A highlight of Rolling Stone’s interview with Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is the insight it gives into what goes on when a couple of Silicon Valley billionaire bros get together.
Asked to describe his “most memorable encounter” with the Facebook CEO, Dorsey cast his mind back to 2011, the year Mark Zuckerberg challenged himself to eat only meat he had slaughtered. “He made goat for me for dinner,” recalled Dorsey. “He killed the goat.”
Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt asked the obvious follow-up question: “In front of you?” No, clarified Dorsey, it was one Zuck had killed earlier – “with a laser gun and then the knife”, before sending the body to the butcher. The rest of their exchange deserves to be reproduced in full:
RS: A … laser gun?
Dorsey: I don’t know. A stun gun. They stun it, and then he knifed it. Then they send it to a butcher. Evidently in Palo Alto there’s a rule or regulation that you can have six livestock on any lot of land, so he had six goats at the time. I go, “We’re eating the goat you killed?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Have you eaten goat before?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love it.” I’m like, “What else are we having?” “Salad.” I said, “Where is the goat?” “It’s in the oven.” Then we waited for about 30 minutes. He’s like, “I think it’s done now.” We go in the dining room. He puts the goat down. It was cold. That was memorable. I don’t know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad.
It was hard to see the metaphor in that, responded Hiatt. Dorsey suggested obliquely: “Revenge is a dish best served warm. Or cold.”
Goat meat – in particular kid, which is tender and milder in flavour, like lamb – is tipped to be a huge food trend this year, following the steady increase in popularity of goat’s milk and cheese, as well as demand for ethical meat.
It was recently reported that supermarkets have been testing goat recipes for sausages, meatballs and ready meals as a means of reducing waste – tens of thousands of male goats are culled each year because they cannot produce dairy products. The Goatober initiative sees a month-long celebration each year to raise awareness of the culling by promoting goat dishes on restaurant menus. It began in the US in 2011, but last year redoubled its efforts, coordinating campaigns in the US, UK and Europe.
James Whetlor, founder of the Devon-based goat-meat supplier Cabrito, a former chef at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage and Goatober’s UK spokesman, says eating goat meat is already common in large parts of the world, pointing out that they have been eating it in Nigeria for thousands of years.
As Global Meat News has reported, even Australia is “ahead of the curve in realising the potential of goat meat” as one of the world’s biggest exporters, with a five-year research and development plan under way to increase sales.
Stunning, then knifing your own goat to serve to your friend, however, is the sort of “otherworldly experience” you go for “when you’ve got loads of money”, says Whetlor. As for Zuckerberg’s treatment, oven cooking a goat for half an hour is “brave, I would say” – western European tastes tend to favour a treatment like that of mutton, where the meat is cooked for longer and falls off the bone.
Several UK restaurants, including St John and Ottolenghi in London, along with the chain Turtle Bay, already serve goat dishes. Trevor Gulliver, proprietor of St. John, says the restaurant has served goat for many years – often braised, in a large dish to be shared at the table, and even sometimes as offal in keeping with its nose-to-tail ethos. “We are delighted to see more and more people using it. It just makes sense.” It is easy to source ethically and locally (St John has the same supplier for meat and cheese) and great to cook with – once one has removed traces of goats’ notoriously wide-ranging diet. “Goats are fantastic converter – I don’t know how many bits of laundry and sheets off clotheslines we’ve had sent up to us in different forms.”
Eventually, Whetlor says, that trend is bound to trickle down to retailers’ test kitchens. “Things are definitely moving in the goat-meat market … There will be a British goat meat product on supermarket shelves by this time next year. I will be stunned if there isn’t.” Like one of Zuck’s goats.
The fact that goat cropped up at all in a Rolling Stone interview reflects its new position in the zeitgeist, suggests Whetlor, as well as the fact that the animal’s public image might align with Zuckerberg’s own. “There’s some slightly demonic stuff going on with goat – it’s always been seen in western culture as not to be trusted, or unusual,” he says. “It just plays into the idea that Zuckerberg is not quite human.”