I feel like being snarky

I feel like being snarky for a bit, but am too lazy to come up with my own bit of snarkiness.

Here's a bit from Anthony Bourdain's book A Cook's Tour
that should please everyone but the idiots at PETA. Bourdain is a rare
breed: a professional chef who also happens to write more than
cookbooks. Yes. This also happens to be the same guy who warned you
never to order fish at a restaurant on a Monday. A Cook's Tour
is a fascinating read. The premise behind the book is that he wanted to
travel the world to find "the perfect meal." In the process he got
drunk with a pack of Basque women, he ate the still-beating heart of a
cobra in Vietnam, and the bastard got to go eat at The French Laundry.
His publisher thought this a great idea and to cross-market the book,
the publisher got the Food Channel to follow him around on his
journeys. This was a cross to bear for Bourdain, a chain smoking,
loud-mouthed, booze drinking, cholesterol lovin' gourmand who did not
relish the thought of being followed around by a TV crew. The passage
you're about to read comes from his chapter on his visit to Northern
California, which, in my humble opinion, is the best chapter in an
outstanding book. Enjoy.
A Cook's Tour, Chapter: West Coast. Copyright 2001 by Anthony Bourdain. All Rights Reserved

Reasons Why You Don't Want to Be on Television: Number Five in a Series."C'mon,
Tony! You've been to Cambodia, for chrissakes! How bad can it be?" said
the television producer. "We can't do a whole show on one restaurant!
This will be funny! They're looking forward to cooking for you!" What
he'd arranged, what he had in mind, was for me to venture in to the
real heart of darkness, deep, deep into enemy territory, to Berkeley,
and a vegan potluck dinner.
I've said some pretty hateful things about vegetarians, I know. In
spite of this, many of them have been very nice to me over the past
year. Though I think I have at various times referred to them as
"Hezbollah-like" and as "the enemy of everything good and decent in the
human spirit," they come to my readings, write me nice letters. My
publicist in England, whom I adore, is a veg (though I've forced her at
gunpoint to eat fish a few times), as are a couple of the shooters I've
worked with. They've shown remarkable good humor, considering how I
feel about their predilections. There have been lots of vegheads who've
been very kind and generous these last few months, in spite of the fact
that they know that at the first opportunity, when they're drunk or
vulnerable, I'm getting a bacon cheeseburger down their throats. That
doesn't mean I wanted to sit in some hilltop A-frame eating lentils out
of pot with a bunch of Nader supporters and hairy-legged earth mothers
in caftans. I certainly didn't want to visit "them" on their home turf.
If nothing else, I was reasonably certain that smoking would be a
problem.
I'm going to try---really try---to be nice here.
I went along with the producer's scheme. Fair is fair. The opposition
should be given every chance to prove the righteousness of their
cause---or at least the merits of their case. The people coming to
dinner, the folks who'd be cooking for me, were all serious vegans.
Cookbook authors. Vegan cookery teachers. People who spent lots of time
going to seminars, classes, corresponding with others of their
ilk---on-line, in chat rooms, and at conventions and informal
gatherings. Maybe it was possible to make something good without meat,
or stock, or butter, or cheese, or dairy products of any kind. Who was
I to sneer? The world, I had recently found out, was a big, strange,
and wonderful place. I'd eaten tree grubs and worms and sheep's
testicles. How bad could it be?
Bad.
The vegans I visited did not live in a converted ashram on a hilltop,
tending to their crops in bare feet or Birkenstocks. No one was named
Rainbow or Sunflower. Only one person wore a sari. My hosts lived in a
kept modern luxury home in an exclusive area of the suburbs, surrounded
by green lawns and shiny new BMW's and SUV's. They were, all of them,
affluent-looking professionals and executives. Ranging in age from late
thirties to early fifties, they were well dressed, unfailingly nice,
eager to show me the other side of the argument. And not one of them
could cook a fucking vegetable. Fergus Henderson, the grand master of
blood and guts cookery, shows more respect for the simple side of
sauteed baby spinach on some of his plates than any of these deluded
vegans showed me in ten elaborate courses. Green salads were dressed
hours before being served, ensuring that they had wilted into
nutrition-free sludge. The knife work---even from the cooking teachers
present---was clumsy and inept, resembling the lesser efforts of
younger members of the Barney Rubble clan. The vegetables---every
time---were uniformly overcooked, underseasoned, nearly colorless, and
