In the beginning …

Hello, my name is Lucy and I love meat. This is a picture of me carving the beef last Christmas.

I used to work for a company that did Hogroasts, so I can butcher pigs, lamb and the odd bit of cow. Plucking and dressing game holds no fears. I have rabbit-skinners thumbs. I relished the horse I ate two years ago, raw in Kumamoto.

In the past year, however, I’ve started to think more about how to be sustainable in my meat-eating. Not just in terms of making sure the butcher is nice and going all Hugh F-W and being able to see the field in which the rabbit pulled the carrots up. But in terms of responsibly eating all the bits of the animals that I enjoy. Not just the bits you can’t really recognise as coming from something that lived and died.

So this year, 2012, I am going to try to eat only offal. Some game. And some seafood – but the seafood types that we don’t normally eat here in England. But mostly offal. To try to balance out the proportion of regular cuts to less than usual cuts that I’ve eaten all my life. (I do not come from an offal-loving family, despite our rural roots.)

I’m going to share my recipes and hopefully, offal won’t seem as scary … the journey starts on January 1st 2012, so I am off now to feast on bacon, which will soon be forbidden fruit (meat).