the whole thing up. I'm also extremely appreciative of his patience in trying to get a coherent answer out of me in the recorded interview.

Meat Bracket - Round 1

The first round of the Green and the White divisions ends by Wednesday - vote now!

The first round of the Red and the Blue divisions has now concluded - see the results below. Click here to see Round 2 in progress.

First Round (White):

Fried Chicken (Anne) vs Roast Chicken ($ophie)
(Voting closed. Winner: ROAST CHICKEN)

Chicken Tikka Masala vs Goose
(Voting closed. Winner: GOOSE)

Buffalo Wings (The Guilty Carnivore) vs Foie Gras (Lebowski)
(Voting closed. Winner: FOIE GRAS)

Duck (Paul) vs Turkey (Claire)
(Voting closed. Winner: DUCK)

First Round (Green):

Offal (Picklin' Paul) vs Tofu (The Guilty Carnivore)
(Voting closed. Winner: TOFU)

Kangaroo (Kirsty) vs Pastrami (Mark) (and here)
(Voting closed. Winner: KANGAROO)

Chorizo (Stephan) vs Spam (Lebowski)
(Voting closed. Winner: SPAM)

Gumbo (Lebowski) vs Pie (Picklin' Paul)
(Voting closed. Winner: GUMBO)

First Round (BLUE):

Hairy Crab (Ed) vs Salmon (Alaskan Jared)
(Voting closed. Winner: HAIRY CRAB)

Sushi (Anne) vs Fish & Chips (Anne)
(Voting closed. Winner: SUSHI)

Snail (Graham) vs Shrimp (The Guilty Carnivore)
(Voting closed. Winner: SHRIMP)

Shellfish (Karen) vs Lobster (Hobart65)
(Voting closed. Winner: LOBSTER)

First Round (RED):

Bacon (US) (Heather) vs Hot Dog (The Guilty Carnivore)
(Voting closed. Winner: BACON)

Lamb (Dan) vs Burger (Adam)
(Voting closed. Winner: LAMB)

Sausage (Marcus) vs Bacon (UK) (Russell)
(Voting closed. Winner: SAUSAGE)

Steak (Alaskan Jared) vs Ribs (Kansas Jared)
(Voting closed. Winner: STEAK)

More Meat Bracket: Round 1 / Round 2 / Divisional Finals (Red - Blue - White - Green) / Rules

Sushi by Anne (Round 2)

Sushi – A Précis

The glories of sushi have been expounded upon at length in other posts, so I shan’t try to come up with another clever shill. Rather, I’ll touch on sushi’s major assets and then conclude with a few toothsome photos.

Sushi is inimitably elegant, endlessly versatile, mysteriously subtle and, most importantly, utterly delicious. It may be consumed at any occasion, and the options it suggests are as limitless as the human imagination. Sushi is colorful, delicate, healthy, (unless you don’t go in for that sort of thing, in which case, tempura-fry it!), challenging, gorgeous, appropriate, understated… in short, sushi is your palate’s soul-mate.

Roast Chicken by Sophie

Fried Chicken by Anne

I've been staring at a blank Word document for ages, trying to think of an angle to take on this whole "fried chicken" thing. Trying - and failing spectacularly. Fried chicken the institution? Fried chicken: a retrospective? Famous fried chicken? It’s not that I don’t have an opinion about fried chicken; on the contrary, I have a surprising number of opinions devoted to the subject of chicken in general and the fried variety in particular.

Rather than coming up with a clever hook to draw you, dear reader, into the Byzantine complications of an artful argument in favor of fried chicken, I’m going to lay before you a selection of its manifold appeals, “the whole accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated with the Author's own candles.”

Pie by Picklin' Paul

In praise of pies

If you like meat you should love pies. Pies make meat portable. They allow you to enjoy meat anywhere. They have freed man from the campfire and allowed him to invent the picnic.

