Saturday, February 4, 2012

It’s the Grill not the Radio

I’m an amateur carnivore-that is to say, I eat meat but don’t get paid for it. I’m thinking of those guys on the cable niche stations who are willing to eat the most amazing crap stuff ever televised (until the next show).  I believe in my entire life, I’ve not (yet) known a vegan but have known a vegetarian, though I didn’t like his rationale for his lifestyle. 

It wasn’t so much that he didn’t like to eat meat, I believe, but that he hated plants. I used to think of him and smile while emptying the grass clippings bag on my lawnmower, 'add oil and vinegar; serves six!'. I’m not nearly as brilliant and brazen when he’s around but give me half a world of separation and I’m fearless.

I thought about this whole Meat the Beatles when I came across this story on pink slime. You’re probably wondering what kind of marketing/ manufacturing people call something by that name. It is, I submit, a vast improvement over its original name, ammonium hydroxide. If you’re someone who has always been disquieted by Red Dye #40 (any relation to WD-40?), this is close to one of those ‘sell my clothes, I’m already in heaven’ moments. I guess Soylent Green had been trademarked.

There’s a subplot deep inside Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 where Yossarian tells Milo Minderbinder about Corporal Snark putting mashed up bars of GI soap in the sweet potatoes at the chow hall to prove the men  are Philistines who couldn’t tell the difference and Minderbinder assumes they most certainly could only to learn from Yossarian such was not the case at all. Funny how life imitates art.

Mom used to say ‘don’t ask the question if you can’t stand the answer’ and the more you wonder and worry about pink slime, the more reasons you discover you ain’t heard nothing yet. We call them “Kitchen Secrets” for a reason and if you think otherwise, try a heaping helping of this and take as many napkins as you’d like. You’ll probably need more. Seems to add a whole new dimension to ‘you are what you eat’.
-bill kenny

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