vol98iss16

Volume 98, Issue 16

October 27, 2008

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News

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Quebecers decry industrial hog expansion

3

Scientists, community groups frustrated with lack of government attention paid to health and environmental risks Max Halparin

The McGill Daily

U

pstream and about an hour southwest of Montreal, manure and urine produced at a new 2,800-pig hog farm in SaintLouis-de-Gonzague is stored in a large container, liquefied, and used as fertilizer – posing serious environmental and health risks for both rural and urban communities, according to environmentalist and author Holly Dressel.

Living in tightly-packed conditions with a near absence of light, pigs are unnecessarily fed hormones and subtherapeutic antibiotics to make them hungry, and these enter surface and ground water supplies.

This process is standard in Quebec industrial pork production – a province home to more pigs than humans – where government subsidies to the pork industry average one dollar per pig, totalling about $9-million annually, Dressel said.

“This is unhealthy food coming from unhealthy animals that causes disease, pollutes our water, and smells terrible,” Dressel said, adding that liquefying manure is unnecessary and dangerous because it contributes to the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant diseases among humans, evidence of which the government often ignores.

Dressel, who has written several books with David Suzuki, including the recent Good News for a Change, lives in St. Chrysostome, Quebec, close to the new 2,800-pig farm.

“Every time, this is presented as a local or rural issue, or about us being ‘fussy,’ when really we’re terrified about our children’s health,” Dressel said.

Jean-Guy Vincent, the president of the union representing Quebec pork farmers (FPPQ), a subsection of the union of Quebec farmers (UPA), said he was not aware of any specific complaints over manure odour and public health. He pointed to improvements in manure-spreading technology that aim to lower odours.

“Pork producers have adopted low-beam spreaders to spread liquefied manure right into the ground....

So it helps to lower odours,” Vincent said in French.

Daniel Green, an environmental scientist with the Sierra Club, has found that in areas where there is more manure to spread than available land, cases of hospitalized gastroenteritis were 30 to 50 per cent higher than areas not in excess of manure.

These manure surplus areas were also associated with high levels of chloroform, which when inhaled can cause internal organ damage, dizziness, and headaches.

Shu Jiang / The McGill Daily

“Quebec has laughably inadequate environmental laws, with no punishment for non-compliance,” said Holly Dressel following her talk on farm policies’ impact on biodiversity at the Two Countries, One Forest conference Thursday.

D

ressel explained diseases linked to hog farms, including MRSA, a staff infection similar to flesh-eating disease, C. difficile, E. coli, and Swine flu, a species-jumping disease exacerbated by pigs’ cramped living quarters.

Dressel, whose most recent book, Who Killed the Queen?, focuses on public health care, also pointed to a study by John’s Hopkins University that found asthma rates quadruple in areas near industrial hog farms.

“You want to get porkchops from an animal who had a life and saw the sunshine. And yes, you’ll pay a little more – but you won’t be put at risk,” Dressel said, adding that to ban similar disease-spreading industry practices in the U.K., the government simply banned the use of crates which prevent female pigs from moving.

In 2002, the Canadian Media Association called for a moratorium on expansion of industrial hog production, similar to plans enacted in Iowa and North Carolina, the two largest hog-producing U.S. states.

G

reen has developed and distributed analytical kits with the WAVENET program, or VIVRE in French, that allow citizens to monitor total chloroform and E. coli contents in nearby water sources.

Johanne Dion, a resident of Richelieu, a town about 40 minutes southeast of Montreal, has fought the introduction of industrial pig farms in her area with a citizens’ group. The town is flanked in three directions by pig farms that spread liquid manure.

One of the farms has a capacity of 5,800 pigs.

“Every time it rains, it’s a real E. ignored recommendations for suscoli soup,” Dion said of the Richelieu tainable and healthy agriculture preriver – the biggest southern tributary sented in the Commission sur l’avenir de l’agriculture et de l’agroalimentaire of the St. Lawrence.

Dion noticed that the citizens’ québécois (CAAAQ), of which he was group – which at one time boast- a part.

“We know that the Quebec goved more than 600 members – has become less active after their efforts ernment will not act aggressively with hog farms that pollute the environyielded few results.

“People realized there’s nothing ment,” Green said. “The fines are so we can do. We don’t have enough small; it’s almost a license to pollute.”

But Clément Salardeaux, a spokesmoney to sue the government or the farm. The laws do not help us; they person for the Quebec Ministry of cannot help us – the laws have been Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food, said written by the UPA and the FPPQ,” that some of the suggestions from Dion said, adding, “The only thing we the CAAAQ report had been incorcan do to fight back is to eat organ- porated into government policy.

Green also emphasized the UPA’S ic....it’s the best thing we can do.”

Dion also criticized the Quebec influence in Quebec politics, and government’s weak environmental said that even areas in surplus of laws for providing no real enforcement mechanisms.

UQAM PhD student Every time it rains, it’s Denise Proulx, who coa real E. coli soup authored Porcheries! La – Johanne Dion, Richelieu resident and porciculture intempestive co-author of a book on Quebec’s hog industry au Québec with Dion and others, said she was most concerned with the industry’s effect on water quality, antibiotic manure have been given additional resistance, and climate change. With hog permits. He said that while the 63 per cent of pork exported from CAAAQ asked for major reforms, the Quebec, she suggested agriculture UPA made its interests clear to the practices should follow Quebec’s government.

“We don’t think the government 2007 law on sustainable developwill have the political courage to ment.

Proulx urged Quebeckers to make change the agriculture regime in this province,” Green said, adding, “The eco-conscious consumer choices.

“I think people have to take indi- UPA wants to keep status quo, and vidual action to contribute to change the Quebec government does not more rapidly.... Eat food in connec- want to take on the UPA.” Dressel noted that economic bention with our seasons,” she said.

Green claims that the province has efits for Quebec as often cited are

“

reason to continue hog expansion – despite few jobs being created with industrial operations.

While Vincent estimated that a farm with 1,000 pigs would have about four to eight employees, Dressel estimated the number was closer to three or four employees for farms like the 2,800-sow farm in Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague.

Vincent also said he was not aware of any pig farms in Quebec with more than 2,000 pigs.

