The Daily Mail features a gritty image of Gordon Ramsay hauling a dead (or extremely relaxed) deer through his London restaurant. The entertaining shot is courtesy of season three of The F Word, a British TV series that brings the volatile celebrity chef in contact with various things that might provoke some kind of extreme reaction (guns, frozen lakes, rotten shark meat), and then films the results.
Presumably there is a lot of swearing.
The interesting thing about the “shocking” deer photo is that it points up the basic disconnect between modern carnivores and the animals they eat. The average restaurant-goer can discriminate between dozens of cuts of meat but may have never personally handled anything more lifelike than a plucked dead chicken. No hunting, no killing, no butchering, no blood and offal and all the good stuff that goes into turning a live animal into a delicious Wagyu carpaccio or quail stuffed with black truffle sausage.
Maybe having a guy haul a dead animal through a dining room now and again isn’t a bad reminder that something with a life and personality has been slaughtered in order to make that yum-o wild boar ragù we enjoy so much.
If that deer photo is “shocking”, what must the yum-o crowd think of last season’s pig butchering?!
I think the pig butchering incident from last season is the thing that opened up ramseys eyes…. and it is a great thing. More chefs should have to butcher (butcher in the real sense) their own food, at least once. Being in culinary school and seeing how afraid the student are of meats and how alien un-broken down carcasses are to them upsets me. Chefs/ cooks should be able to know what they’re dealing with so as to respect what they’re handling and use it to its fullest potential.
*steps down off soapbox*
cutting up a side of beef / pork etc ..
is one thing but if you mean killing that is different
forcing them to kill in school COULD take a FEW potentionaly great chefs out of the business