The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Richard Day's picture

    FOOD FIGHTS

        File:Thanksgiving grace 1942.jpg

    Look, for my dogs it was easy.

    I had 25# of dog food. You know those pellets or balls or whatever that they shove into strange sacks. The dog ate when I ate. Once a day.

    She would come around when I was cooking. No jumping up and down or anything like that.

    I am a sap and could not help giving her a nice big hug. She did not necessarily like hugs. Hahahaha

    Then, whatever I was cooking; whenever it was time for dinner, would end up on top of the dry dog food.

    Now, sometimes, times were tough. Maybe there was not a lot of warm food on top of the pellets. But she got what I got. We had an understanding of course.

    I never ate her dry dog food though. Much too salty.

    Now water, well, two bowls of water at all times available throughout the livable area.  Never a discussion over water.

    And she never hounded for food (excuse the expression). She knew when we were going to eat and she would sashay into the kitchen to discover whether or not it was interesting.

    If she had ever demonstrated that she was hungry during the day, I would have obliged. It just never came up.


    I watch these commercials on the telly. I mean what the f....

    At any rate, now we have tsunamis in Somalia. Right after problems in Haiti and then Chile.

    And yet, they are selling gourmet food for dogs. A gourmet food for my dog was giving her a little of what I ate. 

    WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

    If some horse flesh gets mixed up in the dog meat so to speak, who the hell cares?  We can eat dogs, we can eat horses and we can eat frogs. It is a fact. And we do it all the time in different parts of the world.

    I would think that maybe you do not become what you eat all the time. But if you share your food with other people, you become a family of sorts. "You are what you eat", becomes a reality.

    I wish to sound sexist on purpose sometimes.

    When women call someone, they will announce: It's me.

    Well we are all me. I mean....a guy will never call someone and say: It's me. I mean the other guy would say: Who in the f... is me? Hahahahah

    When I was seeing or dating or sleeping with a woman...how wonderful...the woman had a different way of addressing things.

    If I was out of town, my woman would ask: What did you eat tonight?  A guy talking to a guy, is never going to ask: What did you eat tonight? A guy will ask: How many fish did you catch? How big was the deer that you killed? How about those Mets? Who exactly are you screwing? How much money did you make last week? But never, never would he ask me: What did you eat last night?

    Now when I am speaking of roles, I am speaking of heterosexual roles. I have noticed, from afar, that in many gay relationships, one of the partners is yin or female and the other is yang or male. Okay? I aint discriminating against anyone here.

    Interesting is it not? I think it goes back to social roles so old that they are hidden from us. Fifty years ago, five hundred years ago and five thousand years ago...who made dinner? The woman made dinner. Certain things might interfere like menstrual cycles and such.  But women were the cooks.

    A woman will touch you over the phone in a manner not possible for a guy.

    My children ate with me. Every night when we were together and most of the time the children were with me.

    I despised my parents, so that I would never even think of eating fish on Friday or meatloaf on Tuesday. Whatever was the habit, I broke it. Just for spite I suppose.

    Back to the mutt. The dog became part of me, and I became part of the dog, because we ate the same food, at the same times.

    LarryH always sends me these delightful links to other realities. To understand this, I must remind myself that there is no 'reality'. Reality is a construct. To me a construct is simply a series of assumptions embedded in my brain of which I am not always aware.

    I just finished one of these fun links. I cannot figure out how to make the link 'hot' so just copy and paste it at google or whatever.

    http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2009/03/lnl_20090310_2240.mp3

    The reason the link is fun to me relates to something Alan Watts says in one of the ten different tapes available on Youtube. Watts says that we are the button culture. And he was saying this almost forty years ago. We push this button for the news, this button for music, and another button to order pizza. Because we are all prone to ennui, Watts thinks we need a button that just says 'surprise'.

    The link I cite above is a tape of a radio show. The discussion concerns itself with the collapse of the USA; an amazing little 25 minute presentation discussing the end of the world, really.

