Bloodthirsty Vegetarians

I've been pen-palling with a friend and somehow the art of not eating meat came up. And I have said a few things here and there about not eating meat but have never plopped it all down in one place before...before now.

Here's my take on vegetarians: You eat your prey alive! ALIVE! Take that radish outside and plant it, water it, talk to it, and it'll start growing! Yikes! Potatoes, Carrots, and Avocados'll do the same thing given a chance. They're just sitting in your fridge hoping you'll turn your back on them so they can make good their escape and live out their lives quietly just under the edge of your back deck, out of sight, and safe from your mower.


And when you're not eating them alive, you're doing the lobster to them: cooking them alive in boilng water or steam or boiling oil! I've seen it done thousands of times all the while drooling. And what's worse than that? Sometimes you're aborting the next generation of plants with certain fruits (and fruits used as vegetables: poor poor Okra--doomed to be coated with the ground up remains of infant corn and boiled in the blood-oil of infant corn) by eating their unhatched young. Crack open a peanut and you can see the tiny leaf nestled between the cotyledons...so sad...


I mean it's horrific. Luckily I have a high tolerance for the macabre world of southern dining.I know my place. I'll eat the sweet swine because for me to live, something has to die....might as well be yummy and crispy off of the iron skillet. Oh, if I get the drop on a deer and kill it to eat it (obviously, I don't have to kill deer or birds to survive, it's just fun and awful all at the same time--like sex with the lights on) then great...if I get jumped by a bear or panther in the woods and get et, then so be it. I wouldn't eat good ol' dog Steve unless I had to, but she wouldn't eat me either...unless she had to...we get it.


I guess all I'm saying is that if you don't want to eat meat because you don't want to kill anything, you might be wringing your blood-soaked (or sap-soaked) hands over nothing. Vegans too fret over stuff that only oozes out of animals--and if not squoze out then rendered out the good ol' fashioned, boiling pot way--or pops out an orifice/cloaca. But what they forget is that even their soulless soy bean is alive and was raised in a field that used to be prime habitat for countless examples of wildlife and delicious shootable game animals.


Agriculture is a destructive process, no doubt, and as we work the land more and more, it's becoming apparent that we might have pushed the soil medium too far and might be headed for a disaster down the road, but that's another story. Also troubling is the stranglehold that chemical companies have on our vegetable food chain but that's another story as well. Not only do non meat eaters have sap on their hand for destroying habitat and ecosystems, but even worse, they owe a huge debt to Diesel Fuel and the companies that make it.


Everything they eat is touched by the cheapest to make (yet most expensive--artificial shortage anyone?) and most filthiest burning fuel that'll run an internal combustion engine. Pour it in your yard and it'll kill your grass! Rub it on your hands and you'll smell like ass for days. Your veggie friends are cultivated with it and shipped with it from the seed to the plate. And if you like being green by eating greens, then have a dip in the Gulf, dig your toes deep in that Louisiana sand and see if you can't touch some BP product. I dare you to eat a shrimp from there. Oh, wait, are sea bugs meat?


Oh sure, the way they raise meats today is pretty gut and heart wrenching as well as unbelievable in that, according to the movie Food Inc., the whole enterprise is controlled by a handful of companies in our country. But if there's anything good about the deplorable way domestic meat is raised, it's the fact that the practices make the protein cheaper so perhaps less people are raised on low grade pinto protein and are reaping some benefits of "eetin' mor chikin."*


Well, I hope people don't think I'm anti-vegetarian, because I'm not. I just don't let something's soul get in the way of me having a good meal--every living thing has a soul or, at the very least, an immortal spark that gets passed around like a fake ID. I mean let's face it...the whole foods we're really talking about, animal and vegetable, are much better than the white powder that makes us fat and dead...no matter what you do or eat, we both know you'd be better off (and thinner) if you pass on the white, processed, polished, and enhanced powders and starches that seemed so great a couple of generations ago.


Our ancestors were thinner 'cause Cokes were 8 ounces and orange juice glasses were tiny. And meat was raised locally and so were their green, leafy dinner dates.