Just Call Me a Deadbeat Meat Eater

Three years ago, inspired by dreams of grilling chuletas de fillete over woodfire with my son the way my father and I did during our year together in Mexico, I began building a white stucco grill in my backyard. After the first year of work, I covered it with a tarp until I could finish it the following spring. Then, as we sat at dinner one night that winter, my seven-year-old boy Marcel told me he was swearing off beef. “It’s mean to the cow,” he said, as a perfectly pan-seared steak got cold before him. Someone had told him that his favorite animal, the manatee, was a sea cow; he couldn’t bring himself to eat a relative of his beloved stuffed manatee, “Mano.”

I wrote about this dilemma for this publication at the time, concluding that I should support his sensitivity. Instead of christening the grill with a meat feast, I said we’d make vegetables. But the truth is, the first meal to come off that grill may well have been a spit-roasted Peruvian chicken.