Chris Walker Vs. In Defense Of Motorized Carts, And The Fatties Who Ride Them

I’m starting to think obese people dislike me as much as I dislike them. Or maybe they’re inherently miserable. I smiled at a fat woman in the grocery store yesterday, after she and I made eye contact; she just glared at me. Then, while I was ordering tacos at the local Taqueria, the blubber-fest working the register kept shooting me “fuck-you-die” eye-daggers. And finally, there’s this reaction to Chris Walker Vs. Motorized Carts, And The Fatties Who Ride Them, which I recently received from a woman named Aleah:

“Hi there,
“I read your little note and quite frankly was appalled that you think the way you do. I have a handicap placard. I am overweight. I can walk—unfortunately not far. I have Avascular Necrosis in of both knees, which is very rare (might want to look that one up). After 3 + years of not being able to do any sort of exercise regime; I am a bit voluptuous—or in your words ‘a fatty’. With the first of two major back surgeries coming up, I don’t see anything changing for a while till I get some healing done (four herniated discs, one that’s collapsed completely, and a torn rotator cuff, of which the doctors don’t even talk about because they consider that the least of my concerns).

“I usually refuse to use the carts at the store because I was ‘paranoid’ of what someone might think. I am horrified that my fears are true now that I’ve read your post. That someone like you could (or would) prejudge me on the absolutely ONLY fact that you’d know about me—that I’m overweight. I have used the carts a few times but only with the urging of my teenage son (its faster, and wayyyy less painful). Then, and only then, he got a cart too and we raced through the store acting silly, getting everything we needed, a lot of dirty looks as well. That’s the only way I will use the carts, even though it would make my life easier. I’m so bummed that the one thing I thought I was being paranoid about with those stupid carts—is true. It ‘s a bummer that there will always be sad, ignorant, prejudiced, dorks making life miserable for people they don’t even know.

“In saying ‘ignorant’ in the previous paragraph I wasn’t calling you ignorant; I meant ignorant of someone’s condition that got him or her to ‘the cart’. So no, I wasn’t calling you ignorant. I was calling you a dork.”

I’d be a calloused bastard to keep lambasting obese people after reading that, wouldn’t I? In fact, I should probably apologize for my years of ignorant prejudice. You know how long I felt bad after reading Aleah’s story?

Approximately zero seconds.

According to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) – in conjunction with the National Institute of Health (NIH) – Avascular Necrosis, or Osteonecrosis, is a disease that stops blood supply to bones. It’s believed to be caused by long-term steroid use, alcohol abuse, joint injures, and hypertension (i.e. high-blood pressure). As Aleah wrote, Avascular Necrosis is a rare disease. I’m willing to bet none of the obese people I saw at Wal-Mart had Avascular Necrosis. If anything, they suffered from Drive-thru Super-sisis.

I love when obese people defend their size with adverse health conditions like heart disease, diabetes, high-blood pressure, and now Avascular Necrosis. What causes these health conditions? I read in a 2004 report from the NIH, “eating at fast-food restaurants more than twice per week is associated with more weight gain and insulin resistance in otherwise healthy young adults.” Can’t insulin resistance cause type 2 diabetes? Can’t diabetes cause heart disease? You bet it can. I read in a 2003 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) report, “[s]cientific evidence shows that consumption of saturated fat, trans fat, and dietary cholesterol raises low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad cholesterol,” levels, which increases the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD).” Well, isn’t fast food full of saturated fat, trans fat, and bad cholesterol? Call me crazy but I’m starting to see a pattern.

This isn’t new information. We’ve known constant consumption of fast-food causes health risks. It’s common sense: cram enough shit into your body and, eventually, it will say “Fuck you, I quit.” You will get heart-disease; you will become morbidly obese; you will suffer from shortness-of-breath; you will end up on a motorized cart, cruising around Wal-Mart, stocking up on “fat-free” chips and “low-sodium” fruit juice full of high-fructose corn syrup. And when you are riding around, weighing far more than the average person should, taking up far too much personal real-estate, and you feel “paranoid” because you think considerably normal-sized people are disgusted by your sloth-like appearance, don’t act so shocked when they are.

What I’d like to know is what was Aleah’s lifestyle like before she was diagnosed with Avascular Necrosis? Was she a marathon runner, eating well, only to be tragically hindered by this chance disease? Or was she fat before, the deterioration of her knees a result of carrying around such a massive frame?

