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Sarah Palin Loves Meat

palin_moose1.jpg

So many tasty morsels so many are uncovering. (All that and not one link to Andrew Sullivan. I’ll spend Saturday enjoying his finds.) One topic Sarah touches on that’s relevant to my interest in food is her love of meat. From page 18:

I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon-burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou.

Note, especially, the medium-well-done. Sarah’s confident that those few liberals who still eat meat eat it rare, medium rare, or (for the snootiest among them) bleu. Moving on, from page 133:

I also trimmed the state food budget by keeping our home’s freezer stocked with wild seafood we caught ourselves, as well as organic protein sources hunted by friends and family. We kept an interesting variety of food that way. If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Italics are Sarah’s. You have to love the gratuitous swipe at that most liberal of all liberals, the vegan. I imagine Sarah’s spotted them driving their Prius’s on her not infrequent forays into urban areas outside of Alaska.

She goes on to explain the challenges of hunting while serving as governor: Hollywood pressure to ban guns, halt hunting, and save wildlife. For Sarah, doing the governor’s job while hunting and fighting off liberals and raising kids and “cooking dinner and washing dishes” (page 108) was no obstacle.

What Sarah is espousing is a proud Conservative version of the liberal foodie. From page 134:

People outside of Alaska are often clueless about our reliance on natural food sources. (You know you’re in Alaska when at least twice a year your kitchen doubles as a meat-processing plant.) They don’t use common sense in considering why our biologists need responsible tools for abundant game management. But as the ninety-year-old Alaska Native leader Sydney Hunnington told Todd, “Nowadays, common sense is an endangered species.”

So wonderfully clear and clean and natural. Can’t we just all agree with her on that? Of course we can! But I’m left wondering, has she ever seen a CAFO? And what, exactly, does she believe “responsible tools for abundant game management” are? No further word on that.

For the record, I’m an omnivore with retrovore tendencies. I ponder the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. And I, too, eat meat.

Via this week’s delectable doubleX Gabfest.

BONUS VIDEO: Fans gone mad…

  • archangel
    ok Joe, I fixed your comments access. I just got home from work and got your message. Your article will take comments now. If you go to your edit page and look under Discussion, there are two boxes to check there that enable comments and enable pings etc. Check both and you're all set. I checked them for you on this article.

    dr.e
  • Leonidas
    Sarah’s confident that those few liberals who still eat meat eat it rare, medium rare, or (for the snootiest among them)

    Italics are Sarah’s. You have to love the gratuitous swipe at that most liberal of all liberals, the vegan.

    What Sarah is espousing is a proud Conservative version of the liberal foodie




    In the excerpts posted I don't see this. No mention of liberals at all. Do you think there are no Conservative Vegans? is being a liberal required for anyone choosing a Vegan diet? Are all Alaskans who like to hunt and eat meat Conservatives? Unless there is something actually there that doesn't appear in your quoted areas, I have to wonder at your observations, they don' seem to have much factual basis in the snippets posted here. Are there other remarks? if so please share and maybe your point will appear valid rather than based on an assumption. So far I see a woman talking about food, and the Alsaskan lifestyle, not conservatism vs liberalism.

    Seems to me, unless there is something you didn't include here in the quoted sections, that makes your point, your operating on pure assumptions.

    I do note that you are smart enough to distance yourself from the ultimate Sarah Palin conspiracy theorist Andrew Sullivan.

    PS. I love meat, meat so rare you can almost hear its last breath as you sink your teeth into it. Also sometimes cooked, like in bacon, that paradise for the taste buds. Ok, I'm hungry now, going to fix a steak.
  • rachelmap
    "If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?"

    OMG! Soylent Green is people!

    Edited to add: I doubt there's anything more complicated or subtle going through her head than "I like meat".
  • Like Leonidas, I don't see the swipes at liberals you're calling out here, Joe.

    However, there IS a cultural gap between people who see management of game / natural resources as part of the lifestyle and those who blithely rely on (and eat) packaged meat. I suspect, if you asked her, that Palin would disdain and despise the CAFO's. Certainly the people I know who hunt for food and/or animal control (NOT mutually exclusive) detest them.

    I don't think, though, that this culture gap is between liberals and conservatives so much as it is between urban and rural.
  • DLS
    1. Joe, you're joining your fellow lefties in imagining and wishing, in place of "observing."

    2. Hopefully the lesser-light attacks on Palin won't be stoked, again. Says more about the attackers...

    3. Plenty of us who aren't far lefties go easy on meat (my statement about its being a "premium food" speaks for itself) and don't scoff at or disrespect veganism. (My friend in DC doesn't eat meat at all, and when I'm with her, I eat no meat, either. No deprivation, no oddity, no game-playing, just no meat eaten.)

    4. CAFOs are somewhat of a handy anti-agribusiness and anti-size far-lefty temper-tantrum object, but the problems with these things (McFarms? Ha) are no surprise. These even made the news here in Detroit metro recently, to once more name an example:

    http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/articl...

    http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/05/caf...

    etc.

    5. Related to this -- what about the current "foodist" fad with "rediscovering" small gardens, in urban areas as well as elsewhere, putting PC fluff on what was long known by most of us simply for the value and the satisfaction gardening and harvesting brings to live. All that we need to see now is adoption of gardening by you know who, and related to that, a new book,

    ** Sarah Palin's Victory Gardening **
  • DLS
    "between urban and rural"

    Yep. Ag apathy, or ignorance...
  • DLS
    "I don't need farms 'cause there's a Safeway across the street" -- cynical statement from an Iowa friend
  • kritt11
    I can't tell you how much it bugs me that this idiot is telling me why God put animals on the planet. In China they think dogs and cats are menu items as well as cattle, pigs and chickens. If it makes you squeamish to think of eating your housepet, it ought to make you think twice about eating that cheeseburger.
  • Being a vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian, or a non-vegetarian is a very personal choice and should stay that way without being advertized. My approach to the question of animal rights is that we should recognize the fact of inequity being the basis of existence. Anything short of that is a utopian thought that can never be realized in practice. However, a bit of kindness towards all beings and recognizing them to be sentient, will go a long way in making living a happy experience for every one concerned – whatever may be our eating habits.

    Ram Ramakrishnan
    http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/A...
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