Zuckerberg and eating what you kill
The news that 27-year-old Facebook founder and gazzillionaire Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he’ll only eat meat he personally kills has been food (pun intended) for jokes and puzzlement.
He’s been guided in his efforts by a Silicon Valley chef and neighbor of his with the improbable name of Jesse Cool:
Cool has introduced Zuckerberg to nearby farmers and advised him as he killed his first chicken, pig, and goat. “He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,” says Cool.
So my first impression, which was that Zuckerberg had taken up hunting or at least raising his own animals for slaughter, is incorrect. It seems he merely administers the coup de grace, coming in at the last moment for the kill (literally).
This may seem like contrived showboating, but it’s actually a step up from those of us (myself most definitely included) who get our meat in packages at the supermarket and avoid all the messy stuff. I bet you’ve got some opinions about it all, especially those of you who hunt.
I keep picturing a scene on Deep Space 9 where Keiko O’Brien is trying not to be utterly grossed out when she finds out that her husband’s mom cooked. Touched the food with her hands– even raw meat!
I think he’s just being faddish. Only reason it’s news is because he’s being faddish in a historically turned way, instead of a “futuristic” one. (Would it be big news if he said he only ate plants grown in his own hydroponic greenhouse?)
Actually the killing may be the easiest part unless you are a superpacifist type. Removing the innards is the yuckiest part, unless you’re a featherophobe like me, in which case scalding and plucking is. BTW, does roadkill count?
I wonder if this will become the latest food trend or if it will be just a guy thing.
My forefathers were raised in the mountains of Southwestern Colorado. They killed virtually everything that they consumed. Growing season was very short so there was very limited access to green vegetables.
My grandfather’s opinion was that modern grocery stores were wonderful places where one had the choice of a wide range of both meats and vegetables all cleaned, wrapped and ready to go.
I find it interesting that the uber wealthy would find living in a “turn of the 20th century” lifestyle fashionable…
One side of my family were butchers back in latvia
My moms side were farmers, miners, etc…
Grandad on moms side, used to take me to the butcher, or to what today would be a “pollo vivo” place (thats the name now in the neighborhood i live in).
he taught me very young… where food comes from, why you should respect it and not waste it, etc.
i remember how we went to pick a chicken once
(later turkey)
so here we are… standing in a place with small cages with a few birds in each… i said, look, thre is an egg! and the owner said, you can have all the eggs you collect for free…
i said.. cool.. how do i get it?
he said, open the cage, put your arm in, and pick it up
huh?
then grandpa took me aside and started explaining what to look for. good beak, clear eyes, energy, feather quality…
then let me walk around and pick the bird..
then with instructions, i had to put my hand in, got pecked, then grabbed it by its feet and pulled it out.
he said finish it and give it to the man to process.
i took its neck and made a fist a certain way.
then handed the bird over..
i had not done things like that since i grew up. it was only when i went to Indonesia and ate Ayam (chicken) on the street, that i tasted what i had forgot.
it wasn’t happy, or sad, it was work and living…
mom didnt like me going.. but that has to do with them eating her pet rooster one day.. neighbors complained when it became of age and would do what roosters do… so he ended up on the dinner table
my wifes family early on tried to have some fun with me… offering me things like chicken feet… 🙂
sorry… poor europeans eat the weird food just as poor chinese do… so chicken feet, pigs feet… roast pig.. etc… no problem.
i am a member of the OTHER PETA..
People eating tasty animals
funny thing about paradise (and i am pretty sure Walt would back me up)… everything wants to eat you, kill you, or hurt you and get away…
been wanting to go to the pollo vivo again..
anyway… while born and raised in the city, i can clean fish, skin game, pluck birds…
my grandparents lived thorugh the depression, and a whole lot more… so i was taught all kinds of things.
even things that scientists try to figure out, that they think is dead!!!!!!!!! like how to build or do certain craft work (like mating large blocks of stone).
i do NOT agree with your point as to zukerbergs coming in for the kill.
thats how you get someone who likes to kill.. you give them the power part and take away the messy part that tugs at your heart and teaches you responsibility.
zuckerberg has to do the whole job.
i am kind of getting a bit aggravated watching domesticated humans pretend to be doing something that in no way resembles reality of it, and think its all some kind of, try out real life outside your door, but in complete safety..
its why you get people in the west who will attempt to hug or sit with bears… (i can list several!)
or how the people who wanted the wolves back, are worried for their children… (Seinfeld may have made fun of “a dingo ate my baby” but that actually was a real event in which the parents nearly went to jail for murder as no one believed it).
one of the more interesting was the converted California nature lover who was attacked by a bull deer while walking through the woods joining two campuses. rutting season..
or course BEFORE the incident, she was all… its the peoples fault.. we start the problem.. etc.
