How was your dinner?
Did you have the steak?
Or the burger? Good stuff, huh?!
How about the shame?
You know, of course, that you’re getting a heapin’ helpin’ of shame
along with every bite of your commercially raised, fed, fattened, slaughtered,
butchered and packaged beef you take in, right?
You do know that, right? Because
of all the methane coming out of the assholes of all those cows, not to mention the diesel and the fertilizer used to grow the feed for them, nearly matched
in production by the hot gaseous eructions emitting from the pieholes of most
of the politicians out there who are not named Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth
Warren, that steak was good for you, bad for the environment.
Let me hasten to add that, contrary to what you might be
asking, no, I have not gone all Vegan on us, not yet anyway. I still eat my red meat. I’ve just cultivated a taste for shame. It’s like a guilty pleasure, the kind you get
when you smoke a cigarette, knowing full well that, within a few years, they
will be illegal and marijuana will be legal, go figure that.
It’s a tossup whether shame tastes better than crow. I’ve eaten both, you can be sure of that, and
I think it depends on the recipe. When
you have to eat some crow because you said something about someone else that
was bullshit, and they call you on it, that kind of crow’s not so bad, with
enough catsup and soy sauce. After all,
you did deserve it, right? It’s a lot
better than the kind of aged, stinky crow you have to eat when you get up in
public and try to deny global warming, or pretend that Republicans are the
friends of the working man. If you truly
believe the drivel you spout, then there’s no shame attached, though. That comes when you spout your drivel knowing
it is bullshit, but you’re making money doing it, so you don’t care. Shameful crow is the equivalent of flattened
three day old armadillo off a highway in East Texas or somewhere just as hot,
and there’s no amount of Sriracha that will blunt the flavor of that
snack. The aftertaste alone is a mortal
sin.
So what about chicken, or fish? Is there less shame attached to them? I don’t think so. The only chicken you can eat shame-free is
free range, uncaged chickens that have been fed only organic chicken feed and
bugs, but even then somebody has to kill them, and a certain portion of the
karmic shame that comes with that act is attached to the meat whether you like
it or not. If the chicken comes from a
factory farm where they’re caged by the millions and fattened in three months
the shame quotient goes way up, of course.
The only thing that brings it back down some is if you eat the chicken
in Chinese or Mexican food, where the pieces are small and the sauces strong
enough to allow you to pretend they’re tofu or eggplant. And don’t even start on fish, unless you also
want to talk about farmed salmon, net by-catch and factory trawlers.
The real problem is, if you’re looking for shame-free food,
where are you gonna start? Corn? I don’t think so, let’s talk about fertilizer
and water consumption, not to mention feed corn and gasohol. Wheat?
Sorry, gluten is bad now, as are carbs in general.
The inconvenient truth is that if everyone only ate food
that was ethically and cleanly grown, processed and packaged, we’d all starve. There’s not enough land out there to make
room for all those chickens. So we
better just get used to the taste of shame.
It probably tastes like Soylent Green.
:-{)}
