The Urban Pantheist

"Eating bugs makes sense, ecologically and economically. They also happen to taste really good. The more I eat insects, the more I respect them. Taking them from field or farm to plate has taught me, a recalcitrant urban-dweller, firsthand about the value of meat, and that it should never be wasted because it came from a living, breathing being not so different from us when you get right down to it. I don't believe we should clear all animal protein from our diets--partly because I've tried and it makes me feel exhausted, both mentally and physically (did you know that 'brain fog' is a commonly reported symptom among vegans?)--but mostly because that's not how our ancestors or closest primate relatives approached food. They tended to eat meat when they could. Not a lot of it, and certainly not as much of it as we do, but they did eat some.

We aren't ungulates, deftly digesting the cellulose in vegetable matter with giant internal fermenting tanks. We aren't carnivores, subsisting mainly off the flesh of other animals and not much else. We're omnivores by design. We eat everything--and part of that 'omni' includes some animals. Why not let it be insects, whose life cycles are generally much shorter, whose resource needs are fewer, who are the most plentiful creatures on Earth, and who are already being exterminated by the millions just because we find them annoying?"

From Edible by Daniella Martin. Free to read on Kindle!

There's a lot of talk about eating cicadas on the internet these days--probably I'm encountering it through my own self-filtering. Brood II, in case your own self-filtering has insulated you from this knowledge, is one of the 17 year cicada events on the east coast. From North Carolina to southern Connecticut there will be millions upon millions of large red-eyed insects emerging from their prime number slumber to ascend trees and emit their decibel-shattering love call.

I've only ever experienced annual cicadas--green, "dog day" cicadas which are loud and briefly plentiful, but nothing like these periodical events. I'm eager to travel to the action, perhaps to New Haven, a city I've never visited but that everyone assumes I'm from when I say I grew up in Connecticut.

There seems to be a certain amount of anxiety about this cicada event, fear driven by...I don't know what exactly. The way that cicadas look? The fact that there will suddenly be thousands around, making encounters between humans and these insects more likely? A friend posted a photo of a display of insecticides from (presumably) a hardware store, prominently advertising the fact that the products would kill cicadas. This is the worst kind of fear-pandering, since killing these animals does exactly nothing to control the "problem" of 17 year cicadas. They are active for a short period during one summer, mate and lay eggs, and then disappear again for the length of time that it takes a human to become an adult. So it may appear that by spraying whatever poison around you have made them go away, but they will go away with or without your participation.

The entomophagy community is using the UN recommendations and the Brood II emergence as a synergistic opportunity to promote bug-eating. Supposedly a southern Connecticut sushi restaurant is preparing to (or joking about) make cicada sushi. I'll take the tempura, please--uncooked invertebrates are likely to harbor parasites. This NatGeo Article helpfully adds "[their] plant-based diet gives them a green, asparagus-like flavor."

Of course most Westerners are not among the 2 billion people of the world who already include insects as part of their diet. There's a taboo on this class of arthropod, a disgust borne purely from cultural bias. My favorite recent analysis comes from (of course) a comedian, Andy Zaltzman, on The Bugle Podcast:

"There's no way I'm prepared to eat insects. Mashed up connective tissue of pigs? Yeah, yeah, I'm happy with that. The livers of birds that basically amount to aerial vermin? Yeah! The hacked to pieces corpse of a mechanically slaughtered baby cow? Absolutely! Insects? Never! Unless they're basically insects that live in the sea, in which case, OH YEAH give me a bit of mayonnaise and let me rip its head off! And eat it whole, stomach included, in one go--I don't care if it's dead eyes are staring at me, and if it was waving at me from a bucket ten minutes ago--YUM."

I discovered a grass-fed beef producer at the Roslindale farmers' market yesterday, and posted about it on facebook because I had just had conversations irl with friends at work about where to get locally/humanely produced meat. (Lawton's Farm in Foxboro, by the way.) A friend replied that one could also go to a mutual friend's farm in Lee Massachusetts, in the Berkshires.

This was astounding to me because I had been trying to find that friend off and on for the past 12 years. She was very kind to my first wife and I, especially when we traveled across country like idealistic wastrels and let us stay at her place in California. I knew that she didn't live there any more but had no idea where she ended up.

So it was cool to find out that she was back in Massachusetts. A google search of the name of her farm turned up this nice video (it's a slide show with voice over) with my friend and her husband talking about how they run their farm. Their livestock are pastured on vast acreage (by my city boy standards) and they are reclaiming chunks of the land from invasive shrubs with the use of goats. The sell beef, mutton, eggs and other good looking stuff. It's a little out of the way for me to shop there regularly, but next time I go to see my dad I'm definitely planning to jaunt up to farm country for a visit.

Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot, 2005)

When I worked at Drumlin Farm one of the things I never got to do was accompany the livestock to the slaughterhouse.  I wanted to understand every kind of animal facility, every relationship between humans and animals.  This crucially important part of it, the process by which animals become food, when "livestock" becomes "meat" is hidden from us.  Some believe that the disconnect between modern people and their food supply is a serious problem. 

Our Daily Bread is an attempt to reconnect  modern people with the very odd ways that the food supply comes to be.  This odd documentary, with no dialogue or narration, comes from Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and includes scenes shot in plant-processing facilities as well as those for meat.   Some of the more fascinating sequences in fact are the harvesting of olives (an amusing combination of low and high tech methods are used) and the cropdusting of a sunflower field (a beautiful scene, though it evokes Silent Spring).



( Read more; one not-too-gory dead cow picture back here. )

I had Korean Barbecue last night for the first time.  I had three reactions: Wow, that's delicious, holy crap that's expensive, and wait a minute--why do we have to cook our own food?  I thought that's why we were eating out.  Okay, cooking it ourselves at the table before our very eyes ensures that the meat is piping hot and fresh, but I still thought it was weird.  Alexis pointed out that it gives you something to do as you wait for your food--except that you're waiting for yourself to cook the food.  I guess my feeling is that eating out at a restaurant is an agreement: you order the stuff on the menu (I am against making special orders) and they bring it to you.  When they brought out three huge plates of uncooked meat I was surprised, to say the least.  I guess I like the fact that you see the meat in that state: I don't think people should eat meat without contemplating it (as the remains of an animal) first.

Noticing the year, as a hobby, has reached the overwhelming stage. There are so many birds and plants and bugs suddenly appearing that one can't catalogue them all without making it their primary diversion. For my part, I just saw an eastern kingbird--a decidedly urban species hereabouts that deserves a More Urban Species entry, along with the turkey vulture, brown-headed cowbird, and whatever else.

While visiting my dad in Connecticut, I noticed that spring there--80 miles inland or so--was a good 10 days or so ahead of Boston. Cherry trees had long given up blooming, and strawberry flowers lined the paths. We saw eastern phoebes, tree swallows, and innumerable catbirds. Alexis and I both came back from our weekends (she was in Vermont) intoxicated by the beauty of New England in May. The hangover that hits in November and doesn't let go until late April is always on our minds, however.

Among the many signs of spring are the appearances of spiders, both in and out of doors. I've photographed a few, and seen a couple on friends' journals. I'm amazed at the level of revulsion that spiders can inspire. In North America or Europe, the chances of being injured by a spider are vanishingly small--you are far more likely to drown in a bucket than to receive a spider bite requiring medical attention. (medical statistic made up but more or less accurate) But risk of injury isn't what leads to phobias, otherwise one in ten people would have a justified fear of cars. No there's something mysterious about spiders that scares people, and I'm trying to figure it out.

I realized recently that the orientation and shape of the legs seems to be an important factor. From my research, glancing at wikipedia, I see that insects (which gross some people out, but don't cause fits the way spiders do) have five segments in each leg, while spiders have seven. This results in a leg that tends to curve around and look grasping for lack of a better word. I dunno. I'm just trying to figure out this phobia--which is so pervasive that two of my coworkers, a vet and vet tech, both have it. Perhaps not coincidentally, centipede legs also have seven segments.

In other spider news, one of my livejournal friends in Australia, where it is autumn, just posted that a redback spider came in through his bathroom window. This relative of the black widow can pack a punch, but my friend was delighted to have an interesting pet come his way.

On a more mundane, not urban wildlife related subject, Alexis and I are trying to decide between a ps3 and an xbox 360. There are basically two videogame series we care about: grand theft auto and katamari. GTA4 is available for both systems. The new Katamari is NOT available for ps3, and it apparently never will be. The ps3 doubles as a bluray player, which appeals to the gadget geek in me, not to mention the film critic. However it also costs a bit more. I had some irrational brand loyalty--mostly stemming from the thought that I could play my old ps2 games on the ps3--but that is fading. Mainly this is because I realized that ps2s are pieces of utter shit, and we've bought 3 of them in five years. The most recent one I got on eBay for relatively cheap; it came with a warning that it takes a while for it to read dvd games (ps1 games are cd based, while most ps2 games are dvd based), instead I found that it doesn't play them at all. Apparently there's a voltage issue, where the machine uses two different voltage settings to spin each kind of disc at different speeds, and this goes awry easily. Whatever, I guess we'll get a stupid xbox. It'll stimulate the economy, according to the brilliant minds in the Bush administration.

Or maybe I should just buy this.

