I’m not sure if you all know, but the comments section here is often the best part of this whole ice-cream social.
Up till now, I’ve just been too lazy to pick out some of the gems for you, but I’m going to start. There are too many hilarious, touching, and/or informative vignettes to let them pass without extra notice.
Today’s accolades go out to Arwen:
I remember reading it [Fit for Life] one hungry day – I did most of my reading of diet books to remind me why I was staying hungry – and there was something about how “people aren’t really meat eaters: you don’t see a squirrel in a park and want to kill it and eat it.”
And I thought, oh, man, squirrel. I bet that would be delicious.
Comments
36 responses to “Commenter brilliance – Arwen edition.”
yeah, some of us really aren’t meat eaters. fat veg*ns represent!
Squirrels are safe around you.
Vegan fistbump :)
I’ve actually had squirrel and it’s not bad. Though, I had it breaded and deep-fried, and that makes everything better. (My dad hunts—if it lives in northwest Pennsylvania and it’s legal to shoot at some point in the year, I’ve probably eaten it.)
I had moose once.
Me, too. Served as mooseloaf. Not my thing– and in fact, I’m a vegetarian now– but when you are a kid growing up among hunters, you eat things that don’t show up in the supermarket.
I’ve never had moose. How was it?
I had it in chili. It was pretty good! Very rich flavour, kind of like venison.
The person serving it to me, a friend of my parents, said, “Eat it all up, and then I’ll tell you what it is.” (I will never, never, say that to one of my nephews.) So, to me, moose tasted like deception and game-playing, but that might be unfair to other moose cookers.
Yep. Grew up extra poor. Had squirrel stew and fried squirrel many a time, especially when camping or hunting. Delish, but not as good as venison. Bambiiiiiiiiiii, yum. Sorry.
Oh man, I had days like that when I was dieting. I’d eat ANYTHING I could get my hands on when I finally broke, and I’m damn sure that no squirrel would have been safe from me.
Not interested in squirrel at all, though do agree it’s a funny comment.
I tried the Atkins diet for 2 or 3 days once. When I started craving saltine crackers, I knew I couldn’t last long on that one. Who craves saltines?!?
I do. :/ With cheddar, or tuna.
I have to admit, I crave multigrain saltines when I’m nauseated but hungry. They make my stomach stop eating my spine and they’ve never made the nausea worse.
Of course, considering I have chronic facial pain and TMJ problems that won’t quit so eating crunchy is painful, and it’s that pain which tends to make me nauseated, eating saltines is like shooting myself in the foot.
I’ll try pretty much anything at least once. Squirrel? Haven’t had the experience (I’ll wait until I do to say whether or not I find it a pleasure), but I’m certainly open to it.
An old boss of mine used to have a saying: the cuter the critter, the sweeter the meat.
Squirrels are darn cute. I’m just saying.
Bwah! Good point. And deer, and lambs, and calves (though I do draw a line at eating veal).
Or come to a country where veal boxes have been outlawed since 1990 ;-)
Rabbit is delicious. Just sayin’.
Rabbits! They are eating my garden, why shouldn’t I eat some of them?!? They eat them all the time in France…
Which leads me to the point that it’s super culturally *narrow*, to put it mildly, to say what animals/insects/vegetables etc. people will “naturally” want to eat. I mean, it goes without saying, really.
I did “Fit for Life” for awhile after college – for “health” reasons – and was just recently remembering how I would get up and eat bananas for breakfast, in the middle of winter, in the midwest. How out-of-sync and unsustainable is that? I felt like crap, too – probably chalked it up to a “cleansing reaction.” Squirrel probably would have made a better breakfast – there were certainly plenty of them, though at that time of year they would have been hibernating… ;^)
I had rabbit once! Without really realizing what it was. It was rabbit soup. Tasted kind of like chicken.
*laughing* Now I am immortalized as the one with hunger for rodent! Thanks for the quote, FN, you made me smile.
Mmm…rodent.
Hahahaha…. Oh man.
I’ve had bear, but no other game (if you consider bear game?) that I know of.
And no, I didn’t take the bear down myself.
One time…I got chased away from camping by a bear. But I never ate one.
Best Comment Evar Arwen!
Although Arwen is the one immortalized with a hunger for rodent, she aptly captured what many of us dieters have probably thought at one time or another.
I can remember when I was dieting with the CEA-HOW program of Overeaters Anonymous, and I was craving an oatmeal cookie with peanut butter. I finally caved and ate one, breaking my 14 days of “abstinence” and having to call and confess to my sponsor. I will never again submit myself to a diet that requires that I commit all my food ahead of time to a sponsor and call with any deviation be it squirrel or gum. Ugh. The insanity.
I too joined OA for a while, then realized the insanity of treating food like alcohol. You have to eat to live, you don’t have to drink booze (or shoot heroin or snort cocaine) to live. It has to be approached differently.
Hee heee Fit for life!
You see ,after the 1989 government change all these crap books started coming to my country…. My mother got this particular set.
I was a nerdy kid and when i was about 10 i dug them up somewhere , started reading and epic lulz followed as i proudly announce i had more knowledge of biology than the author itself.
My favorite moment has to be when he somehow claimed that carbonated drinks are bad because of the CO2 which “has to go somewhere” or some nonsense like that.
Oh, and the “meat eating isn’t human nature” was great too – helping around slaughtering pig was since i was about 5 the most fun experience in a year (that was the same pretty much for every kid of the village ) and i have too stumbled around/did some tasks around rabbit,goat,duck,hen killing and processing….. i actually felt insulted that the author thinks i wouldn’t be able to do something as simple as kill my food and process it.
I bought a homemaker book for women written in the late 19th century that included a recipe for pigeon. No joke. It also had this advice on how to slim your abdomen by sitting in a hot bathtub and doing these rubbing exercises against it. No joke. I miss that book.
I remember the author of the book lauding that she has a size 18 waist without resorting to a corset.
Pigeon is still eaten. It’s just that you’re more likely to find it called ‘squab.’ It’s just a domesticated young pigeon raised for its meat.
I haven’t eaten it, but I’ve got recipes.
My family had pigeons in the past – they are commonly eaten, mostly you make soup of them, or bake them filled with bread fill
I eat pigeon fairly regularly – you see it a lot in restaurants here (UK), and our butcher sells whole birds and pigeon burgers. Very tasty, and not all that pricey. Rabbit is the real cheap option though, as so many people are squeamish about eating fluffy bunnies (often the same people who will happily eat battery chickens, but that’s another story…).
Tangentially: I haven’t dieted for weight loss in about fifteen years. But earlier this year I was on a food restriction for allergies. So I was eating no wheat, gluten, corn, dairy, citrus, sugar, caffeine, booze, chocolate, or anything else that gives joy or meaning to my life.
My husband and I went to a concert up in Seattle and hit a pho restaurant first. And they serve these tiny creampuffs before you get your pho. And before I could help myself I ate two right in a row. And they were so. damn. good.
So I just think, if there’s one thing being on an unnecessary food restriction is good for, it’s the cheating part?
I have had squirrel! Its good!
Hee! Thanks for the laugh – it reminded me of my Mom’s vintage “Joy of Cooking” from the ’40s (it had belonged to her mother) that had these little cartoon illustrated instructions for how to skin a squirrel.
I haven’t eaten squirrel, but I eat bison and elk all the time – it’s not so weird up north.
I totally have a Joy of Cooking with illustrations on how to skin a squirrel! Nothing has ever made me lose my appetite so quickly and so completely.
Squirrels?
Nah, too bone-y. ;)