28 July 2011

Don't You Look Nice

I'm seeking permission to compliment people on their appearance when I see them in a public place.  I want to do this nearly all the time, and I never, ever do.  Here's a breakdown of the things that stop me. 

1. Communicating with someone has a number of stages, and it's difficult for me to perform the first one: attracting the attention of your communicatee.  At some point I learned not to speak up in public, not to touch others, etc.  I'm naturally quiet and I get quieter when I feel embarrassed or insecure.  Consequently, I have a lot of trouble soliciting and holding someone's attention long enough to speak a sentence to them (unless I'm paying). 

2. Maybe my attention is unwanted.  Maybe the subject of my attention has an eating disorder, and compliments are triggering for them.  Maybe they're just sick of being reacted to on the grounds of their appearance (viz).  All the outcomes where I hurt someone's feelings instead of making them feel buoyed are readily accessible to my imagination. 

3. It's possible that someone might interpret my attention as a sexual advance, which would distress me.  I mainly want to buck up girls (who tend to have made more of an effort anyway), and I think they're generally less likely to pursue apparent sexual advances, so this one may be just neurotic. 

4. Maybe they're a fucked-up psycho or overly gregarious, and when I talk to them they stab or attempt to prolong conversation with me.  Conversely, maybe engaging a stranger in a constrained public space is the kind of action a psycho or overly gregarious person would do.  I would hate to be seen that way!

I guess I'll probably wait to act on these impulses until I'm an old dear, since at that point talking to people on trains will be my ordained right.

19 July 2011

Meat Foods I Have Not Missed

A companion piece, for your reference. 

Raw Chicken
I don't care how you cook it, the fact that it was recently a gooey pink gibbet of pathogens freaks me out. 

Raw Beef
How can you not feel like a murderer just looking down the meat aisle?  It looks like what you'd see after you set about yourself with the katana in Left 4 Dead 2. 

Iridescent ham or roast beef
This has got to be a bad sign. 

Hamburger
If you buy it pre-made, it is made from ONE MILLION COWS, as well as all the cows those cows ever had sex with.  Think about it. 

Octopus
The worst possible combination of rubbery and intelligent.  Each tentacle is has as many nerves and moral feelings as a mouse's brain, perhaps. 

Scallops
Pointless, chewy.

Clams, mussels, molluscs generally
I just hate eating something's eliminatory organs. This goes for shrimp and their "sand vein" as well.  

Rattlesnake
Tasted this the last time I was in Colorado in an attempt to be cosmopolitan.  What does it taste like?  No idea.  It was prepared as a falafel, and the snake meat was completely imperceptible.  This experience is characteristic of other exotic meats I've tasted, such as ostrich and venison. 

Salmon
Just never liked it that much.  Best as sashimi, I suppose.

Any kind of white fish
Ditto. 

Puppy
Awfully gamy. 

Bacon-wrapped bananas
Nauseating. 

Veal
Associated with my most serious ever bout of food poisoning, plus it is an adorable baby cow.

Poultry fetuses cooked in the shell (mao dan or balut)
This is as close as you'll see me come to expressing an opinion which is anti-abortion.

17 July 2011

Meat Foods I Have Missed

I thought I'd keep a running tally of foods that I enjoyed a lot as a meat-eater, pined for as a vegetarian, then used my newfound cooking skills to recreate.  After some consideration, I've excluded recipes where the flavour comes from heavy spicing and the meat is sort of a blank center point, e.g. curries, buffalo wings, that sort of thing.  I never want for those.  Also burgers.  The state of veggie burgers is fine. 

French Dip sandwich
My favorite thing made from a cow.  Easily recreated with sliced portabello mushrooms and tons of garlic.
Satisfaction: High

Tuna Salad Sandwich
Very successfully recreated with cold crumbled tofu and vinegarMy partner enjoyed this moist sandwich not one bit.
Satisfaction: Mixed

Unagi
The buttery, tender flesh of eels is one of the last things I gave up on my course from pescetarian to proper vegetarian.  Hit on the solution to this one after frying tofu marinated in alcohol a few days ago.  Made some kabayaki sauce to put on it and I was in non-hog heaven.
Satisfaction: High

Ham
It's a struggle.  The grocery store won't sell me any liquid smoke.  I use some quorn lunchmeat right now. 
Satisfaction: Low

Bacon
Lots of work has been done on this by eminent bacon scholars.  There's baco-bits for your baked potato, veggie rashers for your bacon sandwich, and smoked cheddar for anything that takes bacon and cheese.  As to streaky bacon, I haven't really attempted a remake due to the aforementioned liquid smoke issue. 
Satisfaction: Moderate

Sausage
I've posted about this before.  Morningstar sausages also provide that greasy wrongness you want in a full breakfast sometimes.  
Satisfaction: Perfect

Braunschweiger
I like how it tastes of liver.  Haven't really tried recreating it, but Marmite has a nice kind of metallic organ-meat quality.
Satisfaction: Untested

Short ribs
Heartbreaker.  There's lots of good barbeque options for the veggie, but nothing is quite like using your low incisors to scrape the smooth muscle off a jerk-glazed pig bone.  I'm just saying. 
Satisfaction: Low 

Crispy Duck
Of all the ghoulish things I miss about meat, it's eating that layer of crispy, fatty waterfowl skin that I miss most.  There's apparently a couple of Asian solutions to this: Buddha Duck, which is made of stacked tofu skins, and mock duck, which is made of wheat gluten.  I've managed to find neither in Boulder or Scotland as yet. 
Satisfaction: Pending

Chicken wings
The good thing about these was eating all the flesh, then chewing the cartilage, then cracking the bones with my teeth and sucking out the marrow like it was crab meat.  But I also just like dark meat on a chicken.  I'm not going to bake any false bones and then fill them with marmite or something.  It's not worth it. 
Satisfaction: Not to be had

Crab
Is crab delicious, or is it just something vaguely saline that you can dip into lemon butter?  Think about it.  It's more the activity I miss here, the cracking and picking.  Replaced that by buying walnuts in the shell. 
Satisfaction: w/e

Beef Jerky
Again, it's less that I like the actual food, which is just beef, and more that I love taking something very tough and fibrous to pieces with my teeth.  There's plenty of vegetarian options for something tough and fibrous, believe you me.
Satisfaction: At peace 


When I started this list, the intention was to demonstrate that anything you miss as a meat eater, you can substitute as a vegetarian.  As I went through the things I liked eating when I ate meat, however, I found that many of my pleasures were bound inextricably to the consumption of animal parts.  It wasn't a question of taste or texture, but rather my enjoyment at using my hands and teeth and tongue to render those things that had made an animal able to live--its connective tissues, bones, and organs--into energy for myself. 

The capacity to enjoy meat is hardwired in me, and it would certainly be easy enough to pursue its pleasures.  But enjoyment isn't a moral imperative.  We can weigh our pleasures against the harm they cause and make decisions that both minimize harm and make us happy.  Frankly, I think if more people would accept this premise, I'd hear fewer of them assert that a monogamous bisexual is a contradiction in terms.