Dressel echoed Green’s sentiments about lax government policy, and criticized the provincial Liberal government for rescinding the moratorium on hog expansion in December 2005. The moratorium, introduced under the Parti Quebecois four years earlier, prevented expansion of the industry onto new lands.

“We have regulations in place, and they’re wonderful – my favourite part is they’re not enforced,” Dressel noted sarcastically, adding, “The whole thing is ludicrous.... There are no fines, no consequences, no means of measuring to see whether farmers are in compliance, so what is the point of having regulations?” she said.

In Quebec, municipal governments and the Ministry of Environment regulate hog farm expansion, but Dressel said the Ministry rarely denies a permit.

L

isa Bechthold and her community of Forty Mile County in Alberta successfully stopped what would have been one of the largest hog farms in Canada eight years ago. Bechthold said her community was successful in organizing through mailouts, door-to-door education programs, garnering media attention, and putting adequate pressure on local governments.

Bechthold is a consultant with Beyond Factory Farming, a group that created a community guide for citizens’ groups who are interested in fighting the introduction of an industrial farm. She advocates for the government to invest in small-scale, mixed-farming that grow vegetables and grains as well as some livestock.

“We need to change the production system, and get away from specialization and the liquid slurry system,” Bechthold said.

D

ressel also explained the divisive social and political impacts that Quebec’s hog industry can have on communities.

“This is a very unpleasant industry, known to threaten and bully people, likely to get hold of your farmers who are having a rough time and say, ‘Let us spread all this poop on your farm.’ Most go bankrupt, at which point, a large company takes over the land – it’s happened so many times it’s heartbreaking.”

4

News

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Bringing organic meat to the city Farmers harness creative tactics to reach a growing market Braden Goyette

The McGill Daily

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ou don’t have to be a militant vegan to eat more sustainability.

Small establishments around Montreal are trying to offer customers alternatives to industrial farming, while still accommodating a variety of diets and lifestyles.

Jeff Asch, owner of Cote-des-Neiges organic store EcollegeY, described his business as one of the few of its kind in Montreal – a grocery store, rather than a high-end health food establishment, that appeals to customers outside the demographic of “vegetarian pill poppers.” “Meat definitely is a great part of our business,” he said.

Organic Campus, a McGill group that supplies students with organic food, said that logistical issues, rather than ideological ones, keep the group from offering meat.

“We rarely carry meat because our farmer doesn’t have enough supply coming in,” explained Matthew Howco, coordinator of Organic Campus. “Occasionally he brings it to market, but that’s very rare. If we

contacted an alternative supplier for meat only, there’d be a whole other issue with storage.”

Eating organic isn’t just for the well-off, either. Debbie Timmons of Ferme le Crepuscule, a small farm outside Trois-Rivieres that serves the greater Montreal area, said that they cater to a diverse clientele from a variety of income groups.

Asch also attested that anyone can make eating organic work with their budget. “We get plumbers and janitors and security guards. It’s just a choice they’ve made,” Asch said.

Even though meat production inherently involves higher carbon emissions than plant cultivation, it’s a big step up from factory farming.

In order to produce meat on a large scale, conventional farms cut costs in ways that compromise the health of the animals, according to people in the organic foods industry.

Six months before cattle are slaughtered, Asch explained, they are typically brought to a feedlot and put on a diet of about 90 to 95 per cent corn.

“Cattle are grazers. They’re not supposed to be eating grain, and it comes close to killing them,” Asch

said, explaining that to prevent death, the cattle then receive antibiotics that stimulate their appetites and cause them to eat excessively, leading to strips of fat in the meat.

As Canadian meat is distributed extensively around the world – contributing to larger carbon emissions with the fuel consumed in transportation – the industry has also been cited as a major culprit of global warming.

But an April study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that even though food may be transported thousands of kilometres, only 11 per cent of the carbon footprint from meat comes from transportation; most of it – 83 per cent – comes from the growth and production of the food. The researchers argued that switching one day’s worth of calories from meat and dairy to chicken and fish will cause a comparable reduction in the carbon footprint.

The study did not examine organic meat, or its reduced use of resources in production.

Going organic is a complicated process, involving meeting strict standards and large amounts of

paperwork. Farmers end up raising smaller numbers of animals, feeding them a certain diet, and taking care of the soil – all of this while being monitored by a third party certification body, according to Asch.

Because small farms don’t benefit from economies of scale, they have to get creative with distribution.

Ferme le Crepuscule delivers client orders to 25 drop-off points around the city. They operate on a family basis, currently servicing around 800

families. South of the border, Mount Airy Farms, a small organic farm in Virginia, is looking into selling their stock live to restaurants and grocery stores and letting them take care of the processing, according to Mike Quick, who handles their sales.

As stands now, organic meat is more expensive, but it doesn’t have to be.

“It’s supply and demand,” said Howco.

“If consumers made the choice to eat organic meat...or less meat as a whole, organic meat would go down in price.”

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

News

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

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Immigrants drawn to rural meat-packing Shannon Kiely

The McGill Daily

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rooks, Alberta is a slaughterhouse town. The town’s largest employer, Lakeside Packers – a meat processing plant acquired by American multinational Tyson Foods in 2001 – staffs about 2,400 employees, including many of Dinka origin from southern Sudan.

Because Dinka society is centred on cattle in bride wealth exchanges and inheritance, some academics consider this employment ironic because Southern Sudanese at the plant slaughter cows.

“The meat-packing world is a harsh world…. It’s physically and psychologically exhausting.... It’s not the kind of work most Canadians want to do,” explained Carol Berger, sessional lecturer in the Anthropology Department at McGill who carried out fieldwork in Brooks between 1999 and 2005 for her masters thesis on southern Sudanese Dinka immigrant workers at Lakeside.

Berger, however, cautioned against romanticizing links between

the Dinka and their cattle, explaining that cattle shaped their worldview because it ensured their livelihood. “[The Dinka in Brooks] are practical people,” Berger said. “[Cattle] are bank accounts on hooves.”

Assured or anticipating employment, foreign workers immigrated to Brooks.

Some of the southern Sudanese in Brooks have bought houses, married, and begun having families, demonstrating a commitment to their lives in Alberta, Berger said. According to Lakeside, some immigrant employees have been with the company for 15 years. ­ Yet over the course of her fieldwork, Berger observed systematic discrimination against some of the Dinka living in Brooks.

