The lambs don't understand language, and he was speaking in a gentle, happy way, so what, if anything is he doing wrong? I understand objecting to meat-eating, but that just groups him with all meat-eaters, and the question is what's wrong with encountering your meat animals while they're still alive and connecting with them and with the reality of what you are going to do with them? I think it's more virtuous to engage and to be forthright, when there is no issue of imposing any extra suffering on the animals. The meat-eaters who want more distance — they want something neatly sliced and packaged— are not taking responsibility for their actions.
ADDED: Ramsay is saying things that a non-human predator would say to lambs that it was about to eat, so Ramsay is in touch with his own animality. He's speaking animal-to-animal and in showing that to us, he's making an argument that it is ethical to eat meat.
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When Doves Cry
When babies coo.
I want my baby back, baby back, baby back ribs. Get in my stomach! h/t Fat Bastard
Ignorance is bliss. They think meat comes from the grocery store.
The lefty city dwellers think meat is just in plastic wrapped packages in the supermarket. I grew up a city dweller but I went with my father to slaughter house in Indiana where we bought a side of beef. When I was in about 5th grade we had a field trip to the Armour packing plant where we saw cows slaughtered. It was all real, unlike the kids today who get gender queer instead.
I have seen Jesus is sometimes depicted with a lamb over shoulder >>>
did he reincarnate as Gordon with multiplicity of lambs
there's something about lambs, that makes people stupid
they make some people Say stupid things
they make others Offended about stupid things
My cat licks the mouse all over before she cruelly eats it.
so horrible.
Everyone who is complaining should go vegan.
I don't like lamb.
We ate it when I was young because it was cheap back then.
But now I can afford to eat other things so I do...
We saw some of this when Osama bin Laden was killed: there are a lot of people out there for whom what you do is less important than that you wear a decorously long face in the doing of it.
I promise to never again scream ‘Die Bambi, die!’ when I go deer hunting.
Grew up in rural part of PA. My mom went to old farmer Reichstedter every fall to pick out our steer. He would take her into the field and she would choose. Same for the pig that went into the freezer. He barely spoke English, and my mom would negotiate the price in PA German with him. He made the BEST bacon and Sausage. (I also know how the sausage was made and where the casings came from) He always had candy for the kids. I loved visiting his farm.
The point is: people are very removed from where their food comes from. We rarely had meat from the grocery store and it was mostly chicken. We even went to the Berger's Egg Farm to get our eggs, and Hahn's Dairy for our milk.
All of this is gone now, except old farmer Reichstedter's grandson still has the farm, and you can still choose your steer. They have a store now.
Correction (cuter):
I want my baby back, baby back, baby back ribs. Get in my belly!
Apologies to Fat Bastard.
Somewhere in this topic there is an analogy to watching an ultrasound of your baby prior to an abortion.
What's wrong with encountering your unborn child while it is still alive and connecting with them and with the reality of what you are going to do with them?
"Well, Clarice...have the lambs stopped screaming?"
Gordon Ramsay's sense of humor can be off-putting for some; I find it hilarious.
Ann is right, however - there's more honesty in Ramsay's approach to this and the objections are very likely from those who have refused to examine where their food comes from, because the whole concept is just 'icky'.
My family raised beef cattle for our own consumption, and we often joked about who was the next candidate for the chopping block. It never really bothered me; I knew why the animals were there and what their purpose was. But I will admit that it would be a little tougher for me to look into the soft, cute face of a lamb rather than the less attractive face of a Hereford steer who may or may not have a slightly tetchy attitude and be difficult to deal with. But those T-bone steaks were worth it!
Who wants to tell them? Plants are living creatures too. When you cut a plant, it dies. When you fail to provide a plant proper food and water, it dies. Unless it is a mushroom, denying the plant sunlight will cause it to die. Is it kinder to put a plant in a greenhouse to have it grow into a salad than it is to put a lamb in a pasture to frolic and play before it becomes lunch?
Off to the Greek restaurant.
