a particularly enjoyable night spent together
This is so dirty, Becks.
At what point in the relationship does he admit having turned to a bunch of pseudonymous 47 year-old balding men on the internet for advice?
With terribly hostile and unpleasant attitudes about farmed salmon.
Ah, but the seared tuna won out, as indeed it should. Well done, Lothario (whoever you are).
(I expect presently to hear that Getz & Gilberto were a hit, too.)
Things have been going very well between the two of them and recently, after a particularly enjoyable night spent together, he said that she turned to him and, apropos of nothing, recalled the dinner he had prepared on their previous date: "That was a nice meal".
Uhoh. Isn't the subtext there "why don't you cook for me like that any more?"
When's Lothario going to invite us all to dinner, as thanks?
3: but well deserved, for all that.
A farmed salmon killed my mother and burned my village.
At least, I always assumed it was farm-raised.
Perhaps it was a wild salmon in a farmed-salmon Viking helmet.
Farmed salmon is what you serve to the accompaniment of Barry White. Apparently. I have no problem with salmon, actually.
11: Don't be silly -- where would a wild salmon have picked up the sophistication and manual dexterity necessary to work the cigarette lighter?
Is anybody else reading the title of this thread to the tune of "I'm Givin' It All To My Baby"? Or is that peculiarly my affliction?
I once ate wild salmon during a thunderstorm. It was quite the experience, believe you me.
15: If you mean "Doing It All For My Baby" by Huey Lewis and the News, then yes.
That's what I mean, Cryptic.
This is not just me being Little Monsieur Brillat-Savarin, you know. Those salmon farms are like battery chicken cages, and just as prone to disease. If anything it's worse because the toxins that build up in salmon cages do not get broken down in the cooking process as the salmonella on battery chickens does.
They're an environmental hazard too. There are stretches of the Scottish sea-lochs that have been polluted by run-off from salmon farms. It's bad stuff.
19 -- think nothing of it.
20: it's even worse on the pacific west coast, as I understand it. I mean, over and above the insanity of farming atlantic salmon there, when you could have wild pacific salmon...
What is battery chicken- is that like the pickle lamp?
I once farmed a salmon in Vegas, just to watch it spawn.
I once spawned a salmon in Reno, just to watch him burn a village.
pt once pwned eb in Vegas Reno comments, just to watch him cry.
"Uhoh. Isn't the subtext there "why don't you cook for me like that any more?"
Posted by: Hamilton Lovecraft "
my thought as well.
25 has too many syllables in the last clause for it to effectively mimic the rhythm of "just to watch him die." Just sayin.
"just to watch him cry" is good, though.
As far as syllables go, it's not "I once shot," right. It's "I shot."
And what kind of sick individual would try to raise salmon in Reno?
The kind who would end up stuck in Folsom Prison. Of course.
Perhaps 25 deserves the fulsome praise of 26. I am on record as favoring the creation of a pwnership society.
24 is awesome and I take full responsibility for making people misremember that lyric.
But you got it right. Or righter, anyway.
I can't believe we aren't taking more pride in helping one of our peeps get lucky. Is it just that our awesomeness is such a given that we aren't surprised by our success?
We don't get excited less'n the TiVo's at least in three digits.
And, you know, he never showed up in person. If he'd been mixing it up in the thread, explaining the bizarre brown-sugar curry sauce and such, I'd have been rooting for him. As it is, eh?
Eggs Benedict? That's the most impressive part, to me.
presumably they went out for breakfast; someone who wakes up in the morning with a new lover and then hops off to make hollandaise sauce is bordering on the prissy.
by the way, I am kind of walking away from some of my harsher comments about bisque in that thread; I made a soup with some prawn shells the other weak and it was lovely and not heavy at all.
someone who wakes up in the morning with a new lover and then hops off to make hollandaise sauce is bordering on the prissy.
Not so much bordering on prissy as invaded and siezed the capital of prissy...
Or breakfast could be at four in the afternoon?
41: Flip-flopper. I had an amazing crab and lobster bisque a few days ago that I can't seem to stop thinking about.
I'm planning to make an impressive dinner for my wife in honor of our second wedding anniversary this weekend; I ought to go read that thread again.
Or is offhandedly competent enough in the kitchen that god knows why he would have been asking our advice.
