How do we know the world isn’t flat?

Before you go off and answer this question and stonewall your mind, let me explain the context of the question.

We have been a bit exploratory in our food and cooking conquests of late, with meals featuring pork heart and half a pig head.  Bold moves to say the least from a family accustomed to ground meat and steaks.  Staying in a world wrapped in familiarity was safe and easy to do.

That bubble was popped when we decided to go big and split half of a pork share from The Barry Farm.  Sure there were the familiars of pork chops, ground pork, and roasts.  There was also some organ meat, pig feet, and half a face.

I’m not gonna lie, it was pretty daunting to open the freezer to see him staring back at me.

I mean, how the hell were we going to cook it?  It was intimidating to say the least.  We battled with the notion of giving it to a friend but to give it a shot.  How could we waste perfectly good food, no matter how foreign it seemed to us?

Long story short, my wife prepared it, we ate it and it worked out.  To be perfectly honest, my wife was a little weirded out by the whole process but my daughter and I enjoyed it all.  Plus the dogs loved the skin.

This post isn’t all about our exploits of our eating habits however.  It’s more importantly about WHY something like pig face was so foreign to us in the first place.

This is where the question comes into play.  “How do we know the world isn’t flat?”  Quite frankly we don’t until we get out there and do some exploration.

You don’t have to be Marco Polo (yea he was a guy), Columbus, or Sir Richard Branson.  You can get out there and discover a whole new world.  Much like Aladdin did.

You’ll never know what is out there until you try it or search for it.

• I would never have known that cheek meat of a pig was so heavenly.
• I would never have known that it was so easy to cook.
•  I never would have known that some of the nicest restaurants in Htown were preparing pig head as a high priced delicacy and I was paying much less than what the restaurant price
• I never would have known that I supported three small business in the process of purchasing the head

That’s a lot to never know.  All because I allowed fear and intimidation drive my thought process and actions.

As it turns out, this eating nose-to-tail thing happens all over the world.  It happens in restaurants and homes in the US. It has existed for a while.  I’m just late to the party.

I now have proof that the world is in fact round.  I can prove it.  You can as well and here’s how.

1. Change your focus from eating “healthy” to eating responsibly.  Lets not obsess over the calorie number or the macro content.
2. Get your butt in the kitchen.  And then cook.
3. Try something different once a month.  A new recipe, a new twist on a recipe, or a different meat/ veggie on your plate.

It’s okay to be a little intimidated.  It happens.  I’m not saying you be Andrew Zimmerman and eat some really wild things.  That dude gets crazy.

Let’s explore this world for everything it has to offer.  Cuisine included.  If we don’t discover things for ourselves, we don’t truly live.  #mindblowingthought

We can’t make any claims on the flatness of the edible world until we do. Now go get your Lewis and Clark on.