All right, I like cephalopods. I admit it. So why do I find this article about hunting octopus in the Mediterranean so entertaining? I mean, the guy is diving down, stabbing the octopus between the eyes with a pointy stick, and then…
Next step: the octopus must be tenderized by slamming it against a large rock at least a hundred times or more. When its natural color changes to white, I rinse it repeatedly in sea water and drag it back and forth over a rough rock surface with a rhythmic motion. A white foam is released, and this movement must continue until all the foam disappears. When the muscle has completely relaxed, the texture of the flesh changes and the color turns to a grayish white. I grab two tentacles and pull them apart gently…the flesh should tear. Then—and only then—is the octopus ready for cooking.
What follows are recipes. Forgive me, I must be truly evil, because he had me drooling.
An important rule of polite society is: Don’t eat your friends!
And I reiterate that I find death to be a sad thing.
i live in greece — this is an everyday sight, especially in the summer.
octopus is yummy — i love it either roasted or boiled with oil, vinegar and oregano.
mmmmmmmmmm
Wow! ArtLies on Pharyngula… neat!
I’ve watched the fishermen of Crete preparing lobsters in just this way. It only made me salivate for a dish of octopus in the taverna that evening. Who says you can’t have friends for dinner? :)
Geez, the Rasputin of the animal kingdom.
PZ:
I’m a pretty recent arrival at Pharyngula. I’m curious how you came by your interest in cephalopods? Was it for being near the Pacific in the Pac NW growing up? (Not that they aren’t cool enough to be just plain interesting.)
I never eat anything that is more intelligent than most individuals I went to high school with.
I remember sitting on a rooftop terrace in Ortigia, Sicily, watching the fishermen in their rowboats, moving silently in the moonlight, shining bright flashlights into the water to hunt octopus.
Lisa: “Do we have any food that wasn’t brutally slaughtered?”
Homer: “Well, I think the veal died of loneliness.”
~Matt Groening, The Simpsons
PZ: You’re a sick, sick man.
I’d love to be able to say that I would never eanjoy eating anything that has been so elaborately brutalized… But the truth is that I absolutely adore octopus (squid, too).
Baby octopus teriyaki is soooo wonderful, and octopus tempura is… Well… Sorry, atheist brethren – it can only be called heaven.
“I love cephalopods. I love how delicious they are.”
JBlilie :PZ:I’m a pretty recent arrival at Pharyngula. I’m curious how you came by your interest in cephalopods? Was it for being near the Pacific in the Pac NW growing up? (Not that they aren’t cool enough to be just plain interesting.)
I second JBlilie’s motion. Please PZ, tell the story again.
Although I have had calamari and cuttlefish, I can’t bring myself to eat octopus. They are too damned smart. I would start to feel pretty cannibalistic.
Chickens, cows and most sea creatures are a different story.
Millions of years ago the octopus had a shell, but slowly they lost it through the evolutionary process.
eh???
:(
Blasphemy! How dare you promote cephalocide??
why? for the same reason you enjoyed watching the octopus vs. cuttlefish vid.
With the amazing selection of food available to modern society, I really can’t get behind this– it’s nothing more than wanton destruction for the fulfillment of needless greed.
I am also a huge cephalopodophage. Yum yum eat ’em up!
@20: Shhhh…we are trying to eat.
Piggies?
Poke it with a stick, and then smash it with a rock.
Good advice for most situations in life.
Priceless.
As a noted philanthropist, I find humans equally mouth-watering. You save some, you eat some. That’s life.
‘When no spear or knife is available, I must bite them between the eyes to sever this nerve and kill them because they can otherwise be extremely difficult to control.’
I will never look at an octo the same way again.
The best part: “I remember once finding two octopuses locked in mortal combat. They were literally eating each other. I caught and ate them both.”
I remember sitting in a bar in Greece, sipping some wine, and watching with fascination how a street vendor set up a grill, and proceeded to throw whole octopus on the grill, waiting till the legs curled, and then cut up the legs and serve it.
Ooooo, why are octopus so yummy?!
Used to be my favorite food, until I played with one on a dive.
Now I’d as soon eat my dogs.
Damn octopi, teasing me with your fantastic flavor than ripping away my pleasure with your curiously grasping tentacles.
