After a vegetarian childhood filled with alfalfa sprouts, Tara finds herself challenged—by ill health that has her doctor ordering her to eat meat, and by a butcher who dares her to cook her way through his meat counter.

What’s a Californian vegetarian to do? She pushes the cubes of tofu aside and tries to find her way through a foreign world of meat and men. But how to find good meat, how to cook it, and should we even be eating it in the first place? The questions pile up and it’s tempting to give up and go back to tempeh. At the same time, how does she resist the lure of bacon, of a clubby steakhouse, of cowboys and butchers and men who cook with fire? Omnivore’s dilemma, indeed.

The Butcher & The Vegetarian is the rollicking and relevant story of one woman’s quest to reconcile a nontraditional upbringing with carnal desires.

Published by Rodale, February 2010

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