(And I'm sure that farmed salmon is an ecological nightmare. I'm just not sure that it's any more of a horror than a dozen other types of meat I eat without thinking about it, such that staying away from farmed salmon is a lot more urgent than going vegetarian.)
be sure. The most important thing is that most of the nasty stuff *doesn't* flow out into the sea; it stays in the salmon.
This is making me wonder if there's a market for frozen, toaster-ready eggs benedict.
Hell, we could even put chocolate chips in them!
Wait, are you really suggesting that this is bad enough that I should not eat any salmon out at a restaurant without first verifying that it is not farm-raised?
(And if it is really so very obviously harmful, why doesn't the FDA step forward and lay the smack down?)
I think I'm with LB -- it's almost certainly not as good as wild salmon, but then most hamburgers I eat aren't as good as organic free-range grass-fed beef either. I'm not sure this is, you know, extra-super especially bad. Although if someone has good reason to think it is, please do share. (I've read the old thread. That didn't convince.)
Granted, chocolate chips in pancakes wrapped around sausage -- not a good idea. But try to expand your horizons a little. Visualize chocolate chips inside toasted English muffins topped with poached eggs (the stabilizers necessary to preserve poached eggs through the freezer would breathe new life into America's chemical industry) and creamy Hollandaise sauce! Once we got the market's attention with that as our debut, we could expand to blueberries and -- dare I imagine it -- freeze-dried strawberries!
Clownae, I'm trying very hard not to visualize anything of the sort.
A bit of farmed salmon will not kill you. But if it is like your favourite food and you eat it once a week, you are probably running risks you might not want to. Neurotoxins and cancer:
http://www.albany.edu/ihe/salmonstudy/
actually, looking at this chart shows that Scottish farmed salmon is much worse (because more intensively farmed) than American, but they still say that no more than once a month for American farmed salmon. Over here, it is actually advised that you shouldn't eat it more than three times a year. Which in my book means "go the extra mile and don't eat it at all since it is not as if the stuff is a wonderful treat".
52 -- philistine! It's your sort that has always stood in the way of progress. They laughed at Mr. Kellogg too!
Oh wow. That's really bothersome.
(In all fairness, I was warned. It's funny that 56 actually made me go back and click through the link in 48.)
I'd say it's better than tubgirl, but worse than goatse. A hell of a way to start the morning, anyway.
A hell of a way to start the morning
Awesome. This will be the slogan for Eggs Toaster-dict (tm). I'm talking to venture capitalists as we speak.
(And if it is really so very obviously harmful, why doesn't the FDA step forward and lay the smack down?)
That would be because the entities that benefit from the lack of regulation are more powerful and more coordinated than the entities that are harmed by the lack of regulation.
Well, look, I'm not suggesting the agency is wholly immune from capture, but they actually have a reasonably good track record of stepping in an stopping things that are really dangerous. Political pressure may cause them to delay too long when there's ambiguity in the science and whatnot, but the more common complaint against the FDA is that they are too risk-averse (and consequently over-regulate), not too lax.
And if it is really so very obviously harmful, why doesn't the FDA step forward and lay the smack down
It actually explains this in the report;
EPA methods are used by states and the EPA itself to issue fish consumption advisories based on human health effects, but FDA is the agency that would have to act to restrict the sale of farmed salmon. The levels of contaminants found in farmed salmon, while triggering relatively restrictive consumption advice from EPA, do not exceed FDA action levels. Even though scientific information suggesting greater health risks from PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, and other substances has been gathering for more than 15 years, information about the extent of the public’s exposure to these substances - especially from animal fat in the diet - is relatively new. Having been set in some cases as long as 25 years ago, FDA standards for several environmental contaminants do not reflect the latest scientific information. Perhaps for many of these reasons, both EPA and FDA agree that the FDA levels are inappropriate for setting fish consumption advisories (see last paragraph on p. 1-5 in EPA National Guidance for Fish Advisories).
FDA standards are set by considering a range of factors in addition to health, such as the costs and commercial impacts of regulatory action. But you don't have to take the costs and consequences of regulatory action into account when ordering your dinner.
You don't--but on the other hand, the problem with, say, insisting on wild salmon instead of farmed, is that the collective consequences of 'only the best for me' are things like overfishing, which is (indirectly) why farmed salmon is so popular. The whole fish situation makes me really sad.
