Dog Recipes

Was watching "Hollywood Squares" the other night with Martin Mull in the center square. The question, "What is a combination of rott weiler, terrier, grey hound and a Weimaraner?" He joking answered, "the recipe for a Philippine meatloaf."

It didn't quite get the grand guffaw he was hoping for. I turned off the tv. Maybe I should send Marin Mull a plate of lumpia with the special Philippine meatloaf he refers to.

It comes back now and then the jokes about how Filipinos (or just about any south east asian country) eat dogs. I even read an article once at how there was a need for countries to disassociate themselves with the idea that their people ever ate dog so that they can play in the great economic market and be a significant player. Apparently world economic power is dictated by whether or not your population eat dog. Because if you can afford it, you can buy cow or pig, some of the top waste product producing food animals there are.

Have I eaten dog? Yes, I've eaten dog. Watched as a young boy carried a newly charred carcass on his back to the next party.

I guess what throws most people for a loop is how can they be your friend and still eat them. Let's get this straight. We don't eat dogs we know or own that's just barbaric! The dogs we keep are our guardians and eat every imagineable food scrap available which reduces the amount of garbage.

The dogs in the Philippines look like Filipinos in a way, the mix of any dog you can imagine. They kind of look like dingos. For most of the dogs, no one owns them, they're street dogs. They're everywhere. There is no SPCA in the Philippines big enough to solve that problem.

Here, any dog, not found to be owned by anyone gets impounded, then killed. But Americans don't see that. They don't see how many millions of strays are killed each year. And where do those bodies go? I don't know?

I have a coworker who is a very picky eater. She doesn't like to see the eyes of fish, or the feet of chicken. If she eats it, it better be ground up to indiscernible existence. People feel guilty when they see the face of the creature they're eating. They'd rather have this cold disconnection with their food that this is packaged and processed and sterilized to not really be food anymore.

I think we have to regain a greater understanding and connection to the food we are eating. The the animal that is killed, to the growers who raise them, to the truckers that bring them to the properly chilled supermarket. We are part of this cycle. And when you can't acknowledge your roll in it, how can you possibly understand what the meatrix really is? If we really understood and accepted how we are part of the cycle, wouldn't we be more concerned at what goes into the cycle (anti-biotics, etc) rather than complain at how the price of beef is going up?

If dogs weren't pets but forest animals like raccoon and opossum, would we care so much? But maybe coon pie and roadkill stew are part of an archaic age too, when we knew how we were part of this food cycle and not in some processed and packaged imaginary world.