AFTER she was militant, and wanted them ALL killed… as she did nothing and it nearly killed her..
how bout someplace in between?
its not that bad…
if we can be desensitized to let social engineering (like mengele meant well too)… then we also can be sensitized to not be able to live outside of a domesticated situation.
in fact, we can be so removed, desensitized, and form our ideas from cartoons anthropomorphizing.. that we can be convinced that there is no order, and that we can live withotu eating (like feminists claim that women should not have to have babies like men dont have to have… now where woudl that leave things too?)
but its about domestication
squeamish people don’t fight back and give up fast if they see even a tiny bit of something. this makes it easy
if you keep lokoing you will notice that the fly over people are disliked for many things that are moral and good that make the work of progressives creaing a slave state harder
they have boundaries
they have morals which left unimpinged could go so far as to have a civil war to stop such slavery
they would rather live free or die
they love their families, and are not racist (easy to manipulate)
they own, and know how to use firearms
they can hunt, so they know how minds work
they link up fast and can work as a team
they can decide upon a leader, listen to that, and self organize… (unlike dialoging to consensus trained people who will talk endlessly when there is no decider guiding them)
its not superior to be domesticated to the point that one cant live without a huge society around them
it tends to make the outcomes of natural things very bad..
EXAMPLE: the hurricane.. there is a story of a man who worked at wallmart when the twister hit. he describes a beam coming down and crushin a motehr father and baby huddled together..
but he also described getting people inside..
and standing by the doors until the wind tore them off and nearly killed him.
he tells about a woman who came to the store when everyone else was trying to live, and when he told her that she cant shop and pay until after the storm
she want away… probably to her death..
domesticated humans are so crippled they will do bizare things that almost no one else would.. whats worse… is that other domesticated humans will agree…
if you live on the east coast, and you know some EMTs in the ny nj area… go ahead.. ask them about the man who put a lightbulb up his ass.
many of these behaviors would have been seen as a symptom of a disease, like a mouse gnawing on his own leg in a cage.
a kind of cabin fever where disconnected from reality, their minds keep drifting farther away, and the ideas are odder, and are to FEEL.
like the evanescence song..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmHSgNWKd2Q
like a rodent without a chew block their minds grow through their bottom jaw.
they lack so much real world stimulation that their bodies need that they do wacky things.. if enough do it, then we pretend its normal.
i guess this freedom of mental wacky is a way to hide the mental disorders that come from forced domestication..
i kind of, tut tut, dont worry misses simmons, even though johnny tortures animals, you let him do what he wants, and you will see, its just a phase…
wait till the 8 year olds who have been desensitized watching SAW grow up… SAW goes over the line of sociopathic sadism and such to create emotional tension like a roller coaster
so numb and far away from reality, we find sadistic torture death of innocents as entertainment.
we scar and cut ourselves inserting things to look like cartoons or some mental concept ignoring body.
the ghost in the machine, disconnected fromt he machine, loses its moorings.
and you disconnect it, by restricting normal life as the horror of life..
something a farm boy or girl getting a chicken for dinner would not see it as..
and letting the most distant and domesticated be our famous and people to look up to… well that’s just domesticated whores standing at the door beckoning to hookers men to come in for a while..
oh..
and when the bad hits the fan
you can be sure the first line to fall will be the nintendo set..
as in iraq and iran, they put their heads out and such… trained on reset life and try again, they dont get how real REAL can be.
so real you go into shock and your blood pressure collapses from it if you cant handle it.
I don’t get it. Sounds stupid. I could understand eating Kosher meat where you want to ensure the animal has been treated correctly while it is being raised as well as being slaughtered correctly. But what does merely killing it do? Does one have to do all chores now? Will it be “wrong” to live in a clean house without having partaken in its cleaning?
Affected nonsense. Especially if the whole claptrap is for publicity.
Next we’ll hear he makes sure to point the animal he’s killing in the direction of Mecca. That would explain why the facebook group designed to coordinate attacks on women who attempt to drive next month in Saudi Arabia is still up.
