Michael Ruhlman's currently guest-blogging over at Megnut and wrote an excellent post the other day about how all the talk of ethical eating is, well, annoying: It's a Wonderful Life. Anthony Bourdain turned up as requested and left a comment, of which the following is an excerpt:
Extraordinary that in a time when we're force feeding PEOPLE at Gitmo--and when hundreds of thousands of PEOPLE are starving to death in the Sudan and elsewhere, that there is no more burning issue on the minds of educated, well-fed, financially comfortable citizens than whether or not a clam feels pain--or whether a duck can handle what any respectable adult film ingenue considers routine.
On a related tangent, one of my many, many problems with PETA is that they consistently choose to fight the smallest of fights to get attention for themselves, instead of fighting the big battles that would actually advance the, you know, ethical treatment of animals. Augieland, on why the fuss over live lobsters is ridiculous:
At best, PETA and Whole Foods have advanced the idea that lobsters have a central nervous system, equating them with earthworms. Pigs have such developed brains that the common industry practice of weaning them a few weeks early in order to get a head start on their hormone-laden fattening diet leaves them so distraught they develop an oral fixation that causes them to incessantly suck on each other's tails until they fall off, leaving sores that get infected. The pork industries solution? Cut the tails off (tail docking) at the time of the early weaning. But pay no attention to these grievous violations of ethical animal treatment, you can rest easy because PETA has convinced Whole Foods to stop selling the live version of what are essentially bugs.