Stand in front of a mirror. Open your mouth. Look at your teeth. They are the product of millions of years of evolution. They are the teeth of an omnivore.
... and babies are delivered by Stork at the Time of Convenience. And people... persons are of color blocs, not diverse in their individual dignity and agency. And a woman is a man is a woman to be converted through medical, surgical, psychiatric, or social corruption.
Humans were designed by evolution to eat meat. Our tooth enamel isn't thick enough to prosper as plant-eaters.
I hope he doesn’t apologize. But still…
It’s not irrational to be a meat eater who thinks the slaughter should be a solemn act—most of us admire the ritual some Indians engaged in of honouring the animal they were about to eat, thanking it for giving its life for their meal. I reject the moral argument for vegetarianism, but that doesn’t prohibit me from feeling sad for the fate of the non-apex predators of the world. Like the pig that provided the ham that I just ate. I feel no guilt or regret, but I won’t make a joke of its sacrifice either.
One of the odder aspects of mid-20th Century America was hip urban dwellers taking it upon themselves to familiarize farm people with things like sex and death.
When I was young, back before most of Los Angeles County was developed, we would drive by herds of sheep with lambs. Every time my mother saw them, she'd say, "Hmmm. Lamb choppies".
A well-prepared lamp chop is delicious.
I don't like lamb either.
After a bad dream about a pig in distress looking up at me before a cruel slaughter - ever since, I cannot eat pig. I stick to birds and cows. I don't preach about it. It's just my thing.
Also - eating mostly veg is easier. So I do that too.
I asked my cat to go vegan and she told me to F off.
The old joke goes that some earnest San Francisco twit says "I buy all my meat at the supermarket where no animals are harmed".
My family lived in a medium sized city (for Washington state) in the early 50s. Dad leased a pasture on the outside of town and my brother and I raised three steers. The steers made that final trip to the custom butcher and locker plant on the edge of town. Fed the family for a couple of years. We moved to Southern California and had a place in an orange grove which had a chicken coop. My brother and I raised--and slaughtered 100 New Hampshire Red roasting chickens. They were pretty tasty on the plate. Later the two of us did a lot of deep sea bottom fishing out of San Diego and San Francisco bays. Not a heck of a lot of sport there, but there were a lot of tasty fish.
I grew older and got into catch and release as a fly fisherman. My brother was a "meat fisherman" until the day he died. But there's no question that we knew where food came from.
[After visiting a petting zoo, Lisa finds herself unable to eat the lamb chops that Marge serves for dinner.]
Lisa: I can't eat this. I can't eat a poor little lamb. [Pushes her plate away.]
Homer: Lisa, get ahold of yourself. This is lamb, not A lamb.
Lisa: What's the difference between this lamb and the one that kissed me?
Bart: This one spent two hours in the broiler! [Takes a big bite.]
--From "Lisa the Vegetarian," season 7 of "The Simpsons"
@tim "most of us admire the ritual some Indians engaged in of honouring the animal they were about to eat, thanking it for giving its life for their meal." Word. Predators are cruel by nature, but I don't want to strengthen the cruel part of myself. There's a reason why what Ramsay did appears so unattractive.
My father took my brother and me to see a cow we were purchasing being slaughtered and butchered when we were very young. He wanted us to know that this was the normal way meat was prepared. He had become a vegetarian as a young man and thought it had adversely affected his health so he wanted us to be used to the process before adolescence. We did live in a rural farming area.
Outrage outrage.
It's ethical to consume a fetus... a carbon-based fatty clump of protein in a restricted frame of reference. It's moral to eat meat in a universal frame. Animals are in character, if not in body, politically congruent but not equal to human life.
I was reading about a family working to keep a "family farm" going: they have become a boutique business, raising chickens, pigs and probably something else, "grain fed," organic and all that for a clientele that will pay a premium for this. They repeat the funny old line: an ethical farmer raising animals for meat wants the animals to have only one bad day.