“Sudanese have trouble getting rental accommodation, [experience] racial epithets, and simple, stupid prejudice that suggested that people coming from Africa will by definition be a problem… It’s real cowboy county,” she said.

Of the 1,100 visible minorities in Brooks, the majority are Dinka. The 2006 Canadian census reported that

2,080 immigrants live in Brooks, up from 640 in 1991. In the same time frame, Lakeside Packers underwent a massive expansion that saw the installation of machinery capable of slaughtering 4,700 cows daily, creating 1,600 new positions.

The slaughterhouse employees also face difficult work conditions.

Lakeside employees may be stationed on the kill floor, where the animals are slaughtered, “on the knife,” where they cut cows into pieces, or on trimming duty where fat is sliced off of slabs of beef. The kill floor is the only area of the plant that isn’t refrigerated at temperatures below 10 degrees Celcius. Some of Berger’s informants who found the cold stressful requested to work on the kill floor where temperatures rise to about 30 degrees.

According to Andrew Plumbly, the Director of Global Action Network, a Canadian environmental organization that investigates the treatment of animals in the meat-packing industry, said slaughterhouses are known for some of the worst working conditions and highest injury rates in the country.

“You’re freezing...there are sharp

saws, blades, and the rest of it. It’s hard and dangerous. You slaughter animals that don’t want to be and tend to become very animated,” Plumbly said.

Lakeside maintains injuries are few because routine machinery checks are performed nightly. The company has staff doctors constantly on site.

Faced with such difficult work, its high employee turnover rate is not surprising. Chronically understaffed, Lakeside is forced to look outside of Canada for employees like the Dinka. Currently a slaughterhouse recruiting team is on a mission in the Philippines.

A Lakeside employee who requested anonymity explained that the company undertakes recruiting missions across Canada and in the developing world that include numerous information sessions, interviews, and medical exams to place candidates in the appropriate department.

“You go and bring back new workers. We’re always looking,” she said.

Yet recruitment missions targeting foreigners are not characteristic of all slaughterhouses across the country.

Elizabeth Dembil, the general

director general of Carrefour de liaison et d’aide multi-ethnique (CLAM), an organization that helps immigrants in Montreal find employment, said meat-packing plants around Montreal are not staffed by immigrants. “[Slaughterhouses] try to recruit, but [immigrants] are not interested.

Canada chooses [immigrants] that are educated.... Are you going ask an engineer to be a meat packer?” she said.

Lilydale, a chicken processing plant 45 minutes outside of Montreal, does not deliberately recruit immigrant workers.

“We collect resumes and hire employees like any other company,” Connie Smart, Lilydale corporate communications manager, said.

Outside the Lilydale plant, older Quebecois women in lab coats and hard hats took smoke breaks while there were no visible minorities in sight.

Statistics Canada’s 2006 census reported that visible minorities make up 22.8 per cent of Quebec’s population, and only 13.9 per cent in Alberta.

McGill’s cafs offer patchy support for kosher, halaal diets Ethan Feldman News Writer

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cGill’s cafeterias, contracted to Chartwells Food Services, have been long chastised for failing to carry foods that are vegan, kosher, or halaal, making it difficult for students with religious dietary needs to keep proper nutrition.

Last year, Chartwells’ cafeterias began serving kosher sandwiches and pastries. They are all branded with the encircled “MK” logo of the Jewish Community Council of Montréal, and are certified kosher for all sects of Judaism by the Montreal Va’ad Hair.

Hartlee Zucker, president of Hillel McGill, was happy that the decision was made independent from any action by Hillel. “[There are] 5,000 Jewish students who encompass a wide spectrum of observance,” wrote Zucker in an email to The Daily.

Zucker added that it was very important for every cafeteria to stock kosher foods. “[It] demonstrates a level of cultural sensitivity that will allow many Jewish students to feel more at home on campus,” she said.

Ghetto Shul, a grassroots studentrun synagogue, serves kosher meals on holidays, and may potentially serve kosher lunches in the future, according to Bez Scimansky, who works at the Hillel House.

Scimansky also recommended the

Second Cup on McGill College or the Chabad Centre on Peel, which both serve kosher food. The Hillel House on Stanley accepts McGill meal plan cards in its fully kosher kitchen.

Special treatment for religious dietary concerns aside, Lisa Winberg, VP External of McGill Hillel, said that even though she doesn’t follow the religious guidelines, she chooses kosher sandwiches for their quality.

“The kosher tuna sandwiches at the library are quite good,” she said in an email to The Daily.

Halaal food is not as readily available as Kosher goods on campus, although new rez and Repath caf do dish it out.

Sana Saeed, VP External of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and a Daily columnist, was disappointed with the shortage of halaal options.

“In Montreal there are tons of Halaal restaurants, making the lack of halaal foods at McGill surprising,” Saeed said in an email to The Daily, adding that it was crucial to nutritional inclusivity that there were kosher options available at McGill.

Both Muslim halaal and Jewish kashrut are religious prescriptions of what is permitted for the faithful to eat.

While the certification and qualification process of both halaal and kosher are similar, they are not interchangeable to the most stringent followers.

In both the Jewish slaughtering ritual Shechita and the Muslim ritual Dhabh, animals are slaughtered quickly, painlessly, and humanely with a single

uninterrupted sweep of the jugular.

But nuanced differences do exist between the two rituals. For example, the whole cow or sheep is halaal, but only the front half is considered kosher. To be kosher, a prayer must be recited once a day by the butcher, but in Dhabh, Allah’s name must be invoked individually on each animal.

“Muslims are permitted to eat properly kosher meals if non-halaal choices are unavailable,” said Saeed.

The most religious Muslim students, however, are either forced to eat vegetarian meals or must dash off-campus because there are not many halaal choices for them. Al-Taib in Gert’s is halaal, but the fact that it is situated in a bar makes it impossible for MSA to endorse them.

“It’s a constant balancing act,” said Nafay Al-Alam Choudhury, former president of MSA. “Sometimes, it’s impossible to stay halaal on campus.”

Saeed believed that around 50 per cent of Muslims on campus keep halaal. These students mostly eat the newly available kosher non-meat products, which the MSA welcomes.

She also described a personal gratitude to the Midnight Kitchen, which provides choice to both the large and active Muslim and vegan populations. “[It’s] the most inclusive food service on campus, in terms of dietary, ethical, and financial restrictions,” she said.

