Breathe
By Teresa Parrales
For years I have been torn between my -selective- love for animals and turning a blind eye when good gastronomy includes them on my plate.
I read a few half-hearted reviews, heard it mentioned in one podcast or another, and refused to fall for it. I didn't want to fall victim to marketing or literary fads (though truth be told, I avoided the subject). But, of course, Exquisite Corpse ended up finding me.
I am -or was?- that person who cries almost every night watching videos of abandoned, mutilated, abused and homeless dogs; videos of shelters around the world crying for help with food, cleaning products and resources for mass sterilizations; signing Greenpeace petitions and reposted any progress in laws of any country that ensures the dignity of animals as sentient beings... Of course, while on weekends I feast at my table where the protagonist is a good piece of meat cooked to perfection or any day of the week I guiltlessly enter a good trio of tacos al pastor.
Hypocritical, then. Or incongruous, if I want to soften the self-insult.
I want to believe that, if instead of animals the only meat available was human, my disgust and my principles would prevent me from doing so.
But what if the world, the system and governments normalized the existence of two types of humans? Those who eat and those who are eaten. Those who are reproduced in series, bred, taken to the slaughterhouse and to the human meat processing industry, legally of course, because we are not going to be criminals, that's all we need! And... those of us who are of another category because we are thinking, sentient and chosen by who knows who to end the lives of many more with the sole purpose of satisfying ourselves.
Subscribe to read the full column...
