What's the best shellfish? Gerbil-of-the-Sea!

We're not vegetarians, but it almost seems like we might as well be.  Not only does our religious diet have us not eating meat about half the year, especially during Lent, but we're certainly a pack of animals-lovers, and the children, it turns out,  really don't believe in eating what you love.

Madeleine asks me questions about individual "meat products," and the conversation is painful, no matter how I try to triangulate things.  She asked me how you make bacon, and, although I don't know the details, I told her that it involves cutting the meat off a pig in a particular way.  "That's sad!"  She also asked me what hamburger was:

"Uh - hamburger is beef, and beef comes from cows."

"The poor cows!"

But it turns out that Madeleine  isn't the only future PETA member in our house.  Tonight, Amy made me scallop scampi, and Daniel reported to me, "Ian thinks of shrimp as water-gerbils.  That's why he doesn't want us to eat it."

I was intrigued, and went straight to the source.  It turns out that the gerbil paradigm was more of a rhetorical prop than a direct simile for those ever-so-cuddly gerbils-of-the-sea that some benighted people call "shrimps."  What Ian had been saying to Daniel was that you wouldn't eat gerbils, so why eat shrimps, who are also cute - the poor little creatures.

This triggered an association for Madeleine:  "Well, a chicken is a creature."  (I don't think she was commenting on eating chicken; I think she was just showing proper recognition for a category that she knew.)

Then she had another thought about carnivorism:  "I really don't like to eat moose.  It's totally gross."

We do live in Northern New England, but I don't think any of us have ever eaten moose.  It might have some appeal to Amy (already a buffalo-eater, to my chagrin); certainly it would diminish our carbon footprint to eat such a local animal, and it would be a way of thinking globally and acting locally.  But I think the closest any of us have come to eating this hoofed neighbor of ours has been "moose-tracks" flavored ice cream.

I'm not sure that shrimp are maritime  gerbils.  But I do agree with Madeleine:  eating moose would be gross.  And a chicken is a creature.

(July 17, 2013)