The Modern Question:  What should we dine on?  In three bite size pieces. 

Part I:  Dogs

It's still the potatoes that haunt my ethical thoughts, but lets begin with faster moving, more doe-eyed living things that some people still eat, dogs.

I have to kill my dog.  I killed my most beloved dog.  I don't care as much about this dog.  It isn't that this dog is bad, but that this dog is one we rescued and that had never properly socialized.  So this dog was never the companion that my dog was.

We killed him when I could no longer carry him outside and his incontinence made him shake in efforts to hold it, he suffered emotionally and I could see it.  I wasn't going to put him through that any longer.  He had had dental surgery a year before to remove a painful fang.  Anything he ever needed, even when we had no real means to provide it, we got it for him.  As he had done for me.

He had come to us.  He showed up on my doorstep during a very bad year, so damaged that I took him to the vet to have him put down.  He was eventually a glossy coated 75 pound Black Labrador.  He had webbed toes and his paws smelled like lightly stale popcorn.  He could jump 4 feet in the air and snatch a tennis ball from that same air.  He loved pounding into the ocean and biting at the waves.  He was a beautiful, magical creature that saved me from despair the first time I got really sick.

When I found him, he weighed 40 pounds, had mange, and one leg was so damaged he couldn't walk on it.  But when I went to pet him, he let me and seemed to appreciate it.  When I opened the back door of the car, he hopped in, ready to go.  I went to see him at the vet during the three days they hold them when strays are brought in.  They accused me of lying, saying that he was not my dog to avoid the fees.  I brought in my mate who confirmed that I had no pets and never did.  I was collegiate, transient, pets were not apartment friendly.  But this dog touched me and seemed to light up when I came to visit him.  So I visited him every day, walked him, saw that he somehow had the energy to hop after a ball.  I felt that it was the least I could actually do for him, some kind companionship as he waited to pass from the misery that had become his life.

I checked back in after the fourth day and they had not killed him.  His handlers couldn't do it.  He was getting better.  But if they didn't find a foster rehab home for him, he would have to be killed in a few days.  He was a very large dog, but they felt that his age, 3-5, and his temperament made him a good candidate for the Lab Rescue program.  He would find a good home if he could live long enough to get there (and a small testicular sacrifice).  I still couldn't afford it, but they said they would cover all of that.  So we took him in.  And could not give him up when the time came, despite a sudden $600 non-refundable pet fee.  And he was with me for the next 12 years, my constant companion, riding in my cars,  following me to my pottery studio, jogging with me through the city, waiting at night for my husband to come home.  So when he suffered, I killed him.

My current dog was abandoned by an idiot who bought a shepherd/rottie mix the same month she had a baby so "they could grow up together".  She was thrown in a pen in the yard six months later when the baby turned into a handful and the dog outweighed it by 40 pounds. She is sweet and a good watchdog, but dumb as a post and skittish due to under-socialization, malnutrition, and mistreatment from birth to six months, the whole childhood of a dog.  I agreed to take her when they moved away, hoping that the company of my dog would help her and that she would be a playmate for him.  He was a very good teacher and friend to her.  And she learned to play ball with him.  He taught her to be a good dog and enjoy life, essentially.  

She fared much better with love and kindness, but some things don't "fix" regardless of intent and effort.   When I had my son, I had to watch her and never leave the baby alone with her.  He is finally old enough to simply avoid her and her skittish, nervous temperament.  But she is slow moving, losing her sight, her hearing is failing, and she is in the end game.  I will not be as patient with her, I know myself.  I loved my dog, but I am her caretaker.  She follows me and sleeps at the foot of my bed, but I never call her up onto it.  And she would rather not be up there, she goes back to her area within a few minutes of "bed" time.   She is not him.

So at fifteen years, it is her time and I will send her gently into the good night because she deserves that kindness, to not suffer  past the point when the terrible life we rescued her from becomes a different terrible life of hanging on for no good reason.  Her best friend has been gone 6 years now and I know that she still mourns him, although she wears his collar now.

She is currently resting, snoozing comfortably in her bed, like she does most of the day, the good end game for a good dog.  I will schedule it this time, though, like the vet recommends.  She said that people who "just can't do it" are not good owners, because the animal suffers because of their owner's emotional weakness. 

