Food for Thought

What we eat is a major part of the human lifestyle, it is a fusion of many centuries of cultures cultivated from experimentations of flavors and what not. So why is it that there are so many different opinions on what is tasty and what is not? What we "taste may be acquired", (443) depending on the environment we we raised in.

Since the beginning of college, I made a conscious decision to eat vegetarian and eliminated meat from my diet. This caused some contradiction in thought between my mother and me, and so we frequently have heated discussions about previous beliefs. Just this past weekend she was telling me about a client of hers who was offered a chicken. They were at a ranch and the owner of the free-range chickens asked the client if he would like the rancher to slaughter a chicken to take home. This completely freaked my mother out because she could never imagine anyone killing a chicken just for her. She would not be responsible for such an action, and therefore persuaded her client to do the same. When I heard this I felt that it was very ironic, because what we find in the grocery stores is also raw chicken that was slaughtered for the purpose of being cooked. I could not understand the difference because "an animal may be viewed as 'sacrificed' for human consumption."(445) It is difficult for many people to succumb to the reality that they are actually eating the flesh of what once was living and breathing and so they make "psychological efforts...distancing oneself from the reality of eating an animal." (445) Her main concern about my vegetarian diet is the lacking of protein, but that is another story.

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Different cultures consume different creatures as well, because I am Taiwanese I have heard of the many absurd foods that no one in America would eat. However, this is the cultural norm difference and to those who are accustomed they do not find it strange but rather our way of life strange. Like the section about South Korea trading dog meat, that seems absurd, but Hong Kong people used to eat dogs as well as monkey brains.

This reading also reminds me of a scene from a movie that I once watched, and one scene distinctly stands out where a family at dinner eating hamburgers. Somewhere in the conversation the little girl over hears something about her hamburger really being from a cow, and so she got scared and cried because she loves cows.

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[1]http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/food/freedom_chicken440.jpg

[2]https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrqcDoj2ji9kXWoO8gheeoUbhBn5MJx8ub7PDSd7D740bljffPoWygo1hQMOOuWxav7DmCdBRJIwaczHmADmZpICrVQVxecdwEfmZ3eqKFS8lBgsG4YIb2lHegoWj75MGqWYFQO13WIcXo/s1600/vegetarian-argument.jpg