The Meatyness of Meat

Goat meat, cow meat, chicken, pork, shark meat, rabbit meat, fish, donkey meat, hippo meat, are the meats i remember to have eaten. I swallowed all except shark meat. Yes, i weighed between an experience and a gag reflex embarrassment. I chose safety. While visiting Ethiopia, my friends mentioned how starstruck they were by how people walked into restaurants and ordered for raw meat, ate it with spices and other toppings. Nobody else in the restaurants seemed surprised except them ( they were the intruders) .

The story kept me wondering till i recalled how one of my brothers ate raw meat when we were little. I was 12, he was 3. He was impatient because the meat getting roasted took forever to get ready. when the salivating grew stronger than his patience, he grabbed raw meat on a tray next to him, made a big bite and ran off. It was many years ago, i don’t quite remember how it ended, but i could bet he swallowed the meat. Especially because he’s a teenager now and i have recently learnt he has done it again, at least 3 times in the last 6 months.

So today i asked him how it started (because he couldn’t remember his childhood episode). This is hilarious; so he mentioned how he watches the national geographic channel quite alot, and he always wondered why lions feasted on raw meat like they knew something we didn’t. So one day to feed his curiosity, he took a knife, made a small cut and ate. He says the taste was confusing. He says he chewed longer, the meat had no taste, but he could tell he was eating meat; probably meat with no salt. can you believe this guy? so tonight when the conversation got heated and someone else confessed having tasted it sometime back, I asked them why they had never tried it with salt or ketchup ? A very big realization came to his face. hahah. he held a knife, walked to the fridge, made a small slice, added salt and chewed. I couldn’t watch him. I was too full from my meal i could get my meal flowing in an opposite direction. well, i got feedback . He said that in a state of extreme hunger, he would never think twice about eating it with salt. Should i be scared?

You know i judged him in the moment, then I thought to myself, what if we have been doing it the wrong way all this while? Stories by our grand fathers talk about how they drunk blood straight from an animal in the slaughter house, how they ate the liver raw. my big guess is that they probably ate all kinds of meat raw at will. I watched a clip of Rihanna the other day and she ewwwed at how she’d never eat an intestine of any animal. I laughed at loud. Hon. Ssegilinya offers a kilo of intestines to every nakawele( a woman who recently gave birth) that delivers at Kawempe North Hospital. It’s believed they do a certain magic in milk letdown and helping the mother feel better?

Back to the meatyness of meat, I’lll say meat has a higher meatyness when it’s not dilute. My family eats meat in all forms and all kinds i could say, and i am the least meaty person of all. Growing up, i didn’t eat goat or cow meat. I struggled till i started to eat the soup only ( ca we just say eating the soup and not the meat is the biggest scam in eating history). I always seemed like an inconvenience to the rest and I always struggled. Meat with soup has never cut it for me. I’d rather eat my g.nut sauce for a year. But then, i noticed how i always dived into muchomo( roasted meat) and ate it without control. Then it came to my understanding that what i hated about the meat with soup was the fact that it’s meatyness had been reduced by dilution. I tried my recipes and now i could enjoy a whole plate of meat, just because it has a higher meat value that your meat. By dilution, i mean anything including water. I’ll talk about the meatyness of meat from a chef point of view. I don’t cook much, but i find myself cooking atleast every sunday. Coincidentally, my cooking is always a meat dish; any kind of meat. With my cooking experience, i have actually realized meat tastes better with little or completely no water added to it in the cooking process. I don’t add extra oil either, no. I will give you my recipe if you want it.

Interestingly, meat lovers say every meat tastes different, even if its the same kind of animal, goat X and goat Y will never taste the same. You will object at first, and then agree in a split second because it’s actually true. We should discover more animals and make them domestic so we eat them with less shame. what do you think? Don’t tag Dr. Kasenene because i just made meat more meaty.

We need an international meat day. We will be surprised by what other people eat. On my bucket list are animals whose meat would make me look like a poacher. but well, I would want to taste a lion, giraffe, tiger or elephant. Regardless, I’d never ever eat a sloth….noooo. chimpanzeee noooo.