I’ve heard that some people keep an old-fashioned washing machine, the kind with rollers, out back of the restaurant for tenderizing their octopus. They just run the machine with octopods in it, for an hour or so. They do not use the rollers.
Couldn’t you just eat the small, stupid ones?
I used to think cephalopods were too cute and too intelligent to hunt, kill and eat.
Then I had a change of heart. I decided that cephalopods, unlike perhaps most other forms of intelligent life, certainly must my regard hunting, killing and eating them as a form of high respect. Even when I successfully outsource the hunting and killing part to robots and vastly underpaid subsistence wage workers. Perhaps even, especially.
I figure that’s how they roll.
Cephalopods give off very few of the cues that make us empathetic.
What would seem horrible even to do to a rat is more of a curiosity when it happens to a mollusk, or even the far more intelligent-seeming (and being) octopus.
Their alien intelligence fascinates, but it does not provoke much sympathy.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
There are cephalopod creationists? =P
speak for yourself.
As for the article… sounds like a typical Saturday night at Cuttlehome…
That guy is in soooo much trouble when the revolution comes.
From what I read though most of the cruel treatment occurs after the animal’s death. I don’t think this would be much worse than the experiences of other animals we (meat-eating people) routinely eat. I’m not really sure if it’s fair to the “lower” animals to say well it’s ok if it’s a chicken, they’re awfully stupid. The important thing to me is making sure that the Octopi are not being over-hunted though.
@#22– “@20: Shhhh…we are trying to eat.”
While I recognize that you’re also trying to be humorous, how is a statement like this NOT on the same order of similar statements from religious folks, i.e., “we’re not hurting anyone, it’s our own business, religion is a comfort, etc…”?
I think Dawkins proves otherwise in “The God Delusion,” and I think the harm is fairly obvious for the octopus in regards to being torn limb from limb. Both behaviors (religion, eating meat) surely have evolutionary components that were useful at one time for our survival– can you explain why you seem to hold onto one, yet actively work to reject the other?
Humans…yummmmmm….especially jackwhittens…..bring them to a slow boil, marinate in beer, slice’em thin, add a little salt, a little pepper …. c’est magnifique…..
My mouth is watering….. Hey, I can’t help it that I like my food to have eyes…..it’s in my genes, just like Godhead-belief…..take eyed food away from me and I would develop EFD, eyed-food deficiency, not to mention, my life would lose meaning and I might as well go jump in the lake…..
Let’s exchange jackwhitten recipes!
The spousal equivalency unit grew up on a farm near St Louis, had lots of animals as pets, and consequently won’t eat meat. She’ll occasionally eat chicken because they are stupid. She does not like to hear about how smart sea creatures can be.
Me? I’m a carnivore.
@JBlilie (#7)
PZ is a developmental biologist who works with zebrafish–a popular model organism for chordate/vertebrate development. According to an interview he gave (and it’s been a while since I listened to it, so forgive me if I don’t get the details just right), when he started working with zebrafish, he was concerned that he might get trapped in a narrow way of thinking and see all development from a vertebrate perspective. So he decided to study up–on his own–on an animal that was very different from the zebrafish so that he would always have the wider perspective in his outlook.
I don’t remember whether his choice of cephalopods was random, strategic or based on childhood sci-fi/Lovecraftian fascinations (or if he even went that far in the interview). That’s about what I can remember.
PZ,
Octopus with red wine and olive oil? I just ate and already I’m hungry again. How could you do this to me???
From my time in Greece, this is a spectacle to behold. As a youth I was very confused by a bunch of tan, hairy men swinging tenticles around and smashing them into rocks. They then hang them from trees for some amount of time. THAT is a sight to behold while walking through a grove of trees.
Cattle have curiosity, develop likes and dislikes –you haven’t lived until you’ve had a cow rub up against you like a cat–oof!– so we probably shouldn’t eat them either. We could go to the Masai blood-letting scheme of getting nourisment from cattle….
That wrecked me, and good
@42,
Thanks, and that makes good sense.
On the other track … The Pacific Islanders called humans, “long pig” based on the flavor profile of the roasted meat. Bacon anyone?!
I saw someone doing this in the Caribbean. I almost picked up a couple of rocks to throw at him, but it seemed ill advised since I had stuff to leave on the shore while I snorkeled.
How does one know the octopus is dead before one starts beating it on a rock?
