The Pure Water Gazette’s Guide to Ethical Eating

Posted April 20th, 2012
Food, Gene Franks

Gazette’s Guide to Ethical Eating

by Gene Franks

The Gazette’s rule of thumb on the difficult question of what one should eat is not complicated: Eat as far from yourself as possible. Most people, though not all, have evolved to a point where cannibalism is disgusting to them. Eating cows and pigs is only 1/2 inch removed from cannibalism, but a large percentage of humans still do it.Our pious rationalizations notwithstanding, eating animals so much like us, like sleeping with your cousin, it is morally and physically unhealthy. Most but not all modern Americans are natural vegetarians, although the majority live under a cleverly promoted delusion that they are natural flesh eaters.

Below is the Gazette’s scientifically unauthenticated two-part test to determine if you are a true carnivore. Take it if you dare.

To test your qualifications as a true carnivore, purchase a live chicken and murder it yourself with a knife or by the traditional neck-wringing method, whichever seems most natural to you. Eat the cadaver, as do true flesh eaters, without cooking, applying condiments, or selectively removing skin, feathers, fluids, or organs.

If you can do this with gusto, you are a genuine carnivore (soon, probably, to be an ex-carnivore, since you will likely succumb to salmonella poisoning). If you can’t do this, you are a vegetarian. To confirm the result, repeat the test using an apple. If you can butcher the apple without remorse and eat it in its natural state, you are definitely a vegetarian.

Eating as far from ourselves as possible in our mutual eating society requires no special training. One can easily see that a potato is less like us than a pig. For those who argue that plants, too, are alive, I agree. That is precisely why, unlike animal corpses, they are such perfect food for us. Live food is easily assimilated, but dead food makes graveyards of our bodies.

We must never forget that we, too, are predators in the mutual eating society. Plants are our natural prey. We should eat them with reverence and respect. Most ot us have not evolved to the point where we can support our lives on such distant substances as air, as some saintly people are said to do. For most, plants are as far as we can get from ourselves, and they are in every way our ideal food. Nature has wisely arranged things so that we exist in a different time zone from our natural food source. This offers us the insulation from remorse necessary for predators. Substances that writhe in agony or cry out in pain when killed are too near us to be suitable food.