I guess blogs are the place to put thoughts that don't have any better outlet, so here goes. There's a moron criminal in Austin vandalizing restaurants that serve foie gras or veal, and then putting the pictures on a web site, even. I'm a meat eater, and have had foie gras maybe 6 times in my life, and sorry spray painters, but it really is that good. We're also friends of the owners/chefs at Aquarelle, one of the targets of this "activist," and to treat independent high-end French restauranteurs like the worst sponsors of animal cruelty, in a city filled with the usual KFCs, McDonald's, Taco Bells, etc. is so wrongheaded I don't quite know where to begin. I'll leave it to folks like Anthony Bourdain and Michael Pollan to give a fuller history of the dish and its cultural background, but news flash - ridding the city or country of foie gras would barely be a drop in the ocean of animal production, or end the worst of any cruel practices.
I flatter myself to think I have complicated thoughts on eating meat, though they are probably just rationalizations like everything else. Yes, humans have reached the point where we could nourish ourselves with a manmade vitamin paste, but does that mean we have to? We could also all wear featureless beige robes, and drink only water, and live inside pure white cubes, and we could survive. But would we be "living"? Eating different food is fun, and human beings have been eating animal meat from as soon as they learned how.
And yeah, when it gets down to it, I do believe humans are superior to other animals (find me a duck with a blog, dammit!) and thus the whole "food chain" idea makes sense to me. If an advanced alien race shows up feeling peckish, and they can outwit us, then fair enough. For now we got the #1 slot. In the US, we have the luxury to debate our food sources and the morality of a ear of corn's energy consumption and whatnot, so it seems the idea of "food=waking up again tomorrow" has gotten lost inside a number of distracting side issues.
My ideal would be that animals are treated respectfully while alive, killed quickly when the time comes (the idea of "humane" killing doesn't quite compute for me), and then cooked up tasty. I'd also like the humans who work on farms raising animals and growing and picking fruits and vegetables, or in the processing plants, or in the food stores and restaurants, to be given greater consideration than their products. If it takes a battle over a small luxury like foie gras to spark a wider discussion of how we currently feed ourselves, then maybe it is a worthwhile sacrifice. But so far I suspect the "Vegangstar" has provoked many more people to try foie gras for the first time than swear it off.
1 comment:
I'm willing to allow that eating meat might be immoral. After all, "nature" (which seems to condone meateating via the food chain) also condones infanticide and genocide via intraspecies competition. It happens all the time in the animal world, after all.
To be human is to have a choice about what comes naturally. We no longer need to eat meat, so if we do, it's a choice -- a choice we need to justify with moral reasoning.
I'm not a vegetarian, and I am in full agreement with you on the misguided jerk who thinks fine diners and chefs who love food and revere the ingredients that go into it are the enemy. But it may be that my failure to go veg is a moral lapse on my part. It's based on my desire rather than any good reason -- because I don't think human omnivorousness, in and of itself, is a good reason. We're also not monogamous by nature, but that doesn't make marital infidelity right.
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