Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs.
My food thoughts this weekend have been coloured by a passage I read in 100 Days on Holy Island: A Writer’s Exile by Peter Mortimer. He spent some time out at sea in a lobster boat catching not just lobsters but velvet crabs and large brown crabs. They’re brought to shore alive, because as Peter writes;
For some reason, humans consider it the height of culinary sophistication to boil a lobster alive in front of restaurant diners’ eyes. (page 89)
I’m not a vegetarian, although I’m edging that way. And this highlighted, yet again, for me the problem I have with being a carnivore – we have to kill a living being in order to eat it.To be confronted with it in person would be beyond me. I know the arguments for and against but having watched Jamie Oliver on one of his TV series (in Italy I think) kill a sheep I’ve only rarely bought lamb – also remembering my granddaughter’s disbelief that anyone could actually eat lamb!
I like crab but Peter Mortimer’s description of how he dealt with cooking the two crabs he was given at the end of his fishing trip also made me think hard about what I eat:
Millions of creatures and animals were slaughtered every day – humans, too. Here I was, anguishing over a brace of crabs. Except you could read of endless deaths. But needed to see only one.
Something of that morning’s experience, something of fishing’s inevitable brutality, had stayed with me, as if here I was about to square the circle, as if I were destined to perform this act of murder to resolve the day.
The two crabs interlocked their claws, as if seking safety in numbers. Their live presence filled the kitchen and though I turned my back on them it made little difference. (page 91)
He did the inevitable and cooked them, dropping them into cold water and brought them slowly to the boil as he’d read that was the most ‘humane’ way. And then he found that the smell of their boiling was nauseous and
… their clattering noise was intolerable. (page 91)
If I had to catch and kill my meal myself I’d soon become a vegetarian!
BooksPlease 
I know how you feel. When I see scenes of animals being killed for meat on programmes like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay I too am rather shocked. But I feel the problem is more that we in the western world have become completely divorced from the way in which the meat we eat every day is killed and butchered. It wasn’t so when primitive man had to hunt for his supper and it isn’t so in many countries today. But our meat is served up all clean and sanatised and we have no knowledge of how that happens. Personally I could never be a vegetarian but I have decided to try not to forget that a living being gave up its life for me and to be aware of how it died and maybe a little more grateful.
LikeLike
You’re right Cathy, seeing meat sliced, diced and packaged in the supermarket and called by names other than the animals’ names doesn’t help either. I don’t think I could ever be completely vegetarian but I certainly eat less meat now than I ever did and try to buy free range chicken for example and hope it had as good an existence as possible.
LikeLike
A lot of people (most?) would agree wit h you. We don’t eat a ton of meat but we do eat some — all locally raised and humanely killed.
LikeLike
I know exactly how you feel. Back when I was raising chickens, I couldn’t eat them. We killed them “humanely” but I couldn’t touch them. They were my “girls” who gave me their wonderful eggs. No way could I eat them.
LikeLike