My mom insisted on naming our farm animals, and then she'd get upset about eating something that had a name. Dad didn't care if she named the chickens who were layers or the milk cow, but he wasn't going to pass on eating things he raised to be the food. So he named the pigs things like "Bacon", "Porkchop" or "Spareribs". Eventually, the city girl got sucked in by the quality of the meat. I wonder how these folks are going to feel about the slaughterhouse on a cricket farm?t
I asked my cat to go vegan and she told me to F off.
My cat, my dog, my ass, my parakeet purred, barked, brayed, tweeted, respectively, in no uncertain terms, to lose my ethics... religion.
Fat Bastard - Get In My Belly!
To be fair, with progress, tinyism could be considered an impairment that would socially justify elective abortion with a side of [clinical] cannibalism.
Well...he could have said Get in my Belly.
People complaining about Gordon Ramsay need to get a life. And/or get a job at a Locker Plant.
People want to be sentimental but also get the benefit of other people doing unsentimental things. Buy meat at the supermarket but never see the animal it comes from.
Please don't apologize, Gordon.
A bunch of meat-eaters want to pretend that, what, meat doesn't come from animals? They should thank Ramsay for confronting them with reality.
This is nothing new for Ramsey. On one of his TV series he and his family had a bunch of animals...I forget what kind...and he and his children named them. He wanted them to understand how meat got on the table. The kids were involved when he brought them to slaughter and butcher. The talked about how good so and so tasted.
@ alanc709 - Our tooth enamel is thick enough. We can prosper eating nothing but plants "as long as they are properly cooked" (in the words of W.C. Fields). Completely serious, fire and various other food preparation techniques make if unnecessary for us to eat meat. Chimps, on the other hand, who need to eat things raw, spend most of the day chewing. (I got that particular fact from Daniel Lieberman's wonderful, "The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease".)
I’m still here. On the farm. The things I tell tetchy cows would make hair curl!
It’s still hard for me to put animals “on the truck” or know it’s time to put someone down. Or the bull calves, a few days old- going to make hotdogs(so we’ve always said.)
If we’re as kind as possible and feed them the best- we’ve done our job.
I’m grateful for my livelihood.
Best lamb I ever had was at Boskoppie lion breeding center in Kroonstadt SA.
When I was about 10 I got a dozen chicks and duckling for Easter. That was pretty common then. By summer, they were starting to lay eggs and the roosters were crowing. I was sent up to Wisconsin to spend a week with friends. When I came back I was told that the chickens and ducks had been sent to the family farm my grandparents owned. Lots of friend chicken that summer. I had no idea.
"Completely serious, fire and various other food preparation techniques make if unnecessary for us to eat meat."
Not diabetic, eh Roger?
Lamb shanks. Yummy.
A lot of time spent in New Zealand and Australia has taught me to love lamb.
The left gets squeamish about killing lambs but is gleeful when killing babies in the womb.
Go figure...
I once went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. In the awards tent, the display for the blue-ribbon lamb showed several glamour shots of him neatly combed and scrubbed (including a picture of him drinking from a baby bottle) -- and a plate of lamb chops. To get the top prize, you had to win the all-around.
Cooking up the entire lamb is OK with me.
I might get upset if he was only going to cook up the left hindquarter and save the rest for later.
A herd of 3 legged sheep is not a pretty sight.
My daughter's neighbors keep a couple chickens. A while ago they gave a couple chicks to my grandkids, 4 and 6. The chickens are pretty full grown now. I have trouble not asking when we are going to eat them.
I'm too good a grampa to actually do that. But I do have to work at it a bit.
I had a flock of sheep for several years and sold the lambs. Never, ever did I put one in the freezer for our family to eat. Just couldn't do it after being up close and personal with them. My excuse was that I really didn't like lamb chops, but that wasn't it.
My father used to like to hunt deer. He once killed one and brought it home, and my mother (no vegan herself) sent my two youngest sisters out to the truck to ask him if he killed Bambi's mom. I don't think my father ever went deer hunting again.
“most of us admire the ritual some Indians engaged in of honouring the animal they were about to eat”
Potowatomi—maybe.
Comanche—highly doubtful.
