Such Stuff

3 children in the park I'm writing in are counting to 3 and screaming as loud as they can—blood curdling. Like a bird being boiled.

My mother, when she worked in restaurants, said that they have to boil lobsters alive to ensure they're safe to eat. Dead scavengers rot quickly. The head chef yesterday at the restaurant where I bartend corrected me (and my mother I guess) saying that the whistling tones aren't the screams of a crustacean but rather air escaping from their bodies as they boil. Like a tea kettle. He went on to say that we know very little about about the nervous system of a crustacean. With cows, he said, a bullet between the eyes into their brains help them to feel nothing of their execution. Chef said, if you cut a lobsters head off, it's still alive. It could still, theoretically feel the pain of the execution. Boiling them, he argues, IS the most humane way to prepare the creatures for consumption.

I won't pretend to be a righteous vegan or vegetarian. I do however, wonder if an effort to avoid consuming matter laced with the trauma of it's execution could improve my own mental health.

I studied for a summer in Amsterdam. Down the 'gracht' (Dutch for canal) was the the Chicken Man: a local who had started his own shop selling rotisserie chickens. Half chickens, chicken sandwhiches, sauces, etc. One day, in going with a friend, we both decided on the "half chicken" meal. The Chicken Man palmed a rotisserie chicken from the oven, planted in on a cutting board in front of us and, with his other hand, used what looked like fabric scissors and cut. the chicken. down. the middle.

He plopped each half onto it's own paper plate, garnished it with some kind of slaw and a roll and handed my friend and I each a plate of the same chicken.

The experience itself was enough to weep. Meat and bones and skin like I had, split with scissors and slopped onto two slivers of a cut down tree.

Jake and I ate together.

"This is protein," I said.

Jake, cheery and gracious as he is responds, "Yep!"

"No," I say, "this makes up our muscles"

"Sure..." he eats without speaking.

"But it's the same chicken... so, in a micro way... we'll be made of the same... stuff"

It wasn't anything that meant very much at the time. To many, it probably doesn't mean much to anybody now. But maybe what it could mean —is that sharing a meal is more lasting than we can imagine.

"Such as we are made of, such we be."

-Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, IIii