#16 Techskeptic
Octopuses are cephalopods and cephalopods are mollusks, so yes they eveolved from critters with shells. Nautiluses still have them.
I don’t see how anyone can enjoy this story. I really don’t.
Imagine being slammed against a rock a hundred times or more.
Isn’t this what we’re disgusted with Bush et al about? And those guys didn’t even eat their victims.
Where I live in Korea, people eat octopus that is still twitching. They chop the live young octopus into little bits, dip it in sesame oil, and down the writhing bits while the suckers try to cling to your tongue. It’s a visceral experience to say the least, usually accompanied by large quantities of alcohol and testosterone.
You can also buy massive grilled legs as thick and stout as turkey drumsticks from street vendors.
I do. Starvation is a messy thing.
Poke it with a pointy stick? in the Pacific Islands they bite them between the eyes. Bloody labour saving devices emasculating us . . .
Oh yes. Absolutely. I agree.
So, when are we cooking this octopus? I’m hungry! I wanna eat a cow too. Do you tenderize cows like that too?
So do humans taste as nice to Cephalopods as Cephalopods do to humans? I’m sure our tentacled brethren have some plans to experiment . . .
DaveX #39 – Well, I find vegetarians to be just about as ridiculously wacko as I do religious nuts. What makes you think plant life is of less “value” than animal life?
I direct your attention to:
Don’t Slay that Potato
Words and Music by Tom Paxton
http://www.mydfz.com/Paxton/lyrics/dstp.htm
The last verse goes . . .
There ought to be some way of saving our skins.
They ought to be passing a law.
Just show anybody a cute little lamb,
And they’ll all stand around and go “Aw!”
Well, potatoes are ugly. Potatoes are plain.
We’re wrinkled and lumpy to boot.
But give me a break, kid. Do you mean to say,
That you’ll eat us because we’re not cute?
No. They’re big. They usually get bled and cut up and it’s up to you to poound them with large mallets to soften the tissue.
While in Athens once, I ordered a bowl of what looked to be potato salad. The first bite of ‘potato’ turned out to be extremely chewy and I finally determined that it was most likely octopus. I’m pretty sure that was my first introduction to octopus and even though it wasn’t the potato salad that I had expected, it was pretty tasty and I’ve ordered it several times since then. One time my wife and I took our daughters (early teens) to lunch at a Greek restaurant in Tarpon Springs. My combo plate came with whole smelt, calamari rings and octopus tentacles. When I offered a taste to the girls the first reply was “I’m not eating anything that looks like it came from another planet!” Ah well, their loss, my gain.
@Blueelm: Okay then. I’ll just have to settle with shooting it out of a cannon like the Mythbusters do I guess. :P
Ooh, octopus is good! It freaked me out a bit the first time I tried it, but was surprised! Those recipes look delish.
Very chewy and delicious! I love Octopus Sushi!
Don’t forget that you have to turn it inside-out before beating it. Very important! The animal dies much more quickly that way. No need to be cruel.
And, as for recipes, I recommend the “porvo assado”- That’s dried and BBQ’d octopus typical of southern Portugal, the Algarve. It smells like hell but tastes surprisingly good. It’s the equivalent of beef jerky, only tastier.
Just dry the dead octopus in the sun, then BBQ it on hot charcoal. And voilà! Although in the US you’ll probably get into problems with your neighbours (for the smell, I got them for using lavander…).
It has been my good fortune to have spent many happy months traveling in Greece, and this octopus-thrashing is something I have witnessed many times. Also the tenderised octopuses slung across ropes like granny’s tattered underclothes, drying in the Mediterranean sun, awaiting their turn on the grill…
Ah, Greece. I plan to go back this summer. For a couple of months.
Another recipe: pulpo a la gallega. From the nothern Spanish region, Galicia.
Ingredients: cooked octopus, cooked potatoes (dutch sand potatoes or belgian “cwene di gâte” recommended), sea salt (recristallized gourmet salt recommended), sweet paprika (pimentón de la Vega recommended), tasty virgin olive oil (from andalusian picual or hojiblanca olives recommended).
You cut the potatoes and the octopus in thin slices. You put the octopus slices over the potatoes slices on a plate and add olive oil, salt and paprika to your taste. Then a few moments in the oven to bring it to chaud/froid temperature (not hot but neither cold). And ready to eat.
mmmmmmmmmmm I love grilled tattered granny’s undergarments
I mean octopus
That’s a joke right? It was just a set-up for you to introduce a song that you thought had funny lyrics, right?
