The New Yorker gets mail about its review of Jonathan Safran Foer's vegetarian book. Including someone who said he was writing from the parking lot of a slaughterhouse: "I wonder if Foer has ever visited, or considered the impact of, a thousand-acre soybean monoculture. We have demanded cheap food, and so we have received cheap, destructive food production. Second, vegetarian moralism denies an essential fact of living: death. Everything dies, and not always in its due time." The great beyond eagerly waits for all forms of meat, including the writing kind of meat!
Monday, November 23, 2009
52
"Hey, he was going to die eventually anyway..."
I feel that way about fur. Especially vintage fur. Like any of those animals would be alive in the wild today.
It continues:
The deaths of those ten sheep, all individuals to me, weigh heavy and will not fade. And yet to be so intimate with the great other is enriching beyond description.
Death: it's like vitamin supplements for the SOUL.
Adherents to the principle that it's wrong for humans to eat or otherwise exploit other animals perpetuate an anthropocentric exceptionalism: the notion that human beings are uniquely morally obliged to abstain from eating other fauna. Some deep ecologists hold that this exceptionalism is an ideological block to progressive ecology because it perpetuates the illusion that we somehow exist outside of the biosphere. Only when we profoundly accept our status as animals will we be able to appreciate our dependence on ecological stability. This line of argument makes moralistic vegans insanely angry!
I love moralistic vegans...with a little tobasco.
mmmm, grass-fed vegans.
Of course it does... Logic has a tendency to do that to extremists. My other favs are the hyper "moral" veggites who own pets.
that's a bit more of an undertaking. pet-owning hyper moral veggites should be properly marinated. please place your orders at least 24 hours in advance.
Can I get one deep fried for this Thursday?
It's slavery.
Could we pay the pets, and then they'd be more like live-in servants?
what types of pets? in the case of reptiles, birds, rabbits, etc., the naturalist would agree with you. then again, most vegetarians are not naturalists, in fact, far from it, as any intelligent vegetarian would concur that humans are omnivores. that said, any intelligent naturalist knows that the evolution of dogs depended solely on their co-habitation with humans. thus, the pet dog.
secondary thinking!
Then again "intimacy with the great other" smacks of Heidegger, so vegans might just be right.
well I don't know when dude wrote his response Because “intimacy with the great other†is getting too goddamn expensive.
And then a more intelligent species will show up and start using you for food and then you'll be all,anthropocentric exceptionalism, anthropocentric exceptionalism, as your body slides down their throats. Didn't (Speilberg's) War of the Worlds teach you anything?
Besides, we don't eat other animals to survive - we do it for amusement, or pleasure, etc., but survival? Not so much.
I admit this is a totally cynical argument, but the debate is worthwhile. Do you maintain that all omnivorous species are obliged to eat only veggies?
Having said that, if we are one day (or are now being) farmed by another species, I think we will totally deserve it for a variety of reasons.
All human culture is anthropocentric exceptionalism, including morality.
You may disagree with the assertion that vegetarianism is the uniquely moral way to eat, but I don't see how you can disagree with it on the grounds that it is a moralism, or unique to humans. Morality (or moralities if you prefer) have forbidden humans plenty of things which animals do.
Much of human culture is exceptional with respect to other animals, but framing veganism/vegetarianism as a moral obligation and disregarding animals who eat meat on the grounds that humans are uniquely morally endowed is an exceptionalism. To my mind the weakest part of the argument is the assumption that anthropocentrism prevents a deep ecological mindset shift. Couldn't we be vegan exceptionalists who also deeply recognize our animality?
The circles! They bring me round and round!
Isn't this an argument for cannibalism?
I think most vertebrates resort to cannibalism only in cases of extreme resource shortage. Humans included!
We could totally eat our young out of boredom or non-attachment. Pretty common.
You Ate What You Will Be.
Right! Do you want to be a raging bull or a fucking veggie pattie or some other weird, gross, pansy ass shit like that. I don't eat a lot of red meat, but I am completely comfortable saying I would rather have the raging bull in my mouth (and heart) and The veggies shall remain part of my balanced diet, not the entirety of.
I love "You Are What You Eat." http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/273/index.jsp
I never mix meats unless I am certain that the pig and the turkey or what have you being comsumed were acquanited. Seems wrong to put two strangers on the same piece of bread.
My my I have fat fingers.
Now I want Italian sausage, thanks.
seriously, you wanted italian sausage before you read this peice didn't you?
