A Carnivore's Rant

[joreth]

Y'know what I hate? I hate when people who eat meat products get all grossed out at processed meat products, like it's any worse or more disgusting than the death and slaughter of a living being to make a meal. These are people for whom lamb chops are a nice slab of chops in a white styrafoam container, so they have the luxury of being grossed out by processed chicken meat in chicken nuggets or hot dogs. Most of these people have never been up to their elbows in blood and fur and shit and urine to skin an animal and remove the inedible parts. Most of these people have never looked their dinner in the eye and watched the life drain out of it while it lay on the ground twitching.

Nature is not pretty. It can be, but that's not its default. Death is not pretty. We are part of a system that requires one to die for another to live. Maybe that'll change in the future (and I hope it does), but until that day comes, our nice and juicy steaks do not come to us from a steak-tree, where we pick off the prettiest looking chunks and display them with sauces and creative arrangements. No, those steaks come from the muscle tissue of a living creature, that someone had to kill, dismember, and PROCESS in some way.

Now, we can discuss ethical treatment of food animals, and quality of food products if that's your argument. But that's not the argument I'm ranting against right now. I'm ranting against people who see pictures of food during the processing production and say "Eww! It's all ground up and mixed together! Gross! I'm never eating another [name your processed food here] again!" They are simply grossed out about the idea of bits of food getting mixed together and not looking like the finished product before it's a finished product.

And if that's your beef with processed meat, then you need a remedial course on what chewing and digestion do. I also recommend going to a farm or out in the woods, being responsible for the taking of the life that you are about to consume and seeing its terror as it realizes that it's being hunted, ripping the skin off with your hands and knife, removing the bowels before the animal defecates itself in its death throws, reaching your hands in to remove the still-warm and steaming heart, and pulling the muscle off the bones, all knowing that you will be putting it into your mouth shortly.

And THEN you can tell me that running that meat through a grinder is gross.

Comments

[thenanerbananer.livejournal.com]

LOVE IT!!! Great post. That is all.

[joreth]

Thanks!

[terriaminute.livejournal.com]

Those people confound me, too. But then, I was raised around the animals we ate and helped tend them, and helped prepare their bodies to eat. Pulling up entire carrots is also ending lives. Earth life requires this, an exchange of storied energies. Later our bodies will return to the pool of raw elements one way or another. This special snowflake view of neat packages speaks to a remarkable level of ignorance.

[joreth]

Yep. I didn't grow up on a farm, but I did grow up hunting. I also grew up in hippie North California, where I heard people "ewww" food all the time without seeming to understand what "food" was. Hey, I didn't like cleaning fish guts any better than anyone else did, but if I wanted to eat, that's what needed to be done. The idea that putting that meat through a grinder somehow made it *more* gross or no longer acceptable to eat confused the fuck out of me. Really? Cleaning poop and buckshot out of your meal isn't a problem, but mashing it together to form a patty is? Have you people even LOOKED AT YOUR PLATES?

Ahem...

[terriaminute.livejournal.com]

:D

[emote-control.livejournal.com]

I'm led to believe that with ground-up foods like weiners and chicken nuggets, it's near-impossible to keep the mixture sterile. So the meat paste they make is usually infected with various bacteria, which requires them to dump ammonia into the mix to keep it from going completely septic. They then have to add a cocktail of other chemicals to cover the flavour of the ammonia. That's what makes me think twice about eating it. It's not that processed meat is any ookier than regular meat. It's just that the process of preparing it makes it less like actual food than the dead carcass it was made from is. I would rather eat plain old meat than meat plus a bunch of chemicals, given the choice between the two. I have no idea whether "organic" or homemade sausage is any better or worse.

[joreth]

That's basically a fundamental misunderstanding of what a "chemical" is, what it does to you, what a safe dose is, and where else those "chemicals" are found.

