Cow Pooling

So who went and bought a cow this week? Or were you like me and renewed your vow to become more vegetarian?

If you watched Sunday last week you’ll know what I’m talking about. Mind you it’s been all through the news ever since so you’d have to live in a bubble not to have heard of “cow pooling” by now. This is when consumers buy shares in a cow and have it home- killed to save on costs of buying meat over the counter. I suppose it makes sense if it’s done in the right way but it was the graphics that put me off. The unsuspecting victim used for the sake of the story was called “Miss Moo”. I watched in horror as she blinked at the camera and switched her tail oblivious to her fate as the gun barrel took aim. The next frame was of her insides strung up and being butchered while the reporter gleefully added up how many meals of t bone, rump and eye fillet would fill the freezer.

What’s that you say? I should take a cement pill and harden up?

Yes, it’s all part of life and death but I like to pretend that meat is man-made – it’s the only way I can eat it – and avoid graphics such as those on Sunday at all costs.

But, although I was looking away for most of it, I was too lazy to leave the room so heard all the gory details.

Spinach and Ricotta Canelloni

As a result, it’s now meat-free Mondays in our house and a scrumptious dish of spinach and ricotta cannelloni was served up the following night. It’s only one night a week so far until I discover new vegetarian meals (depending on how this goes down with other members of the family who like their traditional meat and veg).

All this talk of meat reminded me of the day in January we purchased three weaner calves (solely for the purpose of keeping the grass down, I like to think) which the children promptly named Milkshake, Chocolate and James.

“They’re called weaner calves because they’ve just been weaned,” I explained more to myself than anybody else that night as we sat down to a meal of wiener schnitzel.

At that point my fork suspended in mid air as the penny dropped and I stared down at the crumbed meat on my plate.

“You don’t think … this is actually weaner calf … do you?”

I took the silence as a polite acknowledgment of my ignorance.

I’d lost my appetite so pushed the meal aside and later Googled it instead but ended up more confused than ever:

“Wiener schnitzel is a classic Austrian dish traditionally made of veal,” one site read.

“In Germany Wiener refers to the city of Vienna while a schnitzel is a cutlet,” it went on.

So Wiener wasn’t the German spelling of the word weaner as I had suspected after all. But just what exactly was veal? A quick search revealed that “Veal is the meat of young cattle (calves).”

My head was starting to hurt at this point so I shut down the window and watched Desperate Housewives instead.

From what I could deduce, although what I had on my plate was, indeed, not too dissimilar to the ‘babies’ we’d brought home that day, the same-sounding name was purely coincidental (unless Vienna was named after a cow). The wiener sausage/hotdog is different again but I did learn from another site that wiener is therefore a slang name used for a similar-shaped appendage.

So in the meantime, I’ve been keeping my distance from our ever-fattening cows down the paddock (who certainly won’t be ending up in my freezer) and trying to forget their names.