Kim Honey's rabbit kill follow-up

After finding herself on the receiving end of expressions of outrage from vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike, Toronto Star's Kim Honey next played the victim card, singling out the angriest comments in response to her article, calling them ''virulent'' and ''outright personal attacks'', perhaps to elicit sympathy or support.

As a result of this, even more readers chimed in on the whole thing. The only people who seem supportive of her are those who are able to haphazardly call some animals pets and others dinner. Had a reporter covered a story about someone's taking a dog and bashing the pooch's skull in, all of the readers would be outraged. As one reader pointed out, yes, it's true that worse things happen in slaughterhouses. I think that the important point, however, is that Honey's piece was a completely unapologetic description of a brutal act; just because some people have an ''out of sight, out of mind'' mentality about where their meat comes from doesn't change that fact or make her article any more acceptable. That's just my opinion, though.

Plutarch and bunnies

A friend forwarded me a link to an article by Toronto Star food editor Kim Honey, who I think took the low road this week by playing the sensationalist (and insensitive) card by writing an article about wilderness survivalism that includes a description of her failed attempt to kill a rabbit and features a photo of her ''cuddling'' it before her survivalist instructor struck it three times to slaughter it. There seems to be this post-Pollan trend for food writers these days to try to prove their hipness through descriptions of intentions or acts of brutality -- displaying their attempts at so-called ''conscious eating'' by getting their own hands bloody. I hope the trend passes soon.

One of the last comments left on the Toronto Star's website was a quote from Plutarch's work Moralia that I thought was particularly fitting:

For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man [...] touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? [...] We slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. [...] For the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.