Time to point out a tempest in the teapot that is CNN’s Eatocracy. Eatocracy posted an innocuous little ditty called “Five Reasons to buy from your local 4H“. The article should be about as controversial as beige paint.
Unexpectedly some folks went into a full episode of TURD.
Total Urbane Reality Dissonance (TURD)© – noun; An illogical emotional outburst caused when a clueless (usually urbane) fool encounters the difference between their synthetic Utopian pretend life and the actual reality in which the rest of us dwell. Example; ‘When he tried to hug the wild moose it kicked him so hard he’ll need training to learn how to drool again. He had a TURD attack and kept screaming ‘I’m going to sue that mean old moose’. Meanwhile I drank his beer and convinced his girlfriend to dump him.”
Why freak about some kid raising a pig? Because farm animals raised by 4H kids are butchered and eaten just like every other farm animal on earth. The relationship between livestock and food isn’t news to most of us but you can never predict what simple fact will cause morons to have a TURD attack.
Apparently a few geniuses were shocked, shocked, to discover that food doesn’t come from the grocery store. (Where do these people come from? Are they hatched from test tubes in shopping malls?) The end result was “Does 4-H desensitize kids to killing“, a remarkably even handed (dare I say too gentle?) summation of the irrational comment shitstorm. Here’s an excerpt from a TURD argument:
“…knowing the animal that trusted you from birth is off to be mistreated before being slaughtered! That’s fulfilling? Maybe that’s because the 4-H has successfully desensitized these children…”
That’s bullshit beyond the pale! Those kids work hard to raise their livestock and don’t deserve to be tweaked by ignorant useless navel gazing dependent jackoffs. Farm kids raise food. They create something where there was nothing. And, yes, that means butchering too. Whiny handwringers who’ve never raised food or accomplished anything else wouldn’t last five minutes without the backbone of society that serves up everything from arugula to iPods. I’ve re-written the comment to match reality:
“…knowing that you’re such a useless loser that a farm kid can do what you cannot (and make a tidy profit doing it)! That’s logical? Maybe that’s because a lifetime of buying food in a grocery store has oversensitized you to reality…”
Human beings have been, are, and always will be adaptable omnivorous mammals. Pretending to be an overspecialized herbivorous moron is just fooling yourself. Food doesn’t come from a grocery store and changing your human nature from hunter/gatherer to furry won’t change it.
A.C.
P.S. Making fun of vegetarians is fun but I don’t want to paint with an overly broad brush. If a vegetarian can ignore my venison steak, leave farmers (and 4-H kids) alone, and raise vegetables without weeping when they harvest a carrot, they’re clearly not susceptible to TURD moments and aren’t a target of my ridicule.