“Lots of friend chicken that summer.“
Friends don’t let friends eat their chicken friends.
An actual conversation in my house this week.
"I'm a vegetarian now, except for pork and beef."
"What about fish?"
"I'll still eat fish."
"What animals are you not eating?"
"Chickens. They're too cute to eat."
"What about lambs?"
"I'll still eat lamb."
"Isn't a lamb cuter than a chicken?"
"Yes, but I don't think I should limit myself so much."
This same main speaker once declared that he was a vegetarian except for hotdogs and hamburgers.
Ramsey treats sheep a LOT better than he treats people. (Though I assume the Hell's Kitchen shtick is partially for TV.)
You don't win friends with salad.
ask him if he killed Bambi's mom
Is it legal anywhere to kill Bambi's mom? Now killing Bambi's dad and a grown up Bambi is another thing.
("Bambi"? Early on Disney started with the gender confusion, huh?)
"The left gets squeamish about killing lambs but is gleeful when killing babies in the womb."
That really is striking.
"Is it legal anywhere to kill Bambi's mom?"
It is in Wisconsin, and I bet most everywhere else. You've no hope of keeping the herd down if you don't take does. There was a time, in certain areas of Wisconsin, you weren't allowed a buck until you shot a doe. Don't know if that's still the case.
Plants aren't cute.
That reminds me, I have a nice leg of lamb in the freezer that I should pull out and cook. Yummy.
Two related stories:
1. My town in the Shenandoah Valley has a Market Animal Show every spring where high-schoolers and middle-schoolers show off their animals for prizes, and also sell them - the prize-winners get very high prices from local businesses. It's a lot of fun to visit: the judges in the ring are quite blunt about exactly what's wrong with the ones that don't win - narrow haunches or whatever. One of my students, a slender 16-year-old, sold two gigantic Black Angus steers that she'd raised. A week later, a substitute teacher, calling roll, said "Megan Whatsername [not her real name]! I bought Zeus, and he is DEEElicious". She was a bit disconcerted: she knew Zeus was going to be eaten, but it had only been a week since she'd seen him alive and well.
2. A nephew and his wife once lived in a trailer in a rural area of Pennsylvania - near York, I think. Their neighbors, also in a trailer, were a one-income family with 4-5 small kids. The wife decided to raise rabbits to save money on food. She told the kids not to name the rabbits because they were going to eat them, but the kids of course named all the rabbits. She dealt with that by labeling the packages with the rabbits' names when she slaughtered them and put the meat in the freezer. When she took them out and cooked them, she made sure to tell the kids they were having Roast Thumper or Fried Fluffy or whatever. The kids never named their later batches of rabbits. Of course, she may have spent more on psychiatrists' bills in the long run than she saved on groceries in the short run.
Mark (not That Mark), asked...Is it legal anywhere to kill Bambi's mom?
hell to the YEAH!
here's wisconsin ANTLERLESS DEER HARVEST AUTHORIZATION AVAILABILITY 2022
I eat fried chicken while feeding the chickens, telling them how yummy they are.
If you haven't been on a first-name basis with some of your dinners, you're really not much of a human being. You should know and recognize from whence your provender actually comes, which ain't a styrofoam tray in the supermarket.
Growing up on a farm imposes certain... Realities, shall we say?
I was gifted a cute little calf to raise. Bottle-fed that little bastard, and treated him with all due respect. He still tried killing me, on numerous occasions, because he was contrary sumbitch, and my (somewhat) idiot stepfather chose not to dehorn his ass when it should have been done. That steer actively sought me out with malice aforethought on several occasions, and were it not for the fact that my running buddy at age 11 was a large German Shepherd, I'd have likely been another "farmkid statistic". I kid you not--Cattle are 'effing dangerous, period. Not a lot you can do to change that, either.
The day we butchered those fat bastards my city-raised and sainted grandmother thought to protect me from the "trauma". I was more like "Can I be the one with the .30-30?" than anything else, and I remember feeling nothing but curiosity as to how those two bovine menaces would taste, once in the freezer.