PZ, being an expert in the biology of cephalopods, do they have a nervous system that would imply they are capable of suffering? Maybe not the “same” way we do, but at least something close to it?
Oh, I forgot. To accompany the “pulpo a la gallega”, I recommend a white “vino de Ribeiro” form spanish Gallice or the portuguese “vinho verde”.
I had octopus once a very long time ago…and I chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed…It was almost like gum.
What was this?
To be more specific the pus I’m talking about was brought over by a native from the Hawaiian Islands and was considered an after dinner treat.
Where is Peter Singer when you need him??
Despite being a huge Pharyngula fan (even if I rarely comment) reading posts like this and others with similar disregard for suffering is always such a disappointment. It has been my hope that those who would place reason over wishful thinking enough to recognize and accept that they aren’t going to survive their own death (no matter how appealing such a concept might be), would also use reason to recognize that thinking it’s a-ok to cause suffering for the sake of taste is far more “wrong” than religion. But seeing the high number of comments that draw attention to this and make excellent, reasoned arguments helps to quell that disappointment. Even with the absurdly hypocritical comments like basset_fan’s implication that animal life is not more valuable than plant life or worse, the implication that a vegetarian is more concerned with an animals “cuteness” as opposed to its ability to suffer, I’m SO glad to read they’re outnumbered by awesome comments like those of DaveX. Help show that atheists are morally consistent and apply the same logic and reason to what you eat as you do to whether or not there is an omnipotent creator fairy, without the bias of your taste buds, tradition, or any other excuse interfering in the process.
Part of the disagreement may be in what we view these creatures, or any creatures as – objects for our amusement on different levels or beings that deserve some semblance of respect.
PZ is fascinated by these animals on a scientific and aesthetic level, as am I, and that does them no harm.
But celebrating beating a creature to death reflects more of an attitude that’s consistent with religion: that all this stuff is here for us to enjoy and exploit.
That sounds like an horrible thing to do to an octopus. I must be hypersensitive because I actually felt sad reading the article. Yes, they look alien but still…
Oh and I also have to say that I don’t find them tasty. Dunno why. I just don’t like the flavor.
#66 – No, it wasn’t a “joke”.
Yes, it was an excuse to link to a song I felt had relevant lyrics.
#72 -Veovis
Maybe plants DO suffer. Just because at this stage of our collective knowledge base we have yet to determine if there is or is not a type of plant conciousness does not mean it does not exist. Plants obviously react to stimuli. (If only they could blog.)
Obviously you’ve made the judgement that plant life is less valuable than animal life. Good luck with that when the meteor hits and the Triffids arrive. Your nym may be on a list.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055894/
“absurdly hypocritical” – I get the absurd part, but how my post was hypocritical escapes me.
Sphere Coupler: Octopus is like squid: cook very briefly, or very long and slow. Anything intermediate gets you chewing gum.
Ethics of eating meat? Very complicated – we are omnivores, nature is not pretty-pretty, everything eats other forms of life. Avoiding cruelty and protecting diversity are my priorities, which is why I prefer free range meat like kangaroo over water intensive and environmentally destructive soy. And you don’t get to call people hypocrites just because they don’t agree with you.
Meat-eating is a problem. Causes global warming, pollutes lakes and streams and oceans and your drinking water;
meat industry has had among highest rates of worker mortality and disability; meat eating isn’t that good for your health either.
Oh, and dead body parts really look gross and putrid.
…And by the way, there are a few moral problems with killing animals for food, when healthier alternatives exist.
P.S. The meat industry likely has “facts” that “disprove” all of the above, probably on some website named “Environmental protection through meat-eating,” or “Meat: the God-given ethical food.”
Meat eating equals fail in my view. Someone drew a parallel between it and religion, and I must admit that both are subjects that I frequently get rather quite animated about. And to the guy perpetuating the crap “Plant killers!” argument: Nervous system or GTFO.
Why am I a vegetarian (almost vegan, until I finally kick my tandoori habit)? Well, I don’t have to pay for animals to die in order to get on with my inconsequential post-industrial life, so I don’t. The argument that I should because humans have for a long time is dead before it gets going, and I find most of the others to be similar. I like animals; so it goes.
