I'm going to take this opportunity to explain the point of this blog, and the mission I'm going to undertake here. It's mostly for a bit of personal vindication but I figured there might be people out there interested in my 'journey' that I plan on undertaking here.
The plan itself is fairly simple. Starting today, Monday May 25th at 12:55AM. I'm a vegetarian.
While to many people this alone might not seem like that much of an undertaking, let me first explain, and then minorly horrify you. I've spent all my life being a hearty red meat eater. At 6'7" and close to 300 pounds, playing sports all my life, I've eaten every form of deep fried, burrito wrapped, butter covered, bacon flavored delicious piece of animal flesh I could wrap my grease stained lips around. And to be honest, outside of the chest pains, heavy breathing and high blood pressure I've loved every minute of it. I feel as though I embody a "red meat eating american" in every sense of the word, and that's why this journey is going to be particularly hard for me. Because even though as of today I'm a vegetarian. I really don't want to be.
My "theory" which I'm planning to put to the test here, is a fairly simple one. Most people don't care what they eat because by the time it gets to them it appears in a processed, hardly identifiable form. Ground beef doesn't look even vaguely like a cow, and a giant turkey leg, while amazing tasting, doesn't require any amount of moral questioning before you dig in. So before I eat another bite of meat, I've decided to earn my stripes and eat my way up through the food chain. I'm going to put my personal sense of ethics and morals to the test by trying to kill everything in my path and devour it.
Maybe I should explain that a little more.
I'm not eating any more animal until I've killed that kind of animal, and eaten the animal that I've killed. While that sounds somewhat brutal I want to be sure that before I actually continue eating meat, I'm ok with swinging the axe/pulling the trigger/choking the chicken and watching the life go out of the creature's eyes before lighting it on fire and consuming it. If I can, I'll add it back onto the list of food I can eat, and if I can't... it stays off the list until I can. I have some ideas on how far I'll be able to go but who knows, maybe I'll surprise myself.
I was debating even taking fruits and vegetables off the list too, until I grew them myself, but this isn't really about the hunt/ability to produce food, it's about having the moral flexibility to extinguish life and enjoy its bounty. So bring on the lettuce while I figure out how to go fishing.
As a note, my OFFICIAL start date is June 1st. I'm going to do my best to avoid animal products but not be too much of a stickler about finding out if something has an egg in it. After June 1st though, I'm going to stick to my guns as hard as I possibly can.
Wish me luck! I'm going to need it. Photos and more shenanigans to follow.
Current Devourable Animals: None
May 25, 2009
Day 2
Vegetarian Day One
I have now gone for 24 hours without consuming the flesh of an animal. This isn't a particularly amazing feat as, hell, I've gone for several days without eating anything but snickers bars, and those aren't even made from anything terrestrial. For my meals today I had lots of salad, fruit, veggies and some french toast. Which was already my bad. I also had some muffins. I figure until my "hard start" date of June 1st, I'm just going to do my best to not eat things with meat, but something with eggs like muffins and french toast I'll try to avoid but c'mon, I dont know if I can quit cold turkey.
Still I did well, I was tempted often by the scrumptious smell of cooking meat and was somehow able to avoid its siren call. After a long day of meat avoidance I came home to see if I had developed any kind of animal-empathic superpowers and low and behold, I found some strange dominance over the animal kingdom previously unknown to me. In the interest of no one believing a damn thing I say I took pictures. Now I can't shoot out tendrils of quickly growing vines like Poison Ivy or anything awesome like that, but Aquaman's super power is he can talk to whales. If that counts, mine totally counts too.
Defeated with my mind
Of course some of you are probably saying... that's fantastic, you succeeded in making a dog lie down. Well to you naysayers I offer the following FURTHER proof of my animal mastery!
This fish is bent to my will
Ok, so the superpowers I've gained from not eating meat kinda suck, but I'm hoping that as they continue to develop they won't degenerate into just listening to Phish and wearing Patchouli oil wherever I go, but actually manifest themselves into something that will help me rob banks or otherwise make up for the lack of tasty steak in my life.
On the topic of which, I wanted to address a few points raised by concerned readers. (most of whom commented on Facebook rather than here, also horribly paraphrased)
Conrad: You should kill an animal, then eat it, then try to kill it again later to see if you've become desensitized to the act. You should also let me know when you're planning on eating Panda meat
I have noticed that generally we don't consume other predators. Coyote, Panda, Tiger, and Sexual all seem to avoid being on the list of things to devour, and I wonder if part of the reason here is to avoid accidentally eating yourself. I'm sure there's more to it than that and this merits further exploration, though along those lines I doubt I could ever kill a Panda bear, but I would love to eat Panda meat just because it's got to be the most rare thing you could consume on earth. Further, I like the idea of trying to kill something again down the road after doing it the first time. I'd be interested to see if I was desensitized, oversensitized or unchanged to the act. Though guessing by the non-chalance with which slaughterhouses operate I can guess the end result.
Peter: I support this, but unless you're going to go the flaccid route, I think you need to take this all the way up the food chain. Because deciding whether it's OK for you to eat something by assessing how you feel while killing it, while laudable, requires a prior ethical assignation of your subject into the "OK to try and kill to see if killing it is OK" category. More clearly stated: why is it OK for you to kill a chicken to see how you feel about killing chickens, but not OK for you to kill a person to see how you feel about killing people?
I don't know what the flaccid route is, but it definitely sounds like something I would like to avoid. I have enough problems with that as it is (routes). I agree that there is some ethical supposition going on here, but I'm approaching this from the bottom up, rather than the top down. My goal isn't to simply butcher everything in the animal kingdom, whether or not I've eaten it before, simply for the sake of deciding that which can be butchered shall be eaten. But rather a re-examination of my current diet, using my ability to go through with the act of ending its life as a gauge for continuing to eat it.
Bill: "I know some guys who can help you kill things. Also, if you kill something you're responsible for its family"
Beyond writing some loving Haiku about whatever I eat, I don't think I'm going to be taking care of its family. Just from a strictly realistic perspective. I'll either be hunting for things in their natural habitat (in which case I dont think I could blast bambi in front of his mom), or purchasing something live to slaughter for consumption. In either case, usually the option of tenderly hugging its family afterwards and consoling them on their loss is likely going to be a non-issue. And I'll for sure hit you up for assistance on your meatfriends when I get closer to needing their aid.
That said I advance to day 2 with considerable trepidation. Already my mom has invited me to dinner and already I was dreaming of the delicious lamb schwarma I'd be consuming at Daphne's. At least the mediterraneans have a fair share of non-meat products to consume.
Superpowers Developed: Mild Animal Empathic Control Consumable Flesh: None Meat Craveosity: Medium
May 29, 2009
Day 4
Meatpushers
I've noticed that there's meat hiding in more things than you'd originally think. While having dinner with my mom some rather tasty looking soup arrived free of charge from the guy behind the counter at Daphnes who clearly reads my blog and was trying to trick me into eating chicken. I still haven't butchered any fowl so they're still off the list of acceptable food. And furthermore unless "superpooping" is a super power, I still don't have any new magical abilities that are developing. Which is lame.
I've discovered strange and new foods, and today I learned that I can eat just as unhealthy having vegetarian food as regular as I had a vegi burger which tasted like it was maybe a hard caked salt paddy (which was delicious) and some fries. I guess I need to be sure not to eat mayonnaise because it's A) Disgusting and B) Made of eggs.