And this is Part I of my issue with animals, eating them, killing them, living with them, loving them, treating them humanely.

For me, if you hold them captive to be your "pet", you owe them something better than they would find on their own, you are obligated until the humane end of the relationships you initiate with creatures that have little choice in the matter.

That has been my experience with dogs, creatures which some people still eat, but not me.  

In Part II,  I will explain my experience with pigs, hog farms, china, community bonding, cracklin's, pork rinds, bacon, southern food, bbq, delicious pit-roasted pigs...magical animals that originate all good meats.

Part II:  Pigs 

Many land areas do not tend toward good grazing, the geography more disposed to chicken or hog farming than raising cattle.  Pork is the most common and beloved meat of China for historical, cultural, and geographic reasons, the same as in the American South.  I had some of the most delicious food there that I had ever eaten, reminding me of home in the most profound way a person can be reminded, through their stomach in a hungry moment.

In small urban environments, hamlets, small villages, collectives and such, pigs are a rational meat source as they will eat most anything and can thrive on human food rubbish.  They are garbage disposals for any scraps, willing to eat anything edible, requiring little specialization.  Of course, large scale factory farming requires a lot of strange things, but we don't eat that on purpose, do we?  

Modern hog farms keep their animals clean by washing them with low pressure fire hoses of clean water.  The hogs like it.  It drains off into hog waste lagoons, an environmental nightmare that has become a wet dream.  The waste used to evaporate and eventually become fertilizer, but this took forever, smelled, and was perpetually diluted by natural rain in the lagoons.   But a solution has been found to the environmental problem with raising hogs enough to feed mega-cities.  They can put a capturing top over them, add bacteria to increase the waste breakdown and capture the methane gas  for clean energy, burning it as it is produced and generating steam for turbines that generate electricity.  It is an awesomely ingenious solution to the problem. 

I like to know where my meat comes from and its impact on the environment.  I know it's trendy these days, but I have always felt this way.  I grew up near hog and chicken farms.  I knew where the meat I ate came from, had tended or lived next to the animals that would appear in the grocery.  My grandmother had killed her own stock and I have vague memories of the chickens in the yard and some goats.  I have this one picture of her and a cow that clearly shows me what I will look like when I am old and what a service milk cow from the depression looked like when it was old.  Both kind of gaunt, bony, and worn out.  But still standing!

Recently, eggs were recalled nationally, but the down-town hippie co-op's eggs are local, so no worries.   Chicken farming is growing meat with feathers.  Those creatures are barely living beings in my mind, virtually meat in a vat.  Heirloom brood lines can be intelligent, interesting pets, but the chickens we eat are not that animal, they never get to that point in their lives.  I am not willing to pay double to make that happen.  Harsh? Yes.  Meat eating is like that.

I think you have to value your meat as a scale of diminishing returns.  Meat protein has finite value and after that it gets hinky fast.  There isn't any veal that can taste good enough to warrent how it is raised considering the potential in the animal being sacrificed for our protein needs.  A chicken, on the other hand, is a bird, a residual reptile that would as soon poke your eyes out and eat them as look at you.  Like tarantulas as pets, they are only of interest for their novelty.  Dogs love you and will not run off if you let them go.  Chickens will leave you faster than a cat will scratch you.  That is not pet material in my book.

Exotic meats are not worth it for me because the novelty makes them a little too interesting for me.  I like my meat fairly sanitized and anonymous.  I like the neat packages of lean ground beef in the grocery case.  I have taken all of my traditional family recipes and minimized the meat content, changing a whole chicken to 2 breasts, 2 lbs of hamburger to 1/2 lb.  I have strong feelings about select cuts and how that is one of the great problems of society, class, and ethical meat production.  I think the best service of cattle is to grind it all up, the whole thing down to the moo and have us all egalitarianly eat the same protein.  I would gladly eat meat grown in a vat with the same nutritional values of a living animal's flesh.  It would suit me fine.  I have herbs and spices to make it tasty.

But there is one meat that I cannot, would not do that to, pig.

