Food Conscience
In honor of Mother’s Day, I’d like to talk a little about guilt. Since my mother instilled in us what she called “a healthy sense of guilt,” I became a minor hedonist to balance things out a bit. So I love sex and I love food, and I feel no guilt about eating eggs from caged chickens or slices from a baby cow raised in a dark box or salmon raised on a farm or meat of any kind.
But there are a lot of people who consider these things amoral, some opting never to eat any dead animals, others even opting not to eat anything that came out of an animal, no eggs, no cheese, no milk, no butter. Some even go so far as to say that eating these things brings negative energy into your body, causing you stress and strife and peacelessness.
Some eastern religions claim that garlic and onions are bad for the soul, and to lead a happy life one must strike them from their diets. I recognize that there is a great amount of peace in people who choose this lifestyle. But I refuse to feel guilt over garlic, this most wondrous creation of the gods.