Best to stick to meat then. No problems there. Nosiree, no problems at all.
(I think the weirdest thing about this "salmon is gay" thing the Brits have been spouting is that the reasoning seems to be that salmon is the least fishy fish, implying that eating fish is a true indicator of masculinity. No wonder you guys lost your empire.)
What if I first liquify my farmed salmon in the blender, and then run it through my Brita filter? Would it be okay to eat then?
I don't think that salmon has ever been overfished? It always used to be expensive because it's difficult to catch, unless it's in a farm.
I don't have a problem with farmed fish in general; I had some farmed cod from Tesco and it wasn't too bad. But farmed salmon is much worse than other kinds of farmed fish because it's a much more fatty fish, and the bad stuff is stored in fat, plus farmed salmon are fed more or less 100% fishmeal, meaning that they build up toxins and pollutants at a much greater rate than wild salmon. Farmed trout are also not my favourite choice (and Brillat-Savarin is absolutely caustic about them), but they are not actively harmful in the way that farmed salmon are.
Salmon are also a much more voracious and carnivorous fish, so they suffer more in capitivity, which has the practical effect that antibiotics are used on them much more.
In summary, my opposition to farmed salmon is actually one of the few elements of my personality that is not based on vicious snobbery. Even if farmed salmon were tastier than wild it would still be a bad idea.
Coincidentally, I'll be having salmon tonight.
It's still bland and texturally unpleasant, though, and almost any other fish would be a better choice.
#65 unfortunately not, I think, because the relevant toxins are fat-soluble.
#64: interestingly, smoked salmon is not particularly poofy IMO. Giving up smoked salmon was the hardest part of giving up farmed salmon.
I might look for some of that farmed cod. I really like cod but haven't eaten it for years because of the over-fishing.
I buy something referring to itself as 'organic farmed salmon' -- significantly cheaper than wild, and I vaguely assume involving less damage to fisheries. But I don't know what the label actually means in terms of farming practices or toxic residues.
It means that they don't use antibiotics. It might mean that they take a bit more care to try and keep pollutants out of the food chain, but the things will still end up being fed fishmeal so my guess is that you should still probably try to avoid having it more than once a month.
Note from that chart that even wild, line-caught salmon still has advisory levels of no more than once a week, for some varieties. There's quite a frightening level of pollution out in the sea, and it disproportionately ends up in salmon.
These guys reckon that the news is not good; the European standard is a bit better than normal salmon farming standards, but not much, and there is no American standard at all.
My guess would be that in the USA, "organic" means that they don't put food colouring in the fishmeal to make the flesh pink, so you are missing out on one carcinogen in the food colouring, but not the really bad stuff.
I surrender -- farmed salmon's off the menu.
Now to figure out what else to have for dinner next Saturday. If I start with pork ribs in an orange glaze as an appetizer, what else goes with that?
btw, regarding #63, you are not necessarily helping with the problem of overfishing by eating farmed fish, since farmed fish are fed on fishmeal (mainly herring and mackerel, which is a damned shame to me as I'd far rather have a couple of nice mackerel than a farmed salmon). On the one hand, fishmeal includes the bits that humans don't eat, so there is less waste, but on the other hand obviously you need to feed several pounds of fishmeal to get one pound of fish. The question of whether fish farming adds or subtracts from the world supply of fish is apparently quite a controversial one among the marine crowd.
Salmon have indeed been overfished, but probably not to the extent of other fish. And the Brits are of course right about the problems with farmed salmon; I just found the gendering strange.
re: #73, the New York Times did this piece a while ago in between the stories about preposterous people shagging each other, and it looks quite good.
And the Brits are of course... strange.
This is news?
Is there anything more yuppie than a long discussion comparing the merits of farmed salmon to Free Willy (or whatever the term of art is) salmon? (NTTAWWT.)
Hrm. I love smoked mackerel -- I don't think I've ever cooked it fresh. But worth a thought.
(Although I need to think about the pork --> fish transition.)
78: Probably not. Does anyone besides yuppies even eat salmon?
Bears are the yuppies of the animal kingdom.
If I start with pork ribs in an orange glaze as an appetizer, what else goes with that?
Tater tots, with Diet Coke to drink.