Pigs are intelligent, friendly, social animals.  Fairly easy to maintain, healthy when not mass-factory farmed, and part of natural ecological farm systems providing waste fertilizer, turning waste food material into meat, and generating a great variety of meat product per lb upon slaughter.  Bacon, sausage, kielbasa, ham, lardon, fatback, jowls, pigfeet, pork chops, ribs, short ribs, country ham, prosciutto, pulled pork bbq, pork roast...and did I mention bacon?  Because that bears repeating.

A pigs life is not misery, as I perceive much dairy cattle life must be.  Their lives are not pointless except for the meat production, like the chickens.  It is not exotic creating its interest by its novelty, like bison, snake, or gator.

Pigs' lives, slaughter, and enjoyment were part of my community.  Every major event was marked by a barbeque, just like out of Gone With the Wind.  There was family, fellowship, and a pig, roasted in a portable bbq grill onsite so that the hours ahead of the eating were all enticement with the smell of rendering pork fat and tender pork ready to be pulled.  Chickens thrown on at the end were basted in the fat making it crispy like fried chicken without the breading. 

One of the highpoints of my culinary history was at a pig pickin' where the pit master was kind of disgusted with the preponderance of northerners and fish-only eaters in attendance.  After six hours of effort and sweat, he opened the cooker and was injured when no one stepped up to be first served.  He gathered himself and said, "I just cook it, ya'll got to pull your own." And put the tongs there.  The agog looks of the northerners, the obvious failure to understand where to begin, and a deep compassion for the heart broken pit master brought out the southern hostess in me.  

"He means to just take the tongs and take whichever part you want, " assuming they had never seen a whole animal roasted and that they had no clue of anatomy beyond the square packets they purchase at mega marts.

They had no such clues.  The whole pig was layed out in the cooker, on its back now with the interior of the animal exposed so that you could pull your own meat and dress it with the vinegar BBQ sauce over on the condiment table.  Part of the pig had been taken and chopped, but that is not what you buy a whole pig for.  You can get that at the restaurant.  You go to a pig pickin' expecting to see the quality animal prepared and to be able to choose your crispy skin and preferred meat.  If you have no preferred meat because all of the meat you have ever consumed came from a little tray at the grocery store...well, bless your heart!

The pit master had stepped back and I could see the disgust in his eyes.  When he had opened the cooker, he was proudly displaying a full day of work slow cooking and carefully maintaining a hard wood fire, charcoal, wood smoke and air.  It was a work of art, a beautiful artisanal production  of real meat presented in its natural state.  

So I stepped up, took the tongs and pulled the ribs back exposing the tenderloin, of which there are two on a whole pig.  

"This is the best part.  Take however much you want, there's more on the other side."

I took some and pulled some rendered cracklin' crispy skin from the back of the jowl and passed the tongs to the next in line, a northerner who took the tongs with two fingers as if I was offering him a bloody hatchet with shit on the handle.

I looked at the pit master, he looked at me.  We raised our eyebrows and I offered him a slight shake of the head, as if to say, "Sorry, man, I apppreciate your work here, but I can't account for these people."

He shook his head and stepped back up and said, "That's the best part of the pig.  Let me serve you."  And proceeded to pick the pig for the people who simply did not understand the food event they had come to.  He was a business man, too, and spent the next hour answering their questions generously and without sarcasm.  I admired that man and respect his restraint. 

Now its possible they did not understand the term "pig pickin'" or "barbeque".  I can't fathom that, but ok.  The people that tried it left either immediate fans or disturbed and unwilling to deal with it again.  I don't really care either way.  To each his own.

But it is the sniveling vegetarians that disturbed me at that event.  There was nothing served that day that suited some of them.  They discovered, if they asked, that the veg sides were served southern style, seasoned with bacon or cured pork.  The coleslaw had mayonaise made with eggs.  The banana pudding was maide with *shudder* dairy!  There was something in every single thing on that spread that someone could and did object to for whatever reason they drummed up to make their and their hosts' lives harder,  inconvenient, and unpleasant.

If they didn't want meat, or dairy, or eggs, they should have brought a brown bag and not expected others to deal with their dietary quirks at a pig picking/barbeque.  And yet they whined and moaned about the barbaric display.  In front of others trying to enjoy their feast of an animal locally grown, not on a hog farm, not from a pack on a rack.  This WAS the Micheal Pollen feast of their locovore wet dreams, culturally relevant, humanely killed, and expertly prepared by an artisanal craftsman.  