    Dmetri Orlov discusses the collapse of the good ole USA with an Aussie by the name of Phillip Adams, a man with an ABC radio show that I never heard of.  Orlov is known for his coverage of the fall of the USSR and its effect upon the citizens of that grand empire.

    Forget our Constitution (our constitutional government is the oldest in the world by the way), forget the thousand or so American military bases scattered around the world, forget our massive police state with millions stuck in corporate gulags, and forget our massive corporate farms because we are all going to hell in a handbasket. Our country will break down into geographic areas. We will start acting like the characters in Mad Max and Jericho.

    There is much discussion concerning foods. Hence my post!!!

    I found an Orlov site and a Russian Immigrant writes Dmetri thus:

    In the talk you gave at the conference in Ireland you mentioned that there are certain regions of the US where the common people only eat garbage food from places like Walmart, which consists of artificial colors and flavors and corn, and that such a diet makes them "a little bit crazy." http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/

    The Ruskie goes on to conclude:

    But even when I've visited here before, as a student, my first impression was of a country that is full of madmen, ranging from somewhat mentally competent to total lunatics. And the further south I traveled, the more obvious this became. At first I even marveled at this, thinking, look at how intoxicating the spirit of liberty can be! But now I understand that this is a catastrophe, that American society is brainwashed and alienated in the extreme, and that all that's left for Americans to do is to play each other for the suckers that they have become.

    Before I get to the end of days, I have to explain something.

    I have very little money. I have existed on very little resources for a decade. But I get food stamps that have made me fat. Again. I have been fat before. I am working on a new diet.

    I am not fat because of McDonalds. I eat no fast foods at all. I do not have food outside of my own kitchen. I go to the grocery store and purchase packages that I somehow drag home and I cook my own foods or I should say I prepare them. I do not 'cook' herring. I take it out of the package, put it on a plate and I add a mixture of horse radish and catsup. I put some saltines on another plate and feast at my table.

    We must properly 'bless' our foods before we can permit them to enter our souls.

    Claude Levi-Strauss wrote a book entitled "The Raw & the Cooked." 

    One of the premises of this book involves the importance of food in human culture. Americans and residents of the so-called Western Culture will not eat horses or dogs or cats or other human beings. That is a cultural phenomenon. That is not some 'natural' law. As a matter of fact, I must point out; there is no 'natural' law. There is only the laws of culture.

    Just review the Mosaic Laws sometime and see the Yin/Yang involving godly foods and evil foods; and the taboos involved in preparing the foods in the wrong manner. When you are outside the 'reality' of a different culture, many rules just seem silly or crazy.

    I mean recipes were formulae for living and written by God Himself. 

    You do not wash your fruit in tap water to save yourself from the ravages of bacilli. You do not spread different colored foods on your plate in a certain pattern for nutritional reasons. You do not eschew meat and have an omelet because of some 'reality'. Corn has not become the enemy of so many Americans because of any real nutritional deficit. Not really.

    There are food sects with deeply religious rules to sup by.

    I certainly can see a lot of culture in action watching the Food Channel. Pork ribs and beef ribs are sacred articles as they are sacrificed before the religious kilns.

    And speaking of kilns, pizza is an art form prepared in ugly corners of Chicago slums as well as the richest restaurants in NYC.

    Bread and cheese.

    Back to Dmetri,  Phillip Adams notes that the Russian peasantry was so hungry at the time of the German invasion, that they made bread with a mixture of rye and wood shavings. As the food distribution system in America breaks down, will McDonald's have to substitute other things for real meat?

    Oh, said Dmetri, McDonalds has not used real meat for years. Haahahaha  Only he did not laugh.

    Adams then discussed how the Russians have always been hardened by wars and economic catastrophes. Even in the urban centers they will use communal areas to grow wheat and vegetables.

    If our food distribution system fails, Americans will just be lost. They will sit and starve waiting for food to be brought to them.

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezLdEcscOxY&feature=related

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