The butcher’s daughter

Fun fact - this dietitian is the daughter of a butcher! 

I remember visiting my dad and grandfather at the family butcher shop as a little girl. I would peek inside walk-in refrigerators that housed gigantic cuts of beef and pork and watch with wide eyes as bright red beef came out of the grinder.  Would you believe that I brought a frozen cow eyeball into school for show and tell?

Filet mignon and fresh pork chops were in heavy rotation at our dinner table. Instead of turning me into a committed carnivore, it turned me off to beef and pork. Forever. It was just too much too soon, I guess.

As I started learning more about nutrition I figured it wasn’t a bad idea to limit meat in my diet. As a young adult I chose to eat mostly vegetarian at home and would eat chicken and fish when dining out. I got married and chicken, turkey, and seafood became a regular part of my diet. Then we had our daughter.

My girl loves all the meats that I don’t eat and she will tell you flat out that chicken has no taste (she makes an exception for Chick Fila, obviously). I started to wonder, should I return to my roots as the butcher’s daughter and bring burgers and brats to the dinner table?

My husband feeds her the stuff she likes, but as a family we still eat chicken, turkey, and seafood for dinner. The compromise is that it’s taken on a new form - we eat a lot of ground meat (turkey and chicken). It’s something we will all eat and it’s versatile and easy to prepare. During our recent kitchen renovation it became a staple for freezer meals that we could grill or heat in the crockpot.

I think ground meat gets a bad wrap sometimes, probably because it IS kind of gross to turn solid muscle into wavy ropes of meat. Food recalls can also be more common with ground meat. So can ground meat be included as part of a healthy diet? Read more about it in part two of the Butcher’s Daughter, posting next week!