generations’ worth – of dreadful, boring fare.

Naše Maso has an exhaustive program of sourcing its meat, forging relations with farmers and even setting demands on how it would prefer the cows and pigs to be bred. And it’s not the only place in Prague doing this. The Real Meat Society, a butcher shop on the other side of Old Town, has a similar philosophy of using organic grass-fed, free-range animal products.
But with only a few places putting such thought into their meat, the city has a long way to go. “It has gotten a lot worse before it has gotten better,” Kšána said. “In the 1970s and ‘80s, meat was rationed and so eating it every day wasn’t a normal part of our lives. After the ‘89 revolution, though, meat was in abundance and people here got used to it. They also got used to the low quality that we were being fed.”
“Our goal,” Kšána added, “is to re-educate Czechs on what high-quality meat, including sausages, really means. And it’s working.”
The country has, in fact, come a long way. To put Czech cuisine into a historical context, we have to go back to 1948, when the communists staged a successful coup and took over the country. A couple of years later, the government issued a book called Recipes for Warm Meals, which dictated what you could serve at restaurants. Anything that popped up on a menu that wasn’t in the book was grounds for serious punishment. This severely limited the scope of Czech cuisine. Add to that the fact that food, particularly meat, was rationed and also distributed all over the Communist bloc, and you’ve got a recipe for a lifetime – or in this case, a few generations’ worth – of dreadful, boring fare.