Michael's Corner

Daily writing prompt

What are your feelings about eating meat?

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If you think the poor bastard above choking his steering wheel is having a rough day, imagine a day in the life of the cave dude below: You might come away with a whole new perspective of the term Door Dash.

It took the entirety of the Pliocene Epoch and a portion of the Pleistocene Epoch—a span that began with Australopithecus Afarensis and ended with Homo Neanderthal—for humans to assume the top spot in a vast and complex hierarchy known as “the food chain.” From grunting syllables to the evolution of spoken language, the engineering of the wheel, discovering fire, and developing the ingenuity to fashion weaponry: the completion of the process took approximately 5 million years, and our undaunted ancestors managed this trifecta-plus-one without a decent cup of coffee or the internet. Not even a lousy Hunter/Gatherers for Dummies manual did our once-grunting, deprived-of-a well-developed-prefrontal-cortex relatives have at their disposal. Thus, despite not being an eater of red meat, as a tribute to our ancestors, who labored harder and longer than any of us could imagine in their quest to sit loftily atop the food chain, I partake in an annual tradition: masticating the living shit out of a juicy slab of ribeye.

Moreover, the 5 million years that it required for humans to ascend to the realm of Earth’s dominant species proves that, irrespective of legislation, progress is a process. In other words, we can wring our hands together over climate concerns, global debt, and the disparities between industrial nations and the third world if we’re so inclined, but there shall always stand issues we’ll fail to solve in the span of our lifetimes and gaps we won’t close or narrow to our satisfaction. Like the great Thomas Sowell once said, “There are no solutions, just trade-offs.” The best that we can do is to tinker around the edges and hope we don’t turn small problems into big ones, or big ones into catastrophes. So, if you’re a meat lover, don’t allow pseudo scientists like Bill Gates to guilt you out of a simple pleasure. It wasn’t for nothing that Melinda divorced Bill: the poor girl didn’t want to spend the rest of her days gnashing away on bug gelatin, and neither should you.

Okay, so beef is for dinner. It may make a good pairing with the Hoe-down from Aaron Copeland’s Rodeo Suite, but if you’re waiting on me to slaughter the animal, it’s best that you’re not hungry. In fact, if left to my own devices, I would wait for an animal to die of old age or trick it into committing suicide before I’d kill it.