Non-mixed-up-in-a-grinder meat also uses chemicals in its production, and "organic" is a marketing buzzword that doesn't mean very much. Most of the time, it just means that it still uses chemicals, they're just different chemicals that are more inefficient and therefore have to use more of them. And more expensive for the label and inefficient ingredients.

[joreth]

Also, "we can discuss ethical treatment of food animals, and quality of food products if that's your argument. But that's not the argument I'm ranting against right now. I'm ranting against people who see pictures of food during the processing production and say 'Eww! It's all ground up and mixed together! Gross!'"

[emote-control.livejournal.com]

You don't suppose that they think it's gross because they know something about the specifics of production? It's certainly on TV enough.

[joreth]

"But that's not the argument I'm ranting against right now. I'm ranting against people who see pictures of food during the processing production and say 'Eww! It's all ground up and mixed together! Gross!'"

[emote-control.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read that. Several times now. And I'm suggesting that it could be possible that the reason they have a problem with it being "all ground up and mixed together" is because they are aware of issues that make ground-up food less appetizing than not-ground-up food because of something other than simply being ground up. And perhaps this comes out as "I don't like ground up meat because it's gross" rather than anything more specific.

[joreth]

You clearly have a reading comprehension problem. I specifically said I was NOT addressing people who have other issues, that I was talking about people WHO JUST THINK IT'S GROSS.

For your failure to read, you are now blocked from commenting in my journal.

[danceswthcobras.livejournal.com]

"I also recommend going to a farm or out in the woods, being responsible for the taking of the life that you are about to consume and seeing its terror as it realizes that it's being hunted, ripping the skin off with your hands and knife, removing the bowels before the animal defecates itself in its death throws, reaching your hands in to remove the still-warm and steaming heart, and pulling the muscle off the bones, all knowing that you will be putting it into your mouth shortly."

Sounds very tasty to me. When I open a carcass, the smell is warm and appetizing and my first thought is generally along the lines of why bother spoiling it with fire. it looks pretty yummy right there. The bowels and bladder do need removing, but if you know what you're doing it's a pretty neat and painless process.

Real fresh food comes in packages that oink and moo and cluck and quack. The stuff in the supermarket is old and yucky and comes from animals that had a miserable concentration camp life and an assembly-line death with no one to take extra care for their comfort. I kill all of my own meat, with only occasional forays into something like hot dogs or salami that is a pain to cure at home. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I s'pose I could make my own hot dogs, but frankly I like the snouts and cheeks and lips and hearts and eyeballs in their honest form without disguise. I don't understand food as "gross" except in the context of what is actually toxic or can make you ill.

Or maybe I do. I think I would hurl if I had to eat a moon pie or a candy bar or a Twinkie. I really doubt I could keep it down. That stuff is seriously gross to me. But a warm steaming fresh carcass is just lovely.

Absolutely no idea how anyone who eats meat can consider good fresh food "gross".

[joreth]

I think it's a nice bit of mental compartmentalization combined with the mental gymnastics that so often accompany cognitive dissonance. Living in a First World nation gives a lot of people the luxury of cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization.

If a person likes eating meat, they have to accept that it comes from animals and it's not always nice and tidy and wrapped in cellophane, vacuum-sealed, and sterile - otherwise they're naive, ignorant, or hypocritical. And by the time it makes it to our dinner tables, it pretty much never resembles its original form, whether it's ground meat in intestinal casings, finely-sliced & mashed-together in fried breading, or grilled with seasonings and served with garnish.

[corpsefairy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that sounds pretty silly. As a vegetarian, I reserve the right to find all meat pretty gross.

Weirdly, at this point, it's not even gross to me. It's more like not food, the way a book isn't food, or a tire, or a bit of cotton. I mean, I could chew up a piece of paper and swallow it if I really wanted to, but it's not food. Meat is in exactly the same category. Not gross... just not remotely foodlike.

Mushrooms, now. They're gross.

[joreth]

LOL I have to agree - mushrooms are indeed gross!