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Home Front: Culture Wars |
Food fanaticism gets out of control |
2007-03-01 |
Remember when the only food fight was vegetarians vs. the meat-eaters? That quaint and comical little war was set for decades in our college restaurants, where people wore plastic shoes and asked, practically every time they came to eat, if any animal flesh was cooked on the premises. "I can't eat it if it's been cooked near a chicken," a fellow student once said, as I poured him a glass of iced tea to drink with his tofu-and-vegetable scramble with nutritional yeast and whole-wheat biscuits, in the earnest cafe where I worked. This guy -- he was the real vegetarian. And yet, he was also exactly the kind of guy who would leave his dog on a rope in front of the library with no water for six hours in the hot sun, wearing a cute bandana tied around its neck, as if that made the cruelty all right. Or, who lived on cigarettes and Yoo-Hoo soda all day long, and did LSD all night. Ah, those were the days. Vegetarianism was the refuge of pious hypocrites! But it was so blessedly easy to make yourself feel better about all the crap you ate (by simply attacking the eating habits of others). Paging Prince Chuck! |
Posted by:Spot |