Not everyone cottoned to the rabbit-for-dinner piece in the New York Times' dining section this month, pun intended.
"Would you have even considered reporting about raising dogs for dinner?" asked Nancy Schreiber of Great Neck, NY, appalled the Times would present the "gentle, beautiful, smart, sentient animals" as the "new chicken."
Parsa Ludhi of New York City agreed. "It is nothing short of mind-blowing to read an article that both intentionally, and maybe to a certain degree unintentionally, encourages the act of violence against these innocent creatures by inexperienced readers who suddenly believe that they can butcher their own meat because they read a 'how to,'" she wrote.
The Bunny-It's-What's-For-Dinner article continues the Times' culinary Realpolitik of depicting chefs and locavores raising and slaughtering their own animals.
Do It Yourself (DIY) killing not only circumvents factory farming and the hypocrisy of someone else killing your meat, it's the ultimate answer to "is it fresh?" like live animal markets in other parts of the world. (Though Illinois Agriculture officials raided Rick Bayless' Frontera Grill in December and confiscated local pig meat because it was so "fresh" it was uninspected and a possible health hazard.)
It even provides a kind of hobby for those enamored by their own ability to transcend such a deeply engrained taboo.
DIY killing was immortalized in Michael Pollan's boar kill in the 2006 Omnivore's Dilemma and more recently in Michael Greenberg's Beg, Borrow, Steal in which he slaughters a chicken which starts "squawking wildly." Surprise. Animals don't want to die.
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