Food for Thought

Last night one of my clients took me out to a posh restaurant for a business meeting and this would have been a fine and sweet experience, had it not been tainted by the fact I found out that he was a vegetarian. Not just a peaceful one either, but one of those who shriek anytime someone puts a formerly living creature in their mouth. What a joke I thought, as I glanced incredulously at his distinctly chubby silouhette. At least if you're gonna be a veggie, make it look like it's a health choice, doing you some good. I can dig Andre 3000 being a vegan, but that's about it. Why give up on meat if meat clearly isn't gonna give up on you? I made a point of ordering pork skewers, just to be controversial. You don't get meatier meat than pork, right, and this one was tender and juicy and slightly glazed in a sweet & sour sauce, which was hugely satisfying, but I digress....

Whilst I pretended to listen to my date, I reflected on the fact that meat is good. That's a biological fact. The world is a beautifully organised place: there's a system that says that if you are an intelligent enough creature to work out how to kill another creature, how to skin it, cut it up, season it and cook it for the greatest pleasure of your friends and family, you automatically earn the right to go ahead and do just that. It's called being top of the food chain. Somehow I don't see any animals having qualms about it in any other microcosms - a glance at any of David Attenbourough's documentaries confirms this. Lions don't think twice about butchering antilopes: they don't sit there and regret having to kill something so pretty. They don't waste time in little lion meetings to come up with an ethical way of getting their dinner. They don't make cute little banners claiming they'd rather go naked than wear antilope skin. They get on with it. But we are humans, and unfortunately our intelligence comes mixed with a certain degree of unrational emotion, which is why some people have managed to convince themselves that eating meat was a cruel thing to do, rather than an energy-boosting, perfectly natural process, and the best way to get your proteins.

Meanwhile other aberrations remain unchallenged in the modern day diet - dairy being one of them. I won't go too deep into this much-derided view of mine that milk products are evil right now, nor will I try and claim that we are all victims of a corporate dairy conspiracy (though we blatantly are!), but once again, let's look at the facts of nature: milk is for newborn cows, the same way breast milk is for babies. We are not supposed to drink it past infancy, and we're especially not supposed to have an entirely different species produce it for us on an industrial scale. What do we have in common with cows, for chrissakes? They have 4 stomachs, for a start. And you never see cows hanging off a human woman's teat, munching on oreos (though I'd pay good money to check that out).

I'll echo Dr Hwen's view on fad diets - it's strange to reflect on how much misinformation there is out there on what is good or bad for us. In the end I do think pandas have one the best deals around, in terms of having a very clearly determined diet and lifestyle. Eat bamboo, sleep. Get a little energy from your food, don't waste it all at once, conserve it to find more food later - after siesta time. Their lack of libido is my only concern (feeding them a couple of meatballs laced with viagra may be the answer to saving the species?) but other than that, what a straightforward way to enjoy life - I'd swap tomorrow, if I didn't think I was gonna miss my posh pork skewers so much.