I Dare You To Eat That

Beating a dead horse and then eating it. So would ya? It’s a consummate question for those with a serious affectation towards adventurous dining.

Now we all had friends who’d do anything on a dare. I even remember getting Brad Holmes (a cook for us at the time) to make out with a salmon head for ten bucks. I’d pay triple to get that visual out of my brain now: it’s haunting and creepy and wrong in every way imaginable. Brad, for the love of God, seek psychological counselling please. It was only ten bucks.

My own demons aside, now that www.New-Harvest.org is producing cultured meat, farm free, pesticide and hormone free, you’ve got to ask yourself the question (see my earlier post here). I’m struggling, to be honest, and I can’t figure out why. I love eating cows, pigs, chickens and fish, and all the parts they come with. I delight in the enjoyment of said delicious creatures from different places and regions, and I have more than a passing curiosity in the constant conflict that arises when the moral and ethical implications of raising any cattle for consumption is raised. And yet never has there been so clear a choice as this.

So clean and perfect an answer, no animals get hurt. Ever. No hormones or steroids needed, and no slaughterhouse or immoral living conditions. Imagine, right beside the basil plant and salt shaker, a lobe of delicious foie gras growing in the windowsill. You might even toss out the bread-maker you never use and replace it with the bacon-maker (TM patent pending).

Lets face it, we’ve eaten everything else. I for one can count eyeballs, guts, brains, hearts, and testicles (cooked, you perves) on my list of oddities, and I enjoyed most of them. I just don’t know if I love animals enough to leave them off the E-list entirely (the E-list is everyone’s subconscious list of things they would eat.  Try imagining anything in the world, and instantly you’ll know whether you’ll eat it or not. Strange, but true).

So the dilemma exists, for me anyway.  Am I just too far removed from the process, with no blood on my hands, enjoying bacon wrapped tenderloin with foie gras toppers in guilt-free, blissful ignorance? Or does the answer lie with science, and the vegans were right all along?

It should get interesting as the restaurateurs bring their ever expanding moral codes into this one, as they toss out Oceanwise, organics, and free range foods and move into ‘animal free’ and ‘Certified 100% lab grown’. The global economies will shift away from agriculture and we can feed the world with Chinese ‘meat factories’ (some melamine included). We’ll be chastised for keeping cows and chickens as anything but frisky pets/deities to be coddled/worshipped, and we’ll finally be able to reclaim that ranch land for sport hunting buffalo again.

This time around, we can kill for fun and no one can tell us its wrong, cause like, what else are we going to do with them?