If I start with pork ribs in an orange glaze as an appetizer, what else goes with that?
Dunno about an entree, but the pork l'orange made me crave wasabi mashed potatoes with a miso sauce.
Bears are the yuppies of the animal kingdom.
This is probably true; we already know they're gay-friendly.
I'm not sure I'm totoalyl sold. Salmon has a very favorable fatty-acid profile. It might not be worth giving that up, even if you need to take in a few heavy metals in the process. I mean really, a little mercury never hurt anybody, right?
[Note that I'm talking right out the back of my ass here, not having read any of the no-doubt-helpful links above. I'll read them this weekedn and perhaps my mind will change.]
Sardines also have a nice fatty-acid profile, and those are totally the yum. So I could probably survive without salmon.
(I refuse to more-than-infrequently spend the $xzillion dollars they charge for wild alaskan salmon at whole foods.)
re: 75
I've not been the major advocate of salmon as ghey, but...
I presume the gendering comes from years of whiny people not wanting to eat anything that's not chicken breasts and veg. The world is full of people who find fish icky (except salmon or cod), meat icky (except chicken), and all non-standard cuts of meat double-icky. Those people are annoying and, unfortunately, my experience is that most such people are (young) women.*
* Gross generalisation obviously. I'm not trolling, honest.
Maybe in the UK. My experience is that people who don't like fish tend to be guys who eat lots of red meat (like me).
re: 88
Yeah, different stereotypes at work, I suppose.
In my personal experience, the fussy non-vegetable eaters tend to be guys and the fussy only-bland-non-gross-stuff eaters tend to be women.*
* With the same 'gross generalisation' caveats as before.
And re. "whining" about food, we return you to the subject of women and body issues.
Yeah, in the US, culinary adventuresomeness is coded more feminine than masculine. (And I don't think salmon is coded as quite such an easy-listening fish here as it seems to be to you. When I think of what fish I could feed an annoying food-fearer, I think of bland white fish: sole or flounder.)
people who don't like fish tend to be guys who eat lots of red meat
ATM.
(I could of course make a follow-on "don't like fish" joke, but it would likely get me banned.)
When I think of what fish I could feed an annoying food-fearer
I think frozen fish-sticks.
Tuna and salmon are the fish for people who don't really like fish. Bland white fish is scary.
re: 90
Yeah, no doubt there are some body issues at root, issues to do with exercising self-control, discomfort with hedonism, fear of gluttony, social disapproval of fat, etc and somewhere, somehow, teh patriarchy is in play.
However, saying all that, I think it generally holds true, that:
If you invite people for food and one of the invitees starts to whine about what's going to be served -- because they don't eat X, or because they're X-intolerant, or because they are a dietary-class-excluding-X-ian, or they are on a non-X diet, etc. -- then the odds are that 9 times out 10 that invitee will be a woman.
92: I believe that joke is already embedded in the one you made, Brock. I'll refer the issue of banning to the Central Committee.
When I think of what fish I could feed an annoying food-fearer, I think of bland white fish: sole or flounder
Interesting. I am not a big fish eater, and salmon is one of the few fish I like. Sole is OK; flounder--not so much. I think of salmon as being one of the few fish even non-fish eaters like.
How does 95 contradict anything about teh patriarchy?
Okay, well, mostly I don't feed annoying food fearers, so my sense of what they will and won't eat is unclear. We generally have crackers or something in the house.
Bland white fish is scary.
Jesus, you people are freaks. Dull, perhaps, but scary?
re: 98
It wasn't supposed to contradict anything about teh patriarchy.
The content was supposed to be something like i) yes, I know there are complex socio-political origins for a certain kind of food-related behaviour in some women, ii) it's still damned irritating.
re: 99
"Okay, well, mostly I don't feed annoying food fearers"
Me neither, I'm more going on things that have annoyed me in the past when I wasn't a grumpy recluse and cooked for relative strangers more regularly.
99: Bland white fish tastes like fish. For someone who doesn't like fish, this is unpleasant. Salmon, on the other hand, doesn't taste much like most fish. Therefore, people who don't like fish tend to not mind salmon, whether these people are annoying women who won't eat anything (McG's experience) or guys who like red meat but not fish (me).
Aren't frozen fish-sticks made of shark, mostly? Also: does anybody eate skate or ray?
