The Meat of the Matter

On a very short bus ride on the #9 from Broadway and Windsor to Commercial Drive, a white man maybe in his 70s or so told me a very interesting story. He was from Newfoundland, as best I recall, and he grew up having only one kind of meat, and that was moose that they hunted themselves. He said he used to hunt moose on a bicycle. "You don't really hunt them, there were so many around, you just picked out the one you wanted." He said that there was no such thing as tough moose meat, that no matter how old the moose was, the meat was always tender, and that it was the best meat in the world because it not only didn't clog the arteries, it cleaned them. He said if you ate only moose all your life, you could be 80 and have the arteries of a 20 year old. The only time you couldn't eat moose was in the mating season, "because they get so wild" and the meat was not fit at that time. He said he didn't blame them because it was such a short mating season, their only chance all year long, they got frantic and they would attack anything. He said the only other meat that was as good for you as moose was maybe kangaroo meat, and maybe ostrich. I mentioned that I had only eaten ostrich once and turned out I was allergic to it, I broke out in hives. And he told me that was certainly possible, because "every kind of meat has at least one enzyme that is not in any other meat."

It is always lovely to meet neighbourhood experts. I thank the uncle for the little lesson in about 8 blocks.