"those were delicacies in someplace in VN,some are just plain street food,some are expensive high class dishes, I’m sadly have to announce to you that."
From "A Little Vietnamese Mossy Frog" (Reddit).
ADD: There's a truly adorable photo at the link, which is the reason I'm blogging this. Please don't think I'm blogging this to attack the animal-eating choices of people in a foreign country. Unless we're vegetarians, we eat the animals we're used to eating, and we don't give a reprieve for cuteness. We eat lambs if we like lamb.
Here's video of a lamb dreaming, presumably not of becoming a chop.
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3 comments:
Bob Boyd writes: "Looks like something you'd see if you were picking your nose on acid."
Temujin writes:
Yeah...I've had a stifled problem with this for years. I love animals. I love nature. (Imagine. A conservative/libertarian type who loves nature!?...How can that be?). Anyway, I often think of the animal as the plate is set down in front of me. Well...not with seafood. I don't think fish do much thinking about anything. I don't worry much about seafood. Except when I boil live lobsters. That didn't bother me as a young man, a young restaurateur, but as I got older, it started to bother me. So much so (and my wife as well) that a dish we used to enjoy from time to time, has vanished from our thoughts. Come to think of it, we just don't do that any longer. Even stupid lobsters got to me. Maybe it was their blank lobster eyes looking at me from below the boiling surface of the water.
But it's more difficult with meat. So I do get why there are vegetarians. I respect that. But I also love beef, lamb, poultry- fowl as it is. Not a huge fan of pork, but Bacon! Bacon is it's own food group. As is pulled pork or ribs properly cooked as only they can do in the Carolinas, Georgia, Texas, Memphis, St. Louis. So...yeah, I guess I even love pork. And I work hard at not thinking about the animals. It's one thing to kill for food, as a hunter would, or as humans have had to do through millennia. But mass slaughter houses is another thing and mass production of food is what bothers me.
I bought a book years ago called "Animal Factory" by David Kirby. I've not yet read it. I'm afraid to read it. I'm afraid it'll make me stop eating meat. And I do so love a good New York Strip or a great burger. And lamb? Oh boy...lamb is my favorite. Prepared in any number of ways: lamb shanks, leg of lamb, lamb chops, lamb burgers, gyros with lamb, and on and on. Lamb is the most difficult of all because of the cuteness of the animal itself. How can I eat that? What kind of monster am I?
I remember in my restaurant days, the big thing was Provimi Veal. Restaurants used to hawk that they served Provimi Veal. What was that? It was supposedly a proprietary mixture of feed for baby calves. Feeding them a mix of protein, vitamins, and minerals to create a richer, more succulent (say what?) veal meat. What was discovered was that those veal producing farms kept the calves still, in small fenced in areas so they could barely move. They fed them, kept them from moving much and gaining strong muscle, and slaughtered them to show up on our plates. I eventually quit eating veal. Only recently bought and cooked some veal chops. Man...were they good. No guilt. I just needed some time (20 years) to forget about the Provimi days.
As you can see, I love meat, but have a problem with the entire thing. David Kirby's book mocks me from the bookcase across the room from my desk every day. Tonight we'll be eating some form of protein with our dinner. What should I pick up at the butcher shop today?
Jamie Bee writes:
Dear Ann,
I live in Ireland, where sheep (and lambs in the springtime) are ubiquitous. Little baby lambs are indeed very very cute. But if it makes your commenter Temujin feel any better, the lamb we eat is not the sweet little ball of fluff you see in the field following its mother around. What is called "lamb" on a menu is typically a yearling sheep (anything older is called mutton). They are young but fully grown by the time they are slaughtered, which (for me at least) greatly diminishes the ick factor of eating lamb. I might have trouble eating a cute little pink piglet too, but generally have no problem with the idea of slaughtering and butchering a smelly, rude, dangerous 250+ lb porker.
Speaking of eating cute things, I spent some time living on a Pacific island where eating dog was very common. Of course we expats were horrified by this. The islanders were equally horrified by the idea of us keeping our pet dogs inside the house - for them it was on par with keeping a pig or a cow inside the house. When my husband and I eventually moved away, we went so far as to fly our adopted island dog off the island and back to the States - and later on to Ireland - so that she wouldn't become someone's afternoon barbeque. We still have her, and it's been over 10 years. She's getting to be an old island dog now.
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