demagogue on 19/11/2012 at 09:26
Quote Posted by hopper
1. The UK is a part of Europe.
But the story was from Germany, and I was thinking of Continental Europe (to include Finland), and that we shouldn't necessarily assume the UK says anything about people buying meat in German shopping centers or in Finland ... which is why I ended up qualifying it like that with the unfortunate wording. But yes I know the UK is part of Europe, though I read books that tell me it's still the Black Sheep of the region & looked at skeptically by other European countries as something culturally between Europe & North America, and people apparently have some self-conscious thing actually identifying themselves as Europeans. Or whatever.
Quote:
2. It has nothing to do with fancying themselves anything gentle, and everything to do with the fact that venison is rarer than farmed meat, hence it's more costly, its supply is unreliable, and usually only upscale or specialty restaurants have it on their menu.
Makes sense. That's how beef is thought about in Japan.
Vivian on 19/11/2012 at 11:01
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Indulge me.
SO: of the common or garden meats, cows I don't eat more for the sake of consistency than anything else. Pigs, I have sat their in the post-mortem room disassembling a crocodile while they slaughtered about 100 pigs for whatever reason right outside the door. The noise is fucking hideous - they make a sound like an absolutely panicked child, rising in pitch and intensity as the guy grabs them (they're not stupid at all, they can put cause and effect together when there is a pile of dead conspecifics in front of them and two humans want to grab you) and then gets cut off abruptly with the quiet but
horribly audible pneumatic 'click' of a bolt gun. So that went on for about three hours, the crocodile I was working on was a relatively rare one (morelets, don't see then so often in europe) but had been in a freezer malfunction so it's chest cavity and skull were full of black, freeze-dried maggots, like squid-ink noodles, and it's muscles were green and shiny because the fascia had started to rot. So I'm not eating fucking pork ever again.
I have a friend who works on broiler chicken locomotion (or lack thereof) and seriously, if you've seen one of those things wheezing around it's pen trying to stand it's freakishly rotund body on it's legs that haven't even half ossified yet because it weighs three kilogramns and it's about
three fucking weeks old, you get the shivers just thinking about them. They get lung disorders, they fight, they don't have any feathers, they get pressure sores all over their body because they can't do anything but sit on their hocks a centimetre deep in their own acidic excretions, and I am not eating cheap chicken, ever.
I know, organic free range chicken is way better, but this brings me to a more general point. I look at a pork chop and see a cross section of superior axial musculature. I can name and give you an evolutionary history of all the muscles in a drumstick. I have a reasonably good idea about the functional significance of 'cheap' (e.g thick-fasciaed, highly internally complex muscles) vs 'expensive' (parallel-fibred, short-tendoned) cuts of meat. Quite apart from the ethical and ecological reasons for being vegetarian, which are pretty solid, I have trouble viewing what to me are mechanical components of an animal as food.
SubJeff on 19/11/2012 at 11:49
So you had an unfortunate conditioning experience with pork. That would certainly put me off, but you can uncondition yourself by having a few nice bacon (not horribly cooked and fatty) sandwiches.
As to the anatomical recognition - I too suffered from the same type of analytical revulsion when I was learning anatomy so I kind of get it. Plus my gf was training to be a surgeon so we'd talk anatomy whilst she essentially dissected the really large cuts of meat she liked to buy. I never liked putting 2 and 2 together regarding the function of the cuts but I got over it. Oxtail, the most functionally clear piece of meat I think you can get, is one of my favourites.
I get what you're saying but we both know that its largely psychological and a result of circumstantial misfortunes; this may fade over time but you can make an effort to deal with it, quite easily.
Not wanting to support the cheap chicken industry based on the treatment of these things is, imho, totally understandable though.
Vivian on 19/11/2012 at 12:08
I'm also really fond of pigs. Right, why the hell should I have to deal with it? It's not some fucking perversion I need to cure myself of. I don't need to eat animals, and basically, on top of everything else, I don't really consider me eating them sufficiently good reason to kill them. And, the cold fucking FACT is that we as a species would require a lot less land and water to feed ourselves if we didn't eat meat.
Chimpy Chompy on 19/11/2012 at 12:34
eat a cheeseburger right now you mutant :mad: :mad:
[edit]I've been considering trying vegetarian for a few meals a week. I couldn't give up chicken tho. Fortunately I can afford free range.
SubJeff on 19/11/2012 at 13:28
I'm not saying you have to deal with it Vivian, just that you could. You are aware of the source of your trauma so you know what is going on psychologically. I'm not saying it's a perversion but from the sounds of it you've experienced an event that put you off pork. I know a few people who stopped eating prawns for a while because they had bad batches that made them sick. I've had pretty bad food poisoning from tuna, twice, and each time it's made me avoid it for visceral and psychological reasons for months or years. But I've always gone back.