Hey Art, does the light bulb really go out when…oh, never mind.
Feh.. Moralistic preening by a pampered blowhard who has been overly exposed to a PC culture. I’d be a lot more impressed if he’d gone to an industrial slaughterhouse and simply watched. I’ve been to a few and seen the awful truth. Pig slaughter is especially horrible with the occasional screaming. But at the end of it all I still eat meat and accept it for what it is. Feeding 300 million people HAS to be an industrial and impersonal activity. Not because of any lack of morals but because of scale. Boutique farms are fine if you have the inclination but it’s no way to feed the planet.
It is hard to kill an animal – any animal, especially for the first time. But if you do it routinely, as I have to, being a researcher in biological lab, it became almost non-issue.
I don’t hunt but have done in the past. I don’t butcher though I once helped with that, too. My biggest complaint is not the messy part–it’s just too darn time consuming. Preening is probably the right description, since he does nothing else associated with the process of raising, dressing, smoking, etc. A farmer that kills and stores meat doesn’t do it as a statement of anything more than self-preservation.
It sort of reminds me of the terrorist training technique used by Arafat and Co. (and the Nazis, too) where men killed small animals before moving on to bigger, more Jewish things.
there are few things more obnoxious than a dilettante preaching, with nose stuck up in the air, on his newest endeavor
I’m not much of a fan of meat in the first place, and reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” didn’t help. I’m appreciative of those who can work in that industry; it’s not for me, but I see no moral problems there. I just have a weak stomach.
Still, Zuckerberg just seems like another nitwibble with more money than brain cells. Speaking of hunters, though, it’s interesting to me to see the difference in coverage of his showboating as opposed to Palin out hunting.
He may be onto something. I’ve often thought about half the country is in sore need of some form of wilderness camp. I’ll give him credit for possibly recognising that need in himself.
There was a pork packing plant in a town about 25 miles away from where I grew up. I knew a couple of guys who lived in our town who worked there. I remember one summer when I was a kid at a pig pickin’ we were playing horseshoes and volleyball and having a good time while waiting for the pig to finish cooking when one of the guys who worked at the packing plant remarked, jokingly I think — but there must be some level of truth to it — that the only thing that goes to waste is the hog’s squeal.
(BTW, here’s what a pig pickin’ is if anybody doesn’t know):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_pickin‘
Anyway, I have no idea how literal his remark about nothing going to waste was. I tend to think (hope) that some of the more unappealing by-products that come to mind when considering the statement are used for purposes other than human consumption. However, I haven’t eaten hot dogs or processed sausage in about 30 years.
Raising and slaughtering your own animal protein insures the quality of what you eat. Moreover, for six months of the year, my wife and I enjoy the affection and friendship of four footed animals who we know are treated kindly. But this practice not for everyone. First, and foremost, you have to be able to afford it. It is much more expensive than buying even the highest quality meat or poultry, especially if you consider the value of your time. If you don’t want to kill and butcher, there are plenty of people in the business who will do it for you.
But let me tell you: There is no better meat or eggs than that which you’ve raised yourself.
I’ve raised rabbits and chickens. Worked on farms (my Uncle was a farmer) and ranches. I love chickens, listening to their cooing and squawking. Throw out a hand of popcorn, or even just cut green grass and watch how fast it disappears! I had an award winning checkered giant, I believe–so many years ago. He had a black stripe down his back and black spots on his hip. Rabbit is kind of dry but high in protein.
Have you ever heard a Cajun just out of nowhere say “swamp?”
That’s when you know you better mind your manners. That buck knife they carry is more than for show.
I grew up hunting and fishing. We were happy to have the meat during WWII when meat was rationed. Trout, pheasant, ducks, rabbits, venison, and elk were always in the freezer. It also helped with the grocery bills. With deer and elk we earned our meat after it was down. Field dressing it and toting it to the nearest road was hard work. When you got it home, the processing took several hours before it was all butchered, sliced, cleaned, and wrapped for the freezer. But it was good eating and good for you – both the meat and the exercise to get it. Spent many pleasant fall mornings hunting ducks and pheasants in farmer’s fields forty milles to the east of where we lived.
I quit big game hunting when I went into the Navy. Too busy and too hard to get leave to get into the mountains for a hunt. Also, I didn’t relish all the post-kill work. Continued to stream fish for trout and salmon up until a few years back. All my fishing partners died or got too stove up to go with me. I fished alone for a couple of years, but fell on a slick rock while wading and darn near drowned. So, I don’t fish anymore unless I’m in a boat with someone. We get a lot of fresh crab and salmon from some young friends that drop it off when they have extra, which is often. We just have to clean it, which is no biggie. Great eating and good for us even if we don’t get the exercise involved.
