Interestingly enough while I can enjoy food, eating in general has been a miserable experience for me most of my life.
At first no one was satisfied with what I ate, and then when I changed to please others, everyone moved on and is unhappy with what I eat now.
That is on top of having some picky habits and an extremely bad digestive system (indeed I will likely be undergoing an operation soon because of its disfunction). In the end, if I was able to never eat, I would probably be extremely happy.
But since I must I do so generally out of need, but try to make it as good as possible since I want to enjoy what is likely to be hurting me later. Thankfully I did work as a cook for a short while, as well as teaching myself how to do things in the kitchen by myself when I was younger.
What has fascinated me is the increased morality regarding food, and our guilt over eating something that is pleasurable (if it may be "unhealthy"), or that it takes another life (all food is the taking of another life unless you eat ground minerals).
Thus I was gratified to see your response to PS.
It seems quite evident that killing animals and eating flesh is quite the human thing to do, and indeed can be done humanely. You did a great job pointing out the facts in this regard.
I think the question to ask is if you knew animals were about to eat you (which they certainly can and do in the real world) how would you want to be treated... that would be humane.
To me putting on airs that one can define eating meat as "bad" or "inhumane" and that we shouldn't because we can rise above it, is not only a testament to the overadundance of food, but a sort of mysanthropy and delusion that we somehow are
more than and
better than other animals.
Not to throw this thread off topic, but since it has reached the morality of eating (and you noted his slight hypocrisy), I thought I might point out something. As I gain little pleasure from eating (so I am not really a glutton) I have generally explored what does give me pleasure and that is sex. Several of your observations regarding eating can easily be thrown back at you regarding sex.
I'm not going to but you might take a look and read your commentary, only from a sexual "dietary" standpoint.
The foibles and errors you see in others about food, I see in others about sex. And in the end the morality of both is just as artificial (or shall I say arbitrary). And lately everyone seems to want to take the fun and fantasy out of both (did you read that they are now going to change Cookie Monster so that he eats more healthy foods????).
The final irony being I doubt I could get away starting a thread on everyone's favorite sexual pasttimes, to be described in lurid detail, no matter if it offended some. Sharing that kind of information about normal human pleasure is generally forbidden
despite the fact that gourmet sex is more "natural" than gourmet food. That is it requires an overabundance of food and "culture" to allow for gourmet food recipes. The cavemen could have been engaging in everything we do today, back then. Just look at the Bonobos.
I tend to think that as a culture, we have replaced sex with food.
holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
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