Currently, the halaal options provided by Chartwells vary in the avail-

ability, and often don’t exist at all.

A representative for Chartwells said that menu expansion was contingent on student opinion.

“Chartwells is always accepting input from customers upon menu

choice, this decision to serve kosher items was likely made in response to McGill student feedback.”

Bill Pageau, McGill’s Food Services Administrator, was unavailable for comment.

Gerts’ Al Taib is one of McGill’s few Halaal options.

Sarah Youngson/ The McGill Daily

6 News Sustainable seafood swims into Chartwells Natascia Tamburello News Writer

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s of this month, McGill’s food service provider, Chartwells will offer a fully-sustainable seafood menu through its partnership with SeaChoice, a Canadian organization that helps people select ocean-friendly seafood.

Tazim Mohamed, general manager of Chartwells for McGill, said the University and its students are paying more attention to the sustainability of the food they eat.

“I think it’s becoming a big issue for everyone, not just for Chartwells,” said Mohamed.

Over-fishing, pollution, and global warming have depleted most fish and invertebrate stocks, which can’t meet market demand.

Mohamed noted that sustainable seafood would not be more expensive.

Before classifying seafood as sustainable, Mohamed explained that the criteria considered the fishing method and its effects on habitat degredation, whether stocks in a given area are depleted or threatened, and whether the species contained contaminants.

“If the product doesn’t meet these criteria, we try to avoid serving it,” Mohamed said. “It would be vain to

say that we’re pioneers. We’re just trying to be a good corporate citizen and responsible in the industry.”

Canada’s lax seafood labelling regulations, however, make it difficult to determine where fish came from or how it was caught, explained Shauna MacKinnon, a biologist with the Living Oceans Society, which promotes environmental stewardship in aquatic environments.

“Lack of clear labelling is definitely a problem in Canada,” said MacKinnon. “Europe and the United States have much more stringent laws than we do.”

Although large, predatory fish such as tuna can accumulate mercury and PCBs in their flesh, and farmed fish can contain antibiotics and other chemical products, this is not necessarily noted on packaged fish.

Further, gill-netting hikes the rate of discarded bycatch – non-target species totalling millions of metric tonnes a year – and bottom-trawling employs weighted nets that scrape the seabed leaving a scarred and barren landscape in their wake.

Seafood stocks are unlikely to recover without intervention.

MacKinnon suggested that concerned consumers ask before buying or contact the Minister of Agriculture to demand better labelling for seafood that will allow consumers to make informed decisions.

Christine Albanese for The McGill Daily

G.Sammi dishes up a tilapia, a white-fleshed fish in the New Rez caf

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

Fishy business at B.C. fish farms Widespread environmental degredation accompanies growing industry Alison Withers

The McGill Daily

“T

here are no commercial fisheries left in the world for Atlantic salmon. When you see ‘Fresh Atlantic Salmon,’ it’s farmed,” explained Catherine Stewart, salmon farming campaign manager for Living Oceans, a marine conservation agency in British Columbia.

“And you shouldn’t eat it until the industry cleans itself up,” Stewart added.

Farming of Atlantic Salmon – a non-native species to the Pacific – took root in B.C. during the late eighties due to the ideal conditions found in sheltered inlets and bays.

A Norwegian-owned company, Marine Harvest Canada, is typical of the industry. During the 20-month growing cycle for salmon, the company feeds its stocks fishmeal, a combination of processed fish and fish oil that comes in pellet form from fish farms in Chile or Peru.

According to Alexandra Morton, a marine biologist with the Rainforest Alliance Association, the use of fish meal requires a large amount of energy for processing, shipping, and feeding.

“You’re fishing huge stocks of fish that could be eaten directly by humans, instead of used to feed other fish” Morton said.

Clare Dackman, Environmental Relations Director for Marine Harvest Canada, said a dye-colourant – SalmoFan – is often added to fish to mute the grey tint typical of the farmed species to make them resemble their shrimp-fed wild counterparts.

Dackman said he did not doubt the safety of the additives, and that Canada has no regulations requiring a label to inform consumers of the dye.

Despite potential uncertainties regarding the dyes, marine activists are more concerned with the environmental degradation of the B.C. coastal ecosystem.

In 1988, the federal government transferred responsibility and oversight of fish farms to provincial governments. But Morton said there are no provincial regulations against waste dumping, and wild salmon stocks are hurt by escaping and diseased farmed fish.

“Every time there is an issue, the provincial and federal governments are pointing at each other,” Morton said. “If it went to the federal government, they would be responsible for environmental effects outside the pens.”

According to Stewart, fish farm location is problematic because fish faeces and waste are dumped straight into the ocean, and that sea lice, small marine parasites, pose an even larger problem because they breed quickly in overcrowded salmon farms.

Stewart explained that juvenile wild salmon pick up sea lice from fish farms on their migration from river beds.

“Sea lice on the farmed fish produce millions and millions of eggs, and the effect on wild salmon is causing a huge decline in cascading effects on the entire ecosystem,” she said, adding the fish are often treated with antibiotics, some of which aren’t legal under Health Canada.

“Companies are getting emergency use permits [for antibiotics], but they do it all the time and it becomes stan-

dard operating procedure,” she said.

While there is no evidence of interbreeding between the five kinds of Pacific salmon and the farmed Atlantic salmon, farmed fish escapes can hurt the wild stocks by competing for food and destroying river beds where wild salmon lay their eggs.

Dackman said his company adhered to regulations and maintained environmental sustainability measures.

“We’ve been a leader in working with the regulatory community – there’s a zero tolerance for escapes.…

We use the strongest nets available.”

Dackman added that she didn’t think regulatory oversight would change because the current system was highly comprehensive.

“The current provincial regulation system is the most stringent in the world…. I don’t know how they would improve that,” she said.

Pamela Parker, Managing Director for Pacific Salmon Forum, a sevenperson research team commission

by B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell in 2004, said the current debate over fish farms demonstrated public skepticism.

Stewart recommended a move to on-shore farms using containers would preserve jobs and lessen the environmental impact.

“There’s a tremendous number of pressures facing our wild salmon: overfishing, habitat destruction, and now climate change,” Parker said.