Eggs seem to be everywhere. The day before today (we call that yesterday here on my planet), I sat down at breakfast and couldn't resist and I had a bagel loaded up with eggs. I had spent all day previously to people trying to push eggs on me with arguments like "Eggs aren't fertilized they aren't even people" and "It's just like eating a chicken period" (way to be convincing) and "As long as it's before the third trimester they're still delicious!". I think you can overly moralize everything. At the end of the day you can eat organic free range chicken eggs from hand massaged chickens who are allowed to run merrily around and you're still really eating the same thing as the eggs from a chicken who you beat on a regular basis because your father did the same thing to you.
I know that's probably a really sophomoric way of looking at morality, but I'm not trying to really empathize with the vegetarians here. I want to be wrong and enjoy eating meat again one day. This doubly became the case when I talked to vegetarian friend Neil and he explained to me that not only do I just stop eating meat, but apparently I have to do some bullshit like actually eating meat replacements too. He recommended vegiburgers, soy hotdogs, and injecting cholesterol directly into my carotid artery. I really think if you're enjoying the sensation of eating tasty meat products without consuming the flesh itself, you're in some weird sort of half-transitionary stage. That's like wanting to molest children but instead just writing Harry Potter Fan Fiction. It's not really BAD but it's not really good either.
Then there's the meat pushers. People who offer you meat like it's not a moral dilemma. I never realized before that I was a meat pusher. But what a terrible fate when you think about it. Jon came over and offered me some beef jerky. Way to really dominate something. We killed you and were going to eat you, but we didn't really want to eat you right this minute, so we're just going to dry your ass out (literally) and save you for a rainy day.
God I wanted that beef jerky so badly.
I've also discovered the "miracle" of wheatgrass which tastes sort of like someone was kicking your mouth in the balls. And then it also burns. In theory doing this to myself is actually good for me. Unfortunately it's not like doing a shot of bourbon that you feel burning going down and are suddenly drunk. It's not like I do a shot of wheatgrass and then can suddenly break a yak's neck with my bare hands. I feel like this is like Reiki. Someone holds their hands over you and tells you you're going to get better. Hell maybe it's working.. but this is more like Reiki where they make you better by raking you in the nuts over and over again to cure the pain in your shoulders.
I could be a millionaire. So I need some advice on whether or not I should consume eggs, or if I should wait until after I murder a chicken to do so. Also, is it socially acceptable to be a fatass vegetarian? I feel like if you're a vegetarian you're also obligated to do yoga and jog or some shit. This sucks I want a burger. I need to call up my meatpusher and get a fix. Sigh.
June 2, 2009
Day 8
Vegivore-urism, and unwanted sexual advances
I always thought it was weird that you have carnivores, and vegetarians don't have any sort of "vore" attached to them. I guess part of that is because most vegetarians are actually omnivores. I've noticed that several people who are vegetarians actually eat several different kinds of meat. Usually just fish, and sometimes fish and poultry.
This, gentle reader, is totally bullshit. Because the definition of the word "Vegetarian" is someone who just eats plants. Not plants and ugly looking living things. That's like being heterosexual because you only have sex with women usually, but then also sometimes with men. We have different words for these confused souls. Most vegetarian's I know then are officially "omni-curious". You're going through a phase and just dabbling in what it's like to be with meat. Which is making me currently vegi-curious. Furthermore since everything "Vegi" is spelled with an I, it's making my ability to spell vegetarian suck even harder than my normal ability to spell, so for the remainder of this blog I'm just going to refer to myself as a vegivore. We have 3 simple definitions, which for the purposes of this blog will be used as follows:
Vegivore: What I currently am. One who only eats plants, and not meat. Carnivore: One who consumes the tender flesh of dead things Omnivore: One who goes both ways
I have also settled the great egg debate. I'm not going to eat eggs by themselves until I'm able to murder the thing that gives birth to these tasty eggbortions, but given that they're in EVERYTHING we consume on a regular basis, I'm not going to lose too much sleep over trying to not eat anything with eggs in it. I also am going to eat Dairy because the experiment is mostly a moral one, and giving a cow a handjob doesn't seem all that morally unethical (well, just to get its milk anyways).
There may be people who point out that given that I'm consuming Dairy and Eggs I'm not technically a vegivore, and should actually be classified as an omnivore. To those people I would counter with the following argument:
"Fuck you"
Lastly, it had never occurred to me the origins of the sexually deviant kink known as "vore", which in some ways shows how retarded I can be, and in other ways really makes me wonder how I even know what Vore is in the first place. This fits into the category of things that some people find sexy that I just don't understand. Do yourself a favor and don't spend too long thinking about it, and definitely don't google image search for it.
I still haven't consumed the flesh of any animals, but given that today was "Sushi Day" at work, I've felt my first real meat cravings since being clean and that was somewhat surprising to me considering how good the food looked and smelled at the BBQ I was at this weekend.
Lastly, I will give you a quick review of vegi-burritos I've had in the greater Greater Los Angeles area. (which is like the regular Greater Los Angeles, only even bigger)
1) Snapper Jack's Taco Shack (Camarillo, CA) - Potato Burrito - While this place has some of the most amazing chicken and steak tacos I've had in my life, their vegi burrito falls somewhat flat. It clocks in at 5 pounds and is really filling, but there's nothing particularly amazing about the flavor and dousing it in amazingly good quemada brought it up to the 'good' level from 'decidedly mediocre'.
2) Sharky's Tofu Burrito (Agoura Hills, CA) - This is one of the better Vegi-Burritos I've had, and something about the way they cook the tofu made me actually pull a piece out (of my mouth) to be sure it was tofu and not chicken because it's REALLY flavorfully spiced. This was a very happy explosion of veginess in my mouth
3) Burrito King (Echo Park, CA) - Upon attending the Medicated Machine's rap battle in Echo Park at an otherwise mediocre comedy show, I munched the hell out of one of these. I then spent the next hour while I was supposed to be laughing at comedy, ruminating on how good that burrito was. It was hot and amazing and I tasted it for hours afterwards.
And on the scale of mediocre vegetarian food...
Who at Subway decided Vegetarians needed a punch in the junk? I went into subway to get a vegi sub and in my brain that sounded amazing since Subway is already fairly healthy. Upon entering I realized that the vegi sub came with all the things you get on a regular sub, just with no meat. And it costs the same as half of the other subs they have. I got one, ate it, and then vowed to one day shake my fist at them if I ever see them again.
So far being a vegivore is good, but I've been humming this song in my head all day today:
"Little fish, swimming in the sea... you're going to taste so good to me"
I think I'm ready for a tasty fishsnack.
My first target? Chordata Osteichthyes. Make peace with your god cause I'm coming to eat you.
June 8, 2009
Day 13
First Kill: Fish
Blood in the Water
It all started to come together on Thursday, I received an email from Vegetarian Extraordinaire/Fishing Master/Guide/Programmer Neil. He indicated that not only should we go fishing this weekend, but we should go SPEARFISHING. I thought this was, obviously, a brilliant idea and I found out from him what it would take to make spears. After a trip to Salvation Army (or three) I managed to find some mostly clean seeming steak knives for a buck a pop. Then a quick trip to home depot and target, and before I knew it I was wielding a real fisherman's backscratcher (I just made that up but I demand it be entered into wikipedia forevermore). Though I have a few observations while shopping that need to be brought up.
A) It's real hard to buy surgical tubing, duct tape, and wooden dowels without looking like a real creeper. Asking the checkout lady if she knew where I could get some sharp knives on the cheap probably didn't win me any points either.
