Sing In Me, Meat

Meat is an important part of in our social fabric, but it has an equally significant role in the creative world. Muse to many of history's greatest artists, meat has long been the inspiration for cultural icons around the globe. Consider a few examples.















A common misconception is that Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" was inspired by the last days of Jesus. Closer examination shows that the central focus of the painting is the succulent lamb chop to the right of Bartholomew. A moving depiction of the influence meat has both artistically and spiritually.





















A famous printer's error led to the mistitling of this seminal concept album. Meat the Beatles!, as it's properly known, contains a number of the Fab Four's greatest hits, including "I Want to Hold Your Meat" and "All My Veal." Not to be missed.
















More than one swain has wooed a lass with these meditations on the romance of meat. Whitman's most famous poem begins:

I sing the body electric,
The meats of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
Turkey, bacon, a pound of jerky, I respond to them,
And digest them, and charge them full with the charge of the pancreas.

Who could not fall in love upon hearing these words?


The list goes on. Merce Cunningham's "Lamb Septet." Miles Davis's "Kind of Pork." James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Butcher as a Young Man." Claude Monet's "Hamstacks." The famous meat masks of Africa and the delicate Kobe beef designs of late 19th-century Japan. It is as hard to imagine a world without meat as it is a world without art. Indeed, perhaps they are the same.