Eintlik, what the hell are we eating?
OCan we all agree that being disgusted by the interspecies abomination of a cat suckling on a human breast is hypocritical?
ne of the reasons why human beings are disgusting is that we eat apples. Calm down, there’s no need to slide into righteous indignation just yet, Virginia Vegan. Don’t waste your energy on this point; this column is going to go significantly further south later.
I recently interrupted my latest booze hiatus to attend a winetasting event in Maboneng, downtown Joburg. Part of the food pairing rigmarole involved scooping up caviar using one of those weird miniature teaspoons I’ve seen Colombian drug cartel enforcers use to scoop cocaine off Vegas strippers’ navels in B-grade Hollywood movies.
A bearded, balding, bespectacled sexagenarian from Stanger tapped me on the shoulder and said: “Wee Qadi, kahle kahle sidlani lapha?” (My brother from the Qadi clan, what are we actually eating here?)
Deep down inside, in places I don’t talk about in polite company, I knew exactly what he was saying to me: “It’s disgusting that we’re busy slurping up fish eggs using midget spoons that have scraped the buttocks of Vegas strippers.”
Sometimes, my more erudite friends and colleagues are at pains to point out the fact that what sets our species apart from “lower life forms” is the advent of human cultural evolution about 50,000 years ago.
This columnist’s views on the existence of human intelligence as nothing but a human-centric delusion have been well documented.
The “cultural evolution” distinction between us and honey badgers is a myth. I bet that dung beetles often shake their heads in disbelief at how stupid humans are for not being able to roll poo into perfect spheres.
If you look at life from a dung beetle’s perspective, the inability of humans to roll the perfect doo-doo blunt is a sign that we’re a lower life form. I agree with the faeces connoisseurs on this one. That fellow from Stanger was onto something. How often do you stop yourself midway through a meal and think, “Eintlik, what the hell am I really eating here?” Let me rephrase that:
A few years ago I saw a YouTube clip featuring an angry passenger on a flight who was recorded, which caused a huge stink.
He accused the woman in the window seat of being “disgusting” for impersonating a mother breastfeeding her infant under a blanket when, in fact, she was breastfeeding a cat.
Internet fake news detectives have since provided “the receipts” proving that it was actually a staged skit for clicks. I don’t care about the authenticity of the incident because it was a delicious show of human hypocrisy because, guess what, even if the clip wasn’t staged, chances are he would have had Witbeex with milk, pancakes for breakfast and washed it down with coffee and extra cream — without any sense of irony.
Can we all agree that being disgusted by the interspecies abomination of a cat suckling on a human breast is hypocritical? And if you think the disgust is about the sanctity of human existence, consider how you’d feel if you found a calf busy suckling a donkey’s udder.
The woman responsible for weaning me off my eight-year-long vegetarianism in the 1990s was a vegan love interest who’d tell me that Pick n Pay should line up cows outside and insist that anyone wanting milk should be made to suckle it directly out of the udder.
Or better yet, scratch the use of milk cartons in favour of rubber bags in the shape of udders that you have to squeeze into your Kellogg’s cornflakes as a reminder of what you’re actually consuming.
In the end, my vegan warrior and I crashed and burned as a couple because her righteousness had gone through the roof. I blasted her face with burger breath, the first one I’d had since Slick Willy Clinton first went on the prowl inside the White House corridors.
The bone of contention (pun intended) was her insistence that the most disgusting aspect of meat eaters is their penchant for lamb, veal and baby chickens.
The relationship all but buckled under the pressure of point scoring when I pointed out that vegan shops seem to specialise in baby spinach, baby marrow, baby asparagus and baby corn, making us all baby killers.
The question of what we’re all really eating is enough to get everyone to stop eating entirely. The worst-case scenario about consuming burgers, mince, boerewors or schwarmas is that each bite you take could be from 17 departed bovine souls. Otherwise, depending on the source of your wors, it could include donkeys, crocodiles, giraffes and zebras. It’s one of those things I accepted around the time I fled the scene of my vegan Waterloo.
During the final battle between my vegan tormenter and me, she questioned my sanity and IQ when I suggested there’s a social contract between fruit and anyone who consumes fruit with seeds.
That contract is; eat the entire fruit, including seeds and make sure you kaka in a veld somewhere to help the apple propagate its own species. Unless there are compost fields where vegans line up to squat after consuming fruit, they’re just as bad as the rest of us who wolf down eggs for breakfast without stopping to ask, “Eintlik, what the hell am I eating?”