B) I realized that walking through target there's this really weird scent in the air, and it hits you whenever you walk into any target. It smells like a mixture of buttered popcorn, lost dreams and mid-life depression. Walking through the store I saw, and I'm not exaggerating even slightly, one person who smiled. And they smiled right after someone said "Ok I think we have everything, we can leave now." Everyone else was sort of shuffling their feet and unenthusiastically putting things in their basket. Anyone I said hi to gave me a flat blank look that said "Hey jerkoff, don't rock the boat"
C) Target has an intimate apparel section. This totally creeps me out because Target is a budget store. Isn't the budget version of intimate apparel just going naked? Whatever
Please don't psychoanalyze me too deeply for this
I got my spearstuff! I also have a sword which I hope to use when possible to kill things. Practically I don't know how much I'll be able to do this, but it's nautical themed so there's a certain appeal there. I took it from my good friend Gofberg's moving out pile of 'shit he doesn't want'. As every epic sword of destruction needs a name, I've named mine "Gofberg's Gift". I'm creative.
With these tools in hand, when the fateful fishing day rolled around I headed over to Neils. I had the tools of destruction with me. I brought our spear-gear, some cash, Gofberg's Gift, and a six pack of beer. I mean what else do you need for spearfishing? Well the answer is: A fuckton more.
Neil grabbed what HE was bringing, which included a dive knife, wetsuit, gloves, boots, a fishing pole, tackle box, and you know... sunscreen. But luckily my guide helped me survive, and after a quick stop by the Rusty Hook, in San Pedro I got the gear I needed, a fishing pole, bait and a license. I was now ready to legally murder a fish.
Fucking sweet. We got a cheapo Styrofoam container to put our no doubt bountiful harvest in, along with ice to keep the fish cold until they could be butchered. We also got a copy of the LA weekly to wrap the dead fish in, and some water to rinse stuff off. Then we hit the beach, got lost, drove around more, got lost, and eventually paid for parking and walked over long rocky terrain to finally find the spot that we'd call "Genocide One". Pretty much this is where fish were going to come to die. And the view here at Camilla Beach was gorgeous.
Sweet view bra'
There was one small holdup which I revealed to Neil at this point. I didn't know anything about fishing, even a little bit. As far as I knew we put the hook on the rod, put the bait on the hook and threw it into the ocean. Which as it turns out isn't that far off, but after a quick tutorial on both how to humanely kill a fish, and how to cast one's line and pull in a fish, we waded into the ocean and began to collect the chicken of the sea hand over fist.
Rather. We stood on some sharp rocks in turbulent water, casting our lines into rocky seas that seemed to chew up our line. I felt like I spent more time on my ass than seriously posing as a threat to any fish. Our new plan was to attempt to go further out into the water to where there was a rock ridge and cast out from there, so we could pull in giant fish and not risk getting smashed on a rock. On the way out, looking down I saw a small purple sea urchin. "Oh look, a Sea Urchin".
Neil looked over and replied "Yeah be careful that you don't get stung by those, they hurt... luckily I've never been stung by one before". It was like Alice Fletcher wandering outside in the Sphere by Crichton. She's terrified of octopuses. They haven't seen any octopuses. Then suddenly she's surrounded by 5 million of them. I glanced around and realized I had somehow waded into a sea urchin minefield, and not only were there jagged sharp rocks seeking to smash my bones, but those jagged sharp rocks were basically covered in small spiny creatures whose sole goal in life was to inject a paralytic toxin into my body. After what seemed like hours of navigating the treacherous terrain I escaped. The only bad point was when I fell and grabbed a sea urchin to try to catch my balance. That was lame.
I kinda look like I know what I'm doing
So it was back to the shore, and I borrowed one of Neil's gloves, and we assembled our trusty spears which we would use to rid the ocean of its water breathing menace. Task completed we found a better launching off point and the other pair of spearfishers who were coming out of the water while we were headed in had a good laugh at our setup. I don't get what they thought was so funny.
Stop looking at my nipples
Anyways, once in the water we saw several fish. Some small silvery ones which were way too small to spear, some Perch, some Opalai (I have no clue how to spell that), and some Garibaldi. The Garibaldi definitely got my attention and I spent the most time hunting them. They are brilliant orange in color and have a small phosphorescent light on their back. They're really beautiful and were a good deal easier to spot than the Opalai or the Perch. So I spent a good hour or two floating around in the water firing off my spear at them. I managed to nick a Perch, but didn't really get close on any of the Garibaldi.
After several hours of time well spent at the beach we eventually decided to pack it in, but so as not to be totally defeated we collected a small spider crab off the beach and I killed him in hopes of cooking him up later, but he was REALLY too small to do so, once I pulled off the main shell and looked at the claws.
Kill #1
So we packed it in, headed back, and I fell on the rocks, erupting in blood and staggering back to the car. Today the only blood in the water was mine, but I feel like I made a good faith effort to murder some fish. The night didn't end there, however, but that second story deserves a second writing. So that's all to report. Well I guess one last thing. It turns out that I found out a few days later that the brilliant and colorful Garibaldi happens to be California's State Fish. Which means I was essentially Bald Eagle hunting for two hours on Sunday. I feel a lot better about NOT catching any of the fish now. Any Sunday you get through without committing a misdemeanor is a good day in my book.
June 16, 2009
Day 22
Premature Mastication
I will give a longer and more in-depth post in the next few days with the further consumables but as a quick aside I wanted to mark my first big fuckup! While hanging out with friends over the weekend I almost consumed sausage on a pizza (but avoided... Damn Meatpushers!), but then today while poking through the fridge I found some amazing greek food that was left over from when my mom, cousin and I had a VEGETARIAN FEAST. As I chewed my way through some sort of filo-dough and spinach I hit something chewing and delicious that at first gnaw I suspected of being eggplant. No sooner had I swallowed however than I realized I had consumed the most tasty of greek flesh... LAMB!
I feel betrayed, my cousin snuck her lamb infested goodies in with my veggie surprise and now I feel as though I've betrayed my morality (though, not really all that much). Though I somewhat feel obligated to move up butchering a lamb on my list.
After brutally murdering a member of the crab family (called "Local Crab"... which I've certainly never chowed down on, to the best of my knowledge, at yea olde crab shacke), by my rules I'm now able to eat crab. More on the deed itself but my first priority in my new life was how to appropriately label myself.
I have to apply a bit of the ole' logic to what my new "Name" is. First I was a Vegivore. I assume Omnivore and Carnivore are easy to discern how people came up with the names. Vegivore is from Vegetable... a common misspelling of a delicious chlorophyll-filled treat, and carnivore comes from, of course, the latin root word Caro for flesh. So for Crab I had to go to the Latin root of the word (which incidentally matches up with my astrological sign) of Cancer. So I'm a Cancivore. AKA, A cancer eater. Sorry grandpa, if I'd been quicker I would have been able to help out a little bit more.
So how did my life as a Cancivore begin? Well after a somewhat botched attempt at fishing I managed to murder a disastrously small crab that really wasn't worth eating, and spearfishing had done nothing to sate the growing pain in my belly to consume animal flesh, so I was forced to turn to fresh farm raised crab instead. After doing some investigating of the Huntington Beach Pier (and seeing a really cool looking, and probably very sick and dying Pelican)
I am a pelican!
I found several places selling live crab. Dungeness crab was like $15 bucks a pound, and each crab weighs anywhere from 1.5-3 pounds. I wasn't quite prepared to spend $45 bucks to murder a crab that I wasn't sure I wouldn't horrifically mess up. So instead I shopped around a bit more and found someone who was selling "Local Crabs" which looked big and gnarly and I therefore assumed their meat must be also bountiful and delicious. After making my 10 dollar purchase (Yum 2 pounds of crab!) he was thrown on ice for me so he'd go into hibernation and stay alive longer so I could draw out the macabre ritual as long as possible. Then I threw him on ice, drove Neil home and went to my own home. The whole thing took like 2.5 hours and I was worried he was going to be dead by the time I got him home since I certainly felt half dead and exhausted, but nevertheless I had a deed to do. And as eager as I am to cook it up, something about cooking it after it was already dead would make me a carrionvore which isn't really what I'm looking for yet.
