Mark Zuckerberg’s year-long personal challenge — to eat only the meat that he kills — is over, the world was casually reminded via the Facebook CEO’s iGrill app.
"I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world," Zuckerberg posted Sunday on his Facebook profile. "Awesome. I'm making a Fred's steak."
For the carnally disinclined, a "Fred steak" isn’t meat culled from the carcass formerly known as "Fred," but marinated beef steak that — thanks to molasses, tamari soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and coffee — looks black even when raw. It is sold pre-dead exclusively from Schaub's Meat, Fish and Poultry Market in Palo Alto, Calif., near where Zuck lives. When TODAY.com called the shop, a representative was able to confirm that the Facebook CEO does indeed buy meats there, and was spotted buying "Fred's marinated sirloin," as its full name goes, over the weekend.
With more than 46,000 "likes," Zuckerberg's meaty update had his Facebook followers surging on the iGrill website to learn more about this app-enabled Bluetooth thermometer which allows grillers to monitor meat temperature from up to 200 feet away. Soon after Zuckerberg’s post, "the iGrill site was inundated with visitors, causing the site to go down for 2 hours," reported the company, in a statement it released celebrating the sudden attention.
Another meat-centric status posted by Zuckerberg last year didn’t receive nearly the enthusiastic reponse. "I just killed a pig and a goat," which Zuckerberg posted May 4, 2011 on his private Facebook profile, "drew a stream of emotional comments, which were a mixture of confusion, curiosity, and outright disgust," Fortune reported at the time.
Zuckerberg decided on his year-long adventure in boutique butchery during a cookout in 2010, when "a bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn't want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive," he told Fortune at the time. "That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don't have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from."
Under the tutelage of Silicon Valley chef and Palo Alto neighbor Jesse Cool, Zuck started visiting local farms such as the one where he helped the aforementioned pig and goat slip their mortal coils.
Of course, as we reported last year, Zuckerberg's Extreme Urban Chicken Farming (yes, he's killed a chicken) was never set to go on indefinitely. It was just one of his personal challenges he says he's undertaken every year in recent memory. For example, in 2009, he wore a tie everyday. In 2010, he took up Chinese. In 2011, killing everything he eats. In 2012, he’s pledged to hunt man code every day.
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