“Degenerates, Degenerates, They Will All Turn Into Monkeys…”

I received this short clip so often, I finally have to post it. Postmodernist omnivore Slavoj Žižek debates with his seminar where to go for lunch. My vegetarian and vegan friends — almost all of them living in Manhattan — will forgive me, I’m sure (or not?). For the record, I certainly understand what people find worrisome about industrialized cattle farms and large-scale slaughterhouses. But I come from a remote place in the mountains, where farms are by necessity, and newly, by conviction, small. And where the farming is so traditional that, by now, it is trend-settingly modern. Lovely and comparatively thin-looking animals graze on places called “alm,” that is, steep meadows that belong to some farmer who tends to the animals, and to the grass and flowers on which they feed.

Either way, in my experience, there is a sphere of life in which vegetarianism does not work: mountaineering. I’m in the Italian Alps right now, working on my Mountain Project. This morning I had two bowls of cereal, two eggs with bacon, two slices of bread with cheese, a bowl of fruit salad with yoghurt, a large piece of cake, green tea, grapefruit juice, and a cappuccino. For today’s tour, I’ll bring more bread with cheese and a healthy supply of Gran Cereale cookies. Tonight’s dinner (I just looked at the menu) will be: salad with bresaola, a kind of beef-prosciutto, dumplings with little bits of bacon in them, consomme royale, rabbit cooked in red wine, and lemon sorbet. This is my normal diet here, and I usually lose weight while I’m in the mountains. I know a woman who sees herself as a fairly radical vegetarian. But during her yearly trips to the Himalayas, she eats meat all the time. She learnt that otherwise she’s just not going to make it to the summit (she failed a couple of times, and the sherpas finally persuaded her to eat what they considered a ‘real’ meal). Oh yes, there are probably a gazillion scientific studies claiming that you don’t need to eat meat to have lots of energy. Tell that a farmer in the mountains…

In that sense, and whether he’s joking or not, it always warms my heart to see the Slavoj Žižek clip above…