I am Jack's bagfull of Crab
I pulled him out of the ice and looked him over and at first he looked rather dead, but as you can tell from the video I posted previously he woke up slightly before long. I got my sister's fiance's help with some video for all of 4 seconds before the battery died, but I didn't want to wait along and prolong the deed. So after performing what Neil described as a "Weak Crab Knock!" where I think I just pissed him off more than actually knocking him out, I did a bit better, got him unconscious, then pried off his shell with a giant knife and cut him in half. I then cleaned him (Which was surprisingly easy) and cooked him up in several spoonfuls of butter and garlic and while the original recipe I was working off of called for some Pinot Grigio, given the somewhat gutterpunk method of his demise I decided to go for an old bud light I found in my fridge instead (Like I have Pinot Grigio in my house...)
Ok so it wasn't a Bud Light
So he steamed up nicely while he baked for 20 minutes in the oven and the finished product is below. I really didn't feel even the slightest tinge of morality set in when killing the crab, other than a desire to not prolong its death any more than I had to. I think that's mostly because he has an armored carapace, giant claws and is totally alien and weird looking. I was probably equally parts hungry and scared of the thing as I was hacking away on it. I really don't think in the future I'd have a problem murdering another crab to give me its sweetmeats for consumption.
Here's the cooked and finished product
A few notes. If you ever decide to do something along these lines (cooking a live crab) you really should watch this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmDorauP5Ag and the followup by the same author. It was really informative. A few other notes... when getting knocked out my crab had one of its claws fall off... I'm guessing that's a defense mechanism to try to protect the body if a predator is trying to get at the goods. It's kind of surprising and mildly gruesome, but something to be aware of. Also for my crab, I REALLY should have cracked the shell ahead of time. Since I baked it instead of boiling it the shell was REALLY hard still and it certainly wasn't "crackable" with a fork. This thing took a few whacks of a legit claw hammer from my garage before I was able to get at the goods. Also the meat itself was VERY stringy. My local crab would have made an awesome crab salad, but wasn't so much a main course in its practicality. I don't know if that's a result of the cooking or the actual type of crab itself. Further investigation is required. If I actually do this again with a live crab sometime I'll throw up a video to give people an idea of what it's like. It was very much a strange and new experience and I did feel connected with what I was chowing down.
March 3, 2010
Day 216
Backwards Pescetarianism
Ok so I'm going to gloss over the fact that it's been 5 months since I've updated this blog. But for what it's worth, there was a MacDonalds in Richmond that was robbed 3 times over the course of 5 months. Some Company in Sunnyvale went through 4 CFO's in 5 months, and some company called Medscape doubled its members to 200,000 in 5 months.
To be honest, Googling for '5 months' was pretty underwhelming. And luckily for me, as I was writing a draft of this entry originally it's been two full months since then... so instead of a month mark, how about this... according to WikiAnswers, every day 138,240 people die. Which means in the time I wasn't updating this blog 33,868,800 people have died. That being the case, even if I had managed to butcher a goodly deal of turkeys, pigs or other godfearing animals, way more people would have died (albeit, not at my hands) than animals. That being the case I think my meager moral victories are somewhat dubious. However I did manage to kill 3 animals of the same species since my last post. That's me, keeping up with mother nature on a 1:11289600. Bring it on you frigid bitch!
According to wikipedia's article on Pescetarianism (Eating seafood, eggs and nuts... don't ask me why they have to specify nuts), it is often used as a transitional diet for people moving from Omnivore-ism to Vegetarianism. I was sort of using this backwards, going from Vegivoreism (Cancivore specifically) to deeper into Omnivorousness. It's also worth noting that my built in spell-checker doesn't know or like the word Pescetarianism and wants to replace it with either Vegetarianism (rightfully so), Sectarianism (All Hail the Fish), Libertarianism (All Fish Should Be Eaten Because the Constitution Says So), Egalitarianism (All Fish Should Be Eaten Equally), and Utilitarianism (We Eat Fish, Because We Can). All -THAT- makes me think of those old school shirts which explain various religions either in terms of weed smoking, or fecal matter. Man those shirts were awesome.
So since I'm talking fish, I'll cut to the spoiler.
I murdered a fish, and ate its delicious flesh. Well three fish, and ate all of their delicious fleshes.
I suppose I can give you some setup. I'll admit that it's been long enough now that I don't remember the exact day, but it was a Sunday in August and I went to the Ventura pier. I did a bit of internet research ahead of time to figure the best time to go and the best kind of bait to use. I took the salted anchovies that I had left over from when we went spear fishing. Who knew dead salted fishmeat kept so well in the freezer, I was expecting WAY more stink.
When I got there I noticed it was coooooooold and I, being the prepared boyscout that I was, didn't actually have a sweatshirt. I dug around in the car and found like 4 dirty t-shirts (who says you should keep your car clean) and put them all on, grabbed my fishing pole and a handful of frozen sardines and made my way onto the pier.
Turns out I didn't actually need a license to pier fish (though I heard conflicting stories on this one) because the idea was as long as you were standing over where there was sand, you were fine, but if you went off the end of the pier... you weren't?
I don't quite get how that works. Is the idea I'm only catching the retarded fish if I'm fishing in the sand? I'm sure that has some bureaucratic backing somewhere, but the important thing was that I did have my license and it seemed like fishing off the end of the pier was obviously the better place to go fishing as that's... where all the people were. Anyways there were way more people at the Ventura pier at 10 o'clock at night than I expected them to be there were various gaggles of teenagers and a few older guys. There was a pair of thuggish looking weathered dudes who ended up helping me as I realized I had no idea whatsoever how to even start hooking dead fish to lure in more fish (though that makes me realize fish are totally cannibals).
Eventually I had managed to stick my dead fish in the water and proceeded to engage in what is the time honored tradition of sitting on one's ass. Staring at the black abyss of the ocean, in the middle of the night in the freezing cold, hoping by happenstance to take something's life.
Eventually, by some freak miracle I managed to catch a fish. I really need to point out at this point that this effort came about ENTIRELY as a result of the guys fishing next to me giving me the 4-1-1. I pulled up some gross looking rockfish and wasn't really sure if the thing was small, or if this was what I should expect. The guys told me it was right on the cusp, and I was pretty anxious to murder something so I decided I wouldn't throw it back.
I figured this was going to be pretty easy, except once I got the slimy writhing mass untangled from my fishing line, and was going to put it down somewhere, I could feel its heart pounding inside it, and see its lips pumping trying to get oxygen. Even now thinking back on it makes me wince a little bit. In this particular instance though, the thing was now sitting on the side of the ocean, out of its home, had been stabbed through the face and was suffocating so it was time to end its life.
I reflected on how terribly I'd done the first time, so I took "Gofberg's Gift" into my hands and brought it down on the thing, whacking it hard right behind its eye (I heard this was sort of the 'kill spot'). It still writhed a little, so I whacked it twice more for good measure.
El Pescado Muy Muerte
BTW, Gofberg's gift is a sword my buddy Paul Gofberg gave me. I'll post pictures of it later, I used the flat bludgeony part, not the sharp pokey bit. I'm pretty sure people at the pier thought I was a maniac for clubbing a fish with a sword. It's bad enough someone was doing their best Aragorn at 2 AM in the dark, but I think the fact that I was using the sword WRONG only made it worse. But after a few more whacks, this seemed to pretty much have done the fish in so I chucked it into my ice bucket I had with me, and fueled with the bloodlust churning inside of me, I grabbed my hook and line and turned back to that sweet yielding whore we call the ocean and waited for her to put out for me again.