While I’m ranting here, I found it interesting that Aleah blames her “voluptuous” size on “3 + years of not being able to do any sort of exercise regime.” As if that were the problem. Have you ever noticed in those health magazines, with articles boasting “30 Day Abs,” that their regiment (not regime, which is a form of government; no wonder Aleah can’t get it together) never has anything to do with crunches and everything to do with diet? (I know you fat girls read them, I saw one of you in the Las Vegas airport flipping through Shape magazine while wolfing down a bag of M&Ms in your Lane Bryant stretch-pants.) How you look has everything to do with what you eat. Sure, a treadmill will help shed those pounds, too, but do you think health clubs are littering the streets of France or Italy? No, however; they still manage to stay relatively skinny. Either they don’t eat the same horrible things we eat or they’re superheroes. Maybe both.

Finally, what does Aleah consider “voluptuous,” anyway? 270 pounds as a natural weight, like fat rights advocate Marilyn Wann? To me, voluptuous is Nigella Lawson: she’s full-figured and sexy as shit. Lawson has a Food Network program where she unabashedly celebrates her love of chocolate. It’s food porn; not to mention, great to watch on Sunday morning while nursing a hangover.

I applaud Aleah for not depending on the motorized carts like so many Baconator-loving, bloated monsters. When her son tells her they should use the carts to save time she should tell him, “Mommy’s gotta do this the hard way because mommy has some dignity to maintain.” Remember dignity? Remember when accomplishment, self-worth, and pride were important? A time before everyone got a trophy just for participating? God, I miss those days. Obese people who ride around in motorized carts are assholes. Plain and simple.

Chris Walker Vs. Offal Good: Chris Cosentino

The other day I wrote “the biggest anti-meat statement I’ll ever make is buy beef that is grass fed, not corn fed.” I lied. I’ve got another anti-meat statement to make, but it’s almost a pro-meat statement. Confusing?

Don’t buy cloned meat.

I wish I was joking but cloned meat is real, and we should be afraid:

Cloned Livestock Poised To Receive FDA Clearance

FDA Says Cloned Animals Safe For Food

I read the first article on chef Chris Cosentino’s website, Offal Good, and, sadly, read the second article yesterday. I’m a big fan of chef Cosentino; I visited his restaurant, Incanto, the last time I was in San Francisco and was excited to find many of the menu items contained offal. What is offal? From chef Cosentino’s Offal Good:

“[Offal is] those parts of a meat animal which are used as food but which are not skeletal muscle. The term literally means “off fall”, or the pieces which fall from a [sic] carcase when it is butchered. Originally the word applied principally to the entrails. It now covers insides including the HEART, LIVER, and LUNGS (collectively known as the pluck), all abdominal organs and extremities: TAILS, FEET, and HEAD including BRAINS and TONGUE.”

One visit to Cosentino’s website and you’ll discover he’s a man who appreciates the sacrifice animals make to appease our taste buds; one visit to his restaurant and you’ll see how he demonstrates it with his food. Cosentino makes haute cuisine out of what most consider leftovers. It’s nothing short of extraordinary. After eating at Incanto I wished grocery stores carried chicken liver so I could eat them more often.

Cosentino also does a lot with salumi – cured meats – which I unabashedly adore. You can find out more about salumi on the Boccalone website (all links below).

LINKS WORTH FOLLOWING:
Offal Good: “chef Chris Cosentino’s educational and inspirational tool for those who are interested in learning and cooking with offal.”

Incanto: Executive Chef Chris Cosentino’s three star restaurant in San Francisco’s Noe Valley.

Boccalone: a website for people who’d like to salivate while staring at their computer screen, and an “artisan meat company” started by Incanto owner, Mark Pastore, and chef Cosentino.

Chris Walker Vs. Bullfighting, And Meat In America

Whenever I tell someone I’ve been to a bullfight I get one of two reactions:

“Bullfighting is cruel and inhumane.”
“Why would you go to a bullfight?”

These reactions are typically from people who don’t think twice about eating a fast food hamburger or ordering filet mignon at a steakhouse, people who balk at fur coats while wearing leather shoes. I find the reactions remarkable because they illustrate how uninformed people are about where meat comes from and how it is acquired.

If people were more informed about how meat is acquired, I don’t think they’d be as appalled by a bullfight. First of all, the life and death of a bullfighting bull are hardly “cruel” or “inhumane” when compared to the life and death of a slaughterhouse steer, which becomes our meat. Secondly, witnessing the animal most Americans eat on a daily basis die, first hand, evokes respect for the sacrifices made to fulfill our dietary needs and culinary indulgences. Not everyone can go into a slaughterhouse but anyone can attend a bullfight. That’s why bullfights are beneficial.


