Author Topic: In the New Yorker...  (Read 1921213 times)

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #710 on: November 13, 2013, 08:04:41 pm »
Well, that seems logical. If you have a cow and a calf, and you've killed the calf (for meat) and kept the cow (for dairy), then in terms of livestock value you've probably killed the wrong animal. Maybe originally they wanted to encourage people to give up the milk in favor of the meat until the calf was old enough to produce milk. Therefor, keep the two foods separate. Or sumpn' like that.  ???

Not being a farm boy, I don't know about these things, but it just occurred to me to wonder whether, in primitive agricultural situations, if you take a calf away from a cow ("boil it in its mother's milk"), will the cow continue to produce milk if she doesn't have a calf to nurse?  ???

But to bring this back to The New Yorker, at lunch today I finished Jane Kramer's Nov. 4 article about the Italian chef Massimo Bottura. I always read Jane Kramer, and the part I liked best about this story wasn't about the chef himself but about the Italian mamas and nonnas that he learned from.  :)
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #711 on: November 13, 2013, 09:17:06 pm »
Not being a farm boy, I don't know about these things, but it just occurred to me to wonder whether, in primitive agricultural situations, if you take a calf away from a cow ("boil it in its mother's milk"), will the cow continue to produce milk if she doesn't have a calf to nurse?  ???


Yes, if you continue to milk the cow after you've taken the calf away, she will continue to produce milk for a given amount of time. Then, in the farmer's language, you have to "freshen" her by breeding and having her produce another calf.
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Offline Penthesilea

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #712 on: November 14, 2013, 02:42:52 am »
What Lee said about cows.



Re eating horses:
I grew up eating horse and donkey salami. Horse goulash also every now and then. Consequently I don't have a problem eating horse meat, albeit I don't do it now.
I don't like salami anymore at all, no matter the animal, and it never occurred to me to look for a horse butchery around here. I don't cook meat anyway. Meat products, like sausages, yes. But raw meat is totally yuck for me. All 'real' meat in our household is cooked by Jens. But a friend of ours had horse Bratwurst (fried sausage) at his BBQ some years ago, and I ate them.

Eating horse meat is by far not as common as the regular stuff like pork, beef, poultry, etc. I'd say it's somewhat rare, but not totally exotic (if that makes any sense, lol). Most common is the salami, which you can often get at regular butcheries. But for whole pieces of horse meat you have to go to specialized horse butcheries.

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #713 on: November 14, 2013, 09:55:27 am »
Yes, if you continue to milk the cow after you've taken the calf away, she will continue to produce milk for a given amount of time. Then, in the farmer's language, you have to "freshen" her by breeding and having her produce another calf.

Thanks, FRiend! Never imagined you know so much about cows.  :D

With your experience of chickens and what you know about cows, maybe you should have bought a house in the country where you could keep chickens and cows. You could have your own farm-fresh, organic, free-range eggs and milk whenever you wanted.  :D
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline serious crayons

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #714 on: November 14, 2013, 11:07:04 am »
There are a lot of interesting links in this, but unlike the talented John Gallagher I'm only doing the first one, to the original news story. If you want to see some of the others, go to the Slate page.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2013/11/12/man_and_dog_vs_bears_and_the_wild_outrage_that_a_starving_man_ate_his_dog.html

Nov. 12 2013 11:00 AM
A Lost Hiker Ate His Dog To Survive. Why Does This Infuriate Us So?
By Rebecca Onion


Canadian outdoorsman Marco Lavoie spent three months stranded in the wilderness of the Nottaway River in Western Quebec. His plight began when a bear attacked and wrecked his boat, ravaging his supplies. Lavoie’s pet German shepherd apparently helped drive off the bear. Eventually Lavoie, starving and dehydrated, struck his dog on the head with a rock and ate him.

Lavoie’s actions earned him a torrent of criticism when he was finally found, 90 pounds thinner and dogless, earlier this month. While survival experts supported his decision, Lavoie told authorities immediately after the rescue that he wanted another dog, and this wish provoked particular ire. On the Huffington Post, for example, one commenter wrote “I would rather eat my own limbs than my dogs.”

