maintaining comfortable thoughts
My mum viciously, passionately hates eaters of whale-meat. She was positively delighted at today's reports of mercury poisoning cases in Japan from eating whale-meat. 'Nature's fighting back,' she said. 'They deserve it. The poor whales.'
Most of the victims were children. It appears that there's something about eating whale-meat in Japanese culture. Unfortunately the seas off Japan also appear to be polluted, and toxins accumulate in creatures the higher you go on the trophic levels. Given the amount of plankton and whatnot whales eat, the amount of mercury they accumulate reach impressive highs. Of course they're poisonous. The cause is in people polluting the sea, not in people eating whales. Nature's not fighting back. We cause all our own troubles.
Poor whales, sure. Guess what -- poor cows, poor chickens, poor ducks, poor pigeons, poor deer, poor frogs, poor mussels. Poor sharks. Mad cow disease, avian flu, eutrophic poisons, hepatitis B, indigestion. Do people die of facial acne because they consume shark's fin soup? Is that a filleted/sauteed slab of chicken I see on the dinner table? We eat animals and that involves blood. You know that yourself. You were still alive in those days when they kill live fowl for you at the wet market when you buy them. You were still alive when people had to kill live fowl for themselves whenever they needed to brew a good protein soup for their sick aunts or something. You visit pig butchers every day and select dead fish from a bloody truckload of dead fish on racks of ice. You see them raw and fresh and eyeless and hanging off hooks in recognisably corpselike forms close enough to touch (certainly close enough to buy). But show you a lump of marbly red stuff on TV and you start screaming like a nut. We eat meat. You feed us meat. Why are you such a hypocrite?
My mum likes whales a lot. Of all the programmes on Discovery Channel there are a disproportionate number on whales, and I swear my mum has watched them all. I don't doubt that whales are cool creatures. But after seeing a pod of killer whales relentlessly attack and tear apart a sperm whale baby on one of the multitudes of programmes, my feelings are somewhat more ambivalent. Creatures eat other creatures. Fact of life.
It's not that I think eating whales is right. In fact, if it's commercial or illegal or, so help me if there is even such a thing, recreational whaling we were up against, I'd be the first to help harpoon the godforsaken poachers. But you don't tell me that eating one creature is evil and then point me to the dismembered leg of a chicken in a pot. And you don't tell me that a wedding's not a wedding without shark's fin soup. I appreciate that you're a fantastic cook, but if you can stomach enough to treat a formerly living creature as just another article of food you better bloody well be fair enough to do enough for the others. I don't care if 'whale-meat' is just 'whale-meat' in English while a live 'pig' evolves into impersonal 'pork' components after it's been slaughtered. Keep your convenient superstitions but don't foist them on me.
I don't think I would be quite so worked up if I hadn't been reading Voltaire this morning.
P.S. I'm still against cannibalism because I'm prejudiced enough to root for the preservation of all my species in whatever form. And I'm selfish enough to not want to be eaten. So is every carni-omnivore. Deal with it.
Most of the victims were children. It appears that there's something about eating whale-meat in Japanese culture. Unfortunately the seas off Japan also appear to be polluted, and toxins accumulate in creatures the higher you go on the trophic levels. Given the amount of plankton and whatnot whales eat, the amount of mercury they accumulate reach impressive highs. Of course they're poisonous. The cause is in people polluting the sea, not in people eating whales. Nature's not fighting back. We cause all our own troubles.
Poor whales, sure. Guess what -- poor cows, poor chickens, poor ducks, poor pigeons, poor deer, poor frogs, poor mussels. Poor sharks. Mad cow disease, avian flu, eutrophic poisons, hepatitis B, indigestion. Do people die of facial acne because they consume shark's fin soup? Is that a filleted/sauteed slab of chicken I see on the dinner table? We eat animals and that involves blood. You know that yourself. You were still alive in those days when they kill live fowl for you at the wet market when you buy them. You were still alive when people had to kill live fowl for themselves whenever they needed to brew a good protein soup for their sick aunts or something. You visit pig butchers every day and select dead fish from a bloody truckload of dead fish on racks of ice. You see them raw and fresh and eyeless and hanging off hooks in recognisably corpselike forms close enough to touch (certainly close enough to buy). But show you a lump of marbly red stuff on TV and you start screaming like a nut. We eat meat. You feed us meat. Why are you such a hypocrite?
My mum likes whales a lot. Of all the programmes on Discovery Channel there are a disproportionate number on whales, and I swear my mum has watched them all. I don't doubt that whales are cool creatures. But after seeing a pod of killer whales relentlessly attack and tear apart a sperm whale baby on one of the multitudes of programmes, my feelings are somewhat more ambivalent. Creatures eat other creatures. Fact of life.
It's not that I think eating whales is right. In fact, if it's commercial or illegal or, so help me if there is even such a thing, recreational whaling we were up against, I'd be the first to help harpoon the godforsaken poachers. But you don't tell me that eating one creature is evil and then point me to the dismembered leg of a chicken in a pot. And you don't tell me that a wedding's not a wedding without shark's fin soup. I appreciate that you're a fantastic cook, but if you can stomach enough to treat a formerly living creature as just another article of food you better bloody well be fair enough to do enough for the others. I don't care if 'whale-meat' is just 'whale-meat' in English while a live 'pig' evolves into impersonal 'pork' components after it's been slaughtered. Keep your convenient superstitions but don't foist them on me.
I don't think I would be quite so worked up if I hadn't been reading Voltaire this morning.
P.S. I'm still against cannibalism because I'm prejudiced enough to root for the preservation of all my species in whatever form. And I'm selfish enough to not want to be eaten. So is every carni-omnivore. Deal with it.
posted by the zen thing at 6:36 pm
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