Why Alton Brown Didn't Eat Lamb For Nearly 3 Decades

Alton Brown's favorite food to cook might be omelets, but the celebrity chef and "Good Eats" host has worked with nearly everything. In the protein-heavy world of meat dishes, you can find Alton Brown speaking about prime rib swaps and his genius bologna sandwich, but it turns out Brown has some complicated opinions about lamb meat. Specifically, it's been nearly three decades since he's eaten lamb, something which only changed just recently.

Brown appeared on a recent episode of Mythical Kitchen, the food-themed YouTube channel hosted by Josh Scherer as part of the Mythical online empire. The interview involved the show's lovably ominous "Last Meals" segment where Scherer asks his guest about their hypothetical last meal on Earth, and then they eat it together. For the third course of his last meal, Brown chose a lamb dish and had a story to tell alongside it: "So I have not had a bite of lamb in 25 years," Brown said, even though he called it his favorite type of meat.

What happened, then? Brown briefly worked in a slaughterhouse in 1997. "I was in meat fabrication class and was given the opportunity to go work a spring lamb slaughter," Brown told Scherer. "And I was like, if I don't do this I'm going to be a hypocrite. And so I did. I went and I spent three days killing the little lambsies, and I have not actually put a bite of lamb into my mouth since that time."

So, what prompted Alton Brown to ask for lamb as part of his (hypothetical) last meal? During the interview, Brown says he included lamb because of the strong impression the encounter in 1997 left on him, saying it highlights the "sacrificial role of all meat." Even for folks who cook with meat professionally, working where the meat is made can leave a strong impression. Even if Brown hadn't eaten lamb himself in more than two decades, he's still a professional and has worked with lamb recipes in that time. The chef has provided recipes for lamb tikka masala to his audience and has championed lamb as the ideal meat for an Easter dinner. Notably, he has a recipe on his website called "Silence of the Leg O' Lamb." The dish is served with garlic, brown sugar, and mint.

Perhaps because of the easy "Silence of the Lambs" pun or perhaps because Jodie Foster's character Clarice's childhood memory of screaming lambs captures Brown's complex feelings, he referenced the story again during the Mythical Kitchen interview. The lamb was served alongside "census-taker's liver," which Hannibal Lecter famously enjoyed with fava beans and a fine chianti (Brown and Scherer went with the more respectable calf's liver). Going even deeper, the lamb and liver were paired with amarone, which is the wine Hannibal Lecter drinks in Thomas Harris' original novel instead of the chianti the movie portrays. The lamb was uniquely Alton Brown's personal demon, though.