But whatever your views (and perhaps tired arguments for them), I don’t think anyone with a modium of morality (non-biblical, of course) can condone factory farming. There’s a world of difference between hunter-gathering, and the reduction of creatures to economic units to be pumped full of antibiotics/hormones to get the most meat per £/$. Add the GHGs, water pollution, health impacts, etc.… It’s clear something must change.
modium should be modicum.
@Cath the Canberra Cook: If you kill it to eat it, you’re not avoiding cruelty.
@Basset_Fan: The problem isn’t that animals can reproduce, but animals can think meaningfully. No, they can’t do it as well as us, but there are very likely people who can’t think as well as you either. It’s also extremely unlikely at this point that plants will in fact be shown to have feelings.
Coincidentally, I just got a preposterous press release from the California Beef Council.
It makes an assertion that people who have driven past the hellish, sprawling industrial feedlots along I-5 might find questionable: that beef is eco-groovy. It also associates beef with All-American family values.
Here’s part of it. And I know, this has nothing to do with beating octopi to death.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Shannon Kelley 916-925-2333 shannon@calbeef.org
CALIFORNIA BEEF CATTLE PRODUCERS – THE ORIGINAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS
SACRAMENTO, CALIF. (APRIL 21, 2009) – For many people, April 22 marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement, Earth Day. For California beef cattle producers, however, every day is Earth Day. As the world prepares to celebrate Earth Day, it is important for the public to understand that the nation’s farmers and ranchers were among some of the first environmentalists. People who derive their living from the land know that Earth Day is not a political or social statement, but a way of life.
Californians rely on farming and ranching families to manage and maintain more than 22 million acres of privately-owned rangeland in California. These families strive to produce food and fiber for the U.S. and the world, while also serving as environmental stewards. It is a job they do proudly and a job that most have done for multiple generations. There is no better group of people to entrust with the care of California’s natural resources than farmers and ranchers.
basset_fan #76
To say “maybe plants do suffer” is equivalent to saying “maybe telekinesis IS real, maybe there IS a god, maybe the reptilian overlords ARE about to take over the Earth, etc.” Sure, it’s possible, but there is zero evidence of it, and even evidence to the contrary. What allows us to suffer? A nervous system and brains. These are things we share with many other animals, but that plants do not have. Maybe ROCKS suffer, but don’t count it, because they too lack the apparatus for suffering. Even if one were to say that on some level plants MIGHT somehow suffer by some unknown mechanism, (which is like saying “even IF there was such a thing as a soul” as there is no evidence for it) we KNOW many animals do. And IF one were to say that animals DON’T suffer, it would simply be foolish, and reveal complete ignorance of biology and an utter failure of reasoning. It has nothing to do with my judgment of the value for one type of a life or another. That’s an entirely different argument (which can also be made, in which your position crumbles). You shoot yourself in the foot with that argument in another way, too. If there is no value difference between animal and plant life, because plants may also feel suffering, then there is no reason to value human life over insect life (which may also feel suffering) and we should have no problem raising and slaughtering humans for food, since it’s obviously fine to do that regardless of whether suffering is involved. You can keep making faulty excuses, but that doesn’t make them reasonable.
Lastly, your pathetic attempt to attack my argument by suggesting I believe in something entirely unrelated and nonsensical (meteors?) reminds me of when creationists say things like “well, make sure to wear your tinfoil hat too” when I inform them that evolution is a reality. I’m glad you are revealing your tactics of argumentation to be identical to those who try to say atheism is irrational, especially in a place like this where such fallacies are generally easily seen for what they are.
Oh, and as for not seeing your own hypocrisy, this does not surprise me in the least.
Cath #77,
You’re right, nature certainly isn’t “pretty-pretty” and I don’t think anyone here has said it is. That’s a common straw-man used against vegetarians, as if they seem to think life is like a Disney movie. We know it’s not. In fact, those vegetarians who have investigated the source for much of our food may know it better than the average meat-eater. But to say that “life is harsh, so we can be too” is about the same as using the fact of evolution to justify Social Darwinism, or to justify eugenics. I think it’s safe to say that those arguments have been sufficiently destroyed here many times already. I’m glad avoiding cruelty is a priority to you, but I think if that’s true, and you examined the issue in great detail, you wouldn’t eat kangaroo meat either. Since we are fine (and arguably even healthier) with a vegetarian diet, and slaughter IS cruel, whether it is range-free or factory-farmed first, why eat meat, range-free or otherwise?