And now for something completely different: Why does the Indian restaurant near my work serve BEEF? That's like a Kosher deli selling pork chops. Looking into it a bit, I find my suspicions confirmed; it's an Indian/Pakistani restaurant. I like their food (except their saag, it's flavorless), and I really look forward to when we have group zoo vet lunch there, but it's way overrated and way overpriced. Eleven dollars for a lunch buffet?

Sorry for the continuing ugly snapshots. I'm thinking of transitioning out of 3 o'clock snapshots into something more photojournally, as befits the cellphone pics. We'll see. Between the business and the intermittently crushing depression, I haven't been livejournaling as much as I like. I'll get some health insurance, maybe a shrink, then we'll see about a new blog project.

2007 was an eventful year for me, with a major change of job as its centerpiece.( Read more... )
On this day in 365 Urban Species: Human, the weirdest species ever to evolve.

I keep making mental notes to post links, and my mental notebook is full! Here are some items of interest from the internet, and possibly the real world too.


Courtesy of g_weir: ( an excerpt from Seven Ages of Paris by Alistaire Horne, explaining where France's taste for horse may have come from--the seige of Paris )From http://delanceyplace.blogspot.com/

From anais2: Perhaps dried squirrel is more to your liking?

I discovered this one on my own: Lethal centipede sting! (Includes gory pictures). "Nearly 5,000 centipede bites are reported every year in Turkey." Book your trip now!

In case you missed it in my Soylent Screen review, The apparent origins of the "Futurama" them song!

On this day in 365 Urban Species: Common eider.

Thanks to all of you various omnivores and others to contributing to what turned out to be a really really interesting discussion! I almost didn't post that last entry, because I thought it was too confrontational. Of course, I was being a bit nasty when I said "how come you don't have to think about what you eat and I do," but it was to make a point, and I think it was heard. No one HAS to think about what they eat, but by and large you all do. If everyone thought about what they ate (and acted and legislated accordingly) factory farms would be illegal, most meat would cost more than most not-meat, and normal meals would consist of mostly plant matter with a little bit of animal on there--the way they did between the last ice age and the mid-20th century, when a huge slab of meat became first a status meal and then an obligation.

I don't believe in absolutes. I can't live all one way. Even when I was vegetarian, I ate cheese and eggs, and I didn't agonize over rennet or gelatin (I did scan labels for carmine, but I don't bother with that any more either). Drumlin Farm sausage broke me of my 15 year stretch of vegetarianism--hey, I know how those pigs were treated, I even knew some of their names. That led to a slope that had me trying humanely raised this and that, and sometimes just eating what I wanted because I liked it and it tasted good. Yes, there is guilt (thus, in part, the last post) but there is also "life goes on." I haven't brought myself to the point of eating meat outside the house (my comfort zone?) and there are some friends who, if they find out, are going to try to ram meat down my throat (and it is so easy to play the veg card in those times).

I discovered that I don't really like meat, unless it's seasoned within an inch of its life. (Spicy wings, sausages, bacon, sausages...) I could get by another several lifetimes without eating beef of any kind. Its heavy and bland, and sorry, I don't appreciate steak enough to warrant eating it. Chicken is the most boring kind of meat, that's why exotic game is always compared to it, but some day I'll own some (gotta get the eggs). Pork, the most eschewed of the main modern meat types, is the best tasting to me. I may tell people that I'm a porkatarian, see how that goes over. Or maybe I'll just be who I am, and not attach an -arian to my identity.

Again, thanks for your thoughts, that was awesome. Next time I post something provocative like that, I'll make commenting conditional on a nickel donation to bowling for rhinos! ;)

Domestic cats are some of the worst invasive species when allowed to roam free and breed. They kill native prey species and compete with native predators. (They also spread diseases like rabies and toxoplasmosis.) In Australia, a place free of placental mammalian predators for millions of years, they are especially bad. That's why they can get away with a feral cat recipe contest while in America we couldn't get a simple hunting season going, on the grounds that it was "cruel and inhumane" (As if somehow hunting feral cats is more cruel than hunting feral pigs, or for that matter, any animal.) Unfortunately for those who would eat cats to extinction in Australia, it turns out they aren't especially good eatin'. Their fur could be a good product to motivate a cat hunt, but you couldn't import it into Europe. Fur, useful as it may be, has fallen out of favor in recent decades, anyway.

What do you think? Any good way to control feral cats that you can think of? Capture/Sterilize/Release is one solution, but still puts cats out in the wild, to kill birds and spread disease. Part of my new job is dealing with feral cats, and not all of them are saved. It seems like a waste to toss a carcass in the trash, or incinerate it, when it's made of useful meat and fur. Or is pragmatism uncalled for with the sensitive issues surrounding beloved species? Do all cats (and horses) deserve decent burials? What to do with the glut of unwanted and pest animals?