Last of my favorite quotes from Anthony Bourdain's "A Cook's Tour". He is hardest of all on the vegans in his book. It's not his fault... his producers made him go.
I can relate to this, "...when they're drunk or vulnerable, I'm getting a bacon cheeseburger down their throats".
the highlights of his vegan trip. I love how he weaves philosophy and current events and travel into his book. (See other posts on this book for full picture - or better yet "Read the book!" ;).
Maybe it was possible to make something good without meat, or stock, or butter, or cheese, or dairy products of any kind... I'd eaten tree grubs and worms and sheep's testicles. How bad could it be?
Bad.
And the hypocrisy of it all pissed me off. Just being able to talk about this issue in reasonably grammatical language is a privilege, subsidized in a yin/yang sort of way, somewhere, by somebody taking it in the neck. Being able to read these words, no matter how stupid, offensive, or wrongheaded, is a privilege, your reading skills the end product of a level of education most of the world will never enjoy. Our whole lives - our homes, the shoes we wear, the cars we drive, the food we eat - are all built on a mountain of skulls. Meat, say the PETA folks, is 'murder'. And yes, the wide world of meat eating can seem like a panarama of cruelty at times. But is meat 'murder'? Fuck no.
I so agree with this part:
Hide in your fine homes and eat vegetables, I was thinking. Put a Greenpeace or NAACP bumper sticker on your Beemer if it makes you feel better (so you can drive your kids to their all-white schools). Save the rainforest - by all means - so maybe you can visit it someday, on an ecotour, wearing comfortable shoes made by twelve-year-olds in forced labor. Save a whale while millions are sold into slavery, starved, fucked to death, shot, tortured, forgotten.
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