The concept of our #wildfishwildgame dinners is simple: everybody brings something to share.
One of the most common questions that follows is: does it have to be something that I have caught or hunted?
Answer: Absolutely not. In fact, it wouldn't be a dinner if all we had was platters of wild-harvested meats and fish.
The best part of gathering is that everyone brings something unique to the table.
However, there is one variety of food that is not welcome at the table: fake, lab-grown meat.
These faux-meat alternatives are owned by large corporations, they rely on industrial, monoculture farming practices, and they spend ungodly amounts on marketing to appear as the healthy alternative—for both people and planet.
If you want to do an honest deep-dive into the world of Faux Meat, there's an incredible article by Anna Borgman on The MeatEater this week titled "Everything You Should Know About Fake Meat".
Take 5 minutes and read it, it's more interesting than whatever awful Reel instagram is trying to show you right now. Among my favorite tidbits from the article are: "Every dime spent on fake meat products goes back into the pockets of global agri-food corporations, several of which are giants in the industrial meat production system that those products are meant to curtail."
I did a brief treatment to this subject last year, right here on Windward-Westward in an article I titled "Your Plant-Based Meat Isn't Saving the Planet"
The purpose of Windward-Westward is to live more connected to the landscape, and more in the rhythm of the natural world. Which is why I will opt for—and encourage—consumers invest in regeneratively raised meat products over lab-grown alternatives every time.
So, for the reasons above, the only food that isn't welcome at the #wildfishwildgame dinner is fake, lab-grown meat.
