Hi, I'm Dan. I'm a part-time cook, part-time ghost writer, full-time lost in the cosmos kind of guy. I like food. I love food. I love cooking. I cook during my spare time. I spent the last 72 hours making a traditional demi-glace from scratch. It's good, rich, velvet--it's a celebration of omnivorous gluttony, made to be loved.
Maybe it could have done without the cloves.
I live with my girlfriend and 2 cats. The cats are in full support of my staying up late over a pot of bones and pinot noir. My girlfriend ... well she got her own business and competing hours, but she loves the food, and loves me for making it, but her feelings of my sometimes bizarre, obsessive behavior, standing with a spoon and yelling "try it again! it's down to a demi!" can range from aloofness to frustration.
I'm in the middle of a mid-cook/life/food-crisis. I revel in roast pork with chicharones, the nasty bits, crab and lobster boils--the jaws snapping carnivore, tearing through cow to pig to duck and its force-fed liver, down through the bellies and bowels-turned-pate .... and then I see that pig on the discovery channel, watch his relief to hear that pork bellies are down this quarter, handsome Wilbur. I think about life, pain, rights and wrongs and things that really just seem wrong.
Vegetarian? Fuck .... no thanks. I ate brunch at a vegan restaurant, proudly pawning off its buffalo wings and blue cheese dressing. What IS THAT? And where do they get off calling it blue cheese?
It feels like a clear fact that things gotta die if we want to live, and who are we to judge the value of a life? So what if kelp doesn't feel pain. Oysters don't feel pain either.
And yet there is something important about what we eat. Meeting a vegan, the omnivore's face wilts into disdain, pride for the beef in there bellies bubbles. Why is it important? what is so significant about what we eat? And is there a way to make what we eat make us better?
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Though I didn't ultimately stick with it, I don't regret my own time as a vegan, and learned a lot from the experience. It forced me to go new places in my eating choices, for reasons of both ethics and taste. Some of those new experiences permanently changed me, and left their mark to this day.
Not that I think you should be a vegan, mind you, nor that my own questions are now answered. But I think the struggle over this stuff is one worth having.
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