And they spurned it because it had a face they could still see.

They disgusted me with their judgy rudeness and their disrespect for the animal and the hosts of the party.  I made notes of the most rude among them and promised to not eat with them again.

You see, I think the fish they freely consume want to live just as badly as the pig that was roasted that day.  "Life" is greater than animals we feel empathy for.  Taking life to sustain ours is a necessary part of being a carbon based life form.  Unless you are a plant, you kill to live, and even some plants violate this rule since protein is such an excellent energy source.

Saying that you will kill one thing but not another is a strange high wire act that I can't buy into.  I am a diabetic of Native American descent.  I have canine teeth that clearly place me in the paleolithic diet zone.  I am meant to eat meat and limited grains, fruits, eggs, and seeds.  When I eat too much cultivated grain, my body freaks out and doesn't know how to handle it, including pure sugar, processed sugar, HFCS, and any of the other foods that end in -ose.

Lean meat doesn't make me sick.  Carbohydrates do.  Non-cooked starchy veg does, too. Thusly, ethical issues about what I am willing to eat get complicated real fast.  Add to that a degree in philosophy freeing me of the comfort of self-delusion in the arguments for the ethical treatment of animals.  I want to treat animals ethically, in the same manner that I want to live an ethical life with regard to all living things.  This too is complicated.

I live at the mercy of big Pharma.  Insulin, even human dna derived insulin, is tested on animals.  They don't inject people with it until they inject animals first.  And I appreciate this as one who must then blindly trust its safety and efficacy when I inject it into my flesh.  The animals they test it on are "put into a diabetic state" in order to make them suitable to test the insulin batches.  This means that they damage their pancreases to render them diabetic.  Without this sacrifice, I would die.  So I need to damage and harm animals to live.

Pigs were the original source of insulin that let us diabetics live beyond thirty years or less upon diagnosis, the old rubric prior to injectable "manufactured" insulin.  Pigs made it, we took it, refined it, and bottled it.  I am eternally grateful for the science and animals that died and die so that I may live.  Not eating them seems hypocritical and ethically disingenuous.  

That human dna derived hormones in vats are now possible gives me hope for my dream of meat in a vat.  It will happen.  My friend with breast cancer is currently having her own new nipples grown for grafting and reconstruction.  I wouldn't eat them, but I imagine a tenderloin would work a lot like that, too. And if I would graft it onto my flesh, I think I could also manage to eat it preferentially over slaughtered animals.  Filet mignon be damned  to history for ever and ever, amen. 

Yeah.  That was a harsh analogy.  Meat eating is like that.

My favorite quote is "The price of integrity is eternal vigilance; the reward for eternal vigilance is integrity."

In Part III, I will explain my ethically valid eating solutions and dietary decisions and regale ya'll with a story of  how an ambitious potato changed my life.

Part III: Plants 

They would eat us if they could!  And some of them do, or would if they were big enough.  Molds and fungus eat our bodies once we slow down enough for them to get to us.   Morbid?  Exactly!

If you think that is gross, consider that everything we eat is dead, too.  Only difference is that instead of waiting patiently for our food to die, we go get it and kill it.

Which brings me to plants.  I had an experience in high school that changed my mind about the ethics of what I ate.  I went to a school for Science and Math.  I liked biology but hadn't had much of it, didn't really understand a lot of the science behind it.  As I took classes I began to understand that it was mostly chemistry and a little mystery.  But mainly chemistry.  Drugs, chemicals, hormones, catalysts, solvents, nutrients, dna, growth...all of it together forming the magical components of "life".  

At that time they defined life as :

the sum of the distinguishing phenomena of organisms 

specifically: metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation 

to environment. 

"They" were teachers and scientists working within the normative fields of biology and education.  I had no knowledge of philosophers at the time, no idea that intellectual rigor could be attached to the very concept of what life is and is not.

But a potato and a biological quirk changed all that.  

I hated to put away my clothes.  I lived at a boarding school and I was a bit of a slob with no parent to control me.  So my effects were strewn about my room in plain sight, like I still like it today.  Once I can't see it, it might as well not exist.  That was the quirk.  

