Tuesday, December 11, 2007

meat as murder

Maybe you've heard of the Qingping wet market in Guangzhou, China. This was the first market to be permitted by the Communist government in 1979 and until SARS in 2002 it was a notorious but completely legal and public free-for-all. There you could find anything that walked, slithered, swam or flew, pick it out of a cage or a box and have it slaughtered on the spot. Not just pigs, goats and chickens, but rabbits, kittens, dogs, monkeys, snakes, turtles, large insects, rare marsupials - everything and anything.

The thought of noisy market hucksters hacking the heads off kittens for a couple of coins is repugnant and naturally despicable. But don't tag the Chinese as uniquely cruel and villainous just yet.

In the 1880s things weren't so different in Boston. There was a resort then, Tafts, out in Winthrop where the Deer Island sewage treatment plant is now. You could get pretty much anything there too. Tafts would hold huge banquets where thousands of wild birds including owls, plovers, curlews and eagle chicks would be eaten in grotesque quantities. On one occasion Taft staked one thousand dollars on the spot to anyone present able to name an edible North American bird that he could not produce instantly, and had no takers. To top off the feast, he served hundreds of guests hummingbirds "cooked to delectation and tucked into walnut shells."

And this wasn't some haunt of savages. Boston's biggest literary names: Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne and others, all dined repeatedly at Tafts.

Point is, this sounds absurd (to most of us) now, and that the Chinese are doing it renders them culturally retrogade. But the trend is so obvious. The civilized world will not continue to consume animal flesh at its current rate, with such shameless gusto, for very much longer. There is evil in it and we all know this despite our continued participation. And if the future belongs to the better angels, this systemic defect will be relegated to the furtive realm that sex shops or cock fights inhabit now, and only a small, remnant population of carnivores will continue to lurk among us.