We went out to dinner last night with a rag tag group of friends. By this I mean that it was a bunch of friends that one wouldn’t always picture being together. It was a group that came together sort of at the last minute. We went to our local Indian buffet where the head waiter and waitress know us and love to give us cooking tips. They also bring us baskets of piping hot naan so that we don’t have to rely on the stale naan in the buffet line. Everytime we go there we get a lesson in Indian culture and cooking.
For some reason the conversation drifted at one point to vegetarian eating. I recalled what had to be the very funniest thing I’d ever read about some vegetarians. It was in an article I read some years back (maybe 4) about raw cooking. The term alone is an oxymoron, but I’ll leave it there. In any case, the article focused on a particular restaurant in California which specialized in raw cookery. This restaurant also refused to use honey as a sweetner. This was considered odd in vegan circles because honey is a raw sweetner. However, this chef would not use honey because s/he believed that use of honey promoted, condoned, and continued the oppression of bees. S/He did not want to have any part in the ongoing trade in bee slavery. I have to say that the term raised all sorts of pictures in my mind of tiny bees rising up and yelling in tiny bee voices, “Help, help I’m being oppressed.” I wondered what sort of chains were used for bees? How does one whip a bee? How exactly does one keep a bee under oppression? Slavery, you see, implies that a creature is being forced to do something for which it was not intended by someone larger and more powerful. However, bees will make honey no matter what humans do or don’t do. I expect they might cease if we somehow managed to remove all the flowers from their territory.
I am the last person to suggest that creatures be used inhumanely. But I have a problem with all of the folks who protest against hunters. I wonder if the protesters have seen what happens when a deer population goes unchecked by hunting. The weak and young die cruel deaths by starvation and water depravation during the winter months. Which is worse, a quick shot or a long drawn out starvation? I do not condone hunting for the rack, that is killing for the antlers and leaving the corpse to rot, but using the whole deer for meat is not such a horrible way to control the herd.
The same goes for eggs and chickens or milk and cows. Chickens will lay eggs. It’s what they do. Anyone who thinks that milking a cow is cruel has never attended milking time at a farm. The cows are desperate to relieve themselves.
Let’s imagine for a moment what might happen if we were to all become vegans. What would happen to all those eggs? They’d all become chickens. They would produce more chickens. Have you been to a chicken coop? Even a small one in the summer time? Peee-uuuuuu. It stinketh greatly and cannot be abided.
On the other hand, I hate condoning the industrial farming methods that have become deriguer on most corporate farms. They are inhumane and treat animals as if they are mechanical products. In the end, I believe, they mistreat the people those animals feed. I wonder if it is really the farming methods that many vegans are opposed to and not the food itself? As in so many areas, we have taken this to such an extreme that I wonder if we’ll ever be able to see our way back to balance again?