I had a microwave on my floor and I used it on the rare occasion for popcorn and hot chocolate.  But one day in the dining hall, they had raw potatoes. (I do not know why)

I got the bright idea to take one and have a baked potato for a snack, nutritionally improving on my diet of popcorn and chocolate...brilliant!  

So I took it back to my room and my roommate, knowing my proclivities, suggested I throw it out BEFORE it rotted and started to smell (plants of mine having died cruel deaths before her caring but not enough to water them eyes).  I, in a fit of pique, threw it in an empty drawer and promptly forgot about it.

Many months passed.  I did not open the drawer, as I had truly forgotten there was anything in it.  The spring came and I saw a small green leaf coming out of the edge of the drawer.  My first thought was, "Oh shit!  What now?"

I opened it and found a shriveled husk of potato and an elaborate vine that had grown toward the slight opening of light in the crack of the drawer in sight of the window.  It had converted its whole being in an effort to reproduce.  It had grown.  It had moved in its only means possible in a cruel and inhospitable environment.  It wanted to live so much that in a dark drawer, when spring came, it tried to get out and do its thing.

I was both horrified and amazed.  I was a thinking kind of teenager.  And I couldn't help but be impressed with the tenacity of the thing.   Seeing the shriveled husk of what it was and realizing that without water, without nurturing, without dirt...it had lived.  My unthinking grinch mind grew three sizes that day.

Ok.  I had no intention of rearing it or harvesting it.  But I did release it into the edge of the intramural field to be free and have a better chance and future.  It certainly deserved that. 

Flash ten years forward.  My emo friends in college have gone vegetarian.  My emo college professor has a vivisected dog picture in his office positioned so that you cannot consult him for a class without looking directly at it the whole time you are in there. (If he loved it so, why didn't he put it on our side of the desk?  Asshole.)  I am contemplating vegetarianism and I simply cannot do it.

It would be phenomenally hypocritical of me.  Reliant on diabetic drugs to live, I am part of the monolithic big pharma machine that tests on animals. My diet works better with more meat, less starch.  Dairy is slavery.  Chickens are meat puppets.  Pigs are delicious.  It all roils and boils in my brain and I come to this conclusion.

There isn't anything we eat that doesn't want to live just as much as we do.   Just because it doesn't have doe eyes for you to stare into and you can't see it move because you don't have the attention span of time lapse photography doesn't mean it isn't imbued with life energy.  That is what being part of an organic food chain is all about.

There are plants that eat meat.  There is meat that eats plants only.  We are omnivores.  You can tell by our teeth and the chemicals in our bodies that are designed to take everything good to eat under the sun and turn it into energy and healthy flesh.

There IS an ethical diet, that causes no harm to normal life cycles and doesn't involve killing anything.  Someday, I would like to live the life where I can eat this way.  I am working on it.

This diet consists of  everything that wants you to eat it or that will rot if left uneaten.  Fruits, seed pods, eggs and vegetation that is finished doing its thing.  This is a LOT of food.  Tomatoes, oils, all nuts, all seeds, all unfertilized eggs, all milk produced in excess of the needs of offspring, all grains, every vegetable fruit pod with seeds inside, all vegetables that are finished with their life cycle like kale, broccoli, sprouts.  Many items want you to eat it and excrete it somewhere else, that is why it evolved to be tasty.  Domesticated animals produce excess milk in exchange for care and feeding.  It is mutually beneficial.  You would only eat meat that died naturally.  You could eat eggs of many kinds and maintain animals to produce them.  Mushrooms and bacteria are abundant and create tastiness, yogurts, and cheeses.  And then there is fruit of the sweet variety, filled with seeds and delicious flesh.  All of the legumes you could consume.

I could live this way. I would love it.  It would cost a fortune in America.  I could go off the grid and become a farmer....

Back to the real world.  I dream of it.  And some day, when I am not a mother feeding a man who likes beef, not a diabetic who can't quite bite the hypocrite bullet, not lazy, not a lover of all things pork related...someday when I am no longer me, I will get there.  And it will be glorious.

I leave you with a short movie.  A presentation from the series, "LIFE".  It explains plants and their desires with illustration rather than words.  It is beautiful and kind of mind blowing.

Visual convincing that plants want to live, too!