Foodie blogs

Foodie I am - well, I'd like to be anyway - but even I, who can rhapsodize about the possibilities of supper at breakfast, am getting fed up with the incessant moralising of taste going on in various forums. Okay, that's just one example - hardly 'incessant'; I'd have a snarky comment if a student tried that in an essay.

I'm not a vegetarian and in the world of carniverous delights, I'm fairly conservative. I don't like the taste or texture of most offal - except, bizarrely, mushed up or chunked up as pate (I'll eat anything as pate) and I'm not rushing to prove my gastronomic worth by eating lamb brains or sweetbreads (or oysters - nope nope nope). I'd like to say I'll try anything once, but the fact is, I won't. I'm not vegetarian and I have little patience for the kind of moral absolutism that gets spouted in the name of vegetarianism and veganism. I'm afraid I don't believe that meat is murder - indeed, a more ridiculous comment I can't imagine. While I fully understand that what I consider edible - on practical or sentimental grounds - is largely prejudicial and based in culture, upbringing, and habit, I'm afraid that I don't really think that's worth any more than an interesting comparison. I'm not going to eat a dog simply because someone somewhere in the world does - what a ridiculous idea. While I am facinated by the connexions we draw between what people eat and who they are, I'm interested less in those connexions than in what they suggest about how we classify and create value in our societies. That's not to say that what we choose to eat doesn't have some kind of effect on our world, but to insist on evidence of 'fairness' in eating habits is just silly.

Hungry enough and sure, I'll likely eat just about anything. I've never been there - I'm not keen to get there, and I'm afraid that I think it is ludicrous to assume some kind of superiority of experience or personal moral worth for either A) having been in that situation or B) castigating people based on the supposition that because they haven't been starving and thus, have never been in the position of having to eat something they otherwise would find distasteful, they are somehow lacking. There isn't a reason why 'rat, dog, cat, or horse should not be perfectly acceptable and delicious' - I'm sure they are - but that doesn't mean I have to eat them. Eat less meat and eat better meat, definitely. When rat appears at the farmer's market I might give it a try but I sincerely hope that the apocalyptic tone of articles like this lightens. We are not in the siege of Vienna and the kind of rabid moralising it suggests is bizarre. We should be very aware of what we eat, but I refuse to believe that because I don't eat the plentiful supply of rats in my neighbourhood that I am guilty of behaviour that, in the words of Lady Bracknell 'lead to the worst excesses of the French Revolution'.

Recommended reading: The Raw and the Cooked - Claude Levi-Strauss; The Civilizing Process - Norbert Elias.