munching meat

At first, I hesitated a little to write about this. I feel like, for some reason, meat-eating can be a volatile issue. That said, I am writing this as a choosy meat-eater. Even if my words aren't worth a read, I'd say everyone should get the book I am discussing, because I want to know what you think.

After reading about it in reviews in the New Yorker and New York Times, I picked up Eating Animals by Johnathon Safron Foer last night. It's been as tough to read as it has been to put down and I'm not sure that I'll easily digest it either. I would say that it's a book about vegetarianism, but I think that would do it a disservice, not to say there would be anything wrong with a book about vegetarianism. However, I say it's "not about vegetarianism" because it's not about vegetarianism. It's more of an exploration of how and why and if we should eat animals.

I find the book challenging because I eat meat. I have not finished the book, nor have I thought through everything I have read. I do, however, have thoughts.


I only eat halaal meat, which means that the animals I eat are presumably raised and killed according to Islamic ethical guidelines.
Going into the book, I:

1) always had problems with the fact that I couldn't be sure (hence, I used the word 'presumably') that Islamic guidelines are being followed (animals raised nicely and killed nicely... what does nicely even mean?)
and
2) believe Islamic guidelines for ethical eating need to be revisited anyways.


As for number 1, in Kentucky, our imam would go to some person's farm and slaughter the animals we ate by hand. I felt comfortable about that situation. Now, I eat halaal meat from Houston. Who knows how they were killed? Maybe my idea of "nice" is not this butcher's?

For number 2, it is currently "halaal" to eat friend chicken at the specific KFCs that sell "halaal" fried chicken. I say it's "halaal" because really, can KFC, which treats its chickens pretty abysmally, really be halaal? Even if the ones I eat were not treated badly?
The spirit behind Islamic dietary laws is to eat with a conscience, humanely, and ethically. So even if KFC kills a few chickens the "right" way, is it still "right" to eat there? Should we indirectly support what happens to those other chickens?
Similarly, it's "halaal" to eat chocolate made from cocoa beans harvested by children who are effectively enslaved in Cote d'Ivore. Can my eating Nestle really be true to the Quran? It say in that book (Surah 42, Verses 41-42, to be exact) first, that one should struggle against oppression, and that "blame attaches but to those who oppress [other] people and behave outrageously on earth, offending against all right." I think we can all agree that child-slavery is oppression in this day and age. Eating the fruits of their free labor is not really struggling against oppression; rather, it is indulging in its melt-in-your-mouth glory.

My point, though: what is halaal to eat needs to be reconsidered by "the scholars." That said, I don't have to listen to the scholars. I just need to listen to my heart and not my tummy and work harder to think before I eat.

Which brings me back to Eating Animals.
My favorite thing about the book is that it does not proselytize. It just sets out the horrors of factory farming (which I knew, but can afford be reminded) but then also raises questions about... eating animals, even the ones we treat nicely. It doesn't tell me not to eat them. It asks me to think about it.

That said, the information it offers me to digest is pretty much "wow look at horrible things that have to do with meat-eating". I would like someone who eats meat (all kinds of it) to read this book and tell me what they think.


Also, just to clarify, just because vegetarians don't eat meat, it doesn't mean they don't think meat is/can be delicious. That's why we eat fake meat. It's like how you wouldn't kill someone in real life, but you would in a video game. I think...

the awesomest kid

Yesterday was the homecoming dance at my school, which I had the pleasure of chaperoning for 3 hours. Mostly, I amused myself at how well or awful my students dance. They dance to Mexican/Tejano music as easily as they do pop music. The Kumbia Kings caused as much excitement as Justin Timberlake. I was never remotely excited about Indian music; it makes me happy that my students love their own and mainstream American culture together.

Either way, my point in writing is to tell you about the most awesomest kid.

I stood to the back of the cafeteria for most of the dance, leaning up against a half-wall thing because my feet hurt. At some point, I heard a kid talking behind me. I turned, and he was just there alone, hopping around animatedly. I turned back around, pointed out to a co-worker/friend that the kid behind us was talking to himself and we laughed.

A while later, I felt someone tapping my back. It was the kid, and he was asking me to move over a bit and bending over to get something at my feet. I was standing on one of those plasticy strings that holds up balloons. Balloons had been popped and deflated all over the place; so, of course, those strings were littered all over the floor. He reached for the one I was standing on and I asked him what he was doing.

"I'm making the longest rope," he replied.

