I slow cooked a three pound cut of chuck roast for dinner tonight in my trusty crockpot. My paranoia levels have consequently fluctuated all day: one minute I'm convinced that the crockpot is an irradiation chamber capable of nuking a stray prion or two into kingdom come; the next minute I'm just as certain it's a petri dish growing enough rogue protein molecules to spongify fifty head of cattle.
If my prose turns spongy in coming weeks, you'll know why.
Moo.
Posted by karik at January 1, 2004 10:20 PM | TrackBackI dunno, I thought the beef tasted fine. No signn of any degnrrititive eff4dvvcts gjrgn 3y rg4k*#2.
Not to sound smug, but those of us who are mostly vegetarian (barring the occasional fish pigout on the west coast) don't have anything to worry about.
...err, except for all those warnings about mercury.
I'd feel pretty smug if I were a vegetarian, George. Go ahead: gloat :-)
Bah, carnivours will be avenged when bovine DNA is secretly incorporated into the beefsteak tomato (as fish DNA is to a lot of tomatos already in mainstream agriculture already) purely to cultivate a vegetative strain of vCJD, so to speak.
Since I like most of you word rustlers, here's a tip. Abandon to co-op when it starts carying Platypus Farms Sertified(sic) Organic Produce.
I know I was dissappointed the first time I tried a beefsteak tomato and found out it wasn't stuffed with meat. I was 8 or 9. I've been traumatized to this day.
But the beefsteak may be chock full of meaty legacy today. A few years back, a writing student of mine had an academic interest in biotechnology while also experiencing a sort of nenewed interest in his family's Hindu dietary practices. I used the "beefsteak tomato" joke as a prompt for him to explore what I'd figure would be an interesting convergence of biotechnology and dietary ethics (wound up more with a paper addressing the plight of the religious vegetation in an overwhelmingly carnivourous culture, which was good but not exactly what I was hoping for, ah well). I know many breeds of tomatoes and variety of other vegetables commonly cultivated in mainstream agriculture contain fish and perhaps other animal DNA for to bolster the produce's resilliance. I'm pretty sure you're garden variety (buh dum dah) vegetarian overlooks the matter, unless said vegetarian is of the pure organic strain with a stake against genetically modified food. However, I'm curious where religiously/spiritually motivated vegetarian or vegan diets would stand on plants incorporating (a more subtle buh dum dah) animal genetic material. My absurdist illustration is the "meat tree" a plant that grows meat, and it's medical cousin the "organ tree."
Seriously, when I was a scientifically precocious 9 or 10 year old, I read up early genetic modification of tomato plants seeking more squarish properties over the spherical tendency (for packaging and transportation purposes) and to this day I'm dissappointed that I haven't seen a perfectly cubed tomato.
Sometimes I think I live under a rock. I had no idea about the piscine properties of some tomatoes. Christ, what's in this cup of Earl Grey I'm drinking right now, I wonder?
I always thought little bits of the Count of Fallodon?
What, you think he just came up with the recipe?
Have you ever heard the saying, "you are what you eat?" Well think about this when someone tells you they are a vegetarian! Yep, they are vegetables!!! LOL. The will never admit the fact that there are scientific studies proving that vegetarianism is bad for your health.
I'd like to invite you to my website and get some great recipes for dinner. They may not be all that healthy either, but you sure will enjoy them a lot more.
Riguardi più caldi,
Chef Giovanni Avella
http://www.harborside.com/~avella/index.htm
Un buon appetito merita il buon alimento!