And then I waited.
And then I waited.
Eventually the guys next to me who still hadn't caught anything offered to trade me some of their dead squid for some of the frozen sardines I had. I made the swap and within 5 minutes had caught and butchered another fish. I laughed with glee and then.
I waited
And then I waited some more.
By this point I was covered in fish ichor, freezing cold and had been sitting on this pier for hours and caught a grand total of two pitiful fish. I stopped briefly on my way out and dropped my lure in the shallow water where the sand and dumb fish were and got one more on my way out. I don't know how but this was the laziest bit of fishing I've ever done in my life.
The Grand Haul (I didn't eat the sharpie)
I stumbled back to my car, and didn't even have to pay parking since it was now ridiculously late, and I blearily drove home and wanted desperately to take a shower, but I also didn't want to just put away the fruits of my labors. After all I'd spent HOURS getting these fish. I was prepared for the tastiest meal of my life.
After a bit of poking around on the internet, I found the best way to clean and cook the fish. I was disturbed by the number of different methods of cleaning a fish I found that said "Insert the knife into the fish's anus" or descriptions of how to find the fish's butthole. Eventually however I removed the heads and butts and guts of the fish and was left with their "fillets". I also ended up having to cut out the backbone on the largest fish, but for the two smaller ones they recommended not even de-boning them (did you know that deboning and boning a fish are the same thing? And neither one will get you sent to prison in the state of California?).
Les Fillets
I noticed that throughout this process, as I prepared the fish to be consumed, what started out as 'small fish' became 'WTF?' fish. These things got smaller and smaller, and cooking them was ridiculously easy. Get a ton of butter in a pan. Wait till the butter was sizzling and popping, and drop the fish bits in. It was basically like deep frying, but with butter and they turned out pretty awesome.
Like Buttah
I'm pretty confident that whatever normal food there is, can be cooked by dropping it into a pan of bubbling butter and taste delicious. Whatever moral issues I had previously melted away as soon as I had removed the heads and guts. It was somewhat like magic. Once it didn't look like an animal, it was like every other time I've cooked fish (which I'll be honest is pretty rare).
It got me wondering if eating other foods is going to be like that too. Troublesome up until I get it into a familiar shape "Oh wow, it's just steak now" or if it's going to stick with me. I haven't noticed any difference eating fish since when this thing began, and I haven't really found myself thinking about fish, even when I'm in the supermarket, but when I think back to this exact experience, I really do find myself feeling bad about feeling the fish's heart beating in my hand as I held it. It made me realize I might be running out of animals I'm capable of murdering fast.
Here's to eating my way up the food chain.
What's left after cookin'
October 31, 2010
The Quick Kill
I know I know I know, it's been for-fucking-ever since I updated. I apologize and promise I'll make it up to you. I didn't want to leave you (yes YOU) hanging for too long without an update though, so I shot a little bit of video for you. It's probably ok to watch even if you're squeamish (unless you're REALLY squeamish), and there's a bit of language in there... nothing quite sailor worthy... probably just more like what your creepy uncle says to you.
I figured this video was apropos for (holy shit did I spell apropos correctly?)... for Halloween, because not only does it involve murder, viscera and an automobile... it also has a cliffhanger ending! (Not really). I'll post the follow up video in a bit. As a sidenote if you haven't downloaded Windows Live Essentials and their Movie Maker thing, it's free and basically like putting your digital penis in a tub of cocaine then putting it in a digital stripper. I don't really know what that means, but it's fan-fucking-tastic.
Incidentally the phrase Pescetarian comes from the Italian word for fish.
I guess this makes me a Molluscovore.
November 30, 2010
Day 555
Chicken Kill
Day 555: Snuff
You men eat your dinner, eat your pork and beans
I eat more chicken, than any man ever seen
-The Doors
I've never understood what that line has to do with banging married guys' wives (what "Back Door Man" by the Doors is, theoretically about). What I do know is that chicken is what started this whole thing. Chicken, more than any other meat, is the 'safe' meat. It's healthy, it's easy to splash it on anything "Add chicken for a dollar more!", and it's in crazy abundance. It was sitting around eating chicken that I realized these little white cubes of protein were so far removed from being something once alive that I needed to feel the heartsblood of this creature in my hands if I was going to keep eating it. Ok maybe not exactly, but my grandmother who recently passed away visited a chicken factory when she was a young girl and never ate chicken the remainder of her life. That's some serious dedication to the sights she saw.
My friends have been hemming and hawing at me throughout my journey with this blog to "Hurry up and kill this" or "Hurry up and kill that", which is A) Kindof fucked up guys, and B) A sign that I'm taking my sweet time working my way through the animal kingdom. As a result people kept saying "When are you going to kill the next thing?" and I kept saying "Soon! Soon!". Originally I was planning on looking for shrimp or lobster because the feasibility of locating poultry turned out to be freaking hard. I'm sure there's a good way to find places to buy live chickens for slaughter but Google was winning the battle.
One day my good friend Davy (of http://letterstobourdain.com/) mentioned his fiancée was walking their dog through Topanga Canyon and they crossed by a place that was selling live chickens. Herself had chickens growing up and so while she wants me to somehow butcher a pig for her wedding, she abhors the idea of me killing a chicken. I immediately hit her up and had they following conversation...
Me: "Heeeey... how's it going? Whatcha up to?"
Her: "Just got back from walking the dog"
Me: "Cool... did you see anything particular interesting when you were doing that?"
Her: ".... No ...."
Me: "Ok ok ok... so... where were you walking the dog at? Like specifically? Like what part of Topanga Canyon in case I wanted to go walking there too?"
Her: "IM NOT TELLING YOU WHERE TO FIND CHICKENS!!!"
Ugh. I have resigned myself to just not ever eating chicken again.
Shortly after my birthday (in July... *cough cough 5 months of backdating cough cough*), I was visiting a friend of mine's house when a good friend Frank Romeo stopped by.
In addition to Frank Romeo having a really cool name, and being the drummer in a band with me for all of one show (the band's fault, not his), Frank has a lot more street cred than most of my friends. He's the kind of guy that if you were to walk into a dark alley and he was standing there and told you he wanted your lunch money, you'd give it to him. Am I right?
Thug Life
Frank had been telling me he really wanted me to go to this party so that he could give me my birthday present which turned out to be an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of paper with "How to kill a chicken" and instructions for killing and cleaning a chicken on it. When he handed this over I realized I was going to have to kill a bird soon since I was now getting novelty gag gifts chiding me for my lack of convictions to my cause.
Then Frank revealed that the piece of paper, was not my gift. The cardboard box that he handed me that felt surprisingly like something inside it was moving around was. Upon further inspection, this box had a chicken in it, and the party came to a stop and I realized everyone there knew this was going to happen except me. I thanked him awkwardly and said I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it. Then he revealed that he'd cleared things with the person whose house it was, and all the tools for killing and slaughtering the chicken were outback, so it was time to nut up or shut up. I think my response was: "I need a beer".
With all the other animals I've killed (Cause to date it was Fish and Crab... I'm like Charles Manson), I had some time to do a little research on how to humanely kill them, but in this case I just had some cliff notes. I wasn't psychologically prepped at all, and as a result it was pretty emotionally intense situation for me. My friend Mary (no embarrassing photo included) was really helpful and showed how turning the bird upside down caused it to pass out. I read on the note that you could just grab the chicken by the neck and twist it's head back, breaking it's neck. This was my plan, and we had a wooden board with a hatchet as a backup plan.