“We’re tipping these stocks over the edge...and it’s imperative that we fix those threats that we can.”

The B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands declined to comment for this piece, and the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans was unavailable before press time.

News

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Eating on the streets

7

The challenges of Montreal food banks Erin Hale

The McGill Daily

Y

ou can’t just show up to many of Montreal’s 16 major city food banks.

Many trips require a mess of requirements – proof of address, proof of welfare, proof of work, and sometimes an interview – and visits are restricted to only once or twice a month.

According to Matthew Pierce, director of the Old Brewery Mission, the list of verifications aims to motivate people to establish stable living conditions.

“One reason [for requirements] is to encourage people to seek solutions and not get ensconced in a shelter,” he said.

The Mission is Quebec’s largest men’s shelter, the largest women’s shelter in Canada, and one of the few which has none of the require-

ments standard in other shelters.

Laden with stipulations and inadequate provisions, food banks are not feasible options for many who may be in the greatest need of their services.

“Ever seen [a] Sun Youth [food bank]? They have stuff you wouldn’t even sell in stores – they keep the good stuff for employees,” said a homeless man known as Superman who lives with a group of men on the grounds of the Anglican Christ Church on Ste. Catherine.

Superman explained that food banks are unrealistic options for the homeless population, leaving many to dine on a combination of produce, fast food, and Tim Horton’s.

“I used to eat McDonald’s every day, and then my heart started to hurt – so I switched to Subway. It’s healthier,” said New Kid, another of the Christ Church gang.

But Matthew Kay, director of NDG Food Depot, explained that

homeless present a greater challenge to food banks than clients with apartments.

“The homeless have certain unique nutritional needs. The biggest problem is we give people stuff to prepare at home, and a lot of them don’t have stoves,” said Kay. “Many [also] just don’t have utensils or can openers.”

But the homeless aren’t picky, just hungry. When asked what kind of food another man named Toby likes, Superman replied, “He likes to eat food.”

“Food is food,” Toby agreed.

Superman, Kay, and Pierce all noted, however, that welfare fails to move the homeless from the streets, mainly because it simply does not offer enough – only $536 per month according to le Collectif pour un Quebec Sans Pauvreté. “$500 a month [in welfare] won’t last anyone 48 hours with heat, bills, phones, bus passes, food. I was

starved when I had an apartment,” said Superman.

A side effect of welfare insufficiency, Pierce noted, is that midmonth, when many deplete their checks, the Old Brewery’s clientele spikes.

Furthermore, Montreal shelters receive only 20 per cent of their budget from the provincial government, forcing them to rely on individual or corporate donations, the income from which is inconsistent.

Shelters in Toronto receive full government funding.

For the homeless, to get a job and stop relying on welfare just isn’t that easy, according to Pierce.

“We’re talking about Montreal’s most excluded, vulnerable people, who don’t have options,” said Pierce. “Thirty-five per cent of our clients suffer from debilitating mental illness. Those clients are not people who can go out and get a job. A background of a homeless person is more complex than peo-

ple realize.”

Unfortunately, the food banks the homeless can access seem just as illequipped to provide for them as the welfare checks. “[Some places] give you twoand-a-half bags of food and it’s supposed to last two people a week. I went through mine in one-and-a-half days,” Superman said.

Superman and his friends make do with what they can acquire themselves from welfare and minimum wage jobs. Sometimes, their methods are creative, Superman said, claiming he has traded joints for hamburgers at a local restaurant.

“I haven’t lost weight since I was on the streets because people are more willing to give you food. You get a lot of people who like to measure where their money goes,” he said. “At the end of the day my belly’s full and I have money for cigarettes and pot.”

University of Ottawa

Graduate studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences

It starts here.

Why choose the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences for graduate studies? t

Funded research: second in Ontario and among the top 5 in Canada in research support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

t

Financial support: over $18,000 a year for 4 to 5 years for doctoral students, and over $16,500 for master’s students.

t

Bilingual environment: programs offered in English or in French, the choice is yours!

More than 240 professors and 19 graduate programs.

Why I chose the University of Ottawa: “I chose the University of Ottawa because Canada’s bilingualism matters to me and because the University of Ottawa provides attractive funding that lets students focus on their studies. The quality of teaching at the University of Ottawa is unparalleled. The Graduate School of Public and International Affairs stands out in this regard. Its professors are not only excellent academics, but also seasoned practitioners. They bring both theoretical and practical knowledge to the classroom. What’s more, they help students develop beyond the classroom by providing meaningful advice and opportunities to put passion into practice.”

Ian Anderson, master’s student Graduate School of Public and International Affairs

www.socialsciences.uOttawa.ca scsgrad@uOttawa.ca

Le Délit,

le seul journal francophone de l’Université McGill, est à la recherche de

chefs de pupitre

pour ses sections Nouvelles et Société. rec@delitfrancais.com

8

News

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Campus eye Fed up with drawn-out negotiations, about 150 of McGill’s non-academic workers picketed outside the Roddick Gates Thursday, shouting, “solidarity” and “What do we want? A fair contract.”

McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) has been negotiating a new contract with the University since December, and rejected the most recent offer last week.

McGill proposed a 12 per cent salary increase over four years, but the union, which represents 1,800 technicians, nurses, library and clerical workers, will not accept an offer below 13 per cent.

“I’d like to see a lot more than that, but McGill says they don’t have the money,” said MUNACA president Maria Ruocco.

MUNACA was satisfied with the University’s offers on increased liberation time, summer Fridays, and comprehensive job security.

Recognizing that neither would budge on salary increases, a conciliator mediating negotiations urged the two parties to reevaluate their positions.

McGill and MUNACA will meet again in early November – Shannon Kiely

GLENDON

Stephen Davis / The McGill Daily

MASTER’S in PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS Canada’s premier bilingual program in public and international affairs prepares students for leadership roles in the public service, public affairs journalism, non-governmental organizations and business-government relations.

OUR BILINGUAL PROGRAM • A unique approach to the study of public institutions and their domestic and international settings.

• A central location in Toronto, a global city with world-wide connections.

• A commitment to bilingualism, helping each student to achieve a high level of proficiency.

• Enhanced learning through a paid internship as well as an exchange option with a university in Canada or abroad.

• Guaranteed minimum funding of $10,000/year to every student.

