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The staff ate it later

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Re: The staff ate it later

#241

Post by rhet0rica »

watwut wrote: post #228
krapp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, "European" means "white." Jesus probably did not look like the bearded white hippie commonly depicted in Western (primarily American and British) iconography. Spaniards, Egyptians, Greeks and Levantines may or may not look similar (seems a bit broad, like the geographical definition of "European") but they also don't often look like "white people." Especially not in Egypt or the Levant.

As an European, I find the definition of European that excludes Spaniards super weird. Likewise, not counting Spaniards into white is weird too, but at least it does not betray complete lack of knowledge about what counts as Europe.

Generally the matter is one of blood purity, as with all racism. Southern Spain, Italy, and Greece were all occupied at one time by Arabs, which contributed certain hair textures, skin tones, and facial features to the local gene pool. Those with no knowledge of history or civilization tend to be terrified of acknowledging the artistic and cultural contributions of al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire. As you probably know, the northern reaches of Italy are more German than Romance, on account of those pesky invasive Lombards.

Of course the true absurdity of all this comes when two people from the same parents end up with different physiognomical and racial labels; since these traits are rarely as simple as idealized Mendelian characteristics, it is entirely possible for them to be passed on a couple of generations before re-coalescing. (The case of Summer on The Sopranos comes to mind—while her parents both have fairer skin than she does, the result is otherwise not all that unrealistic.)

Re: The staff ate it later

#242

Post by evilduck »

shermantanktop wrote: post #53
bondarchuk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are very normal weggebobbles for anyone outside the US. Big no-no to vegan cheese though.

Are they not normal inside the US?

They're normal vegetables, but not normal pizza toppings. Just look at the menu offerings of any big US chain pizza place, deviating from that without warning is going to cause disappointment.

Re: The staff ate it later

#243

Post by dotancohen »

keiferski wrote: post #110
adriand wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess our cultures are simply too different, but it genuinely seems like people saw all animals as "things" until, like, the 1950s or something like that. There’s a weird disconnect where people ignore or are wilfully ignorant of cruelty to animals in industrial food production but are sensitive to it in virtually every other context. I saw a woman the other day who was tending to an injured pigeon and had called…

It is mostly just proximity and framing. A hurt wild animal is alive and right in front of you. Meat from the grocery store is a prepackaged product that isn’t mentally associated with the bloody process behind the scenes required to get it there. The commercial aspect is pretty dependent on this distancing. Case-in-point: I once stayed in a small town in Morocco for a few weeks. There wasn’t a grocery store nearby,…

  > if you wanted chicken, they killed it in front of you. Needless to say, being directly confronted with the process…I didn’t eat meat the entire time.
The one time I had opportunity to kill a bird with my own hands and eat it, I ate it with far greater respect and less waste than any meat I'd ever even before or since. I wish there were an efficient way to bring the consumer closer to the animal in everyday Western society. I doubt that we would consume less meat, but we would certainly have more respect for it.

Re: The staff ate it later

#244

Post by Iv »

amelius wrote: post #191

Many people are against throwing away of food because of certain principles. But the irony is of course that in the West most people eat _far_ more calories than they really need, so they are doing basically the same thing.

Old people in Japan went through the deprivation of post-war Japan. Not all boomers were raised the same. It is harder for someone who has known famine to accept it is ok to throw food away for fun.

US grandparents think you can buy a house with a part time job, Japanese ones think that you could save a life with a watermelon. Different delusions.

Re: The staff ate it later

#245

Post by dotancohen »

rkomorn wrote: post #195
iamtedd wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know how to spell shakshuka.

You don't have to! You can just say it's imported from a language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, so there's no canonically correct way to spell it. It's probably a lie but it doesn't sound like one!

Though Arabic has quite a few letters you won't find in the Latin alphabet, all the letters in the word shakshukah map perfectly to Latin letters. But put an H on the end, and quarter-pronounce it.