And how can 100 have passed unremarked?
Mmmm, skate. Although I eat it primarily in restaurants, rather than cooking it.
Actually, swordfish is the fish for meat-eaters. B/c it's meaty.
102 gets it exactly right.
OT, but related to food and notions of what is tasty. Since I am working at home today, my wife cooked breakfast--seaweed soup accompanied by tiny anchovies, dried, fried and coated with sesame oil. However, she cautioned my ten year old not to put the anchovies in his soup, because it might spoil the taste.
Just as there are people who think that you can make the taste of seaweed soup any worse, there are those who don't generally like fish, but who like salmon. It's a big world, LB, a little tolerance, please.
And actually, that sounds rather tasty.
It sounds delicious. Does "seaweed soup" mean miso, or something else?
Geez, orange glazed ribs as an appetizer? LB, you're my kind of woman.
How many people are you serving?
Hell, take Smasher's advice--serve half racks of meaty spare ribs l'orange with wasabi mashed potatoes. Shaved fennel salad to start, cheese course to finish.
Yum.
None, just the ribs and the fish.
Does "seaweed soup" mean miso
Nope, it means boiled seaweed. There were a few tiny pieces of meat in it for a touch of flavor and, like almost all Korean food, garlic.
Idealist, does you wife make homemade kim chee?
But seriously, the recipe I like is stir-fried 2" sections of rib, and cooking enough to feed 6-8 adults and two kids dinner is a hassle. I figured I'd just make the same amount I feed the four of us for dinner, and call it a first course.
that sounds rather tasty.
Tell you what, I'll save you some and trade a Tupperware full for some meaty spare ribs l'orange with wasabi mashed potatoes.
Idealist, does you wife make homemade kim chee?
No. There are big Korean supermarkets not too far from where we live. She buys it (thankfully--the last thing I need is the additional duty of digging holes in the back yard so that we can bury jars of rotting cabbage).
I just found this out a few months ago.
You know what's good? Homemade pepper parmesan breadsticks, crisp and still warm, wrapped with a slice of prosciutto and drizzled with just a touch of lavendar honey.
She buys it (thankfully--the last thing I need is the additional duty of digging holes in the back yard so that we can bury jars of rotting cabbage).
My buddy Mike's mom just sticks food-safe plastic lidded buckets in the basement--it turns out awesome.
Sha also does those little salty pickles. Yum
I think I'm going to go eat lunch now.
Idealist, you could do the cooking yourself, you know.
re: 113
The wasabi mash and the cheese course sound great.
Can't be doing with the fennel, though. One of the best meals I ever had, at a Michelin starred restaurant in Glasgow, was nearly spoiled by a preponderance of fennel.
Idealist, you could do the cooking yourself, you know.
Sorry, cooking's women's work.
Nice looking bridge you're hiding under there.
On the subject of picky eaters and gender: the pickiest eater I've ever known was my best friend for years, and he hated almost every kind of vegetable, including tomatoes and mushrooms. Any time we ate anywhere he'd spend ten minutes picking the offending bits out of his meal.
A lot of guys I know have diets that primarily consist of what I call "brown food": french fries, meat, anything deep fried. Sometimes cheddar cheese adds a splash of color.
On the subject of salmon: the first time I ever had smoked salmon was on a BA flight when I was twenty years old.
re: 129
When I was mostly cooking vegan or veggie food, there were a few of my male friends who used to express pretty extreme scepticism at what I was about to serve up as they did indeed 'have diets that primarily consist[ed] of what [you] call "brown food"'.
That stereotype is alive and well here, too.
On the other hand, all of them ate what I served up.
Oh man, that's sad. My dad used to smoke salmon at home when I was a kid. So damn good.
129, 130: Yeah, that was the stereotype I was appealing to when I said culinary adventursomeness was coded feminine over here -- while there are certainly annoying-female-non-eaters, they run different: they seem more likely to be intentionally controlling their diets. Men seem more likely to just fear the non-breaded foodstuff.
So, really, the challenge is to come up with an entree that serves 5-8 plus two kids that doesn't violently clash with the ribs, and doesn't involve farm-raised fish?
Early fall, in New York...maybe a pate en croute (i.e., meatloaf with puff pastry)? Golden beet salad, with goat cheese and dill? Smashed new potatos with sour cream and chives? Serve with a nicely hoppy pale ale or cider instead of wine?