APPLICATIONS NOW BEING ACCEPTED FOR FALL 2009 “By bringing together global and domestic issues and drawing on Glendon’s interdisciplinary and bilingual tradition, the new School is helping to prepare Canada’s future public leadership.”

ALEXANDER HIMELFARB Canadian Ambassador to Italy; former Clerk of the Privy Council Chair of the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs Advisory Committee

www.glendon.yorku.ca/gspia

Glendon Campus, York University 2275 Bayview Avenue Toronto ON Canada M4N 3M6 publicaffairs@glendon.yorku.ca 416 736-2100 ext. 88565

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Death is not a failure

volume 98 number 16

Commentary

9

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Komal Ali, Julie Alsop, Adriana Celada, Emma Chait, Lynne Champoux-Williams, Maeve Clougherty, April Engelberg, Ethan Feldman, Sophie Gaillard, Richard Hink, Catherine Howells, Sean Iacurti, Douglas Jack, Patrick Janukavicius, Shu Jiang, Alex Knoll, Daniel Lametti, Andrea Maldonado, Casey McLachlan, Midnight Kitchen gals, Roxanne Kirshenbaum, Maia Reed, Natascia Tamburello, Kyle Valade, Arie Voorman, Joseph Watts, Sarah Youngson

Ricky Kreitner

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” – 1 Corinthians 15:55 Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

T

here was an article in The New York Times last week about a sweet old woman, Marie-Dennett McDill. After being diagnosed with fast-spreading cancer this August, McDill checked herself into her beloved, posh Carlyle Hotel in New York to spend her dwindling days.

It was a touching human-interest story that certainly made one think of the way one wants to leave this bizarre world. She went out with a bang, and why should she not? Far better, I say, than the sterility of the modern hospital death, nurses rushing and TV sets blaring. Reading this story, I admired the woman’s faithful Epicureanism.

Which is why it struck me all the more to read this quote from her son: “It wasn’t a fight for life anymore, but a matter of time.”

This model of illness as a fight is a fairly modern construction, and one to which I adamantly object. It rings as inhumane, almost to the point of cruelty.

A fight is something one can either

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to find out there were psychosomatic effects of all this “fight to the death” mentality.

The Onion had a headline a few years ago that humorously but accurately reflected the ridiculousness of this sentiment: “World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Per cent.”

Almost universally, death is the most painful part of life. But it need not be an anti-climactic defeat, a lost battle in the lopsided crusade for impossible immortality – in a word, surrender. The onset of death – in a person who has lived a long and fulfilling life – can be seen as a victory or a reward, celebration of successful completion in what Robert Frost called “the trial by existence.” What is more powerful than sending a weary loved one into the sweet, sweet slumber of the beyond?

It is absurd – and, most importantly – morally hazardous to wage a war on things invincible. When the painful time comes for each of us to bid adieu to our loved ones, let us congratulate them on their successful completion of the universe’s

strange test.

Walt Whitman gets the final words: From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you, You are to die – let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate, I am exact and merciless, but I love you – there is no escape for you. …

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions, Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile, You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick, You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends, I am with you, I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated, I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

first week and a half. Then on a special Tuesday, an hour before my 8:30 a.m. class, disaster struck.

The manufacturers of my alarm somehow wired it so that on this day it would blare twice the usual decibels allowed in most countries. This gave a new meaning to the phrase “loud as fuck.”

After ascertaining that my ears weren’t bleeding, I slammed the alarm with such ferocity that there was no way it would ring again, and ring again it didn’t. Thus, I woke up for my 8:30 a.m. lecture at 8:25 a.m.

My humble abode lies on University Ave., while my class was starting on the other side of campus.

To call my next action “sprinting” is an understatement. With my conscience and thoughts of oncoming midterms flying at me, I started yanking on clothes, most of which I only got on at the red light two blocks from home.

It’s a miracle my laptop stayed in its bag, and a bigger miracle that McGill Security didn’t come after me.

Between the running effort and the guilty conscience, I know my face had a determined-criminal-just-escaped-outta-jail look.

Finally bursting through the auditorium doors, I discovered that life was normal. Students casually strode up to find seats. The professor lazily flicked through the textbook. The clock read 8:29 a.m.

In the next hour, I listened to a lovely lecture which I reviewed again (through the Internet) a few weeks later in preparation for my midterm.

And lo and behold, it was different.

I was certain that in the lecture the prof had talked about something – the superior colliculus integrating cortical as well as retinal information – which definitely was not on the net. This was wonderful news. A true moral to my story. Something to sing about or jive to.

It better be on the exam.

Ricky’s column appears every Monday. You can reach him at pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

Running to class for a reason Life Lines

The Daily is published on most Mondays and Thursdays by the Daily Publications Society, an autonomous, not-for-profit organization whose membership includes all McGill undergraduates and most graduate students.

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win or lose. I completely understand the desire for a loved one to “win their fight” with whatever ails them – physically, mentally, or otherwise. But I reject the construct that views such an ailment as something that one can “defeat,” “beat,” or “win over.”

There are a few people close to me who were diagnosed with illnesses in the last year or two that, given enough time, have a mortality rate of 100 per cent. My earnest attempt at stoicism does not go so far as to allow me to reject western medicine and leave it all up to Providence.

However, I believe that to frame a patient as waging “battle” against their illness carries with it some cumbersome implications. Most importantly, it frames death as a failure – of the doctors, the family, and friends, and worst of the all the patient herself. It implies that if the patient had only fought a little bit longer, perhaps the battle would have turned in her direction. Sometimes it is best to let go.

Such an atmosphere of battle is emotionally debilitating for all involved, and I wouldn’t be surprised

Johanu Botha

Y

ou know that thing they tell us about “needing” to go to class? That spiel about how “actually being present” tends to make a difference? The “you-mightmiss-what-I’ll-only-say-in-class” prof talk?

Yeah, that thing. Well, they better be right.

Professors go to great lengths to make subjects discussed in lecture available outside of class. Some genius figured out how to put slides, notes, extra reading, and a whole variety of academic paraphernalia on that plate of information from which we can eat at any time: the Internet.

I assume it’s the same genius who scheduled classes for 8:30 a.m. in the morning, that introduces this dilemma. The person in the front of the room tells us that there is data on the net that will make any notetaker drool while claiming that come rampant cyclists or a Montreal snowstorm, we better be in class. Irony much?