I wrote a master’s thesis on dog-in-the-wilderness stories, so the Lavoie tale, and the outraged public reaction, piqued my interest. Of the “Man and Dog vs. the Wild” genre, popular at the turn of the 20th century, we mostly remember the works of Jack London, a writer so loved that a new biography merits a long review in the New Yorker. Parents may be familiar with the real-life tale of Balto the sled dog, who brought diphtheria medicine to snowbound Nome, Alaska in 1925 and has been memorialized in children’s books, animated movies, and a statue in Central Park.

But many of the “Man and Dog” stories from the 1900s to 1930s now reside on the lower layers of the cultural landfill. Ever heard of Arthur Bartlett’s Spunk: Leader of the Dog Team (1926)? Ernest Harold Baynes’ Polaris: The Story of an Eskimo Dog (1924)? Esther Birdsall Darling’s Baldy of Nome (1916)? Probably not. Even John Muir’s story “Stickeen,” about a dog who traversed a dangerous Alaskan glacier at the explorer’s side, is now relatively unfamiliar.

What all of these stories have in common is a careful balancing of ideals of wildness and domesticity. Historian Gail Bederman, whose book Manliness and Civilization shaped a lot of my ideas, describes key conflicts within turn-of-the-century ideas of white masculinity. At a time of urbanization and modernization, Bederman argues, people were obsessed by wildness and tameness. Fears of the bad effects of soft city living were joined by equal fears of descent into total “savagery.” (This was a time when eugenics and cultural chauvinism were quite mainstream.)

Summer camps, wilderness recreation, and cultural tourism on Southwestern reservations, all of which were newly popular, were inoculations against softness. What all of these activities had in common was the promise that participation might give you just enough of that taste of wildness to get you through your everyday “civilized” life. 

The dog in the wilderness was a perfect literary metaphor for the times. Dogs like London’s Buck in The Call of the Wild found their wild interior when they were forced up against the harsh realities of Alaskan travel. Dogs learned to fight, to eat wild game, and to persevere on long runs.

But through all of this exertion, they always loved their masters. Their wildness was never so complete as to foreclose that affection—and, indeed, many of the fights they engaged in were on behalf of those masters. Like Lavoie's dog, they stepped between the dangers of the great North and their masters' hides, turning "red in tooth and claw," but for a purpose. The dogs in these stories, like the men they accompanied into the wilderness, were brawny, with a solid core of morality.

In using dogs as transportation, white explorers, missionaries, and prospectors were adopting a practice of the native Alaskan, but they staunchly held that they were doing it better. Hudson Stuck, a missionary who wrote a memoir called Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, argued that native Alaskans had never figured out how to run dogs in teams, and it took white immigrants to perfect the concept. (Musher Scotty Allan and game warden Frank Dufresne agreed, taking credit for the invention of the harnesses and sleds that made rapid dog transportation possible.)

Sourdoughs in any number of stories contrasted white kindness to animals with native cruelty. At a time when the anti-animal cruelty movement gained traction nationwide, the stories embraced this particular emblem of “civilization” as one that differentiated white from native in the frozen North.

In a 1905 story by Addison Powell in Alaska Magazine, “The Alaska Partners,” a prospector’s dog, Summit, is kidnapped by native Alaskans, who have covetously observed his hunting prowess. Summit’s fate,  “tied to a post with no food except an occasional raw salmon that a squaw threw to him,” shows the inferiority of native treatment. In Katherine Reed’s story “The Klondike Nugget,” published in Alaska Yukon Magazine in 1907, the heroic Prospector Dave’s very character is tied up in this difference. The narrator observes: “‘Go to Hell yourself but be white to your dogs’ was one of [Dave’s] favorite proverbs.”