As a side note, how is soy environmentally harmful? That sounds like a myth intentionally perpetuated by those with interests in the meat industry. I could be wrong, and if so, I’d like to know, but at first glance, that reeks of myth. I know you weren’t implying this, but I would like to point out again, as others have in this thread already, that raising meat is horrendously environmentally detrimental.
The worst part of arguments like Basset’s is that they’re so tremendously similar to the ad absurdum “logic” that creationists throw at us all the time.
I submit THIS comment as evidence: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/who_needs_a_vat_when_youve_got.php#comment-838102
I’m not actually seeing all that much suffering here. The first step, the stabbing between the eyes, ought to destroy the brain and kill instantly.
Cephalopods being such fecund critters with such short life spans, why can’t we harvest them (at least some squid species at any rate) during the time of their periodic mass spawnings/dyings? Pluck the adults just after they mate and just as they’re dying anyways. (Leaving enough behind for the rest of the local ecosystem that depends on these die-offs for sustenance, of course.)
I have my logic and compassion-based arguments for being vegetarian.
Trumpeting them won’t convince or convert anyone. This is something you come to on your own, or not.
All I’ll say is that someday I hope we get beyond stabbing and slamming animals. Seems like there are better ways for most of us to spend our time.
I’ve been bitten, sucker marked , and had my mask ripped off my face. Grandma used to stew it in olive oil, tomatoes, wine and garlic. To die for. As a nasty turn, when we were kids we would have octo wars. Those things hurt !
Amphiox #86
I’m inclined to agree somewhat. It really is the suffering that is the issue, and if there is a way to do it with minimal suffering when the creature would be ending it’s natural life cycle anyway, that’s a million miles from what we do to mammals in factory farms. However, I also think there is a thin line that should be thoroughly discussed/examined.
Kevpod #87
“Trumpeting them won’t convince or convert anyone”
Should we then not also “trumpet” our reasons for being atheists, but remain silent, so as not to offend anyone away from possible “conversion”? (After all the framing discussions, I am surprised to see that espoused here.)
I eat vegetarians. Humans are omnivores, it’s how our digestive channel and teeth evolved.
That said, that Zimmerman fellow on the travel channel was shown eating still-crawling octopus arms and it almost made me throw up. I also get the heebie jeebies about the Japanese sensibility of taking the tail off lobsters without killing the lobster before (Iron Chef Japan). Fastest way to make me change the channel outside of seeing Sandra Lee on Food Network.
“Should we then not also “trumpet” our reasons for being atheists, but remain silent, so as not to offend anyone away from possible “conversion”? (After all the framing discussions, I am surprised to see that espoused here.)”
Framing, schmaming. I haven’t been silent.
Even when our pal PZ goes the wrong way, I’m happy to pipe up. Here’s my synopsis: we have better things to do than smash up animals for kicks and then squabble about it. I do anyway. Agree or don’t.
My main focus now is the Hubble repair mission. It doesn’t involve octopus sacrifice, so surely we can agree about that.
Oh jesus… first the libertarians, now the vegans…
Me, I’m not a vegan. Lacto-ovo with all the attendant guilt.
And thankfully, jesus isn’t involved. Or wasn’t up till now.
I don’t like Octopus because it is usually tough so I only tuned in to see if anyone suggested bacon. Well they did but only one and it took until post #46.
SLACKERS!
I don’t eat things that are as smart as an octopus… sorry Dr. Meyers!
LRA writes: “I don’t eat things that are as smart as an octopus… sorry Dr. Meyers!”
The octopus, on the other hand, quite rather enjoys hunting, killing and eating the smartest things it can find. Given your failure to spell the professor’s name correctly, it would seem you might have some reason to hope the octopuses will be distracted by more interesting lunch opportunities the next time you’re swimming in their tank.
Haha, when I was in Spain I thought I was a good diver (w/o Oxygen I mean) until this 12 year old dove off of a 15 foot high rock, was submerged for a little over a minute and came up with an octopus he had grabbed by the tentacles. I wanted to ask the kid to teach me but he left :o(
Veovis,
Large scale monoculture agribusiness such as that engaged in by companies such as Monsanto is not exactly what I would call environmentally friendly.