There are a lot of extraneous question marks floating around?
re: 132
The guy-squeamishness you are talking about -- which can be jiust as annoying as the passive-aggressive controlling squeamishness I was talking about -- seems partly to be about living up to a certain stereotypical masculine image: real men eat burnt dead animals and bread; only effeminate men and the French do otherwise.
135: There can be a countervailing stereotype, thoguh, that real men will eat anything. That is, if you're not willing to chow don on the weird stuff, you're just a total puss.
(Yes, yes, ATM)
My father won't eat onions, or anything that resembles them. I don't know how my mother puts up with it.
135: they also eat day-glo orange cheese.
Goat cheese and beets is a great, nay, divine combination.
Also, re: dagger aleph's smoked salmon thing. I was also in my erly to mid twenties before I ate it.
We were a vegan household from when I was about 8 until I was in my late teens, and when I left home I mostly cooked vegan or veggie -- with occasional chicken or pork -- for quite a few years.*
* not because I didn't like other things. Whenever I tried them, I liked 'em but it just takes a while to get round to try all the things you've 'missed' growing up vegan.
The whole vegan childhood thing is also why piss-poor half-arsed vegetarians -- the kind that don't eat meat or fish, except chicken occasionally -- piss me off. Take a rigorous moral stance people, or admit you just don't like certain things. But don't straddle the line in the middle and dress your personal taste up as an ethical decision.
I had dinner in a good restaurant with a man who -- not for any reason of morality or allergy -- insisted that there was nothing on the menu he could possibly eat, so he demanded a plate of nothing but romaine lettuce.
I would cook halibut with soy/maplesyrup/mustard glaze.
You know what people don't eat very often, that would be just perfect? Ham.
That is to say, order one from an organic, pasture-fed pork farmer, preferably one that raises one of the old, fatty breeds. Stud with gloves, baste with beer as you roast in a nice it's hot all the way through. It's a revelation.
142: Is your dining companion that much of a tool outside of restaurants? Or just really thrifty?
re: 143
My wife's village in Bohemia has its own communal smoke house that smokes hams or bacon-like pork joints. I couldn't believe it the first time I tried it. Just a world away from anything else I'd had before.
144: tool, or (more precisely) freak
I've never met a person who was raised as a vegan. I take it you were never subjected to school lunches.
I think I would have preferred being raised vegan, rather than being raised, as I was, by parents from Eastern Europe.
Stud with gloves
Where do I find this gauntleted stud?
cloves.
People keep interrupting me here. Makes it hard to compose coherently.
We didn't become vegans until I was about 8 or 9 so I wasn't totally unaware of what meat was like.
But yeah, we took packed lunches to school, in a box.
Generally, I didn't mind. Both my parents were good cooks so we ate pretty nice food. The only thing I didn't get used to was the absence of milk. Soya milk just isn't an adequate substitute.
My parents were pretty paranoid about nutritional stuff so my sister and I took various supplements -- brewer's yeast and B complex -- which, in retrospect seems a bit wierd, but it didn't seem strange at the time.
To this day I don't eat a lot of red meat. I like it, I just rarely feel the urge to eat it.
148: Not all vegetarians are vegetarian for moral reasons, you know.
Re. annoying diners, my father's wife basically won't eat anything that isn't middle-American chain-type and/or processed food. Also no onions and I think a couple of other things that make her a pain in the ass to eat with. Ostensibly the onion thing is allergies; she's also allergic to blooming flowers and a bunch of other crap, and yet her own house is filled with air fresheners and the like. God, it drives me nuts.
"Not all vegetarians are vegetarian for moral reasons, you know."
Well, that just comes down to 'I don't like X' then. Which is fair enough.
You father's wife sounds like some people I know.
154: No it doesn't.
For instance. It could be a health thing. Or it could be a factory farming thing, which is a moral stand, but not necessarily the "don't eat animals" moral stand that people associate with vegetarianism. When I didn't eat meat, it was b/c of that, and I did eat fish and, when I could get it, organic/free-rangey type meat.
So there.
