Mental Barriers to Eating
Saturday, September 30th, 2006The other day I went to the butcher to buy some lamb chops. The butchery here is slightly different from back home, especially since back home I was a vegetarian. [A vegetarian that ate fish. A piscatarian you might call it or a fishetarian or a seafood veggie or … I’ll just stop right there before I get really silly and say that back home I didn’t eat chicken or meat. Mostly.]
Anyway its interesting to see the meat being cut from the carcass and then chopped up into, well, chops. I was wondering if back home they chop it up by hand as well or if they use a machine. But then back home the carcass doesn’t hang over the counter, especially when the counter is facing onto the street. I shit you not.
You would think that being an ex-sorta vegetarian (for the sake of brevity let’s all just assume we all know what I mean when I use the word “vegetarian” from now on) that seeing the meat cut from the carcass would freak me out. But I’m not one of those vegetarians that does it because of ‘the poor animals’ or any of that crap, I do it for health reasons.
Eating snails that first time (long ago in Casablanca) was a bit queasy because after eating a few I started to realise that they have faces and that turns me off a bit. The other time was when I was here in Mehdia and someone dropped off a packet of small pigeon-like birds, I think it was quail, with feathers on and everything. Almost still looked alive. Sure enough later that day there was a stew of small bird with sultanas and mielies. It tasted delicious.
Ghalied