BTW in case you missed it the slamming of the octopus against a rock happens long after it has ceased to be alive.
As for myself I certainly eat animal protein, I also spearfish and hunt lobster, however production of meat as we in the industrialized world do it is an absolute travesty, so here is a little food for thought:
Link
Imagine if instead of pouring resources into killing insects with environmentally harmful toxins to grow our vegetables we harvested them as food to feed the world’s poor?
Wow. Arguments from absurdity, vegetarian strawmen, AND framing?!
Yet this stuff is taboo in Pharyngula otherwise. It’s like someone just gave you guys the cheat sheet for atheist discussion, and you failed to learn anything in class in order to apply it elsewhere.
I’m super-disappointed.
Well I did try in #23 to get the ball rolling…
Who is this Dr. Meyers?
Newfie #24 wins teh Intertoobz for ever.
TechSkeptic #16
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/octopods_from_the_cretaceous.php
A recent PZ post that may help with your confusion.
I saw a guy doing this in Bari, Italy when on vacation, just a few blocks from–and no, I’m not kidding–the grave of Saint Nick, AKA Santa Claus!
I wish type key had a post post edit function. When I say I saw a guy doing “this” in Bari “this” means some guy brutalizing a dead octopus he just fished out of the sea.
Veovis@72:
Veovis@72: Screwed up my html. Supposed to look like this:
I never go for gratuitious suffering. I’d like to see more humane methods used in livestock production (see Temple Grandin’s work.) Hence, I buy humanely-raised/slaughtered livestock, when possible. And free-range, cage-free, hormone-free and antibio-free, etc. I also eat plenty of game hunted by friends (I don’t hunt, the act of killing doesn’t appeal to me; but I’m not opposed to it in general.) Kill with as little trauma as possible, of course. (Forget the dog-torture and monkey brains in E Asia.)
I evolved in the Pleistocene as an omnivorous ape that successfully passed on its DNA by eating anything that served that it could lay its hands on, certainly including meat, eggs (cheese and milk came later, with more education), grains (grass seeds), nuts, all sorts of invertebrates, fish, fruit, etc. I don’t see any reason to spologize for anything I eat.
I find vegetarians (and vegans in particular) to be often terribly whiney and self-righteous. It’s almost as bad as religion. In fact, I think it’s almost a form of religion: A public pennance performed out of a commandment, which brings the actor comfort.
I have tried to be a partial vegetarian (I still ate fish, shellfish, etc., obviously including cephalopods. I guess I cut out the warm-blooded creatures.) It was just impossibly boring.
Veovis and DaveX, welcome to my world whenever women or sex comes up here. Just because you consider folks highly enlightened on a subject or two, does not mean you’ll see eye-to-eye on everything, of course. I expect to be a vegetarian someday and that I’ll be a more responsible human when I am. I know for a fact that if I had to have any more interaction with my food than putting it into a shopping cart, I’d be one already.
I dunno, but if
LRA isn’t going to eat him, I will.
“I find vegetarians (and vegans in particular) to be often terribly whiney and self-righteous. It’s almost as bad as religion. In fact, I think it’s almost a form of religion: A public pennance performed out of a commandment, which brings the actor comfort.”
Even as a vegetarian, I know what you mean. There are didactic True Believers in every category. And what I’ve experienced is that the loudest most militant ones are often the ones who will most readily “cheat” if there’s a free food table bearing fish or chicken treats.
But I will push back a bit. On the other side, there are folks who burst into rhetorical flame at the mere mention of vegetarianism. I’ve never really understood why there’s so much hostility to the idea of wanting to be harmless.
Also, I submit that the people who find veg-ism boring aren’t doing it right.
I feel much the same way, but I can’t handle going veggie. It triggers my ED which is barely under control at most times. So I try to compromise in a healthy way by including as many vegetable and grain dishes as I can. We can all be somewhat responsible by reducing the demand for mass produced meat.
Pffft. I love vegetarians. But I can only eat two.
Ba doom Bap
Seriously though. While I’m a rabid omnivore, I never understand the unwarranted hate at just the mention of someone being a vegetarian or even a vegan. Only when they get preachy is it ever an issue for me. I lived with two vegetarians for about 6 years and I never had an issue. Even cooked mainly vegetarian meals during that time.