Not What I'd Planned
No plan makes it past first contact. In this case trying to break the chicken's neck resulted in me just sortof giving it a weak shoulder massage (me? not use enough force when trying to kill something? You don't say). Once it started to freak out, I held it down on the wood, took the hatchet and tried really hard to use one clean stroke to cut off its head. It took four, and this was by far the roughest part of the process. I had wanted to make things quick and painless and instead it took a grand total of 5 attempts to kill the chicken before I was able to do so. The first thing I noticed was there was a lot less blood than I thought there would be afterwards. I had expected arterial spray and something obscenely gory. There was blood, but nothing that wild. The second thing I noticed is that it was very much moving still once I moved its body into the tub that we had set out to drain it into. It wasn't quite running around, but it was still pretty flightly. Gofberg was awesome enough to video tape the whole thing, but the video is pretty big so I'll need to trim it down and post it in a separate post.
With the tough deed done, I got down to cleaning the bird. This meant removing the feet and neck, and plucking it. Plucking it was a giant pain in the ass, and I can see how tearing off the skin would have been much easier. While plucking it I noticed the heat of the animal fading. That was a very odd experience, but when I picked it up and first began plucking it was very much warm, like most mammals you'd expect. Still very much alive.
By the time the chicken was plucked I'd lost any empathy for it. I don't mean to say that I didn't have any feelings about what happened, but by the time I had a plucked, "cold", de-footed and de-necked chicken, it looked very similar to many a chicken purchased in the supermarket. I'm not sure when it made the change from living thing to food product, but I think it was somewhere during the de-feathering process. So much of the mass of the chicken went away that there was really considerably less left. When cleaning it I have to stress how much time was spent focusing on the words "Cut around the anus" and "Be careful not to cut the anus". It gave me a lot of respect for people that cleaned animals back in the day without great tools, where if you did "nick the anus" (my new favorite phrase) your whole family could get sick and die. I guess that's why you didn't piss off your wife back in the day.
That done, the guy whose house we were at (Big ups to Chuck) helped cook up and barbeque the meat, and I took a much needed break for another beer or six to calm my nerves.
As fresh as it gets
After eating the chicken I felt a little bit of nausea. I'm fairly certain that was more from the whole experience, and less from the actual meat itself. I ended up keeping the feet and head to see if I could do something with the bones, though I ended up failing to figure out what to do with them. I'd also like to take a moment to pimp out the place where Frank got the chicken from. The place is called Blacksmith's Corner and you can check them out at http://www.blacksmithscorner.com/. They even sell Doves. I am fairly certain that according to Viking legend, you're condemned to a life of war and depravity if you feast on the flesh of the Dove though...
I guess I'm a Pullivore now and can devour many a chicken that crosses my path (since then I have. Check Davy's blog above for the best chicken I've ever had in my life). All in all this was a really interesting experience. I think I could do it again, and I'd really like to do this properly and more humanely and see if it changes how I feel about things. Since Mary essentially handed me a sleeping chicken there was a good portion of this activity that was a bit lost on me I think, but for the time and place I needed it. Since then I've often thought of this when I go out, and I don't always instinctively reach for the chicken. I know in the grand scheme of things whether or not I purchase chicken on my burrito doesn't make a damn bit of difference, instead I just find that I can often eat vegetarian and enjoy what I eat (if I'm at the right place), but it's funny how much easier it is to eat chicken (on a scale of how readily available it is) as compared to vegetarian or seafood.
I'll have more thoughts for you later. For now I decided to upload a cut down, sound off, black and white clip of the act itself. Again I should caution this is pretty straightforward me cutting off a chicken's head with an hatchet, and not doing a particularly clean job of it. I won't blame you if you don't watch, but I think you should. It's where those little white clumps in your Caesar salad come from after all.
Sidenote: I've now gone 555 days (the number of the beast's nosy neighbor Gertie) without eating Red Meat. That's one year and six months.... and 10 blog posts. Jesus I'm sorry guys, I'll write more I promise.
December 5, 2010
Wherein I don't actually kill anything
Let me introduce you to the subject of today's blog:
Sup, bitches?
I had never heard of the "majestic" Lionfish until my friend Priya told me about them. I was pretty horrified at first because the way she introduced them to by telling me that her work (as a SCUBA divemaster) instructed her and her colleges to try to kill as many of these fish as they can when they're out on their dives. Not catch them. Kill them. Stab them in their beady little fucking eyes and let them bleed out. Maybe lean in and whisper through a haze of bubbles into their ear. While they do you can shake them and say "Look at me... look at me... I DID THIS TO YOU". Achem. I was disturbed to say the least when I found out about it, but on further inspection I'm getting swayed to the "Lets blindly murder them" side.
One of the things that's been curious to me since starting this project is the sustainability of eating animals. If the average person wolfs down a chicken breast every couple days we're talking about needing 100 or so chickens a year. I imagine in a farm setting you'd split one bird for your family but that's still crazy to image. In David Saffran Foer's book "Eating Animals" he discusses the ecological damages that can be done by a lot of the fishing we do. All of this started to get under my skin, and then I read that the female lionfish can release 2 million eggs per year. If 10% reach maturity, and 50% of those are female. As it takes 2 years to reach maturity, this means after 2 years one female lionfish will have produced 10 thousand mature female lionfish. They'll repeat the process and in another 2 years she will have been responsible for 10 billion, and 2 years later, 10 quadrillion FEMALES. I'm not making that number up, literally a 1 with 15 zeroes after it. A quadrillion. That my friends, is a whole lot of egg salad.
So these Lionfish have migrated into the carribeanish areas off the coasts of Florida and Central America, where they've started hanging out in reefs. The only problem? Turns out they don't have any predators there because of their GIANT FUCKING POISONOUS SPINES. As a result you've got an exponentially growing population of fish that are devouring everything around them and nothing is killing them. Except for Priya.
There's a catch to that of course, see it turns out the Lionfish dont LIKE being killed, and while their venom isn't fatal to human's, neither is it comfortable. Turns out even after hours of excruciating pain and morphine, one of their stings still doesn't look so pretty:
The one on the left is the one that got stung.
As a response to the growing population of Lionfish, the United States National Ocean Service has started a new policy that I 100% get behind. They want us American's to start eating more Lionfish. No Seriously. It turns out once you remove the horrible poisonous spines from them, the rest of their meat is perfectly edible. So for the sake of Priya's hands, we should all start ordering up some Lionfish and see if we can't make the world a little bit of a better place by devouring some of its inhabitants.*
I don't really know where or how I can start devouring Lionfish, but as I've heard plenty of Vegitarians throughout my life say "If you don't eat meat you'll decrease the demand for it", I suppose the people at NOAA believe that the opposite is true as well. I think it's a fascinating idea and while I'm a bit dubious of it's ability to work, I feel like the alternative is bringing in some kind of sharkmonkey that we've trained to eat them... and I know how that movie ends.
*Note: To any alien species currently reading my blog, please do not apply this logic to humankind. Thanks!
April 1, 2012
Turkey Kill
Turkey Murder
Sarah Palin got flak for killing all them Turkeys. Recently I had a bit of an experience of my own.
Happy day.
June 20, 2012
Day 1123
Shrimp Kill
Gambertarianism
Oh man, how great is that word I just made up? Gambertarianism? Well... I'm totally a Gambertarian now. WTF is a Gambertarian?
I'll happily tell you, but first you'll have to follow me to paradise...
Welcome to paradise. It smells like fish here.
