in a largely male meat world: testy butchers, defensive cowboys, egotistical steakhouse cooks, burly hunters, raw-meat-diet
gurus. I hadn’t encountered that much
machismo since Pam Houston’s Cowboys
Are My Weakness, and the testosterone
alone made me want to reach for a veggie
burger and cup of herbal tea.
Without spoiling it all, I’ll let on that
Bourette >nds her most satisfying meals
and conclusions where machismo is
abandoned and where food, culture, and
community intersect. Her experience
making boudin, a pork sausage traditional
to the Acadians of the Deep South, exempli>es profound appreciation for the animal that provided good simple food and
whose ?avor is as intensi>ed by tradition
and warm fellow-feeling as it is by spices.
As much as it is the right book at the
right time, the biggest trouble with Meat
is the timing. If you are already inclined
toward investigative eating-books, you
might feel Michael Pollan-ed to tears by
now. (You might want to eat a cupcake—
preferably one baked by Nigella Lawson—
while emptying your head in front of
Dancing with the Stars.) But the subject of
meat eating deserves singular devotion,
and because most of us can’t, or won’t, go
to the lengths Bourette did to explore the
complexities of the carnivorous urge, we
should at least get bloody vicariously
before we so easily reach for our next
grass-fed burger.
— Lou Bendrick
Because the Cat Purrs
How We Relate to Other Species
and Why It Matters
by janet lembke
Skyhorse Publishing, 2008.
$22.95, 240 pages.
READING Because the Cat Purrs by Janet
Lembke on the airplane, I >nd myself
hunching over to hide the cover. The boy
next to me is ripping through Crime and
Punishment. Meanwhile, my book is
bedecked with a photo of a ?u=y kitten
with eyes so blue they must be digitally
enhanced. It looks like a two-hundred-page Hallmark card.
Then the author starts
laying plans for the groundhog named “Big Beast” who
is shredding her sun?owers.
She reports with a hint of
glee that a friend with a
problem groundhog “beat it
to death with a two-by-four
and ?ooded another out of
its burrow, whereupon her
husband shot it.” Now who’s
too sweet, Dostoevsky?
Lembke inspects plants and animals
that live close, sometimes too close, to
humans. Whitetail deer, harlequin beetles,
red maples, English sparrows, E. coli—
none of her subjects are found farther
away than the garden or, in some cases,
the small intestine. Digging into these
relationships that many take for granted,
she charts our mutual dependence and
antagonism, layering in personal stories,
literary references, and notes on evolution.
Lembke also translates Greek and
Roman poetry, notably Virgil’s Georgics,
and her unraveling of ancient stories provides some of the book’s greatest pleasures. It also marks her prose with a certain
formality. A cat wonders, “Shall I leap
upon the kitchen counter or shall I not?”
Of people who might fall in love with a
laboratory mouse, she writes: “woe betide
them.” This, combined with cheerful animal line drawings and the
chapter subtitles—“A Bird
of Consequence: A Tale of
Bargains” (about chickens);
“A Bale of Chelonians: Tales
of the Licit and Illicit”
(about turtles)—give it the
air of some nineteenth-century volume stamped
with gold-embossed beetle,
but with a dash of contemporary sauce. Both might