LIVING ACCOMMODATIONS

Highly regarded by their respective cultures, bullfighting bulls flourish on posh areas known as dehesas. Even the people at Stop Our Shame, a site dedicated to stopping bullfighting, admit dehesas are “privileged natural spaces … essential to the survival of valuable trees, plants, mammals and birds.” A bull lives on a dehesa between three-to-five years, and only after it’s naturally matured is it ready for the ring.

Steers bred to become McDonald’s cheeseburgers and T.G.I. Friday’s “flat-iron” steaks are not so lucky. A calf is allowed six months of nursing and pasture grazing with its mother (who’s probably been inseminated again) before it’s sent to a feedlot, which it shares with ninety-nine or so other cattle. There, the young calf is “bulked-up” to the size of a full-grown, three-to-five year old steer in roughly eight months. From Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “What gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.” In less than two years, most of that time cramped inside pens, ingesting things it wouldn’t naturally consume, the steer is ready for slaughter.


MAKING THEIR WAY TO OUR PLATES

Here is a brief description of how a bullfight unfolds:

• The bull enters the ring and charges at peones, matador’s assistants, whom taunt the bull with large capes to learn the bull’s natural patterns and preferences.
• Next, picadores, or lancers, enter the ring on horseback. When the bull charges a horse the picardor stabs the bull in the back.
• Each matador, carrying two banderillas, decorative wooden spikes, runs at the bull and attempts to drive the banderillas into the bull’s back.
• Finally, the main matador steps into the ring and directs the bull through a long series of passes. After several successful passes the matador stabs the bull in the back of the head, killing it instantly. If the matador is unsuccessful the blade is removed and a second attempt is made with a new blade.
• Once dead, the bull is carted out of the arena.

Here is the slaughter process, from Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse:

“[C]attle … are either prodded along a chute into a ‘kicking box’ or up to a conveyor/restrainer, which … carries them up to the ‘stun operator.’ The stun operator … shoots each animal in the forehead with a compressed-air gun … If the knocking gun is sufficiently powered … and properly used … it knocks the cows unconscious or kills the animal on the spot.

“[N]ext … the ‘shackler,’ wraps a chain around one of the stunned cow’s hind legs … Once shackled, the animal is … lifted onto a moving overhead rail. The cow, now hanging upside down … is sent to the ‘sticker,’ the worker who cuts … the carotid arteries and a jugular vein in the neck … to cut off the flow of blood to the animal’s brain.

“Next the cow travels along the ‘bleed rail’ and is given several minutes to bleed out. The carcass then proceeds to the head-skinners, the leggers, and on down the line where it is completely skinned, eviscerated, and split in half.”

[For more compare and contrast visit this link: Supplemental: Bullfighting, And Meat In America]


APPRECIATING THE SACRIFICE

The life of a slaughterhouse steer is not a great one, particularly after comparing it to the life of a bullfighting bull. And their deaths? I’d rather go out like a bullfighting bull (especially after considering the Supplemental information), it sounds a little more honorable. It’s hard to dismiss a bullfight as “cruel” and “inhumane” once you know how that pretty cut of meat, neatly sealed in plastic and slapped with a sticker, got on the supermarket shelf, and onto your families plates however; it’s easier to appreciate the sacrifice animals make everyday to become our food.

I’m reminded of a passage from Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef, where chef Thomas Keller recalls killing rabbits:

“‘You have to have enormous respect for the food,’ Keller said … ‘It’s why I killed the rabbits.’ … It was an awful experience, … But he learned something more. He had taught himself about respect for food and, its opposite, waste. It had been hard to kill those rabbits because life, to Keller, wasn’t meaningless … He took that life, and so he wouldn’t waste it … These were going to be the best rabbits ever … ‘They taught me a great amount about care,’ he said, recalling the rabbits. ‘It’s up to me not to waste them.’”

I haven’t provided vivid descriptions of death to deter you from eating meat. You shouldn’t become a vegetarian, a vegan, or an animal rights activists because of what you’ve learned here (the biggest anti-meat statement I’ll ever make is buy beef that is grass fed, not corn fed). There is nothing wrong with killing and eating animals. Humans have been omnivores since our inception (it’s only after becoming such a spoiled culture that we’ve been given the options of vegetarianism and veganism; you think there were any vegetarian Eskimos?). It’s important to remember where our meat comes from, that something lived and died before it got to our plates, and to appreciate the sacrifices made for our carnal enjoyment.

REFERENCES:
Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry, Gail Eisnitz.
Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry, Danielle Nierenberg.
The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan.
The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection, Michael Ruhlman.

WEBSITES:
United States Department of Agriculture
Stop Our Shame