That being said, I do think that some vegetarians and vegans are overly sensitive to jokes and friendly kidding around.
But that applies to any group.
“That being said, I do think that some vegetarians and vegans are overly sensitive to jokes and friendly kidding around.”
And you’d be surprised – or maybe not – how insufferable the more stringent veggers can be to those of us who still consume dairy.
i’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that that everyone but the vegies will be eating a lot more cephs in future, because squid will become the dominant apex predator in the oceans due to the triple whammy of their prolific reproduction & omnivorousness, 2 year life cycle, and us taking out all the formerly apex predators.
we’re already seeing it in Sea of Cortez and on lower Left coast, where the totuava and albacore are essentially gone and the groupers, white sea bass, corvina, yellowfin tuna, billfish and dorado are slowly on the way out…not to mention the salmon. people are catching increasingly less fish and increasingly more humboldt squid in the Sea of cortez, and they’ve extended their range up west coast from formerly about San diego to northern CA-sourthern OR.
soylent pink, anyone?
BTW, it’s refreshing to see REASONED discussions on the whole food choice/lifestyle issue…….
Regarding anti-veg rage, let me confess that I am an on-and-off perpetrator of this phenomenon. As someone who is truly passionate about food, absolutist positions on what is and is not okay to eat tends to offend my aesthetics, even if those holding the positions are not in any way pushing it on me.
I recognize this is a purely personal, entirely irrational, and somewhat petty way to feel, so I try to contain myself. But I also must admit that when I find out someone is a vegan, there’s a part of me that is pissed off, no matter how tolerant that person may be of my own eating habits.
I’m not defending this in the slightest. I probably shouldn’t feel that way at all! I’m just trying to give insight into what is going through the minds of anti-veg people.
(Perhaps some will find irony in the fact that I almost never eat factory-farmed pork… and think that even humanely- and sustainably-raised pork should be eaten only in moderation… but it is not an absolutist position! heh… but if some find hypocrisy in that, I understand…)
I’m truly passionate about food as well. I was a chef for about 12 years before deciding that the lifestyle combined with my already questionable outside of work lifestyle was going to kill me. And like you I get extremely pissy when I get preached to about food choice. But I get extremely pissy when I get preached to about anything.
Me too
You know what group really gets on my nerves? Abolitionists. Those who vehemently speak out against slavery are so damn preachy. If you don’t want slaves, don’t keep any! But don’t push your morals on me. I mean, seriously, it’s in our DNA to dominate others. But I guess you’ll find extreme wackos in any movement.
the only absolutist position i take on food is a very simple and i think pretty rational/honest one: if i couldn’t look it in the eye and whack it on the head (or bite it between the eyes, as the case may be) to put it on the plate, i got no business eating it. just my test for personal comfort zone, no suggestion that others should do it this way….but there’s at least a bit of hypocrisy in being willing to eat it but squeamish about killing it. had a pet hog for years, smarter than most of my dogs, and realized during NPR’s coverage of S. Korean govt efforts to tone down the dog eatin while the furriners were in town for olympics that i should either drop pork or start eatin my dogs. i opted for former. pretty much vegie these days except for fish i whack over head, but i get equally annoyed at holier-than-thou vegans and the veg-anger described above.
interesting philosophical Q: most bivalve mollusks are, IMHO, not much more sentient than a bacterium. logically distinguish why killing former should be verboten and latter not. just a thought for discussion.
I think the harm is fairly obvious for the octopus in regards to being torn limb from limb.
Well, you’re obviously so much smarter than all these atheists who didn’t know that.
Both behaviors (religion, eating meat) surely have evolutionary components that were useful at one time for our survival– can you explain why you seem to hold onto one, yet actively work to reject the other?
Total logic fail. That two things share one attribute says nothing about them sharing any other attributes; torture and breathing are both things that occur during the Bush administration; why do we hold onto one yet work to reject the other? And, religion is a false belief based on erroneous reasoning and ignorance, whereas eating meat isn’t a belief at all. There may be reasons not to eat meat, but they aren’t the reasons for rejecting religion. If you’re going to try to sway people, you’re going to have to present valid, intelligent arguments, arguments that show that you at least understand the difference between ethical wrongs and factual wrongs.