Mmm. I've toyed with ethical vegetarianism on the basis of 'factory farming is cruel and wrong' rather than 'killing animals is wrong'. (On the latter proposition, I'm firmly of the mind that 'If God didn't mean us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?') Therefore, if I went vegetarian, I wouldn't think of the occasional deviation from purity as abandoning my position -- the point would be to reduce the demand for factory farmed meat, not to avoid contaminating my lips with the flesh of animals killed in anger.
an organic, pasture-fed pork farmer
Chopper, do you know how I go about finding somebody like that? Will he ship pig pieces to me?
Whoever he is, he should stop eating all the pasture. The pigs need some too.
Cherry Grove Farm looks promising.
The 'no factory farmed meat' seems a perfectly consistent moral position to take. I have a lot of sympathy with it. If I was a better person or had a larger disposable income, I'd be inclined to that view myself.
I'm just irritated by a certain type of inconsistent life-style vegetarianism which does come down to personal taste dressed up as a moral stance.
Moral positions that are more nuanced than 'no meat' or 'any meat' weren't the target for my bile!
When I was a thoroughly consistent vegetarian I walked around in Chinese slippers in the New England winter. Not advised.
Clownae--we're blessed in St. Paul to have a Farmer's Market that requires all food sold in it to be organic and raised within 100 miles. Frankly, I just kept trying the different pork vendors, talking to them about how they raised their animals, what breeds they raised and so on, until I settled on a guy (partially because he has great bulk purchase prices, but also for the raw quality).
If I were you, I'd research the local farmer's markets in your neck of the woods--I presume NYC has them--and find one that features/requires organic meat purveyors.
Of course, what I'd really like to find is a farmer who raises his pigs in an oak forest, letting them grow up on acorns and whatever they can forage. According to the books I've read, that's how the Spaniards do it.
When I was a thoroughly consistent vegetarian I walked around in Chinese slippers in the New England winter.
Goodness. I'd have expected a little more sympathy for Mr. flip-flop person.
Yeah, there's a good farmer's market in NYC -- I have never seen pork there but have seen lamb. Also I haven't been there in a while. The famer's markets in my part of New Jersey are pretty lousy. But I might drop by a couple of the farms on that EatWild page and see how they are.
But SB, my point is I have ceased to be consistent.
And I believe it's a universal truth that there is no one who scorns the winter flip-flopper more than the winter slipperer.
Following up on the veggie thing: I think it comes down to some sort of Calvinist belief that making moral commitments ought to be hard. If you don't make the hard commitment, you don't get to use the label.
So, I can't swan about describing myself as a practicing Buddhist* unless I make some kind of effort to follow the eightfold path. That sort of thing.
In the same way, someone who rarely eats meat because they don't like it, or because they think it's bad for them shouldn't be adopting the label 'vegetarian'. They are just someone who doesn't eat much meat.**
* I'm not, obviously.
** I realise there are two senses in which we use 'vegetarian': i) descriptively, someone who doesn't eat meat and ii), prescriptively, someone who thinks its wrong to eat meat.
156, 160: That's been essentially my position for the last dozen years or so. It's basically a `a lot of industrial agriculture is wrong, or cruel, or stupid (or all three)' and I don't have to support it. As a (broke) student, that essentially defaulted to being vegetarian (plus avoiding some veggie sources etc. which are also stupid), and I got used to it. I've got the disposable income to turn that into a `select meat only' diet now, but haven't bothered to research it because I can't say I'm unhappy with what I eat. I've described it to people as: I'm not vegetarian, I just eat like one.
162: wow!
What about when you get frostbite? Are you allowed to claim it then?
This concludes an unproductive attempt to revisit the "Mr. flip-flop person" incident.
Oh, a side effect of going after less processed food & less automated etc: It might cost a little more (not much, if you are careful) but wow does it ever taste better. North American food marketing has been optimizing away from taste (and towards other things) for ages now ... surprising how much has been lost in some cases.
re: 172
They do make non-leather shoes where you come from, right?
re: 175
Yeah, there's a good organic butcher in Oxford where I buy game (on the odd occasion I have it). The quality is noticeably better for their other produce too.
re: 172
Kudos on the painful self-sacrifice though!
My best friend made me go out and buy boots once it snowed, so my martyrdom didn't last very long.
On the downside, non-leather shoes are often not the nicest.
This concludes an unproductive attempt to revisit the "Mr. flip-flop person" incident.
You can't go home again.