He had, in his hand, a half-deflated balloon, tied to a string tied to a string tied to a string. He tied the string I was standing on to it, and walked away, half-deflated balloon trailing behind him. I turned around and heard him saying, "Awesome. This is awesome. Awesome..."

I'm not sure that I love teaching because I'm helping fix the achievement gap. But I know I love teaching because I get to work with the most random people ever.

oh, and I forgot to mention

The story's called Best Friend to Worst Enemy. The tiger's shift from best to worst actually never happens in the story, because I ended the story before then. Oops.

BUT I STILL WON

Young Author

In third or second grade, I was a proud recipient of the prestigious Young Author's Award, which maybe a zillion other kids also received in the state of Wisconsin. I found the winning piece today, in a box of old stuff. I had an excellent time re-reading what is clearly the first major stepping stone towards what will hopefully be a long, successful career writing.

The story's main character is a lion, Raja, who live in a jungle in Delhi, which I subsequently learned is actually kind of sort of full of humans and not jungle.

Here are some excerpts, a preview of what will maybe someday be published in full in my Collected Works:

One rainy, rainy day Raja heard some thumping coming toward him. He jumped up and growled.

Then the thing that was thumping said "It is okay," in a crying voice, "It is only me, Share (Raja's BFF, a tiger). I have some very bad news, but you have to promise not to ry."

"Me? Cry?," he answered. "I'm a full grown lion."
...
"Our parents, even mine, have died because they got sucked up by quick sand."

The reader then learns the parents were chased into the quicksand by two evil snakes. I remember pretty distinctly knowing the parents needed to die, and being unwilling to give them a more violent ending than quick sand. Either way, that night, Raja hardly ate dinner, "even though it was his favorite food, deer meat."

After Raja's announcement that he is now king of the jungle

... an elephant came to their house and asked for Raja...

"I heard how your parents died.," said the elepahnt, "Do you think you need a guard? Because I can be yours."

Well why," asked Raja, "I'm not trying to be mean or any thing but I just want to know.

That sentence is probably the only one without proper use of quotation marks. When I was in a creative writing class at Tulane, we had to review quotation marks because some of my classmates didn't get how to do dialouge. Major props to my elementary teachers for having covered that so well! (Oh, and the elephant's parents were sucked up by quicksand--because of the snakes--in case you're wondering why he offered to protect the lions.)

Either way, I apparently didn't have time to finish writing the story, because the narrator ends the story with (Yes! There is a narrator! I must have read some Kipling around when I wrote this, because I seemed to have imitated his narrative voice.) this:

Now you will have to figure the rest out yourself because I do not remember the rest.


Awesome. I'm kind of awesome. I really hate sharing my writing with people (like, non-blog writing, of course); but if you come over and ask about my writing, I will let you read the whole thing!!!

scary.

Once I took a class on the archaeology of gender, and, since then, I have been scared of contracting cribra orbitalia aka porotic hyperostosis. Basically, if you are malnutritioned (is this a verb?), your bones can start to get spongey. And the spongey marrow in your head can start sponging all over the place... including your eye sockets, as shown in the above photograph.

Sometimes, my eyes hurts and I am scared. I worry that the skull sponge marrow is growing into my eyeball and if I touch my eyelids, I will feel it under them. I didn't eat any vegetables today. What if I am malnutritioned? What if bone sponge grows all up in my eye sockets? I'm going to eat a children's chewable vitamin before I go to bed in hopes of preventing such an awful fate.

Can you prevent fate?


Once, I took an online quiz to see if I had adult ADD (or rather, to see if I should bother seeing a doctor about it to be for-real diagnosed). I remember it asked if I ever felt like more than a couple TV channels were on in my head. I said yes then, and still say yes now. But what's good is that each individual channel has a clearer signal these days than ever before.

oh, and just because I go to Starbucks, it doesn't mean I would ever buy one of these things

A guide to downtown Denver's hotspots. THIS IS JUST DOWNTOWN DENVER.

That said, today, upon getting to a too-packed Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, I said, "They should just build a free-standing Starbucks over there", pointing to the strip mall (fancy one) behind the Barnes and Noble (the one with the Starbucks). I used to be too principled to go to Starbucks. Now I am too principled to plan a poor lesson because I sat at home and couldn't focus. Starbucks helps me focus because it doesn't have a TV and it does have a bunch of high schoolers from the fancy school district doing their homework. The non-Starbucks coffee is far and gross and full of college kids talking about their opinions way way way too loudly. Hey college kids, I don't care.