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Originally Posted by Anthony Bourdain
It is repugnant, in principle, to me – the suggestion that we legislate against fast food. We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we are infantilised to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers out of our hands. It is dismaying – and probably inevitable. When we reach the point where we are unable to raise a military force of physically fit specimens, or public safety becomes an issue after some lurid example of a large person blocking a fire exit, they surely shall.
But if you are literally serving shit to children, then I've got no problem with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I'll hold the spoon.
In this way, me and the Peta folks and the vegetarians have something in common. They don't want us to eat any meat. I'm beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat. Peta doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die – ever – and basically think that chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat.
I am still genuinely angry at vegetarians. A shocking number of vegetarians and even vegans have surprised me with an occasional sense of humour, refrained from hurling animal blood at me, even befriended me. I have even knowingly had sex with one. But what I've seen of the world since my first book was published has, if anything, made me angrier at anyone not a Hindu who turns up their nose at a friendly offer of meat.
I don't like circuses, and I frankly think Siegfried or Roy – whichever one of those guys got mauled by a tiger – got what he deserved. Tigers like to maul people, and anything preventing them from doing that on the one hand, while tempting them with a German in a sparkly, cerulean suit on the other, is clearly animal cruelty. But the idea of a vegetarian traveller in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality – the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience – of, say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with spluttering indignation. No principle is, to my mind, worth that; no western concept of, "Is it a pet or is it meat?" excuses that kind of rudeness.
This is, however, an area of overlapping interests. The cruelty and ugliness of the factory farm, and the effects on our environment, are, of course, repellent to any reasonable person. But it's the general lowering of standards inherent in our continuing insistence on cheap burgers, wherever they might come from and however bad they taste; the collective, post-ironic shrug we've come to give each other as we knowingly dig into something that tastes, at best, like cardboard and soured onion, that's hurting us. And our children.
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