I love to eat.
If I had unlimited funds and resources – not to mention a complete disregard for my health or what I looked like – I would be a 900-pound jiggling blob of gluttony that had to be moved around with a crane.
Think Jabba the Hut with a goatee.
And I eat everything, too, with the exception of yucky green peppers and coconut, because I am an equal opportunity devourer of living things. Unlike many people, I don’t delude myself with some self-righteous, anthropomorphic notion that only things with eyes and ears are alive. I recognize that pretty much everything we eat, from cows to carrots, was once a living thing… and they are all freakin’ delicious.
But, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be a happy-go-lucky ultra-omnivore, because every time I turn around there’s a news story telling me how awful everything is that I eat.
Do you like chicken? Well, thanks to avian flu being recently found at a bunch of chicken farms in the Fraser Valley and Langley, B.C., I’m having second thoughts about ordering the wings at my favourite pub.
Well, how about beef? Unfortunately, it seems our whole food inspection system is breaking down, and this month there was a recall on ground beef sold in Western Canada that was apparently infected with E. coli. What’s more disturbing is the recall was not widely publicized until Dec. 2, three or four days after the “use by” dates of the packaged meat had passed. So there’s a high likelihood that someone consumed that “possibly contaminated” meat. Mmmm, E. coli burgers.
Your fish apparently can’t be farmed, and depending on where it comes from, it may have unhealthy levels of mercury or been raised on human waste. Yummy.
Okay, well fruits and vegetables are safe, right? Sure, but they have to be organically grown by Buddhist monks who read them poetry – or else you’re supposedly fouling your body with pesticides and helping to ruin the planet’s ecosystem.
Gluten, milk, butter… nope, those are supposedly bad, too.
All I want is a BLT but my omnivore’s dilemma is I like to eat everything but am not allowed to eat anything, apparently.
If you’ve got a solution, let me know. I’ll be the guy gorging himself on those Styrofoam packing peanuts in the meantime.