I like all animals btw - I think chickens, pigs, cows and sheep/lambs are great and just as magnificent as tigers or leopards. We had a goat when I was a child, that we got as a tiny kid and which was my pet. When it was finally slaughtered and served up I couldn't eat it. I'm not criticising your choices, am I? I'm just taking about the issues.
And I know we don't need meat. We like it though and as top predator we've chosen to farm animals. I don't have any issue with people who choose not to eat meat for reasons that aren't hippy meat eater demonising bs, and that is, unfortunately, what I've encountered an awful lot.
demagogue on 19/11/2012 at 13:43
Things are evolving, so to speak. In law, the case for animal rights are a lot stronger now than even 10 or 20 years ago, and definitely more respectable ... It's considered a legitimate field of law in its own right now, which even feminism hasn't accomplished.
The philosophical moral case against meat eating is also more respectable, and there are respectable arguments not only under utilitarian theory anymore (Peter Singer's old saw that's still a good argument 30 years later), but even deontological theories ... I think because the neurosciences keep demonstrating more & more human-like cognitive functions that animals also possess to varying degrees, and humans having more and more animal functions that we once thought were much higher cognitive faculties but they aren't. It's getting increasingly hard to keep human rights & animal rights hermetically sealed with consistency.
This is aside from the general fact that the state of cognitive science is a blistering mess. It's not very persuasive anymore to say there's a monolithic "Language" module in the brain and your best argument is just to shout "Chomsky! Left temporal lobe! Chomsky!!" From when I actually studied cognitive science & language, and even more the books I'm reading these days on it (just read a great "state of the art" of cognitive science book recently; the era of neat cognitive models of "higher reasoning" are now pretty much officially dead) I was astronomically more convinced by cognitive linguistics, in which case (if it's true) language is much more constructed from general cognitive features that animals, and definitely our primate cousins share, and it's limits in things like nesting-depth (the parallel slots working memory holds open when you're constructing or interpreting a sentence) or mimicry capacity that matter than "reasoning" per se, which they can also handle to just as much sophistication as us, e.g., for a physical puzzle test or pure economic games. Once you get on that track, the line between your foundation of human rights as separate from animal rights starts getting even more murky.
Edit: I'm not expressing any opinion about what the majority of vegetarians actually say when defending their own actions though. If you know anything about me at this point, it's that I have never and will never give two flying fucks what the common folk argue about anything. I usually assume they'll pull arguments out of their ass that don't mean much, even if they blunder into a respectable position sometimes (which is not to say I would be impolite about it; I'm happy to talk about arguments with anybody on anything). But popular culture debates have never meant much to me... (Although I still love all of you & shooting the shit with you all. I can still have fun with arguing off the cuff, it just doesn't persuade me in the end.) And I'm rather anal about just saying what the philosophical arguments give a foundation for, and hearing all arguments out, and I do actually change my mind when I hear better arguments. I still fancy myself a credible philosopher really.
Fifteen years ago I didn't give the argument against meat eating as much credibility, but the more I've gone back to the question the more aspects of it make sense, especially since now I'm doing so much human rights work and working out the natural foundations for human rights itself.
heywood on 26/11/2012 at 07:36
Quote Posted by dethtoll
You don't eat horses, you don't eat dogs, you don't eat cats (and yes I mean the animals you perverts) and you don't eat reindeer. Some things just aren't done, otherwise what's the point of polite fucking society?
Pets are off limits.
But reindeer are basically the cattle of the subarctic, farmed for food. Most of the livestock you eat can't live in that climate. I've had reindeer in a stew and burgers and it was good. Not as good as white-tailed deer venison though, which I've eaten loads of.
And one of the tastiest meat dishes I've ever had was basashi (horse sashimi). If you've had beef carpaccio, it's like that but twice as good. Horse meat from the rib area is also my favorite in yakiniku (Japanese BBQ).
Quote Posted by Harvester
Yeah, in Holland only more classy restaurants offer deer meat and it's not that cheap. I mean it doesn't have to be crazy expensive either but it certainly costs more than say, a chicken breast fillet or a pig "schnitzel" (don't know the English word for schnitzel).
We call it schnitzel. Unless it's baked in cheese and tomato sauce after frying, then it's parmigiana.
Peanuckle on 26/11/2012 at 17:26
I had a Game Stew once that had rabbit, raccoon, venison, groundhog, and all the little woodland critters you can imagine. It was delicious, and each meat had a different texture to it.
As long as the animal is put down cleanly, I have no problems eating it. I'd probably eat dog or cat if it was served to me. Not eating animals that are used as pets in some countries is a ridiculous distinction.
Renzatic on 26/11/2012 at 17:36
I dunno if I'd ever eat raccoon. Deer? Pretty alright. Frogs? Decent enough. But raccoon? That'd almost be like chowing down on opossum to me. I don't want to be eating anything that spends a regular amount of time rooting through my trash.
Also, this thread would've been better titled "Rudolph The Red Nosed Ribeye".