abused, any flavor, texture and lingering vitamin content leeched out.
Painstaking re-creations of 'cheese', 'yogurt', and 'cream' made from
various unearthly soy products tasted, invariably, like caulking
compound, and my hosts, though good humored and friendly to the hostile
stranger in their midst, seemed terrified, even angry, about something
nebulous in their pasts. Every time I asked one of them how and when
they had decided to forgo all animal products, the answer always seemed
to involve a personal tragedy or disappointment unrelated to food.
'I got a divorce,' began one. 'I lost my job,' said another. 'Heart
attack,' offered another. 'I broke up with my...' 'When I decided to
move out of LA, I started thinking about things...'
In every case, it appeared to me (in my jaundiced way of thinking
anyway) that something had soured them on the world they'd once
embraced---and that they'd sought new rules to live by, another
orthodoxy, something else to believe in. 'Did you read about the PCB's
in striped bass?' one whispered urgently, as if comforted by the news.
'I saw on-line where they're pumping steroids into cattle,' said
another breathlessly, every snippet of bad news from the health front a
victory for their cause. They seemed to spend an awful lot of time
confirming their fears and suspicions of the world outside their own,
combing the Internet for stories of radioactive dairy products,
genetically altered beets, polluted fish, carcinogenic sausages,
spongiform-ridden meat, and hideous Grand Guignol chamber of horror
abattoirs and slaughterhouses.
They also seemed curiously oblivious to the fact that much of the world
goes to bed hungry every night, that our basic design features as
humans, from the beginning of our evolution, developed around the very
real need to hunt down slower, stupider animals, kill them and eat
them. 'Don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night craving
bacon?' I asked. 'No. Never,' replied every single one of them. 'I've
never felt so healthy in my life.'
It was difficult for me to be polite (though I was outnumbered). I'd
recently returned from Cambodia, where a chicken can be the difference
between life and death. These people in their comfortable suburban digs
were carping about cruelty to animals but suggesting that everyone in
the world, from suburban Yuppie to starving Cambodian cyclo-driver,
start buying organic vegetables and expensive soy substitutes. To look
down on entire cultures that've based everything on the gathering of
fish and rice seemed arrogant in the extreme to me. (I've heard of
vegans feeding their dogs vegetarian meals. Now that's cruelty to
animals.) And the hypocrisy of it all pissed me off. Just being able to
talk about this issue in reasonably grammatical language is a
privilege, subsidized in a yin/yang sort of way, somewhere, by somebody
taking it in the neck. Being able to read these words, no matter how
stupid, offensive, or wrongheaded, is a privilege, your reading skills
the end product of an education most of the world will never enjoy. Our
whole lives--our homes, the shoes we wear, the cars we drive, the food
we eat---all built on a mountain of skulls. Meat, say the PETA folks,
is 'murder.' And yes, the wide world of meat eating can seem like a
panorama of cruelty at times. But is meat 'murder'? Fuck no.
Murder, as one of Khmer pals might tell you, is what his next-door
neighbor did to his whole family back in the seventies. Murder is what
happens in Cambodia, in parts of Africa, Central and South America, and
in former Soviet republics when the police chief's son decided he wants
to turn your daughter into a whore and you don't like the idea. Murder
is what Hutus do to Tutsis, Serbs to Croats, Russians to Uzbeks, Crips
to Bloods. And vice versa. It's black Chevy Suburbans (which, more than
likely, US taxpayers paid for) pulling up outside your house at three
in the morning and dragging away your suspiciously unpatriotic and
overopinionated son. Murder is what that man sitting across from you in
Phnom Penh does for a living---so he can afford a satellite dish for
his roof, so he can watch our Airwolf
reruns, MTV Asia, and Pam Anderson running in slow motion down a
Southern California beach.
Hide in your homes and eat vegetables, I was thinking. Put a Greenpeace
bumper sticker on your Beemer if it makes you feel better (so you can
drive your kids to an all-white school). Save the rainforest---by all
means---so maybe you can visit it someday, on an ecotour, wearing,
comfortable shoes made by twelve-year-olds in forced labor. Save a
whale while millions are still sold into slavery, starved, fucked to
death, shot, tortured, forgotten. When you see cute little kids crying
in the rubble next to Sally Struthers somewhere, be sure to send a few
dollars.
Damn! I was going to try and be nice!{...}