Bill's posts with tag: food
 I'm getting so damned sick and tired of self-styled vegetarians who pretend they're "superior" to the rest of us I'm trying to think of something seriously calculated to yank their chain...
So how's "World Meet Your Meat Day"?
Those of you who have read The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy will remember the Meal Of The Day at the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, a cowlike animal that comes up to the diner, introduces itself, and volunteers to be eaten. Well, I suggest we meat eaters organise a day where we go to the farms and pick out the cow, pig, chicken or goat, as the case may be, that we want to eat and have it slaughtered and carved up while we watch.
Might be called drastic treatment, but these so-called vegetarians (there isn't any such thing as a genuine vegetarian, and a moment of thought will tell you why - think of all the insect parts, live nematodes and protozoans in the average vegetarian/vegan diet) pretend to be superior to the rest of us and they need a lesson.
So, see you at the beef bin?
This post has a bit of history to it. Many years ago, when I was working with a colleague called Idaiasuklang Tiewsoh in a subsidised hospital, she said something to me (I don't remember what it was) which I misinterpreted as "rat pickle". Afterwards, when we'd stopped laughing, I happened to wonder if rat pickle was actually possible and I asked the best pickle artist I have ever known (my grandmother, who was still alive then) about it. She thought it over (let me explain here that she was a strict vegetarian, before you go getting ideas) and then said it just might be done...
So here is what we thought up between us. I found this recipe after a long desultory search spread over months. It was inside a book on artillery, of all things.
Again - this is not meant to be serious. However, if you should want to try it, by all means go ahead, and let me have...ahem...feedback.
RAT PICKLE
Ingredients:
Two large freshly killed rats (not poisoned, we're not doing Tiger Fugu here, thank you very much);
A quarter of a litre of olive oil (any olive oil, not necessarily extra virgin stuff, whatever that might be);
Two large lemons;
Five large dried red chillies;
100 grams of mint;
Turmeric powder;
Salt to taste.
Preparation:
Using a sharp knife, cut the heads, paws and tails off the rats and skin what's left. Slit open the abdominal cavities and gut the rats completely, removing all viscera. Wash the carcasses thoroughly in running water.
Boil the carcasses for five minutes in water, then dry the carcasses in the sun for a day. Chop them into small pieces.
Break the red chillies into small pieces (this is easy if the chilies are thoroughly dry). Mix the rat meat and chillies together with 100 ml olive oil, enough turmeric powder to give a yellow colour, and salt to taste.
Chop 100 grams of mint into small pieces - as small as you can get them. Squeeze the juice from the lemons (it will come to about 200 ml) and mix the juice and mint with the prepared rat meat.
Take a big jar and put in the mix of rat meat, mint, lemon juice, et al. Add 150 ml more olive oil on top and close the lid tightly.
Sun the jar daily for a month until the colour changes to brown. Then it's...uh...ready for eating.
Bon appetit, people.
 Today, I called a halt to an experiment. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I had, over the past several years, become a near-vegetarian. My diet had become something in the neighbourhood of 95% vegetarian, which is more than several self-professed “vegetarians” I know who binged on meat products when away from the disapproving eyes of the family circle. The reasons for this were several, but in the main they included: The fact that I didn’t actually need meat to survive, since vegetables provided nutrients enough for a day-to-day life; The fact that meat products – with all the hormones and stuff that go into them – are not quite as safe as they used to be; The cost of processed meat products. Again, as I already mentioned, I never was a convinced vegetarian, if any such thing exists. After all, each vegetarian consumes enough animal protein along with vegetables (think insects and protozoans) for it to provide a not insignificant portion of the diet. There’s much more to be discussed about the morality or otherwise of vegetarianism; I’ll talk about it another time. What’s significant was that for years I was mostly a vegetarian. Today, I’ve called a halt to it. I’m going back to eating meat on a regular basis. As I said some time ago, I have resumed weight training and with increased muscle mass has come an increased demand on my body to supply the nutrients, specifically proteins, required for muscular growth. What this means is that in practical terms I am hungry all the time. And along with this I, ever since the time I was obese back in my teenage, have had a mental block to eating a lot. But since vegetables are not easy to digest, and the available protein levels are low, I’d have to eat (and prepare) a tremendous amount to supply me with the proteins I need. I can’t eat that much, not that I have to. So, yes, I’m a carnivore again. Animal proteins are easier to digest, and in salami and sausage form don’t even need cooking. I don’t actually have to enjoy it, but I don’t mind if I do.
