Eating Animals, Foer

       There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists. These opposing positions -- and the closely related unwillingness to take a position -- converge in suggesting that eating animals matters. If and how we eat animals cuts something deep. Meat is bound up with the story of who we are and who we want to be, from the book of Genesis to the latest farm bill. It raises significant philosophical questions and is a $140 billion-plus a year industry that occupies nearly a third of the land on the planet, shapes ocean ecosystems, and may well determine the future of earth's climate. And yet we seem able to think only about the edges of the arguments -- the logical extremes rather than the practical realities. My grandmother said she wouldn't eat pork to save her life, and though the context of her story is as extreme as it gets, many people seem to fall back on this all-or-nothing framework when discussing their everyday food choices. It's a way of thinking that we would never apply to other ethical realms. (Imagine always or never lying.) I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.) 

       We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often in the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we're all going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it? 
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Stewed Dog, Wedding Style - A Classic Filipino Recipe

 First, kill a medium-sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire. Carefully remove the skin while still warm and set aside for later (may be used in other recipes). Cut meat into 1" cubes. Marinate meat in mixture of vinegar, peppercorn, salt, and garlic for 2 hours. Fry meat in oil using a large wok over an open fire, then add onions and chopped pineapple and saute until tender. Pour in tomato sauce and boiling water, add green pepper, bay leaf, and Tabasco. Cover and simmer over warm coals until meat is tender. Blend in puree of dog's liver and cook additional 5-7 minutes.

       A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing.

      Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.
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The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses.
The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows.
The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

Jack Gilbert, RIP

"....Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe

barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds."

- Excerpt from The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
 

 Link: A Guide to Seed Saving, Seed Stewardship and Seed Sovereignity

       “What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how baldly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page—for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love (adolescent, romantic, or "religious"), which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands, acts, showing its successes and failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity. I think that this sort of love defines the effective range of human intelligence, the range within its works can be dependably beneficent. Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows...

...But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in." In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”

                           ― Wendell Berry

Aided and abetted by blue jays and their magpie collaborators

Why more people don’t eat acorns is no mystery: It is a plot perpetrated on us humans by a vast squirrel conspiracy, aided and abetted by blue jays and their magpie collaborators. OK, maybe not. But we can learn something by watching squirrels.

Squirrels don’t bury every acorn they find, you know. Scientists observing squirrel behavior back East noticed something unusual. The fuzzy varmints would seek out white oak acorns and gorge themselves on them, then dash off to find the acorns of other oaks, mainly the red oak. Powered by a meal of white oak acorns, the squirrels would then spend hours burying red oak acorns in the ground. Why?

Turns out white oak acorns are extremely low in the bitter tannins that give all acorns such a bad name. Red oak acorns are high in tannins. But tannins are water soluble. So by burying them, the squirrel hid the acorn from the stealing blue jays (and rival squirrels) and plunked it into water-rich soil. After rains and snow and freezing and thawing, the tannins leach into the soil and leave the red oak acorn as sweet as a white one.

Link: Comprehensive Article on Knee Pain for Cyclists

Link: The Greenhorns - A Resource Network for Young Farmers