Dog-eating, an extreme form of this kind of cruelty, was in these fictions a practice observed only by native Alaskans. In the 1933 film Eskimo, for example, Mala, the Inuit star, eats his dogs one by one when he’s lost on the ice. In a 1930 skit in which he played a sourdough, W.C. Fields made a joke at Balto’s expense, telling an inquirer that he “just et Balto,” and adding “Right good he was with mustard, too.” That joke worked because white prospectors were not supposed to eat their heroic companions, no matter how hard things got.

People angry at Marco Lavoie aren’t explicitly mad that he wasn’t “being white to his dogs.” But the long history of the “Man and Dog vs. the Wild” story can shed some light on the fury his action provoked. Taboos about the treatment of particular species, as Dana Goodyear explored in her recent story aboout eating and loving animals in the New Yorker, are wrapped up in a lot of cultural baggage. In the case of Marco Lavoie, we have years of stories telling us that we should starve rather than violate the man-dog bond.

That doesn't mean the reactions to his case were uniform. Some of the most interesting responses to the Lavoie story can be found in the comments section of the conservative site The Blaze. Here, some commenters compared Lavoie to Obama, repeating the story that Obama ate dog meat in Indonesia while growing up. Other commenters shrugged, saying “Let’s just say he was resourceful.” One added: “If [Lavoie] would have died before eating his dog, his dog would have surly [sic] ate him.”

Rebecca Onion, who runs Slate’s history blog The Vault, is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. Send her an email or follow her on Twitter.



Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #715 on: November 14, 2013, 12:01:39 pm »
Geez. That doesn't infuriate me. It makes me sad, but I would have thought Lavoie a fool if he had chosen to die himself rather than eat his dog.

I wonder what the dog was surviving on before Lavoie killed him? There probably wasn't much left to the dog by the time Lavoie ate him.

In the Jamestown colony, during the "Starving Time" of 1609-10, people ate horses, dogs, rats, and, finally, each other.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #716 on: November 14, 2013, 12:48:11 pm »
What is the most unusual thing you ever ate? For me, I guess it would be sea urchin. It was wonderful, but I wouldn't eat it often. In Scotland I ate (and loved) haggis and in Nepal I ate yak meat. That was pretty bland. There are more off-putting dishes here in America, IMHO. Okra! Fried pickles! In fact, anything fried kind of turns my stomach.

Thanks, friends, for talking about the Nov. 4 issue. It got lost in the chaos at my house. I dug it out of a pile of magazines that were going to the retirement home and now am enjoying reading through it. If I had missed it, it would be the first time in more than 15 years that I didn't read the food issue from cover to cover!
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Offline milomorris

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #717 on: November 14, 2013, 02:50:02 pm »
On the Huffington Post, for example, one commenter wrote “I would rather eat my own limbs than my dogs.”

Yeah...right. I'll believe that when it happens. Smack talk from HuffPuffers is often entertaining


Back when I was at Verizon, we had a software enginner on the web team who grew up in rural China. When he was a boy, his family made a move from one farming community to another. They had 2 dogs. His father was able to give one of the dogs away to a neighbor. Nobody wanted the second dog. The engineer's father killed it, his mother cooked it, and the family ate it. Nobody thought anything of it. Apparently, the Chinese do not look at pets the same way we do here in the west.

I would say that Lavoie is a brave man, and displayed a great deal of courage in this ordeal. He must have felt absolutely horrible about having to kill and eat a dog that he no doubt loved. Sometimes one has to make difficult choices.   
  The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Offline milomorris

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #718 on: November 14, 2013, 02:52:37 pm »
What is the most unusual thing you ever ate?

White trash.

And, BTW, Okra happens to be one of my favorite things in the world.
  The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Offline serious crayons

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Re: In the New Yorker...
« Reply #719 on: November 14, 2013, 03:37:44 pm »

Quote
On the Huffington Post, for example, one commenter wrote “I would rather eat my own limbs ....”


I wonder if anyone has ever done that. Move over, James Franco, a movie about that would be far grosser than 127 Hours.