I was in junior school (I don’t quite remember how old I was, but most probably this was about 1978 or so – I was seven or eight years old) when one day I got an invitation for dinner from a Muslim neighbour. Now there was nothing odd about the invite; we were always in each other’s houses day in and day out, as children will...though then again, it was a more tolerant time. It’s only that this was a formal invitation, to Eid dinner or something (it was a long time ago and the family concerned moved away long since, so I can’t be specific). But then a Hindu kid of my acquaintance got to know of the invite and came running over. “Don’t eat anything in that house,” he gasped. “They’ll feed you beef and turn you into a Muslim!” I went, well, not in that particular format, but approximately, “WTF”? Well, now, I’m an atheist, so if you’ll excuse me if I don’t understand how on earth eating or not eating a particular food is going to take me to heaven or hell or even change my religion or what. Normally I’d have dismissed it as just another religious incomprehensibility if it were not for some things – how did food ever get mixed up with ritual purity? And why is it that much of the world’s population puts up with being deprived of food nutrients because of some religious scruples? As I was pointing out a while back, beef and pork being interdicted for today’s Hindus, a very large number of them are acutely protein deficient – chicken and mutton are inefficient and expensive for them, even if they are theoretically non-vegetarian. All right, we were all hunter gatherers once, and we didn’t have scruples over food. We wouldn’t be alive now if we had. If it looked even remotely edible, we ate it, and if we didn’t die or fall violently sick, it ended up added to our diet list. (The Japanese didn’t even have that scruple – they still eat the lethal Tiger Fugu pufferfish.) So where did we go cockeyed? Some of it is comprehensible – sort of. The Hindu and the cow I explained some time ago as a deliberate policy decision, and the pork ban for Muslims and Jews may have to do with the pig’s role as a scavenger, something it still does in tribal communities worldwide (though they do eat it all the same). And Hindu widows are supposed to torment themselves eternally for their late husbands, which is why they shouldn’t eat any food that tastes remotely good – and all their food must lack onions and ginger because these are alleged sexual stimulants. If you accept the basic premise, it makes some kind of sense. But there is the other thing. It’s not just food. It’s how that food is prepared or even killed. Why, I wonder, do Muslims and Jews insist their meat is bled to death (halal/kosher) rather than killed any other way? Why are locusts kosher, specifically, but not any other kind of insect? Hindus will decapitate their meat, but neither they nor Christians will scruple to eat kosher/halal meat (of course, if you look at it, some Hindus won't eat chickens and I read somewhere that Leviticus says Christians shouldn't eat cloven hoofed animals, but I'm talking of day-to-day stuff here). So why won’t Jews or Muslims? All right, I’m not asking for explanations from Koran or Torah. I’m asking how it began. After all, the hunter gatherer will eat his food in any way he can kill it, bash it with a stone axe, spear it, whatever. He won’t waste the blood either, he’ll drink it or turn it into a pudding or use it somehow. So where did these fancy ritual killing ideas originate? Incidentally, Khasis torture their pork to death by ramming a pole down the pig’s throat, but that’s because they have a mistaken idea that animals killed slowly and painfully are tastier. Actually the exact opposite is true, but that is just another proof of the blind tenacity of tradition. If anyone has some answers to give, I’d like to hear them.
This is something I've been thinking about for some time now.
As we all know rather well, meat production uses up an inordinate amount of resources. In terms of animal breeding, raising, protection from disease, the growing of grain to feed them, their housing, transport, the expense and effort involved in slaughter and the preservation of the carcasses and their processing, you just think of it...the effort is enormous. And even then, after getting rid of all the inedible parts of the animal, you lose maybe half the animal: skin, bone, hair, feathers, and viscera, none of which is anywhere near as important as a by-product as it once was. Bad.
And then think about all that goes into creating the animal. The economics of the whole thing means that the animal is fed hormones to promote growth, confined to small spaces so that it does not waste food in exercise, routinely fed antibiotics so it doesn't fall sick, and given processed feeds which contain body parts of other slaughtered animals. Even if you aren't an animal rights activist the meat of such a creature doesn't seem worth the eating.
Besides which, the amount of methane animals such as cows release into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming, is simply enormous.
So, what is to be done?
Now, it takes less effort to raise one cow or pig to slaughter weight than an equivalent number of goats or sheep. This is because grass is not an efficient source of energy and ten goats would eat more grass than one cow, even if they weighed the same, to produce the same meat. So, if we could switch the world to beef and pork away from mutton, we would make a start. But the Muslim world will not eat pork and the Hindu world won't touch pork or beef, so there's a problem. Some Hindus - non-vegetarians - won't eat chickens either. Why not? How should I know?
So, if we can't continue indefinitely as we are at this time, we have to find solutions. More meat cannot be produced for a larger population without diverting grain and resources from direct human consumption; and by no means is the world going to turn vegetarian (we are not a vegetarian species anyway. I'll save my anti-vegetarian rant for another occasion).
Anyway. So I'm thinking of solutions to the problem. Here are a couple:
In the short term: Try to promote rabbit farming. If you're not pernickety about eating an animal that swallows its own waste, rabbits are fast growing and convert grass to meat very efficiently and quickly. They're also fairly resistant to disease, much more so than poultry.
