G´day,
And another special welcome to Emily, Josara, Julia (yes, you always pay for a good night out but I guess it was worth it), Cord, Dan, Andrew, Scott, Bill (congrats to your first album!) and Jan. Today´s topic is food (the indulgence of) and the connection between catholicism and vegetarism/veganism.
Yesterday evening I had the best salmon I ever had and the way to do it is amazingly simple. You just need salmon, a cookie box (metal), sawdust and a barbie.
First you need to empty the cookie box of it contents and then you punch some holes into the lid:
Then season the salmon with some olive oil, salt and lemon pepper
In the meantime put some sawdust (preferrably 100% wood without artificial stuff) into the box.
My dad used a mixture of this woodshaving stuff people use as litter for rabbits/hamsters and beech tree smoking sawdust and he put some fresh herbs (rosemary and sage) into the mixture.
Cover the whole thing with a grate
put salmon on grate
put lid on box, place box on barbie and fire it up
Wait for ten minutes and no worries if it starts smoking and stinking like a bushfire, ah that reminds me: do this outside or your house will smell bushfirey for the next month or so...
And after ten minutes the salmon looks like this
Awesome stuff
Yes, yes, I know you should drink white whine with fish but a nice Australian Red is always in order...well, what can I say apart from that this was the fucking best salmon I ever had and it´s so simple and quick to do...the only question now is if there are metal cookie boxes in Australia...
This culinary highlight brings me to my next topic. When I phoned with Josara last night we had a discussion on sustainable cooking/ethical eating as she has bought a "Sustainable cooking" cook book and the most sustainable thing to eat are veggies. If you wanna eat sustainable meat and you really take the whole ethical/sustainable eating seriously you would have to get yourself a piglet/baby sheep/calf and raise it in your back yard, using it´s dung to manure your sustainable veggie patch and feed it with sustainable grown grass. And comes the time you get your sustainable knive and apply it in an ethical way on the animal using even the last bit of it as it would be un-ethical to leave any waste. Well, one would need to learn the art of tanning hides and I am still wondering what to do with hoofs and teeth but I guess the hoofs could be ground up and used as fertilizer but no idea what to do with teeth yet.
So (apart from the teeth issue) no worries with sustainable meat but Josara pointed out that she would see a problem eating an animal you cared for for quite some time as you would grow attached to it. Well, call me heartless but personally I wouldn´t have any issues in that area but via that discussion we reached the topic of vegetarianism/veganism and I had a think about these ways of life from a different angle.
Starting with the question: why do I eat meat (and when I come to think about it, why do I eat anything)? Answer: because I like the taste of it. And so I can absolutly see the point that people who don´t like the taste of meat become vegetarians. But honestly I can only think of one vegetarian who has become a vegetarian because she doesn´t like the taste of meat and that´s my Ex-girlfriend Dorit. But I know heaps of vegetarians who don´t eat meat either because "awwww, you can´t eat the oh so cute animals - look at this little lamb with the soulful eyes" or because they don´t agree with the conditions animals are "produced" by the big meat corporations or because they think that animals are the better humans and you should not eat your fellow being.
Well, I have shocked already several of the "animals are too cute to be eaten" persuation when they looked at me triumphantly and said: "You wouldn´t eat an animal if you had to kill it yourself" and I said "Wanna whatch me? Been there, done that. Killed it, ate it. So what?". I sneer at those pseudo-hippies. Being vegetarian only because animals are cute? What a bullshit! If you´d try to apply logic to that kind of conviction it would be ok to eat the meat of ugly animals wouldn´t it?
The next group has a point as the "mass production" of meat in a capitalistic industrial scale has the tendency to minimise the costs at the expense of the well being of the animals. We don´t need to discuss the grievance in this field, they are well known. But again I think becoming a vegetarian doesn´t help at all. It´s like you want to change the game by not playing it anymore. In my opinion if more people would stop buying cheap meat from the big supermarkets and start supporting local ecological farmers, there would be more of them, ergo more animals who lead a happy and species-appropriate life until the get eaten. But if you don´t support alternative ways i.e. ecological/ethical meat because you don´t support meat at all as you are a vegetarian, you can say "I don´t support the big meat industry and their bad ways" but you will not make a change, the only change is in your own conciousness...
The "animals are better humans"-romantics are often not only vegetarian but vegan as they feel that drinking milk would be exploitation of sister cow...and here I can´t follow any more. The first and most obvious logical flaw would be the the afore mentioned "you can´t change a game by quitting" aspect but the whole "animals are better beings" thing is such a childish, idiotic bullshit thinking. Humanising animals is bullshit per se but if you really have a close look at nature it´s just sex and violence and survival of the fittest and so on. I would like to see a P.E.T.A. activist explain to me why animals are the better creatures so I could even begin to understand that weird thinking.
So let´s sum up the reasons for being a vegetarian/vegan:
a) because of emotional issues as amials are cute
b) because you don´t want to support a system that is wrong
Now let´s sum that up, too: GUILT
A vegetarian/vegan feels guilty for depriving animals of their right to live on or in the case of vegans even feel guilty of exploiting animals.
In order to not feeling guilty they deny themself the pleasure the world of cookery holds and that reminds me curiously of this large religious organisation which operates by planting guilt into their members so that they deny themself the pleasures the world offers, the catholic church.
But even the religious nutcase of the catholic church think in their delusion that they will get a reward for all the denial after they are dead, vegans and vegetarians don´t even get rewarded for their denial.
Well, I think life is just too short to ruin it by riding the guilt trip and if it comes to that life is also too short for not eating stuff that you like.
And one last word in the direction of vegans: ever wondered if plants have a right to live, too? Science as shown that plants react to all kind of stimuli so who are we to draw the line at animals, eh? If you really want to make a difference, try not to eat at all, just to be on the safe side. In about six weeks the whole vegan movement would be history.
And now the final thought, science is already able to genetically engineer meat from cells. So I like to imagine the reactions of all the vegetarians to synthetic meat. Surely there is no ethical/philosophical reason not to eat that as no animal has been harmed in the production of it. Will you just construct another weird chain of "logic" to justify why it´s wrong to eat meat or will a large number of vegetarians just change their reason for vegetarism to the reason my Ex-girlfriend has for not eating meat: "I just don´t like the taste of it" ?
That´s all for today and just to make it clear to my vegetarian friends, yes I like you as you are (especially Jimmy and Kathy) and I don´t have the desire to convert you into carnivors but I still think you are missing out on a good thing...
Have fun, take care and cya
Cologne picture taken while crossing the river Rhine through a dirty windshield
Like I have already explained for Berlin, Germans live in apartment buildings but the ones in Cologne are a little smaller than the ones in Berlin but also quite nice architecturewise.
and played billards...well...Olli won nearly all games as I always managed to sink the eight into the wrong hole..
Olli sorting his balls
Me having another try but I´m just not good enought to win games (apart from soccer) I guess I´ll add billard to the long list of games I am just not able to win...
Olli and me later that evening
Mark and Yvonne joined us later. They have a little boy, David (4 month something) and live opposite to the pub so they are able to take the babyphone with them when they go out drinking. Quite convenient located pub for young parents.
Yvonne and me
An artistic expression of some thoughts on Roman-Catholicism
The decoration of Olli´s fridge, cover of the best German satire magazin "Titanic", translation "What´s the matter with German women? Too stupid to drink!"
The last beer of the day and then we called it a great evening and went to bed...
