On Meat and Real Estate are both Murder
This is always a strange debate for me! I grew up in a pescetarian/vegetarian household in the middle of the rural midwest. And the only rationale my mother ever gave was that eating meat was gross and therefore we didn't do it.
That was all, but for that, I spent my childhood picking pepperoni off of my pizza at friends' birthday parties, ate warmed-up lentil soup in the school cafeteria, never let a chicken finger dipped in ranch pass the threshold of my mouth at various fast food restaurants in high school. At 26, I'm still a vegetarian, and my younger sisters (20 and 17) are as well. It just stuck, became something that identified our family as a cohesive unit, different from others around us. Ideological reasoning for it (factory farms are pretty gross, eating some animals while living with others as pets is kind of silly) came later, to give a firmer underpinning to what was a lifestyle I couldn't give up now if I tried.
I guess this is my way of saying Safran Foer's kids probably won't be sneaking out to the Steakhouse. Most of us eat the way we were raised, and challenging that is extremely difficult.
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On Sandra Tsing Loh, Thief
Why oh why must there be so much anger against women who don't sacrifice literally every aspect of themselves to their children? Why is Loh's affair worse than her husband spending 20 weeks out of every year away from his family?
The reactions here make me feel similarly to whenever I see women tearing apart the character of Betty Draper for being such a horrible mother. As though none of us would spend our time smoking, drinking, and looking for an escape route if we were left home all day to raise children alone, while the man of the house drank and fucked his way throughout the greater NYC area...