Joining me on the adventure (well, she actually architected the whole thing, which makes her more like Morpheus in this alternate reality and that makes me more like Neo. Woah), is my wonderful GF Rachel. You might think it's a perfectly normal thing for a young(ish) couple to have a romantic date to a fish market to find things to murder. It turns out, however, there is a bit of a hitch here in that Ms. Rachel has a bone rattlingly horrific fear of crustaceans. I blame this on the fact that she's Jewish, and the bible CLEARLY says "But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales, of the swarming creatures in the waters and of the living creatures that are in the waters, is detestable to you." Do Jewish people follow that part of the bible? Rachel finds shellfish 'detestable' in the same way that waking up to find a naked guy in your room wearing a mask of your face with a wig fashioned from your barber shop hair clippings as 'detestable'. Which is my way of saying 'horrifying' (if you don't think of that as horrifying I don't know what to do to help you).
Incidentally, just a little while in Leviticus it also very clearly states not to eat Camels or Rock Badgers either. Luckily for us, this store did not have any Rock Badgers in it. Unluckily for Rachel, it had one or two giant crabs, lampreys, weird looking fish and other swimming horrormonsters. It also had the reason we'd come down to sunny Rosemead:
Sorry about the horrific grating sound. That's what Satan's laughter at the fate of these shrimp sound like. One of the other things I've learned about the whole 'kill your own food' thing? If you're not Zuckerberg and you have to find this shit on your own, it's not the easiest thing to do, then when you eventually do find it, it's not exactly a cheap option. Here I got 2 pounds of shrimp (I think these might have been prawns technically) for $19.99 a pound. As I was checking out I looked down and they were selling Tiger Shrimp for 3.99 a pound. Life, in this case, is worth $16.99 a pound. I paid an extra $33.98 for the privilege of taking the karmic debt of shrimpmurder onto myself.
We then put the shrimp in a bucket with some ice and drove them over to my friend Gabe's place who lived nearby. They were thrashing around and I was still a bit overwhelmed from the fish market, so by the time we got down to slaughtering time I hadn't really been thinking about how to do it. As a result, I end up doing this shrimp 'backwards'. I tried to kill them the same way as lobsters, which didn't work so well for lobsters (I know I didn't post anything about lobster, I'm terrible but I did kill a lobster). I ended up bisecting them and then was forced with the same issue as with lobsters, where the tail portions with the distributed nervous system continue to move once detached from the brain. It's not too gruesome, but if you're easily squeamish you might not want to watch. Personally I think the sound is worse than the video (Rachel's noises here are pretty cute, IMO).
I'll put up a second post (in theory) at some point regarding the humane way to slaughter shellfish, as this is something that's not nearly as easy as it sounds like, and to those of you who are offended by the method I used to kill these shrimp, sorry! Most of them had been chilling in an ice bath so they didn't move much at all. If you're planning on killing your own crustaceans though, don't be too freaked out when they continue to move after they're in multiple pieces, it's pretty weird the first time you see it. I'll say that killing these shrimp was much easier than killing a lobster and I didn't feel anything resembling remorse. They're too alien and too weird. I think having more people there helped too, because talking about it made me think a bit less about it. This wasn't like a fish though where I could feel its heartbeat. It still felt very much like a weird alien bug that was flapping around. In the video I'm wearing an oven mitt because I didn't want to get 'stung'.
Weirdly enough when I was trying to find live shrimp originally, we found a sushi restaurant that would let you eat live shrimp (still 'dancing' when they gave it to you) sushi, but in this case when I asked them (and that was a bit of an awkward conversation) if I bought their dancing shrimp meal, if they'd let me be the one to kill it, they were weirded out by this and said no because the shrimp have sharp stingers and if one stung me and I was allergic they could be liable. Now that I've seen a shrimp my question is: What the fuck were those guys talking about?
Once I had killed two shrimp I decided the best way to eat them was shrimp sushi. So I deveined them, removed the shells and left the tails on so they'd be pretty. Here's what fresh shrimp sushi looks like:
Fresh shrimp sushi
Incidentally the knife Gabe had was as sharp as the devil's balls and it made this whole process much easier. The shrimp themselves were actually surprisingly non-tender and extra flavorful. I suppose that's not really shocking but I found cooking the shrimp made them much less rubbery than eating them raw. I have one last video of Gabe and I enjoying some very very fresh sushi. I was a little worried about getting sick from eating shrimp after not eating anything crustaceany in a while (see above re: co-star's horrific fear of anything with a shell, weird eyes or claws).
We tried frying a couple in butter in the more traditional "expose them to high heat" method of killing them. This seemed to kill them much faster (some quick internet reading on the ride over to Gabe's let us know if the car just got too hot during the car ride over the shrimp would probably die), and the moral of the story was "Shrimp dont do well with heat". Ultimately the pair we cooked this way were good, but then we ended up bisecting the rest and cooking up just the tails and this really hit the sweet spot for flavor. This was certainly the biggest massacre of them all yet on the site and all in I think I probably ended up killing about 15 shrimp. At the end it went really fast and all in all I didn't have any moral hangups knifing them. In hindsight though if I could have done this in a way that killed them faster I would have preferred to.
Rachel experienced the same weird issue that I had with killing a chicken. When the animal went from being alive and 'horrible', then once it was dead and scaled and bisected it quickly became something else. Our brains categorize food quickly as no longer being 'this is something alive or once living' and instead into 'this is a familiar looking delicious thing that I want to eat'. It's a very weird mental transformation and you can really feel the change happen immediately.
Here's a pair of final images of what they looked like once all cooked up and then the remnants of our feast.
Shrimp in the panMassMurderOn the plateIn the stomach
April 17, 2013
A prelude to murder most fowl
A few facts for you.
1) MT is a metric ton, or 1000 kg or 2204.623 pounds. A "metric fuckton" is a part of speech without any real measurement value. For some reference, here are things which weigh 1 ton: An Audi TT or a cow. Detonate 1 tonne of TNT generates 4.184 gigajoules of power. That's awesome because that would get 3 and a half Delorians into the future. 1000 kg of cocaine is about how much you would have needed to get John Belushi through a weekend. The world's largest hamburger weighs 2,014 pounds, which if you add on a 190 pound maniac to the scale to start gnawing on the thing, you'd have a 1 tonne burger.
2) In 2013 an estimated, 5,155,000 MT of turkey will be consumed worldwide. That's 5 million tons, or 11,364,831,565 pounds of turkey. So, with 7 billion people on earth, and 11.3 billion pounds of turkey. That might not seem so bad, only 1.6 pounds of turkey per person per year on the planet.
3) If we could do a turkey to TNT comparison for a moment. We're estimating 5 megatons of turkey per year. The total energy of all explosives used in World War Two (including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) is estimated to have been 3 megatons of TNT, according to Wikipedia. If only we can find a way to weaponize turkeymeat, we could be sitting on a gold mine people. A delicious explosive goldmine.
4) Tryptophan doesn't seem to actually be a) more present in turkeys, or b) make you sleepy when you eat a bunch of it for Thanksgiving. (There was a Mythbusters on this with Alton Brown but it looks like the video has been taken down from any legit source I'd link to).
5) EU-27 Sounds like some awesome kind of new chemical.
6) The italian word for turkey is tacchino, making someone who eats turkey a "tacchitarian"? I guess in my case it's a Tacchivore!
7) We eat chicken eggs and not turkey eggs because turkey eggs are expensive. They cost generally $2 - $3 each, fancy paying $36 for a dozen eggs?
