VARVAKIOS AGORA

When I went to Athens a couple of years ago I visited the big meat market that hosts an enormous display of butcher shops all squeezed into one big hall that has the size of a small football stadium. As I walked in I was overwhelmed by the strange beauty of all the different animal parts gleaming under the red spotlights. The meat market in Athens is not only a professional market for professional buyers and restaurant owners but it is also the market where the poor people buy their meat. In the kitchen of the poor of course nothing gets thrown away and every part of an animal is turned into a dish.

Not so in most of the Protestant countries. The aesthetics of butchering an animal and fragmenting it in its anatomic parts has been more and more banned from our Western prosperity minds by presenting the cuts almost as an artificial, disconnected part of the animal, which looks like it never actually lived. There seems to be an inner logic of not eating the parts of an animal that define its very existence, its head, the brain as well as all the life spending organs. Thus we could say that in Western civilization we only tend to eat the parts of an animal that are dispensable to its life, letting our subconscious suggest we didn´t kill it!