Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson is the director of experience design at the National Museum of American History, at the Smithsonian Institution. He grew up in a family that hunted for and/or raised about half of the meat they ate.

These formative experiences have informed his Good Meat® values, as an adult, and feed it to his family, which includes his wife, daughter, son, two dogs and two cats. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

How do you define your Good Meat® values?

To me, it's about the good feeling I get when buying, preparing and consuming it. My Good Meat® values include meat that must be good for the land, the animals, and all the people involved. It’s also about knowledge. I want to know as much as I can about the animal, its life and death. What I hear from people who are otherwise caring and informed about food issues, but who say about the animals they eat, “I’ll eat it but I don’t want to know anything about it”, is opposite of my thinking. I’ve always been like the carnivorous Looney Tunes characters, Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote. I can look at a living creature and envision a roast, but I can also love and respect the live animal. I really feel it’s important to have that relationship, in order to care enough to try to envision a system that respects animals, people, and that natural world.

What experience led you to be a conscious consumer?

I grew up raising or hunting about half of the meat we ate and always had a better feeling about meat that my family produced. This was before the rise of widespread confinement livestock and poultry production, so much of that feeling was about pride, independence, and taste. Those are still chief concerns for me, but animal welfare and ecological sustainability have become so much more important. On the grain farms that surrounded my family’s acreage in southern Ontario, Canada, over the years we saw the change in agriculture very clearly. When I was a small child, I remember watching the fields around us being tilled and saw the flocks of gulls fly in from Lake St. Clair and follow the tractor along, just as our chickens would follow our tractor in our fields looking for worms and insects. By the end of the century, while our beautiful soil stayed fertile, when the surrounding farms were tilled, no birds came because nothing lived in the soil, despite the increased corn yield. This was an apt metaphor for the rise in extractive food production generally, to me, and has led me to try to find Good Meat, as well as grains and vegetables.

Where do you buy/source most of your meat?

My friends and family have always remarked on my eccentric shopping behaviors! I’ve always gone to many sources for various foods and products. We belong to a buying club in my town, for meat from Polyface Farms in Virginia, and I go to our local year round farmers market. But having raised a lot of my own food throughout my life on my family’s farm, I’m generally looking for a more cost effective option and try to buy in bulk directly from farmers or whole meat butchers, when I can, to fill our freezers. I cure my own meats, but also love products from trusted and quality producers like S. Wallace Edwards bacon and Herb Eckhouse’s La Quercia products. This year, due to the pandemic and our family doing work and school from home, we have raised meat chickens in our backyard. In addition, I take advantage of the drastic overpopulation of deer in the DC suburbs and can put several in the freezer each year.

What meat, or meat dish, do you eat most regularly and what do you eat for a special occasion?

My kids feel we can’t go wrong with great pasta, or rice and other grains from Anson Mills, and some meat to go with it. So, I braise our venison, pork or beef and make lots of sauces from Italian tomato based sauces to mole. Our own chicken generally gets barbecued or roasted. For special occasions, it’s not so much about what we make, as how complicated a dish it is. I generally like to add value for a special occasion and cure meat or make sausage or otherwise prepare a dish in a special way.

What is your biggest challenge or obstacle when it comes to being a Good Meat® consumer?

There are many struggles. Time generally is a major one. Other issues are: One finicky child, who wants fast food chicken nuggets; sports schedules that keep us on the go; taking the time to pack lunches rather than going to restaurants near work; the time it takes to source meat rather than going to Costco; traveling and dining out.