8) The average weight of a turkey is 29 pounds, meaning our 11,364,831,565 pounds of turkey is roughly representative of 391,890,744 turkeys. 391 million turkeys might seem like a lot, but if you remember the Lionfish article I posted in December of 2010. In that article I mentioned that 1 female lionfish could lay enough eggs to 2 years later create, conservatively, 10 thousand mature female lionfish. If the initial guess was correct, our 1 Lionfish from 2010 may not seem like she's catching up on turkeys, but her 10 thousand female children would have reached full maturity around December 5th, 2012. So right now each of those 10 thousand females has laid another 2 million eggs so far this year, so we're up to 20 million and climbing. I would suspect our lionfish will be quickly closing in on our turkey. So go eat some lionfish soon.
9) Cooking the turkey was the hardest part.
Enjoy your turkey facts, while I will have plenty of video and pictures for you soon!
November 28, 2013
Day 1649
Final Turkey Kill
Droppin' The Hammer
"love
iz
a
big
fat
turkey
and
every
day
iz
thanksgiving"
-Bukowski
Lets not dance around the issue. One year ago today I slit a turkey's throat, scalded it in hot water, used some low tech machinery to get its feathers off, cleaned it, took it home, and I ate it. What follows is an account about all of that, and since I'm publishing this on Thanksgiving I'm going to go ahead and suggest that if you're squeamish you may want to hold off on reading this post and certainly clicking play on any of the movies, until you've had a chance to let the turkey digest or maybe wait a day or two until leftovers are done cooking.
Disclaimer done, lets get to killin. First and foremost, I need to thank my lovely girlfriend Rachel, as without her I wouldn't have been able to organize this. As I've said time and again the hardest part about all of this hasn't actually been the ethical dilemma of whether or not I can bring myself to kill an animal, but rather the smokescreen of modern society that REALLY doesn't want to let you get your hands bloody. I imagine if I lived somewhere other than Los Angeles, and knew some friendly farmers all of this might be WAY easier.
That being the case, Rachel was able to track down a place called the Flip Flop Ranch where we were able to take a Turkey Killing class. While not exactly cheap (classes were $150 if you wanted a turkey and $100 to watch, so for Rachel and I we got set back $250 and walked away with one turkey), it was a small price to pay given the amount of time and consideration we got. This was a one on one lesson in Turkey Murder, and out of all of these I've done it's been the cleanest and most direct.
Turkeys need shade too
This is where the turkeys themselves were kept and it gives you a bit of an idea of the surrounding at the Ranch. It was a long drive up there and while we traveled Rachel and I had plenty of time to talk about expectations, thoughts and general nerves. Once we got there we were greeted by two of the folks who work at the Ranch (my apologies to them as their names have long since escaped me). They showed us the Turkeys and walked us around the farm. They showed us their livestock, pigs, goats, ducks, and more that they had there and were raising.
As you can see from the picture above these turkeys are just about as "Free range" as I imagine you're likely to get. There were a pair of European guys staying there doing what's called a Farm Stay. This was amazing to me as I imagine it's like how we in the US go to Bulgaria to tour amazing castles, these guys having their fill of amazing castles have traveled to San Bernadino to shovel goat shit. All that being said, I would absolutely do a farm stay there and I think it was an awesome ranch, I just dont know that it's worth a trip over from Europe for the experience.
There were also a ton of cats and dogs they had, which they mentioned they didn't give names to until they had been there a while as wild coyotes would have a tendency to run off with them.
Rachel keeping Captain Thunderpunch safe from coyotes.
At first it seemed really sad to me, but it also struck a weird chord that we were there and sad that coyotes had been eating the cats, meanwhile I had payed someone to kill a turkey in the very same spot. Regardless, the cats kept Rachel company throughout the proceedings, except for when she revealed a hereto unknown superpower of Turkey Wrangling. In order to get the turkeys from the yard into the killing field (I dont know if that's the right term... I'm guessing not), someone had to "Get" the turkeys, and while I was garbage at this Rachel was some kind of ninja when it came to turkeypoaching. She was basically like The Manhunter but for turkeys.
Once netted like a bunch of overly large pokemans, the turkeys were loaded into some giant cat-carrier looking contraption and dragged over to the road cones of doom. At this point I also learned something interesting which is that only the male turkeys are eaten (except for a few who get to grow old and giant like Turkeyzilla here).
This giant bro was king of all the turkeys
So the next time someone is arguing with you about gender inequality you can bring up the fact that male turkeys are all killed for thanksgiving while lady turkeys get to live a long and happy life. Any fallout from using turkey based logic in arguments is all on you though.
This then lead to the inevitable moment, which was of course the hardest part of the process. I watched as the guy who was showing us the process went through it, but all in all it was pretty straightforward 3 step process.
Load the turkey into an upside down traffic cone. This makes it go complacent and basically zone out.
Extend the turkeys neck and cut the arteries on either side of it
Go with the knife through the bottom of the jaw, up through the roof of the mouth and into the brain, making sure step 2 worked
All in, this was a very quick process and it was mentioned that this is basically the fastest way to handle things, and causes the least amount of suffering. Cutting the arteries rather than the throat prevents the animal from feeling like it's suffocating (though I'm sure the experience isn't pleasant).
All that being said. Here's a video. It's in color and it has sound and it's exactly what's described above so if that sounds like the worst thing ever to you I don't recommend you watch it.
All things being said you can see in this video I still have the same problem as always which is not applying QUITE enough force, but in this case it's not too bad. You can see there's not much struggle or resistance and it's all over pretty quick. Once that was done the process begins of turning something that was living into meat. This is the step that has always been fascinating to me, because it's where the empathic connection seems to vanish for me.
The first step is basically scalding the turkey in crazy hot water. This loosens the feathers and makes them easier to pluck. Then the real magic came on a turkey plucker. Plucking the chicken was one of the most time consuming parts of the process, and this giant machine seemed to just batter the turkey's corpse until all the feathers came off. For whatever reason however, this did 0 damage to the turkey or the skin, just magically made the feathers come off. My buddy helping me went ahead and handled this step since otherwise I was likely to defeather my hands. I appreciated this muchly.
Next was more familiar to me. Cut off the head and feet, and get the turkey neck. This required a bit of work to save the turkey neck and get rid of the gullet (which was a new experience). Then, remove all the guts from the internal cavity of the Turkey (don't nick the anus!), and rinse everything out. This step was hardly "old hand" but I felt more comfortable having done this before with a chicken. It's generally surprising how easily MOST parts of the inner cavity come out. This video may or may not be particularly disturbing as it's a bit more gutsy than the other videos.
That being done the turkey went in a cooler and on ice and we made our way home for the holidays. I ended up brine-ing the turkey because I hadn't had turkey in like 4 years and so I was super excited, and then I proceeded to totally botch cooking the turkey.
In my enthusiasm to handle all the parts of the turkey from selection and killing to the time it came out on the table, I had neglected to remember the important fact that I have no idea how to cook a turkey. Rachel's mom helped save it but it was still kinda dry and a bit gamey. Also it was obviously not a giant crazy mutant turkey like we're used to buying for Thanksgiving, but after all that I was able to re-enter the world as a happy turkey eating member of society.
I'm going to do a followup post on this with a bit more of the empathic and long term feelings I've had both as a result of this and everything else but I promised Rachel that I'd put SOMETHING up by Thanksgiving and at least a mechanical recounting of the expedition is the BARE MINIMUM I can provide for you. This was a hugely affecting experience that I still think of regularly up to a year later and I want to thank again Rachel and the Flip Flop Ranch for the experience.
I'm thankful this year to my friends and family, Rachel, that first turkey, and all of you guys who are reading this. Have a great Thanksgiving.
