Last night I drove out to Brooklyn to see my b-in-law and his girlfriend for dinner. We ate at a restaurant called Mutard (a French place). Needless to say, the appetizers used a lot of mustard. The escargot was in butter and pesto and was slammin.
The issue of the dead horse came up again b/c the restaurant has Foie Gras on the menu. It is made of goose/duck Pâté, where the goose is kept in a small pen so it can't move, and then the goose is force fed to build up a giant liver to make the Pâté. I don't know how to spell Pâté, so I used spell check for those keeping score at home. So there's now free range Foie Gras, but since goose will continue to eat so long as there is food around, it's pretty much the same old stuff. As a meat eater, this raises a fundamental contradiction to me: when is it okay to use an animal for sport, when is it okay to use an animal for food, and what is the spectrum of tolerance between those two points? Horse racing is purely breeding an animal for sport, and the Foie Gras is breeding and torturing an animal for an overpriced cracker topping. But where does cruelty become the underlying definition of our relationship with these animals? At first, the horse dying had very little impact on me b/c I didn't see it. But the Neverending Story scene of Artax sinking into the swamps of sadness played itself out on the track at Churchill Downs. And there was no giant turtle sneezing to lighten up the mood.
After watching it on you-tube, this internal contradiction that likes animals but likes to eat and chase them has surfaced and I'm not so sure that my general relativism can brush this back under the carpet. Knowing my penchant for extremes, I'll probably declare myself a vegan by lunch today.
Has this horse incident affected you all in this way? Do you think that there is applicability of that situation to other things like eating meat? Don't you think that Mutard is a fun name--it's like a slow cow...
3 comments:
It's a tricky question. I hate to think about how the animals I need to eat for protein are treated. And how animals that are used solely for their eggs or milk or whatever are treated to make those items bigger/faster/better. Where do you draw that line? Is it worse if the animal is cute or if you have to think about a beakless chicken in a cage with 30 others just laying eggs than if you think about a happy cow in a pasture running in to hook its heavy teats up to a milker? Would you rather take the unhappy animal out of its misery or slaughter a cow that has lived its life happy and free? Too many things to think about. I'm just glad chocolate and alcohol aren't animal products.
I only drink cruelty-free beer.
and consume only organic herbs
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