So it’s not surprising that most cultures have developed a variation of the pie. Consider the traditional British Pork Pie; Cornish Pasties and their close relative the Australian meat pie; Empanadas, the meat and fish pies of Galicia that have spread to Mexico; Calzone, literally a ‘stuffed trouser leg’ from Italy, Pierogi from Poland and Russia; Arabic Sanbusaks, Asian Samosas and to a lesser extent the Spring Roll. All are basically meat encase in a mixture of flour, water and fat.

But to be considered the ultimate meat is this enough that they are convenient and popular? I would say not. A truly great meat needs to transcend cookery and influence wider culture.

Offal by Picklin' Paul

Say bye-bye to bland

Meat is becoming increasingly bland. Factory farmed, skinless Chicken breasts and anaemic Pork chops are so devoid of taste that you might find it hard to tell the difference between the two. We have let our taste buds become so use to this flavourless cardboard that someone even believes Tofu is a meat.

However, if you’d like to experience a range of tastes and textures that you simply don’t get with other meats try Offal. Its taste ranges from the delicate and sublime to the bloody and gutsy.

Don’t believe me? Try the contrasting flavours and textures of the following recipes. They’re all very simple. They’re all based on liver plus a few basic ingredients. And they display a range tastes that’s million miles away from the blandness of farmed chicken and soya bean curd.

Kangaroo by Kirsty

Pastrami is a deli meat. DELI meat. Made from corned beef BRISKET. Commonly eaten in sandwiches. Like at lunch and shit. It was invented as a method for preserving meat from SPOILAGE, before fridges existed. In fact, 'to pastrama' is to preserve meat.

Gripping.

And, let's be honest, most often followed by slicing and stuffing into a vacuum pack for someone to rip open later and wolf down on a quick lunch break. Sure, there's better quality versions, but the pastrami most people come across comes straight off the supermarket fridge shelf. Mmmm.....

Moreover, pastrami is a naturally fatty meat and the fat is an important part of the flavour. Which, great, but if you want to kill yourself you can always jump off a cliff.

Kangaroo meat, on the other hand, has an incredibly delicious delicate game flavour that is not at all dependent on fat. Indeed, it has one of the lowest fat contents of any meat.

Turkey by Claire

IN PRAISE OF TURKEY

Christmas's bird. Turkey Lurkey. Gobble Gobble.

Yeah, you may laugh. You may mock and turn your back on the turkey and think you're so frickin' now and 'on trend' by having goose or duck instead. I've even done it myself and fetched a poncy chicken stuffed with goose and duck from Borough Market. It ain't the same.

Spam by Lebowski

(Click here to download)

Pastrami by Mark

Pastrami - it’s kosher bacon.

Pastrami is more than a delicious meat – it’s a culture in its own right.

Why? Well for one thing, it’s because pastrami has lore, stories and rituals to surround it. It’s a meat with a real experience to surround it that goes beyond just the taste. The culture of the New York deli is the culture of Pastrami. Everything from George and Jerry kibitzing around it to Sally orgasming over it. And what other meat could inspire this.

Foie Gras by Lebowski

Gumbo by Lebowski

Do you like a taste of the exotic?

The unusual?

The off-the-beaten track?

The you'll love baby elephant.

Sushi v Fish and Chips by Anne Perry

SUSHI v. FISH AND CHIPS

Case Summary

Plaintiff, sushi, alleges that co-defendants, Fish and Chips, are an unhealthy, uninteresting, unsatisfying, and in all other respects miserable excuse for a fish-based meal. Codefendants raise a number of affirmative defenses against these allegations, and furthermore counter-claim that Plaintiff is over-priced, over-consumed, over-rated and, frankly, kind of gross. Arbitration has proven futile; the solution reached, "fusion cuisine," e.g., wasabi-seared blue-fin tuna on a bed of sweet-potato straw, has been deemed "trendy," "spectacularly pretentious," and "less original than it sounds" by both parties and various restaurant guides. Parties seek final judgment in this matter.