Re: The staff ate it later

#246

Post by AxEy »

jajko wrote: post #164
AxEy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Personally, keeping chickens has almost completely put me off empathy with them. Roosters are assholes. Into the pot with you." What a relief that we don't generally take this policy toward asshole humans. At any rate, it's one thing to eat one asshole chicken and another to systematically farm asshole chicken to be killed.

What do you mean, in many places around the world we kill people society or state considers assholes, including US. Then we can discuss where is the cutoff line for enough assholishness to go for a slaughter and where something less severe, but practice is here and not going anywhere.

> " in many places around the world we kill people society or state considers assholes, including US."

Not really the same as systematically bringing into existence a species with behaviors you find objectionable, keeping them in your proximity so you can experience said behaviors, and then slaughtering them with the excuse that they are all assholes is it?

> "Then we can discuss where is the cutoff line for enough assholishness to go for a slaughter"

When you say that roosters cross this line do you mean with respect to their behavior towards you? I'm guessing this can't be that bad since you're much more powerful than they?

Or do you mean towards other chickens? If so, and if it's really that bad, then surely the best thing is to just not bring them into existence in the first place (not systematically breeding them with the intent of slaughtering them)?

Re: The staff ate it later

#247

Post by DonHopkins »

alpinisme wrote: post #98
jfengel wrote: post #81

Restaurants (at least in the US) have very strict standards about how long you can keep something at room temperature before you have to throw it away. Those standards are extremely conservative, and lead to a lot of food waste, but if I were on the staff I'd at least want to keep an eye on how long something has been sitting out. Those standards have just been beaten into me. You also see that on a lot of fictional…

That and nobody wants to eat a meal 40 times to get 40 takes.

With a notable exception...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvxwf1jxdaM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i7ycxiog40

Re: The staff ate it later

#248

Post by chuckadams »

bambax wrote: post #207
adrian_b wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the serpent had a dark role in the Epic of Gilgamesh too, it is extremely sad how the Genesis has twisted completely the beautiful story of how Shamkhat has civilized the wild Enkidu, whom God had made from clay (by showing him the pleasures of a city, as opposed to the harsh life in the wilderness: eating bread, drinking beer, being massaged with oil and making love), into the ugly story of how Eve has committ…

I don't know if it's sad; it's a different story, it's a kind of riff on the same themes. In Genesis III, it's necessary for Adam and Eve to acquire knowledge and leave the garden, because in so doing they have sex and make children. While in the garden, they didn't know they were naked, and presumably didn't have sex or reproduced. Also, when God finds out, he fist asks the man, who accuses "the woman you gave me".…

It's a rather obvious allegory for the loss of childhood innocence. We all have to leave The Garden at some point. See also Puff the Magic Dragon.

Re: The staff ate it later

#249

Post by chithanh »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #177
a-french-anon wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cruelty" is a rhetoric word because its meaning is caught between the classical "deliberate causing of pain" and the new "neglect, indifference towards another's pain" and of course, that discrepancy is fully exploited. What livestock beasts suffer is purely for practical reasons. >I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from 1. Empathy is a base emotional response triggered by nearby animals, not a ration…

> 2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people. This is just untrue, hundreds of millions of rural South Asians are vegetarian. > 3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important. Everyone has a brain. Both vegetarian and omnivore groups have their share of geniuses and fools. Meat was important as a calorie sourc…

> Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc.

I think the most important drawbacks which actually threaten modern society are deforestation and zoonoses. Both can be largely avoided by raising only insects for meat, which reduces water and land use by 80%, and CO2 emissions even more if feed is mostly food waste. It is however a hard sell and has to be hidden in products in order to be accepted by consumers.

Re: The staff ate it later

#250

Post by hollerith »

chithanh wrote: post #249
HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people. This is just untrue, hundreds of millions of rural South Asians are vegetarian. > 3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important. Everyone has a brain. Both vegetarian and omnivore groups have their share of geniuses and fools. Meat was important as a calorie sourc…

> Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc. I think the most important drawbacks which actually threaten modern society are deforestation and zoonoses. Both can be largely avoided by raising only insects for meat, which reduces water and land use by 80%, and CO2 emissions even more…

So, it is marketing and perception problem and not because insects are objectively terrible as food for people?
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