Cadmium Magenta said:
So why do we think it's okay to deprive an entire species of their liberty and kill them for their flesh?
To sum it up: Just because we *can* eat anything, doesn't necessarily mean that we *should*.
What do you think? I'm very curious to know.
Hey there. While I know my way around Tofu, I mostly stick to the
eat anything motto, and I very much enjoy preparing and eating meat. With a side of veggies, and a very moderate amount of carbs. I love a little bit of butter in my olive oil. It goes so well with anything from carrots to noodles to proper meat. Silky shine, great taste, multiplies any and all sugar, salt or spice added.
I like things "real", and some of the more perverted ideas, to me, would include any industrially prepared food, including soy or quorn based meat-look-and-taste-alikes. Or Jellybeans tasting like bacon. That just seems wrong to me.
I enjoy grinding and shredding my soy bean curd to make veggie/vegan tasty dishes that would otherwise be based on, say, crumbled ground meat, and it really is just as good as with meat, all it takes is more spices, herbs, sauces or a marinade, and usually more time for preparation. It's a nice element within an all-embracing cuisine, but I would never want to limit myself to vegan cooking only, because I really do love my eggs, my meat, my milk, my cheese and my bacon. Yes, I do love my planet, too, but I really think most of the theories we've been fed with lately are misanthropical loony bin material.
Yes, I am a hunting-killing-gathering type of person. I really do enjoy doing things myself and sharing the knowledge, so even kids - or especially kids - know the difference between biting into self-made jerky or some cheaply bought candy crap. I like to trick them, at times, and I make them eat turnips and carrots and parsnips when they think they are munching on some unhealthy sweet treat. Kids make you reconsider simple things, like spinach or Brussels sprouts.
We entertain our own very veggie, very non-flowery garden, and to be honest - just between you and me now: Deep down in my core I am genuinely saddened when snails "kill" some salad or destroy some other crops. When a cherished and, yes, beloved apple tree falls sick we treat it and cure it and help it as much as we can. Not just because we want them apples. When it gets better, it's happy time for all, yet still we don't feel like crafting our own loincloths and falling back to troglodyte pagan times. I can easily kill dozens of snails to protect the plants, but I would never use poison, because I'd fear I'd poison the soil, the plants, the cats, the dogs, the foxes and crows and everything else, including us silly humans. And we can't have that, now, can we. The lesser of two evils does seem like a decent approach to me.
When we go fish or hunt, we go out to obtain food in a seemingly very roundabout fashion. We go out, we stand around, we sit around, we sneak and we run and we hide and we wait some more. The shot - most of the time it is but a single shot - still always feels like sin, for it disrupts the silence of nature, the great outdoors in which we always feel to be but guests. But as long as we do it properly, we do help nature keep balance. We all enjoy eating meat, otherwise it would often be difficult or detrimental to our network of relationships.
Sometimes, for example for our popular Sushi-sessions, I offer veggie-only plates for picky guests. This allows for culturally-handicapped folks (especially of the religious kind) to stay away from pork, cow or any meat at all. For most religious folks, this is good enough. Others, especially of the oft-cited pseudo-religious (but usually openly non-religious) veggie/vegan preachers, invade our space, and they will very rarely become regular guests, because those that do have a tendency to annoy do so with quite a punch, a lot of words, and an ego that could wipe out small towns were it to ever explode.
We enjoy the company of cats, dogs, snakes, skinks, scorpions, spiders, cockroaches and whatnot. Some we keep and feed because we feel good having them around, seeing them eat and drink and grow and make (and have) babies. Others we keep because we use them to feed the other animals.
So, the cockroaches would probably be the "lowest" creatures in the bunch. They haven't felt like evolving much for hundreds of millions of years. We feed them oats, fresh fruit, potato husks, veggie material and protein-rich pellets of bird or cat or dog food - all as natural as possible. If left to their own devices, these magnificent cockroach critters would start munching away on the wood material inside the boxes we made their homes. They would eat all the paper and cardboard and whatnot, because they can. Some would very quickly turn on their fellow roaches, nibbling on their antennae, legs, heads and whatnot. Those without heads will find it impossible to eat, bummer that. Bigger ones would eat all the smaller ones. They would keep themselves alive by thinning out their population. It's OK for roaches to do that, but we wouldn't want to witness anything like that in cats, dogs or humans. We humans have a brain that is far too big to allow for anything stupid or evil, yet we've become quite elaborate in making life harsh for ourselves and/or others, and we are masters a making things complicated.
I might sometimes mix up vegetarian and vegan - don't take that too personal. In my ignorance, I consider them both to be exlusive and oftentimes very narrow-minded pseudo-elitarian world views, really. The notions that brought veganism to be seem to meanwhile invade the scientific space, just as religious mumbo jumbo invades the supermarket packaged meat aisles. The further away from nature we are, the easier it is to become antisocial, and pests to each other.
Killing an animal is messy. Everyone who enjoys meat should know what it looks and smells like. But, if done properly and with respect, it is just part of us being human. If you have a snake for thirty years, you don't want it to get hurt by an overly aggressive rat. Eyes don't grow back.
Some people claim to have been traumatized when they first - accidentally or otherwise - witnessed an animal getting slaughtered. I think it's not the act of turning the creature into meat that's bad for kids, but the lack of shared knowledge, the lack of actively transferring knowledge to the little ones that helps them understand the world around them and, ideally, themselves.
One lady in our neighbourhood fed her dog in a vegetarian, if not vegan manner, with lots of simple recipes (boiled rice) and some very odd ways of delivering non-animal proteins. The dog grew normally, a bit too fat even in the end. It smelled funny and eventually developed bone cancer, not even four years old.
Sure, our dogs do enjoy pasta and all the treats we let them have (or to which they sneakily help themselves to), but wanting to restrict a dog to a vegetarian or even vegan diet should be considered a crime, and raising kids on vegan diets just turned out to be not the smartest idea. If it was all peachy, your overly ethical approach to pondering on food would, in my eyes, be justified. However, it is not. Yes, I am entertaining relationships to, say, Sikhs, and their veggie-only cooking has influenced my handling of veggies, cardamom and gram flour. Still, I've incorporated their ways into my cooking, and I've expanded my horizon,
because I can and
because I want to .
