Quote:
Originally Posted by Troo
So many things to disagree with here. I'll go with the obvious one: "We just need to understand other countries culture and when it comes to food, there's really no such things as torture".
Patent nonsense. Is it not torture purely because it's done to an animal? Or because that animal will be eaten? Where do you draw the line at torture no longer being torture?
A hundred years ago, the Victorians used to believe that black people didn't feel pain the way those proper, normal, white folks did. That doesn't mean I can't stand here and say "We just need to understand that the Victorian culture was different from ours, and that when it comes to black people there's really no such thing as torture".
Some people torture animals before killing them. Heck, even in the West we'll boil shellfish and other hard-shelled seafood to death because it's the easiest way of killing them. Can we genuinely sit here as an enlightened society and say "well, it's okay, because that's food-preparation. But if you're boiling animals to death for the fun of it, that's just not on"?
I'm not a vegetarian. I've no moral high-horse to stand on here. I eat dead animals, which have been killed in any number of inventive ways. But there's a line between killing a creature to eat and survive, and torturing something to death when we as human beings have the option not to.
Predators will catch their prey, and some will start eating it while it's still alive. Lions are happy to chew on the intestines of a still-breathing gazelle, and foxes will happily eat your pet bunny while it's squirming and squeaking. We humans like to think we're not animals (even though we are, and don't mean that in a derogatory sense), but if we really want to put aside our primitive origins and move forward we could do worse than to start eating ethically.
I'm also not American. Nor am I a non-American who is in the US. Nor did I say that eating cats or dogs was an evil act, or that those who did it had no heart. What I did was lay out the facts, then add that I thought it "charming" (in the sardonic sense). You'll also notice that earlier in this same thread I stated that I didn't think that eating dog was especially disgusting.
I'm also an avid cook, with an interest and speciality in Asian cuisine, biased toward Indian, Punjabi, Japanese and, yes, Chinese cooking. I've seen a fair few Chinese kitchens, and it would be an error to mistake noise level for aggression. It's energy, yes, but not hostile energy.
Anyway, we appear to be digressing, which I'll cease, and return to my prior claim that at the top of the list of disgusting foods available in the world is natto.
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Ditto, that is all I can say....