Unfortunately none of the mail contained advice for ambivalent vegetarians who--although they realize that there is no escaping all that death and destruction--due to a decade's inertia (and a little bit of poverty) are just, well, stuck that way.
I solve that dilemma by only eating meat that I'm not paying for. That way I'm not personally economically contributing to the perpetuation of the meat industry, but I can have bacon.
Don't look at me like that, it makes sense, I swear.
This free-meat ethos makes a whole lot more sense than, say, my current half-assed-riddled-with-contingencies attempts to be quasi-vegan. Godspeed, P.G.O.A.T.!
We called this "freeganism," except we were less smart about it and only applied it to dairy on dumpster dived Pappa John's and Entenmann's. Which, in hindsight, gross.
Thank you for "freeganism." That's much cleverer and more succinct than my current "I'm a vegetarian but not really" explanation of my eating habits.
I was so hoping for fucking instructions on the motherfucking cooking of fucking bacon upon glancing at the headline. Goddamn shit-for-brains fucks.
You got your commenter tag right before me. Hi.
Cosmic. Like, with Internets.
@FlipperBaby: He is, after all, the Kwisatz Haderach.
I once made some fucking bacon and fried a fucking steak in the fucking bacon grease and it was pretty fucking good.
How to fry bacon is go to Balk's fucking store and ask his mother for a bunch of fresh spinach the size of an intelligent man's head, advertised as "washed three times," as all spinach is advertised. Rinse it leaf by leaf in a large bowl, by hand, until there is no more feces on it. Fry as many sliced-up rashers of bacon as you can afford on motherfucking medium low in a high-walled skillet and fucking throw the dripping wet washed spinach in on top of the fucking frying bacon. The fucking heap of fucking dripping spinach is fucking going to fucking wilt, so it doesn't matter that it is twice as high as the skillet, because you are a fuckhead. When the spinach is wilted, fuck you and remove it from the skillet along with the bacon pieces and salt it and eat it. Go swimmin' with bare-nekkid vegan wimmin and recite the poem by Swinburne that begins, "Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow," and see how long they stay vegan after that.
If we ate the meat of things that eat meat, the whole problem would be (somehow) solved, but since we eat the meat of things that eat plants, we compound the problem.
Meantime, I would die in two days if I couldn't eat meat.
As a not unintelligent New Zealander once said - 'scratch a hippy, find a fascist'.
I like the idea that if you scratched a hippie it would make him scream and a jack-booted, leather-wearing fascist would come running up to defend him, because the one thing a fascist hates more than a hippie is you.
Jonah Goldberg is from New Zealand? And "not unintelligent"?!
well, Kiwis are an exceptionalism unto themselves, sometimes, bless'em.
It's not like all those mistreated pigs and what-not were plucked from nature -- were it not for meat mills they would never have been born.
Given how little life the universe seems to throw off, who is to say that even partial sentience under even circumstances as grim as Foer describes isn't a gift of incalculable value and a thing of near-unimaginable beauty, in the scheme of things?
Also he can't possibly really care about these animals because they aren't him.
Needs more cursing.
Sentience just makes things more delicious. Think about it.
Air - Not at all salty, and wholly unsatisfying
Water - Still no sentience, and it shows.
Lettuce - BO-Ring.
Insects - even with chocolate, not something I would enjoy
Escargots - Yeah, but with a LOT of garlic and butter. Because FYI not great.
Birds - YESDELICIOUS
Pigs/cows -YESMOREDELICIOUS
Humans - obviously, the sweetest plum.
There.
Would I could stand outside a JSF reading holding up the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and yelling, "Here's the rest of your veggie burger!"
thanks for telling all vegetarians what they are like! good thing you're not one of those subtle, complex assholes who things people are individuals within groups! WHAT'S THAT ABOUT, AMIRITE?
*thinks
I never understand why people get so defensive whenever the words vegetarian/vegan come up. It's like the simple act of declaring, "I'm vegetarian" is somehow slapping a meat-eater in the face.
Which I'm not! I'm going to be at a Thanksgiving dinner complete with turkey which has been so overbred until it has no flavor and must be brined for a day in plants in order to taste good. :-)
The only time I ever feel really militant about eating meat at all is when I think about the factory farming and all of the clear and obvious health problems involved. It's ok to be a little enlightened and still eat meat! It's not inherently wrong in and of itself, but we've certainly created a gross, unsustainable process when there are other ways to get your fatback fix.