The Animal Question

For Halloween, a helping hand...

via www.notmartha.org

An awesomely awful concoction from "not martha." Go over there to her recipe and enjoy, if you're inclined to eat meatloaf, or just gape in horror if you're veg.

This spider's a vegetarian!

From Wired:

Found in Central America, the order-defying jumping spider eats nutrient-rich structures called Beltian bodies, which are found on the tips of Acacia trees. Trees produce the bodies to feed ants that defend them, which is a textbook example of what’s called co-evolutionary mutalism, and one that B. kiplingi has evolved to exploit.

via www.wired.com

This is the world's first known vegetarian spider. The males also take part in parental care, another arachnid rarity.

Meat over Miami

My husband and I met as committed vegetarians, but once we got together, we began to eat fish. First it was small, overpriced bits of it that had been flown to restaurants in St. Louis, and then we ate much larger, fresher, cheaper entrees when we moved to Miami.

The mid-90s were a revolution in the restaurant industry in the U.S., as diners with disposable income were looking for more variety and fresher ingredients, and the gourmet movement that had initially been touched off by the likes of Julia Child gained momentum. We were happy recipients of this new food bounty. In the mid-1990s, transporting fish by air to the Midwest was cheaper and easier, making it a more likely menu item, and we found it hard to resist. We tried salmon for the first time although in retrospect, I’m sure this salmon was most likely farmed and not wild caught. There is a huge difference between the two, which anyone in my neighborhood--an old Scandinavian fishing town annexed by Seattle but independent nonetheless--could tell you. We bought smoked salmon and ate it with bagels and cream cheese, inspired by an old St. Louis Central West End deli called Kopperman’s, which featured bagels and lox on its menu. Our wedding menu consisted of gazpacho soup and salmon cheesecake.

But our fish consumption was few and far between until we moved to Miami.

It was in some ways harder to be vegetarians in Miami than it had been in St. Louis. The population of Miami is 65% Hispanic, and most Miamians are Cuban, owing to first the close proximity of Miami to Cuba and the resulting long-term ties between the two places and second to the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, in which as many as 125,000 asylum-seekers made it to Florida during the exodus sanctioned by Fidel Castro. I won’t attempt to explain Miami to you, as other writers have already done a better job than I can do, (most notably Joan Didion, with her book named after the city, and even she is limited, perhaps, by the fact that she is not Cuban and writing only from an outsider’s perspective). What I’m concerned with for the purposes of this post is the Cuban diet, which favors meat.

Popular foods vended on the streets of Miami include: fried croquettes of dough stuffed with ham or pork; fried potato balls with ground beef; and the Cuban sandwich, which is thick pieces of buttered white bread laden with cold cuts and cheese, thinly sliced, the entire stack pressed together. The Cuban sandwich is a menu item in South Florida McDonald’s restaurants. Most people assume Cuban cuisine would quite naturally feature seafood, but this is not the case. Cuba is an island, but it is a big island, and much of the cuisine is influenced by inland agriculture and Spanish colonialism, which accounts for the copious attention paid to pork and beef. A slab of beef or pork or even chicken slathered in mojito or some other aromatic sauce is the main feature of many Cuban dishes. Beef or chicken are often stuffed with sausage. Tamales always contain beef, and although arroz y frijoles is a dietary staple, the frijoles are often cooked with diced ham. Cuban cuisine is a vegetarian minefield.

The hub worked at the Miami Library and found himself a minority both as vegetarian and what Miami Cubans called an “Anglo,” regardless of his protests that his people are Germanic. A longtime coffee lover, he was easily sucked into the cultural event known as the Cuban coffee break, which occurs several times a day and is always a communal affair. The coffee is strong and steamed with plenty of sugar. A group of workers orders una colada at a walk-up window. The woman behind the counter is neither young nor called a barista in the Seattle sense. She is an older woman, a professional who has been making Cuban coffee ostensibly since birth. She produces one Styrofoam cup of syrupy brown coffee accompanied by a stack of little white plastic thimbles. Whoever ordered the coffee pinches the rim into a spout and doles out thimblefuls to the group. Most slug it back like a shot, but there are people who prefer to sip from their thimbles.

