the hydranchula goes to ireland: new year's, new foods

the hydranchula goes to ireland is a series of posts i'm writing during my j term study abroad in dublin, ireland. these posts will look a little different because they will have proper capitalization and pictures because professors like proper capitalization and pictures. please follow me on instagram to see what i'm eating and drinking up to every day.

read the rest of the story here.

Finding a butcher can be difficult. Not that I would know; I’m a vegetarian. But I’m fascinated with meat. Not all meat, though, chicken and pork don’t really do it for me. I’m a beef girl. My favorite thing to do on a lazy day is head to Eataly where I grab a small cup of pear or coconut gelato (it’s the third best gelato in the world, so I’ve been told) and walk around the meat section. I love checking out the marbled steaks and string wrapped roasts. Everything is so beautiful, but rarely do my desires to purchase any meat go too much past wanting to bring it home and keep it as a pet. A dead pet.

I’m a vegetarian for health reasons. When I ate meat, I ate a lot of processed and breaded and fried meats. I was a cheeseburger junkie, but the meat didn’t make my body feel the way it made my mouth feel, so I gave it up. I occasionally eat fish and every once in a while; I’ll fold for a cheeseburger from Five Guys.

But now that the ban on European beef has been lifted in the United States, I’m considering a switch back to my old carnivorous ways. I’ve been a pretty good vegetarian for the last three and a half years, so the thought of eating meat, and not just any meat, but beef, is a little weird for me.

So where do you even buy good meat? As much as I love Trader Joe’s, I don’t feel great about buying meat from a package. And as much as I love window-shopping at Eataly, I don’t think my student salary can afford it. A butcher just seems like the best option.

While doing research for the final project for my Ireland class, I used Yelp to help me figure out some butcher stats in Chicago and Dublin. Typing “butcher” into Yelp for near Chicago yields 962 matches. The same “butcher” search finds 943 matches near Dublin. At first, I was surprise to see more butchers in Chicago. Although it was only 19 more, I couldn’t believe it. In my 18 months in Chicago, I’ve never noticed a butcher. You can’t walk down a street in Dublin without finding a butcher.

            Then I remembered population. Dublin had a population of 506,211 as of 2011. Chicago’s population? 2.719 million as of 2013. So for about the same amount of butchers, Dublin has about one fifth of the population.

            That’s so many butchers! Crazy, right?! Butchers are the new Starbucks, I guess. It’s got me wondering if reintroducing Irish Beef into the US meat market might start a change in the way people buy and eat meat.

            Visiting Europe has made me reevaluate what I eat. From what I saw, Europeans seem to have a healthier relationship with food. Portions are smaller, the quality is better and a lot of people still leave food on the plate. So, since I didn’t really make any New Year’s resolutions, I thought I might type up something like a food manifesto… or something like that. So here they are, better food choices for 2015:

1. Go to more local and famer’s markets: support local farmers that make better choices for how food grows.
2. Buy organic: spend a little bit more money to lose as many chemicals as possible.
3. Read labels: don’t buy anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce or don’t know what they are. If they have to be explained, you probably don’t want them in your body.
4. Shop more often: do two small shopping trips a week instead of one big one every two weeks, this will help guarantee that the food is fresher
5. Stop buying processed food: just stop.