But I, being the reluctant owner of a pesky conscience, decided that since I am not at university out of my own pocket, it is only right that I attend every lecture which my parents’ money is paying for. This idealistic strategy served me well...for the

Johanu’s column appears every Monday. Send him your notes to lifelines@mcgilldailycom.

10 Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

We can all take responsible meal actions How Newton, Pythagoras, and morality come to dinner

Adriana Celada

HYDE PARK

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e live in an era when it’s hard to believe whether Newton’s Third Law or – more philosophically (and trendily) speaking – karma really exists. Very few actions bring immediate results, and that leads us to think that they are nonexistent.

When I was little, I asked myself whether the juice I dumped in the sink and the business I did in the toilet went through different ducts.

I thought that maybe great scientists had a machine to separate water from the junk I dumped so it wasn’t all a great mess. Oh, what a disappointment. Our whole lives we have been accustomed to automated actions without thinking about how things get to us and where they go after we use them.

It takes us less than a kilocalorie to turn a light on, but we don’t see how it is produced. If, as many people used to, we lived in the woods, lighting our own fires, carrying our own logs, I’m sure we would think twice before leaving the heating on while we’re away.

And these concepts are easily applied to tonight’s dinner. I know meat eaters, and they don’t like to learn how cows and pigs are treated and slaughtered. There’s no need

to gross anyone out, we’re all more intelligent than that.

There’s a Latin American saying that goes: “Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente” (or, not seeing means not minding). We are probably not as evil as that. We don’t want horrible things to happen to animals; however, we are not responsible enough to choose wisely. Why? Because we are unaware of what our decisions involve. We go to the supermarket and have the power to choose from the most miserable to the luckiest cow – as weird and as simple as that. Here is where responsibility plays its role.

If I am going to eat meat, I commit to take all the grace or guilt of the animal’s suffering or joy because I made that choice. No one is exempt because ignorance is never an excuse.

Last week I read a column in The McGill Tribune, written by a vegetarian who wrote, “Any group that opposes animal testing for lifesaving medical purposes is deplorable.” Where is the consistency? You don’t want animals to die unless they die for you? There is a great debate on whether animals are equal to humans, which the author also mentions in her article. Pythagoras said, “Man is the measure of all things” and in one of its many interpretations, we believe we have being conceded with the power of judging according to our own perspective. We are not one to judge and we are not one to

decide over any other beings’ lives.

Why wouldn’t one run over a dog, but will step on a spider? Double morality shoots back.

If I was a meat eater, at this point, I would be thinking, “And now what am I supposed to do?

Am I not already fighting myself enough with school and life?”

Simple actions: Let’s be responsible in the three basic human physical needs. Food: look for free range and responsible products (or go vegan), but watch it – just because it’s organic doesn’t mean it’s necessarily humane. Clothing: no sweat shops please. Housing: turn off the lights and turn down the heat when you leave. Act as if the whole world was your house, because it is.

One last thought. I believe many of us are missing the point of living on this Earth. We are missing the beauty of smiling. Let’s leave the thirst for power aside, and let’s occupy an important role in our society, one that makes us valuable for being helpful. It’s time to respect and time to love. Let’s treat other beings like we would like to be treated without judging. Give yourself a change and sit down by the lake, letting bugs friendly crawl up your shoes, not destroying but embracing the place we live in.

Adriana Celada is a U1 Animal Biology student.

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

Would a cow eat sliced human sandwich?

Greater risk with every bite What Chartwells, Schwartz’s, and sugar shacks don’t want you to know Emma Chait

HYDE PARK

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efore taking another bite of smoked meat, I encourage you to question this ingrained habit. Every bite of processed meat increases cancer risk, environmental damage, and animal suffering.

The 2007 World Cancer Research Fund and American Institute for Cancer Research’s Second Expert Report stated, “Processed meat is a convincing cause of colorectal cancer.” Ham, bacon, lunch meats, hot dogs, and sausages – all meats preserved by smoking, curing, salting, or the addition of chemical preservatives are processed meats to be avoided. No meat, or any animal product for that matter, is necessary

for a healthy life, and studies continually show the benefits of eating plants rich in cancer-fighting nutrients.

Carotenoids found in carrots, apricots, sweet potatoes, and other brightly coloured fruits and vegetables and dark greens are shown to help prevent cancer. Vitamin C can neutralize cancer-causing chemicals, and soybeans contain anticarcinogens such as lignans and phytoestrogens. According to the National Cancer Institute, 35 to 50 per cent of cancers are preventable by changing dietary habits.

Lacking fibre, meat prevents proper colon function, and by cooking meat at high temperatures, harmful carcinogens such as heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are produced, which are related to colorectal

cancer risk. In the Nurses’ Health Study II, Harvard researchers determined that the risk of breast cancer increases with the consumption of animal fat, especially from red meat and high-fat dairy products. Whereas there are convincing links between consumption of animal products and colorectal, breast, and prostate cancer, further studies are necessary to determine links with other cancers.

The North American diet is related not only to cancer, but also to heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. Around the world, rates of these chronic diseases are on the rise as meat and dairy-based diets become more popular. Excessive amounts of animal protein are associated with a higher risk of a variety of chronic diseases.

Pressure to continue consuming animals can be neighbourly and deadly. From government-run school lunch programs to social events and holidays surrounding animal products, the social pressure to adopt and maintain an animal-based diet is

high. For those who grew up eating a typical North American diet, meals without meat and dairy are also often ridiculed and thought to be limited to salad and side dishes. However, a plant-based diet is in no way inferior to a traditional diet, and with very little effort, it is very easy to thrive and surpass the nutritional quality of a traditional diet. A plant-based diet also encourages creativity and freedom from the restrictions of local cafeteria menus. A plant-based diet goes far beyond positively impacting personal health – it also positively impacts our planet and the lives of fellow animals. A plant-based diet is direct action.

According to the UN report Livestock’s Long Shadow, animal agriculture releases more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry – methane being more harmful than carbon dioxide. Rajendra Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told the BBC this September, “I want to highlight the fact that among options for

mitigating climate change, changing diets is something one should consider.”