Also sold at these walk-up windows are ham croquettes and guava pastries. Once the hub succumbed to the congenial pressure of his coworker, Armando, (who fought for Castro but was then kicked out of Cuba on El Jefe’s orders). Armando wouldn’t let up until the hub ingested a fried ham croquette. He was sick all afternoon and doesn’t know whether it was the meat itself on his vegetarian system or the quality of that particular ball of fried ham and dough.

One popular Miami fast food chain is Pollo Tropical. We liked it because we could order vegetarian: arroz y frijoles (they made it without pork), fried yucca (which is a lot like French fries, only more fibrous), plaintains, yucca in garlic sauce. A veritable starch fest, if you're choosing to forgo the pollo but still craving el tropical.

Miami Cubans did not ‘get’ vegetarianism any more than they got that the hub wasn’t really “Anglo." Vegetarianism for any Cuban wishing to retain his or her culinary cultural roots is untenable. The only place we came across tofu while in Miami was in the few Japanese restaurants there. The hub’s friends at the library constantly tried to get him to eat meat and kidded him about the fact that his abstinence from animal flesh did not make him skinny, as if he should waste away on a meatless diet instead of sporting the inevitable slight paunch of a man in his late forties who is not obsessed with his physique.

Library-sponsored events held few choices for him, as even the paella, which looked promisingly laden with tomatoes and seafood, contained not just chicken, but also sausage.

In the midst of Miami at the turn of the last century, which is to say, in the midst of a Miami that with its dominant Spanish language and Cuban culture might as well be the capital of Latin America instead of a minor U.S. city, we learned to love fish.

You could eat fish and thereby appease your Cuban companions. There was always a fish entrée on the menu, and there were a few Cuban restaurants focused more squarely on seafood, a contemporary influence on the cuisine, owing in part to American diets more often opting for fish due to its health benefits and in part to the influence of more sea-centered Caribbean cultures.

Miami is of course a maritime city, and seafood is prevalent. Sushi is popular there. I remember ordering pan-seared tuna at a popular Coconut Grove restaurant and being surprised to learn that pan-seared means rare. I ate it anyway and loved it. I had never tasted fresh, good-quality fish before. There was something primal about its briny flavor, the feeling of iron and protein surging through your veins.

Lest you think the hub’s influence at work in my dietary choices, let me explain something: I led this charge toward pescatory indulgence. He is what I like to call “meatsqueamish.” (A play on the names for cities in the Pacific Northwest, which are Anglicized derivations of Native American words: Sammamish, Seaqualish, Snoqualmie. There is also “seasqueamish,” coined when I took the helm of a fishing publication.) The hub is much less inclined to eat meat than I am--unless there is a tuna melt in the vicinity. He loves him some tuna melts. I would order sushi and even big hunks of sashimi while he stuck to veggie rolls, miso soup.

One fish dish we could both consistently get behind was ceviche, which is a Spanish-Caribbean concoction of white fish marinated in lime juice. Done well, it is tart and tender. We ate ceviche at restaurants in Miami where there were large aquariums full of the fish that might end up on your dinner table, something the hub found disturbing, but not enough to deny himself a copious helping of ceviche.

A human-eating eagle?

They compared their data on the Haast's eagle to characteristics of modern predator birds and scavenger birds to determine that the bird was a fearsome predator that ate the flightless moa birds and even humans.

via dailyme.com

Using latest medical-industry technology, researchers found evidence that this bird, thought to be a scavenger, was a fearsome predator. And a very large one, too, which evolved in a very short time. Maori myths support the idea that the eagle may have preyed upon humans.

Eating the amazing octopus

Brendan Kiley's article in this week's The Stranger (one of two Seattle alt weeklies) is an excellent gloss on the giant Pacific octopus as beautiful and amazingly complex sea creature. It's also a personal reflection on what it's like to eat a still-live tentacle, and a commentary on the best way to prepare octopus.