In the medium term: Switch to eating insects. We already eat shrimps and lobsters and crabs, most of which consume such delicacies as stinking rotten meat. Insects like locusts and grasshoppers have infinitely less yucky diets and are much more plentiful and can be bred easily. Much of the world's population already eats insects (the Chinese used to call grasshoppers meant to be eaten "woodland shrimp" if I am not mistaken) - they are almost fat free and full of easily assimilable protein, so eating them shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
In the long term: Now here's where I began to let my imagination run a bit wild. Imagine a nutrient broth kept in a huge vat in sterile conditions. Imagine tissue taken from stem cells from whatever animal you want - beef, mutton, pork, whatever - and grown in this vat. Under the right conditions, it could grow forever, into a huge slab of meat tissue. All you would need was to cut slices of whatever size you wanted, perhaps by remote controlled knives. Nothing would die. There would be no waste in transport, or growing grain for the meat, or anything like that. Even vegetarians, I think, should be able to eat that without guilt.
Not that any of it will happen, of course. But it's still a thought.
|  | The caterpillar of a large grey Australian wood moth which lacks working mouth parts, it's supposed to be good to eat. Excellent food for the Bush...they say it tastes like scrambled eggs sprinkled with sugar. Care to try?
After all...just look who's eating them...and the idiot grin on his face. |
 A certain person (I am deliberately being vague so as to disguise this person's identity, but he/she is on Multiply) writes a paean to SUV's which goes roughly as follows (I am again deliberately misquoting enough so as to blur identity, but all the essentials are there):
I
drive an SUV. I love how whenever I have visitors, I can pick them all up at
the airport in my SUV, fit all their luggage in and drive home without being
crammed in the car. I love the fact that I have enough seat belts for my kids,
and their friends whenever we have an outing. I love that this SUV I drive has
a towing package, so I can hitch a trailer and move big furniture items or
whatever, without having to pay for someone else to do it for me. I love how I
can drive my SUV in the snow and not slide off the road. I love my SUV, and I
love the fact that by the time I need to get a new SUV I'll be getting the GMC Acadia, which has improved gas
mileage use and by then will come in Hybrid as well. There'll also be other
optional fuels to choose from. Not a problem, there's plenty of industrious (sic) heritage here too.
Right...
I don't know whether I even have to begin pointing out all the things wrong with this person's attitude, but here goes anyway.
I love how whenever I have visitors, I can pick them all up at
the airport in my SUV, fit all their luggage in and drive home without being
crammed in the car.
I suppose no one else has visitors to be picked up at airports and driven home, and that there are alternatives other than SUVs to do it? I don't think this person actually goes daily to the airport, so it becomes a major issue whether one is "crammed" or not.
I love the fact that I have enough seat belts for my kids,
and their friends whenever we have an outing.
Now I know for a fact that this person has two children, not a football team as the quote would suggest. And if one has to go for outings, surely one can plan how many people would go?
I love that this SUV I drive has
a towing package, so I can hitch a trailer and move big furniture items or
whatever, without having to pay for someone else to do it for me.
I don't suppose he or she moves house daily, do you?
I love how I
can drive my SUV in the snow and not slide off the road.
People were driving in snow without sliding off roads before SUVs were ever thought of, or didn't you know?
I love my SUV,
Big surprise.
and I
love the fact that by the time I need to get a new SUV I'll be getting the GMC Acadia, which has improved gas
mileage use and by then will come in Hybrid as well.
By the time you need to get a new SUV? Do you change SUVs with the year and model? The era of living disposably is past, or didn't you know? As to "improved gas milage", what does that translate into? Does it use only as much fuel as three ordinary cars, instead of five? And as for "hybrid", I'll tackle it with the next bit.
There'll also be other
optional fuels to choose from.
Which? Ethanol? Biodiesel? Let's see. Already, maize ("corn") prices in the US are shooting up because of food crops being diverted to produce ethanol for vehicles...so that a minority of pampered Americans - and their wannabe imitators - can continue to drive around in their dangerous, in fact lethal, fuel guzzling, environment destroying vehicles which take up inordinate amounts of road space, contribute to global warming, and kill people far more easily than normal cars.
And of course as global prices shoot up I can already see speculators in poor countries, where people are starving, buy up food grains and export them to be turned into ethanol so these people can continue to indulge themselves.
Then, as global warming induced droughts and floods sweep the world, and food production plunges, there is still going to be the requirement to plunder grain for these vehicles. So much so that invasions may be conducted for the grain and for food to eat. Not to be turned into fuel. Who can drink petrol?
But, I forgot. Have faith, global warming is a myth, and Al Gore is a hypocrite.
Not a problem, there's plenty of industrious (sic) heritage here too.
Not nearly enough to heal the damage already done, let alone fixing what you're going to do.
There is a myth (it is, unfortunately, only a myth) that the average person swallows four, or eight, or 20,000 spiders in one's sleep every year or every lifetime. (I guess, though, if you sleep with your mouth open, drifting male spiders, which are very tiny, might get drawn into your mouth when you breathe in, once in a very, very long while.)
But we do eat thousands of unseen animals along with our food. Once while having chop suey I found little black cooked caterpillars in the mix. By that time I had already eaten half the serving (the lighting in the restaurant was, probably deliberately, very bad) so I must have ingested a considerable number...
I wonder in what culinary purgatory this leaves all the strict vegetarians?
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