Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Food Fight Friends of Thumper Start Cyber-Brawl
Posted by Nicki Wood on Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 7:43 AM
A simple question posed by one of the Fine Cooking magazine bloggers turned into the kind of free-for-all usually reserved for presidential speeches on health care reform.
Writing for Test Kitchen blog, Jennifer Armentrout asked, would Fine Cooking readers like to see a feature on rabbit recipes?
At this writing there were 150 comments. The first 20 or so were enthusiastic yesses and that included me. Omnivore was the term invented for me -- really, I'll eat anything except beets, and I avoid lobster. Rabbit is better than chicken for dark meat fans. A dark meat person is already an outcast -- just make it official with rabbit.
Rabbit is raised more humanely and on a smaller scale. When I had a source for fresh whole rabbit, we fixed it a couple of times a year.
After the 20 positive comments, Friends of Thumper arrived and the solid matter hit the rotating blades. It started with a slightly wounded and sentimentalist tone ("I can't eat bunnies") and progressed to passive-aggression: You wouldn't eat rabbits, would you?"
Then word got around, and commenters piled on with threats of boycott, aspersions cast at ancestry, near-violence hinted at, and (wait for it) Bible verses trotted out.
Reading the comments is like watching the stoning of Mathias, son of Deuteronomy of Gat.
Only substitute "rabbit" for "Jehovah." What's up with the extreme bunny lovin'?
Comments (4)
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What a great article! I was just browsing around and had to watch the Monty Python clip while at work of all places. That made my day!!! :)
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Oh YAWN. Hypocritical omnivores that only eat animals that they think aren't particularly cute just bore the hell out of me. Calves and lambs are cute, but few omnis take issue with that meat.
Rabbits are still just rodents...a little cuter than a squirrel, but a rodent nonetheless, but I don't suppose many people would object to squirrel recipes. Because they don't sell squirrels at Petco.
That's my take on it, too, Lesley. That, and the cultural elitism in the implied "you're not civilized if you eat _______."
To update: Sadly many of the best comments were taken down by the editors of Fine Cooking, including "Well you'd probably eat roasted kitten with peanut sauce, too." Still, you can get a hint of the action with the 86 remaining comments, including, "This is America. We don't eat pets. We just don't."