I’m with expat on plucking chickens. My grandparents lived on a farm. During harvest grandma would cook huge meals to feed the extra men who came in to help with the harvest. Grandma would catch five chickens, wring their necks, douse them in boiling water, then have my brother and me pluck the feathers. No fun! Once again though, the eating was the best. They killed and rendered a hog every year for lard, which also led to lots of good food. Pickled pigs feet and smoked ham. Mmmm good!
It really isn’t so unusual that young people today don’t know about killing and preparing meat. It has become something quite remote and unseen. Few even give it a second thought. Those that suddenly decide they want to get in touch with the basics of life seem amusing, but I say it’s a good thing if it gives them more understanding of the basics of life. Although refusing to eat anything you haven’t personally killled seems a bit far out.
To The poster formerly know as Jack: Good Lord, don’t encourage him or we’ll get another fifty paragraphs.
Regarding Zuckerberg, I think it’s just another way to get media attention, and/or drive Facebook activity up. I agree with SteveD who said I’d be a lot more impressed if he’d gone to an industrial slaughterhouse and simply watched.
I think he’s wacky, personally.
Having experienced the “joy” that is plucking chikens on a warm day, I’m thrilled to get tidy little packages wrapped in plastic.
Now if only I could experience the joy that is correct spelling.
Wait a second… are you trying to claim grocery stores don’t raise meatsicles in their store rooms and then package them for sale?
Nice try, but I haven’t just fallen off the back of a turnip truck!
I think Tesh, above at 5:06 PM, hits the nail on the head with “Zuckerberg just seems like another nitwibble with more money than brain cells.”
On the other hand, I do think it would be a good thing if people were more realistic about where their food comes from. One example of this mental gap between farm and dining table: a few years ago at our local Farmers Market on the Saturday before Easter, I saw a man pick up a whole lamb that he had special ordered from one of the vendors. The lamb was ready for the spit (skinned and gutted, head and hooves taken off) but it was still obviously a whole animal. I was amused to see the reactions as he carried it on his shoulder thru the crowded market. People gasped in horror and flinched back in a way that I thought would have been more appropriate if he had been a cannibal toting a brace of butchered babies.
By the way, Tesh, I love the word “nitwibble”. It will be a fine addition to my vocabulary of insults. “Nitwibble, learn to use a turn signal!”, “You, sir, are a dribbling nitwibble.” “Madam, your shrill and vacuous ignorance marks you as an obvious nitwibble.”
I have no opinion on Zuckerburg because I don’t know his motives.
I do know that if people had to kill, and dress their own food, there would probably be a lot more vegetarians.
I am of an age that I can remember some women family members cleaning the Sunday chicken then cooking it over a wood fire-in Florida-in the summer time. You have to be hungry to eat after that. On the other hand the chicken was a happy camper one minute, and on the way to the pot the next, with never a worry in the world.
Obviously, raising and killing your own food is more natural. The lives of farm animals who are consumed on the farm where they raised is also much more natural. I went vegetarian a number of years ago, because I fished on the Shenandoah River in Virginia, and followed one too many poultry trucks enroute from one of the many factory farms, crammed obscenely full of the poor creatures. Hog or cattle trucks would have the same effect. I will say that, the worst thing I ever saw was on the farm as a kid, when a presumably slaughtered pig came to life when dropped into the boiling water. The screams from pig, women, and children were the stuff of nightmares. A man with an axe brought it to a merciful end. (I guess the old North Florida crackers didn’t think to bleed the hog out, ahead of the dunking. Or maybe there was a reason not to.)
Hunting is one thing. Being a butcher or working in a slaughterhouse is one thing. Raising your own animals and processing them is one thing.
But the way I read it, Zuckerman is slaughtering animals as a hobby. That seems a tad creepy.
Zuckerberg. Sorry.
I knew a guy who worked in a slaughterhouse. He seems a tad “toughened.” The kind that eats nitwibbles.
In the Army, we had one exercise where we were in the field and each given a chicken to kill and prepare and eat. The event is one of my “stories” in that (and I’m chuckling even now) one soldier had a stand off with the chicken in the box. It looked at him, sideways, with that crooked cocked head. It was clear he was afraid of it. He reached it for it like some retarded Frankenstein. The chicken hoped out of the box and bested all of us. We did not catch it.
