7 Comments

1. October 8th, 2011 / 10:55 am JScap—

   Wow, this is really something, especially those last few paragraphs.  Thanks for sharing this.

   My father, who grew up in Sicily, remembers drinking calf’s blood as a boy.  He says his mother gave it to him when he was sick.  (Though he doesn’t recall this experience with any particular fondness.)

2. October 8th, 2011 / 11:09 am Adam D Jameson—

   I ate a lot of blood soup in Thailand. I didn’t know what it was at first. One day, I was watching the vendor prepare it, and when he got to this bottle full of dark brown liquid, I said, “What’s that? Some kind of sauce?” In half Thai/English he explained that it was pig’s blood. I suddenly understood why the soup tasted the way that it did!

   I couldn’t eat it for a while after that, but then I regained my taste for it.

3. October 8th, 2011 / 6:13 pm bobby—

   “The strings dissolved, the blood was ready. ”

4. October 8th, 2011 / 7:47 pm Craig Duncan—

   There is such a tremendous amount of sorrow to be had in reading in a piece like this. There is no denying the force of the prose, but when one starts looking for beauty in an act so morally depraved while being so completely unaware of the philosophical implications of what’s being done, to pretend that it’s human necessity that we should slit the throat of those who have no voice, who cannot speak for themselves, who we arbitrarily ontologize as “companion animal” in one instance and “livestock” in another, is, perhaps, one of the most disgusting displays of fetishizing violence, fetishizing murder, that one could ever hope to see. One is immediately reminded of Adorno’s warning like a splash of cold water to the face: “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”

   Ironically, the author claims to be making the connection to nonhuman animals that most people never do, and yet, when faced with the gaze of the soon to be killed victim, there is no hesitation, it’s only business as usual: human exceptionalism at its worst.

5. October 9th, 2011 / 9:34 am c2k—

   But has Mr. Buford savored the testicle(s) of the Himalayan yak? Because until you’ve drunk the spunk of bos mutus, you’ve yet to have begun living.

6. October 9th, 2011 / 9:37 am c2k—

   I was with you until Auschwitz but still—

   We eat a lot of meals in a life. Sometimes I don’t know why some foods break through elevate themselves in my consciousness (???)  and manage to stick. It is often for reasons besides the food itself, the theater surrounding its eating, the culture of the experience, the otherness that naturally gathers around the things we eat: history and grandmothers and death and the mechanics of surprise.

   The blood was good. It was ridiculously vital, as rich as it was vibrantly red, and weirdly, unapologetically full of health. It had a taste that I hadn’t known, and like the experience, like the theater where I drank it, is something I won’t forget.

   A culture that takes perverse writing and – more so – thinking like this seriously is in deep shite. The NY Times loves to publish ridiculous stuff like this. 

7. October 9th, 2011 / 1:40 pm Omar De Col—

   who takes the new york times seriously?