That the three types of writing can coexist peacefully in one feature story says a lot about cognitive dissonance, our capacity to hold contradictory thoughts and beliefs in our minds and recognize them as contradictory. You can feel how the arguments against eating octopus probably weighed on Kiley's mind as he researched and wrote the piece. But he doesn't get off onto any tangents about animal rights in the story, and I'm glad.

He explores the possibility that a concentration of neurons in octopus limbs suggests that consciousness for this creature is not relegated to its brain, but rather spread throughout its body. After this, he writes, "I'm beginning to wonder what the tentacle I was chewing, back in that dark-paneled room in a restaurant in Osaka, was thinking."

On the question of when and how to study the creatures, we have another tension. Kiley is straightforward (but not judgmental) about the methods scientists use to study octopus intelligence, such as one experiment in which the two halves of an octopus' brain are severed to discover whether or not octopuses, like humans, can "lateralize information" (they can).

And again, as if Kiley's one by one evoking every animal-rights position in the book, we've got another problem, and that's that octopuses apparently don't like to be in that watery equivalent of zoos: aquariums. He spends a good deal of time describing escapes:

When they can't get out, some octopuses tear up their tanks. Another octopus at the Seattle Aquarium, nicknamed Lucretia McEvil, destroyed her life-support system in one night: She dug through several centimeters of sand, chewed through wires lashing down an undergravel filter plate (a ridged plate that covers the bottom of an aquarium, allowing beneficial bacteria to process ammonia buildup), yanked up the plate, and ripped it into pieces for the staff to fish out of her tank. Octopuses also squirt water at their keepers (either in play or hostility—it's hard to tell), and Dr. Anderson has heard of sensitive lab equipment ruined by precisely aimed jets of salt water.

via www.thestranger.com

But there's no singleminded sympathy for the plight of the caged octopus here. At this point, Kiley's already enumerated the octopus' own predatory tendencies (including attacks on humans). And a good deal of the article focuses on a Seattle Aquarium researcher who's devoted his entire career to cephalopods, the study of which he feels is not given sufficient attention. Thus, the aquarium as institution is redeemed by this endearing lover of octopuses, who wears an octopus T-shirt and carries an octopus bag and washes with octopus soap.

But the fact that the article ends with Kiley's visit to two local restaurants with octopus on the menu shows that in this case, an animal-rights/vegetarian position is rejected, despite a tremendous argument for the octopus as intelligent, probably capable of emotion, and worthy of our study.

Like Kiley, I've eaten octopus at Tavolata and thought it marvelously prepared. I've also eaten squid at Le Pichet, where they serve it in an endive salad with pickled fennel root, the squid so light and delicate it seems to have been fried in air.

The trouble with finding your 'soy' mate

Internet scams are pretty sophisticated; here's one targeting vegetarians looking for love:

Recently I was the victim of a dating service scam. I want to make people aware of this company because they prey on special-interest groups such as vegetarians.

via vegangirlnextdoor.wordpress.com

Sad story, told in a rambling, entertaining sort of way, and it brings me to this question: Vegetarians and vegans, would you date a meat eater? And meat eaters, vice versa?

Back in the early 90s when I was a staunch vegetarian, I had trouble dating meat eaters because when people eat meat, especially red meat, regularly, their breath has a tendency to smell like rancid meat. I think I might be 'smell sensitive,' or something, as I often detect scents that others seem to miss (I think it's possible that yoga practice keeps my sinuses free and clear), but still, bad breath is a pretty big deal, and no one wants to smell rancid meat. I never was as strict as a vegan I knew who refused to eat in a house where meat had been served, even if the host was serving only vegetarian for her visit. She wouldn't eat with utensils that had touched meat, no matter how clean they were.

That seemed rather judgmental and unnecessary to me. It limited her social sphere for sure.

A little humor with your meat

via www.flickr.com

I took this picture a couple of weekends ago at Seattle's Pike Place Market.

The hunters in my family

Along the same theme as my earlier post on food's centrality in family and culture, here's a look at food rituals and recipes getting passed down from the patrilineal line this time. One of my Facebook friends surmised that "Hunter's Delight," a dish that does not actually contain the meat of a hunted animal, might be so named because it's a dish you'd serve to someone who'd been out walking around and hunting all day. She's probably right....