The poster formerly know as Jack Says:
Hey Art, does the light bulb really go out when…oh, never mind.
George Carlin says in “Ice Box Man”:
Y’ever been looking through the refrigerator and you come across an empty plate? Boy, that starts me to wondering. Did something eat something else? Maybe the olives ate the tuna! Maybe that chicken isn’t really dead yet. Actually, I picture a little mouse with gloves and a parka on, y’know. Just waiting for the lights to go out.
I’ve hunted big game, slaughtered and cleaned my own farm animals for personal consumption, and done the same for sale at a farmers market. Cleaning a large antelope or American wapiti is a long, hard process. Even moreso a steer. Slaughtering and cleaning 100 chickens a day for a week or so will make you sleep at night like there’s no tomorrow. Killing your own goat or chicken a la Zuckerberg is not arduous, but it sounds like a gimmick. While I’m glad he’s done it I’m also confident he will leave it to others before long.
Somehow, when I saw the headline I imagined him running after wild animals and tearing them apart with his teeth. The idea of a feral Zuckerberg running amok in the woods sounds somehow appealing. While he seems likeable enough and it is hard to knock his achievements, he looks like someone who needs to get out more, enjoy the fresh air, and kill something.
Z is a 27 yr-old billionaire. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and has the money to infinitely indulge his ignorance and vanities. Endit.
Talk about a nice Jewish boy blatantly eating trafe with all of the pigs and lobsters he eats. I happen to keep Kosher; it doesn’t bother me if other Jewish people do not, but for some reason, in this instance, this does.
this is either the beginning of a descent into madness or he’s sublimating his desires to do the same to humans…just what do you feel when you slit their throats, mark? do you become sexually aroused? do you imagine their blood is that of your rivals? is killbook on the horizon?
Projection ,mitty, projection. Or you may just be a vegan.
Oh I think he’s just another liberal being very good at being silly. They seem to have a knack for it.
Art’s right, things out here in “Paradise” want to kill you. Then there are the animals…
I’ve hunted, but not recently, and I also like to fish. Someone, LAG perhaps, mentioned that it wasn’t the difficulty in cleaning and butchering game that was the problem, it was the time involved. I’d agree with that. Once you’ve done it a couple of times, you get over the gross-out factor, but while field-dressing a deer is a pretty quick process, I prefer to let a real butcher handle the cutting-up part, which many will do for a reasonable fee. Fish above a certain size, same thing. Killing the critter is actually the easiest part of the whole event, once our natural (for most people) squeamishness is overcome. Until I know otherwise, I’ll assume that Zuckerberg is just another rich poseur looking for publicity.
Neo thinks that:
it’s actually a step up from those of us (myself most definitely included) who get our meat in packages at the supermarket and avoid all the messy stuff.
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
Yet one of the reasons given for the kosher laws of slaughter is that it isolates the cruelty of killing in the hands of a few people – who must be scholars.
A saying:
No Jewish Mother ever ever wrung the neck of a chicken. No Jew was ever put to bed by hands that had ended a life, earlier that day.
I could use that as an excuse to be vegetarian. Oh no, can’t eat that. I didn’t kill it.
Has good potential to keep ‘all sides’ out of your business.
“isolates the cruelty of killing” merits a huge What? the cruelty, repeat, cruelty of killing? Have you never had to put down a beloved pet to spare it the cruelty of unremitting suffering? Kosher killing of meat animals is not cruel. It is dignified by its quickness.
Every quail kill I make, and I’ve made many, is still associated with a feeling of sadness, however briefly felt. The pleasure is in the gunner-dog teamwork of the hunt, and the execution of a good shot, not in the killing.
I hate injuring a bird or not being able to find it. Inflicting injury instead of death is closer to cruelty.
I’m not a hunter or a butcher — but thank goodness some are.
Zuckerberg likes to slice the animals throat -but turns over the laborious work of butchering his own meat to another . LOL !
That says it all . Hes in it for the joy of killing and not to get in any kind of touch with how things work .
All you apologists are the same .
Hes so rich -hes perverted now . Looking for killing thrills because he never feels powerful enough . Hes a bully and a bastard ….before facebook and now .
They are killing dogs in Asia and eating them . Try that -Zuckerberg -try that .