Freaked out the city-kid relatives when they stayed for dinner, every time: "Hey, Mom... Is this Blacky or Browny we're eating tonight?"
I guess some of them had issues, remembering the calves they saw bottle-fed, and did not connect those with the warnings not to go into the pasture if they valued their lives on later visits with said cute little calves.
Way I see it? My people worked long and hard to get to the top of the food chain; I intend on staying there, and if any of y'all feel like your place is lower down on it, fine. Just don't try to tell me I have to join you. I'm comfortable as a carnivore.
Out kindergartner aged granddaughter had a tough time processing chicken nuggets and chickens. And was in denial for a couple of months about a pork chop recipe she loved. She sorted it out using logic. Carnivore, omnivore, herbivore.
She followed the science. I also explained to her cattle were natures most efficient Solar power converter. Cows turn sunlight into nourishing protein.
No worse than picking your lobster from the tank at a seafood place. Or at the Korean restaurant, picking the puppy you want from the display case.
My daughter, way back in her high school days, raised a lamb in FFA, for showing at the state fair. She shared feeding chores with another classmate, one doing mornings and the other after school. One day I got a call from this other girl, who told me first that the lamb was "lying down" and my daughter should come by after school to see it. Confused, I asked what was wrong with the lamb lying down? The girl explained next that the lamb "couldn't get up." I asked if it was visibly hurt. She hesitated a bit, and finally said, "Well, I wanted to break it to you gently, but the lamb is dead."
So I took my daughter to see the lamb that afternoon, and yes it was dead, very dead. We iced it down overnight in a wheelbarrow. The next morning, the veterinarian associated with the FFA program necropsied the former lamb. The lamb apparently had been excited by something, perhaps a snake that had been seen in the farmyard area, and in leaping about its stall had ruptured its diaphragm. If you ever get a chance to see a domestic animal necropsy, don't miss it. The smell alone will be a memory forever.
The vet, washing her hands after finishing her exploration of the lamb innards, said to my daughter, "Don't feel bad. Sometimes I think lambs wake up every morning just looking for ways to die." A replacement lamb was obtained, the task of raising it was successful, it won no prizes at the fair - but sold for a good price.
Lambs are food. Delicious, cute, cuddly, lovely food.
Roger Sweeny said...
And we have the digestive tract of Paleolithic hunter gatherers. Which means we can process a certain amount of scavenging as well.
Meade said...
“Lots of friend chicken that summer.“
Friends don’t let friends eat their chicken friends.
Which is why you should eat more game. At one time there was no dove season in Wisc. Just a few miles to your south it will start Sept. 1st.
The vet, washing her hands after finishing her exploration of the lamb innards, said to my daughter, "Don't feel bad. Sometimes I think lambs wake up every morning just looking for ways to die."
As a kid, we had a large vacant area in the corner of the farm yard, grass, some trees, stored tillage and other farm equipment, and in the corner a low pull together shed. I asked what it was used for. Dad, said it was for lambing, when he was my age. So I asked if we couldn't get some sheep. Dad said "nope, they die too easy". I asked what he meant, and he explained you could check them 4 times a day, but too often you would go out, and one will have just dropped over for no reason. Dad was a cattle guy, and could spot a sick steer from 100 yards. But could not stand stock dying for no reason. I had a second hurdle for my dream for sheep. Mom, a city girl, that had a phobia about birds, so no fresh eggs, and she was a WWII nurse in Europe. That meant no lamb on the supper table EVER. That seems to be the reason for an increase in lamb consumption. WWII vets dying off, and near as I can tell, the army ruined mutton for several generation.
Years ago, my wife was the sous chef in a French Restaurant in Philly. "La Camarque", I think it was called. One of the dishes involved cutting up live lobsters. The dirty work was done by teenagers hired off the street and taught on the job.
One of the kids, when he had several lobsters sentenced to this treatment, would line up the creatures so they could witness the fate of the lobsters who would precede them.
I think it was lost on the lobsters. But he gets points for creativity.
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