    My paternal grandmother ate an awful fiber cereal each morning and expected me and my siblings to do the same. We sat in her breakfast nook trying to choke down All-Bran while listening to Amway tapes, which she thought would give us ideas about future career ambitions. Her name was Marcella, which my sister and I decided sounded like the name of one of Cinderella’s evil step-sisters. She hated our mother, and we were always hearing from her about Mom’s imperfections and from Mom about Grandma’s nastiness. She thought our father, her youngest child, was a man-god, perfect in every way. Probably no woman was good enough for him although she seemed to think several of the girls he went to high school with who’d stayed in Rhinelander would have been far better choices than Mom. She was a big-boned woman, healthy and intimidating in stature and timbre, like Bea Arthur. She had very particular ideas about nutrition, the bran cereal just one manifestation. She baked a wheat bread laden with walnuts that I actually thought was delicious; I could not get enough of that bread. Much to my brother’s dismay, she insisted that the only way to make hamburgers was by adding Lipton’s onion soup mix to the ground beef. My brother despised onions but loved hamburgers; he was apoplectic at the way she ruined them. My father, who normally would object to the addition of Lipton’s onion soup mix in the ground beef, quietly went along. He quietly went along with anything his mother did or said.

            In Rhinelander, there is snow on the ground from September till May, and people hunt wild animals. We were always receiving Christmas cards with enclosed photographs of a moose or deer strung up by its mouth as if hung from the back of a tow truck hook. I think they might actually have been tow trucks. Someone would bag a moose, and then there would be wild meat of different sizes and shapes wrapped in white paper in the basement freezer. Everyone had a basement freezer for this purpose.

            One summer, we all went up to Rhinelander, and my sister and I brought a boyfriend and friend along. The adults had something else to do, so Grandma hosted all six of us kids for dinner, and she served deer stew. I was a staunch vegetarian by then, and although she balked at doing so, I got her to cook a pot of vegetables for me that was untouched by deer flesh. There was also her wonderful bread, so I knew I would not go hungry. Everyone else was to eat the deer stew, but my boyfriend, who had no qualms about eating other kinds of meat, refused to eat it. He complained rudely that he would “not eat Bambi.” He acted as if my family’s long practice of hunting deer was barbaric.

            His reaction is even funnier in light of the fact that one day, a deer ran through the alley behind our house in Belleville, Illinois. Out of the woodwork came every redneck with a gun and a flatbed pickup within a five-mile radius, including my boyfriend’s brother. It was his brother who shot and took home the deer. I’m not sure why a deer running through the alley should set off alarms and be instantly killed, but that was the general reaction among everyone on the street, that the animal should need to be killed. The only question was who would get to it first.

From Meat: A Memoir.

Gives 'Pet Sounds' a whole new meaning

Wired Science has a great article on a species-specific music test, a collaboration between a composer and a scientist. They found that the monkeys they tested the music on aren't that interested in most human music, but when the musician created music that shared pitch, tone, and quality with the monkeys' own communications, they responded:

Monkey music, on the other hand, had a significant and predictable effect on behavior. After listening to the fear-based track, the animals became anxious and upset, as indicated by increased activity and nervous behaviors like urination and scent marking. After hearing the calm music, the monkeys became more relaxed and social.

via www.wired.com

This makes sense to me, but I also wonder about the potential for cross-species communication through music. I played both the 'happy' and the 'fearful' monkey music and much preferred the soothing quality of the former to the dissonant angst of the latter. My husband plays guitar, and we often observe our cat responding to the music he plays. She is calm and expresses pleasure in particular songs and will seek him out when he's playing in the backyard, as if she enjoys the serenade. The Wired article includes a link to a company producing music specifically for cats. I enjoyed all three cat compositions myself! 

Thanks to Mike Levine for sharing this article.

Keeping my distance

via www.flickr.com

I took this photo of Roosevelt elk grazing at the airstrip in Forks, Wash., in December 2007. Even though wildlife photos often zoom in for a shot, I like seeing the elk from a respectful distance.