'Cutting up poor, defenseless animals...'

[yagol]

... is how the chef-instructor describes the material in the last class, at least the 'Protein Fabrication' part. It's a fair assessment in many ways, although we don't start with live animals. The squeamish may not want to read inside....

Comments

[roaming]

I'm glad that people are being trained to do things properly. :-) I care most about how they are raised and and how they are slaughtered. I'm only squeamish about causing animals pain or fear stress. Once they're dead, they're just meat. Like we'll be some day. :-) You can do anything to a carcass and I don't mind. Mess with a living sentient creature, however, and I'll tear your eyes out. :-)

I don't eat lobster for this reason. Or veal.

Good luck with your studies! :-)

[yagol]

Yeah, unfortunately veal is part of the curriculum. It comes with the whole 'traditional culinary' package, but the non-use of veal is something I'll be looking for in my career choices. (And if I were ever to have a say in designing a curriculum, I should also encourage using pork and beef substitutes for traditionally veal recipes.)

Lobsters, by the by, are extremely simple animals, ethically equivalent to killing an insect. Which isn't to say that it shouldn't be done as humanely as possible, but, if one is going to eat animals at all, I object to lobster the way that I would to veal.

A thought that had come up in conversation the other day - the same things that make veal an unusual meat - bloodless, un-exercised muscle tissue - make it likely that cellular cloning would be useful in duplicating it in a humane way that arguably isn't even animal at all. Whether people would eat it (or be permitted to eat it) is another question, but perhaps in time.

ethically raised veal

[roaming]

There's a name ethically raised veal (which I forget and will keep trying to find on google, no luck so far). Some restaurants are bowing to consumer pressure for it.

[c1]

Lobsters, by the by, are extremely simple animals, ethically equivalent to killing an insect.

Which is why one nickname for lobsters (among sea-folk) is "bugs."

We had to listen to breath-sounds on pigs' lungs/throats once. Pigs are biologically very similar to humans, so a 200# pig has similar sized parts as a 200# human.
On the one hand, it was really fascinating, especially when they poured water into the lungs to simulate edema (you hear different things), or punctured a lung.
But I couldn't stop thinking about the pig.