Last night some friends from Milan cooked a fantastic Italian dinner, complete with rooftop aperitifs and platters of cold cuts and blocks of fine cheese and a homemade pasta sauce that took nearly two hours to prepare. I don't know how many liters of libations or pounds of comestibles we made it through; all I know is by the time I left at the end of the evening, I was on the verge of breaking out into a severe meat sweat, the likes of which I hadn't seen since All You Can Eat Wings Night at Hooters was a socially acceptable challenge to undertake.
But as I walked the walk home, clutching my stomach in a world of delicious, I-regret-this-but-not-really pain, I had a truly painful thought. What about the many people in the world who did not eat meat? They would never even get to experience the experience that I was experiencing at that very moment. Because from where else could they possibly derive that sense of unbridled pleasure, followed by that unique thrill of playful remorse? Carbohydrates? Other people? Vegetables?
Highly unlikely, if you ask me. I'd like to meet the man, woman, or loaf of bread that can elicit something even close to the intensity of anticipation that you get when the idea of "bacon" suddenly comes to mind. You know what I'm talking about: you're walking down the street, it's 8:30 in the morning, there's not a whole lot of traffic for some reason, and suddenly you remember that bacon exists, and you start running and running, and people near you think you're just running because you're afraid you might miss the walk signal, but then even after you've crossed the street you keep running, and then they realize, oh, it's bacon time. No one would ever think to themselves: oh, it must be a really fresh salad.
Have you ever heard of a person wearing a shirt with a picture of another person on it? Rhetorical question, because that would be retarded. And have you ever seen someone wearing a shirt with a giant baguette printed on it? If you did I hope you ran the other way, because that person was unquestionably a sociopath. (Banana nut bread might be cool, though I can't really visualize it.) But meats on shirts is nothing if not the new black. I personally own Prosciutto and am hoping to procure a Soppressata in the near future. These make great relaxing-around-the-house shirts, great eating-lunch shirts, great going-out-at-night shirts under other shirts, and are also like very soft towels when you want to wipe your face. I should point out I have no affiliation with meat-shirt manufacturers anywhere; I say these things simply from the vantage point of a grateful consumer.
In the spirit of half-hearted diplomacy, I should also acknowledge that of the many people who refrain from meating, I know that most have "legitimate" reasons, which I will not try to explain, because I don't exactly understand them. But to the ones who simply choose not to eat it because they "would rather not" or because they "just don't want to", I have to say, the sound of my tears is even louder than the sound of the rain outside my window right now, because there is no way you fully understand what you're missing, because if you did, you would stop missing it and start eating something that used to have a personality.
Oh and obviously these are mostly tears of laughter, mixed in with just a few normal-type tears. But all of them -- regardless of where they came from -- are going to just keep flowing, and mixing disgustingly with my salty beads of meat sweat, until more of you man up and learn to let beautiful dead food love you the way it wants to. Or at least until I find my Prosciutto T-shirt so I can properly wipe my face.
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