Ribs by Jared Shurin

 

Lamb by Dan Shute

Ah, Las Vegas: the Ikea of hedonism. Just as picking up a bath mat from Brent Cross is impossible without impulse purchasing four shower curtains, a kitchen unit and a lawn-mower, so it’s impossible to breakfast, or see a show, or buy a tacky snowglobe in Vegas without inadvertently surrendering to the tables – I challenge anyone to ask for directions without hearing the phrase ‘Go through the Casino…’ It’s a bizarre place, an inhuman place, a city that reeks of heady despair imbued with a fatal trace of hope: a place where people drink scotch at 7am whilst tossing their daughter’s college fund desperately towards the dour dealer who’s seen a million other people lose everything and never once given the slightest of shits.

Yes, well spotted; it’s time for a tortuous analogy.

Burgers. Las Vegas. Can’t you see it? Both seem like really good ideas at the time, both give you a slightly sickly high when you’re ensconced in them, and both (the majority of the time) make you feel sick as hell once you’re done with them. I won’t deny that a good burger, like a winning trip to Sin City, can be a wonderful thing: unfortunately, it’s also equally rare. Most burgers are bad burgers: and no amount of dousing in cheese, bacon, relish, avocado, pineapple, egg or any other bugger is going to change that.

Hairy Crab by Ed Warren

I’ve a theory.

Judging by the fact that you’re spending your valuable time on a site dedicated to meat eating, you’ve probably accepted that you’re a carnivore.

You’ve got over the fact that, in order to eat the juicy red stuff that you crave, creatures that up until recently have been walking around living blameless lives of animal bliss, have to be rounded up, slaughtered, skinned chopped up, burnt to some degree of your choosing and then served with sauce and a parsley garnish.

No doubt, given that you’re reading a series of articles about the relative values of different types of meat, you probably consider yourself to be an enlightened meat eater. You’ve stared in the face of the simple truth that in order to enjoy your ribs, or your steak béarnaise or a grilled sea bass, living things have to be killed, killed dead.

You’re willing to take responsibility for the bolt in the cows brain, and (provided it’s humane) the sudden squealing, sticky end of a free-range pig, chicken or sheep is a price worth paying for bacon sandwiches, fried chicken and roast shoulders of mutton.

You’re probably the kind of meat eater who goes for the whole ‘nose to tail’ theory of meat eating, and skips merrily through the more squelchy delights of offal eating, because you know that meat comes from an animal, not just a polythene wrapped packet on the supermarket shelf, and the best way to honour the ‘sacrifice’ of that animal is to make use of as much of it as possible.

Still, despite all of that being the case, despite your undoubted sophistication and your rationalisation of your carnivore status, here’s my theory: I bet you’ve never eaten sea otter. Or baby seal. Or dolphin steak. Or a family pet.

You haven’t have you.

The Meat Bracket - How's this work then?

OVERVIEW

The tournament will be a series of one-on-one (meato-y-meato) match-ups. Each dish has a champion, who will talk about their meat and explain why it deserves to be the Ultimate Meat. The viewing public will then decide which dish is worthier, by means of a vote.

After each match-up, one dish will progress, and one dish will be knocked out. This is a single-elimination tournament, but there will be an opportunity for some popular, one-off, match-ups later on (Bacon vs. Bacon comes to mind).

(See the meats and their champions here)

The Meat Bracket - Adopt a Meat

[Comments on this post have been CLOSED - please check the progress of the 'Meat Bracket' by clicking here]

I think our Meat Bracket is in a good place - ready for comments and claims.

There are 32 dishes, in four categories, as to make for a nice, easy tournament.

Please chime in if you want to champion any of these dishes.  It'll just take a little work, and you can do it in any format whatsoever (post, poem, podcast or just draw a pretty picture).

The first round will tentatively begin the week of January 15th.

The Meat Bracket - Recruitment

[Comments on this post have been CLOSED - please check the progress of the 'Meat Bracket' by clicking here]

Come January, I'll be kicking off a lengthy competition tentatively called 'The Meat Bracket'. By taking 32 of the top carnivorous edibles and having them face-off, we'll eventually drill down (or climb up) to the Ultimate Meat.

To make things much more interesting, I'd like to get guest authors to act as advocates for many of the meats involved.

If you're interested, go to Adopt a Meat.