Grain fed to animals also contributes to world hunger – an issue hardly acknowledged during the current food crisis. Over 55-billion cows, pigs, chickens, and other sentient animals are slaughtered annually for human consumption. This torture is completely unnecessary, and most people never witness the violence that goes into making dinner. Consuming any animal product supports the cruelty of continued world hunger, animal agriculture, and slaughter.

So, when it comes to meat, there are no excuses. It is impossible to justify eating meat in our present society. It’s time to take control of what we’re eating. Give peas a chance and say yes to soy!

Emma Chait is a U2 Anthropology student and a member of the Animal Liberties Club at McGill. She can be reached at emchait@gmail.com.

Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Respect and fair employment for all teaching staff Richard Hink

HYDE PARK

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his has been a rough year for labour on campus.

Teaching assistants (TAs) are still fighting to be paid for workhours completed before their long, bitterly-fought 11-week strike earlier this year. Getting paid for your work is a principle we all agree with, and we hope the University will move quickly to find a solution before proceeding to arbitration. The union representing non-academic staff, MUNACA, is also in negotiations, and so far McGill has been unwilling to meet their demands.

Apparently, the University’s motto – “By work, all things increase and grow” – doesn’t apply to workers’ salaries or the consideration they receive from the administration. And to make matters worse, a short-sighted decision last month by the Quebec Labour Relations Commission has placed TAs, other graduate employees, and non-traditional workers at a disadvantage by placing all of their on-campus activities at risk when exercising their right to strike.

This week, McGill TAs join contingent academic workers from across the continent to observe Fair Employment Week. We are calling attention to those whom the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) dubs “invisible academics:” teachers who do their fair share of teaching but don’t ben-

efit from the same respect and protections as do the full-time, tenurestream faculty.

Fair Employment Week has traditionally focused on working conditions for sessional instructors. At McGill, they carry a huge portion of the teaching load and their numbers are growing; according to the University’s web site, in January 2007 only 26.5 per cent of the academic staff were tenure-stream faculty. And even though we depend so heavily on these professionals, most sessionals earn as much as $3,000 less per course than their equivalents at other Quebec universities. According to CAUT, they have no benefits, limited job security, inadequate academic support, and no opportunity to participate in research activities or academic governance. They are academia’s cheap labour.

In the past few years, there has been a growing awareness that, like TAs, graduate employees must also be recognized as contingent teachers. As enrolments increase and the number of tenure-stream faculty – for instance, those involved in research – stagnates, the teaching load is shifted more and more to sessional instructors and assistants. In fact, several well-respected education journals have acknowledged this shift by publishing articles demonstrating the need to include teacher training in graduate curricula for those who will become TAs and instructors. This should come as no surprise to McGill undergraduates who will likely have

more face-to-face contact with their teaching assistants in many of the University’s larger lecture courses.

In my own experience working with TAs, I have worked alongside an accomplished journalist, an awardwinning world-class musician, and a number of junior scholars conducting ground-breaking field research, to name just a few. The next time you find yourself meeting with a TA during office hours, take a few moments and ask them about their own work. Let us not forget that the term “graduate student” can too easily disguise the fact that your TAs and sessionals are talented teachers and scholars in their own right, deserving of the same fair and equitable treatment as anyone else in the university community. You can judge for yourself whether the administration’s response to TAs and other graduate and contingent employees constitutes “fair employment.”

We should all take a moment this week to reflect on the role that all teaching staff play in the academic vitality of the McGill community.

Their contributions shouldn’t need Fair Employment Week to be recognized; let us all carry forward that sense of respect and equity for the rest of the year.

11

Vote with your fork So you might be thinking: why a meat issue?

There are identities, ideologies, and politics involved in the food we choose, and meat is one we have a particularly complex relationship with. This year at The Daily, we decided to do some unpacking (get it!?), and chose meat for the ethical and political debates surrounding it.

The moral qualms around eating meat are many and varied, from concerns over climate change, to animal cruelty issues, to world hunger. As George Monbiot wrote in his summer Guardian column on the food crisis, “While 100M tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars [with bio-fuels], 760M tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals.

This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.”

On the other hand, Schwartz’s is at the heart of Montreal culture, and for many of us, potatoes and peas just seem lonely all by themselves.

We’re hardly of one mind about what to eat ourselves, and we’re not here to preach to you to become vegans on the spot.

The point is more that going to the grocery store seems like such an everyday chore – and the food industry so huge – it’s easy to forget that individual choices actually do count. Supermarkets are very sensitive to the turnover rate of different products. With computerized inventories, whether a product moves or not impacts if it will be re-ordered. Individual consumer actions could be much more decisive in determining what markets stock than we tend to think.

When you buy food, you’re supporting a specific agenda, and sending a message all the way down the supply chain. Be conscious of what you buy, and vote with your fork.

Editorial

Richard Hink is a PhD student in communication studies and President of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM), the union that represents TAs.

Curing our moral schizophrenia Sophie Gaillard

HYDE PARK

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ncoherence and contradiction is the norm with our attitudes toward nonhuman animals. We are, as Rutgers University law professor Gary Francione puts it, guilty of “moral schizophrenia” in our relations with other animals.

People generally agree that it is morally wrong to inflict suffering on animals when this suffering cannot be justified by necessity. In fact, this idea is so widely accepted that it has been enacted into provisions of Canada’s Criminal Code, which prohibits causing “unnecessary pain, suffering, or injury to an animal.”

But what about our practice of raising animals for meat, dairy products, and eggs? Could it fall into this category of acts we consider morally wrong? In order to answer this question, we must first examine two sub-questions: first, does our current treatment of farm animals cause suffering? And second, is this suffering necessary?

The answer to the first question is undoubtedly affirmative. Each year in Canada, over 650-million animals are slaughtered for food – over 1.5 -million daily. Contrary to what the meat, egg, and dairy industries lead us to believe in their advertisement campaigns, which depict cows happily grazing in pastures and chickens running about in a courtyard, the modern farm has nothing to do with these idyllic country scenes.

Today, the overwhelming majority of animal products consumed by Canadians comes from large-scale industrial farming operations known as factory farms. These farms strive to produce the most meat, milk, and eggs as quickly and as cheaply as possible, in the smallest amount of space possible. The unavoidable side effect of this mode of operation is a complete disregard for the most basic physical and behavioural needs of the animals. Animals are raised to grow up in incredibly large numbers, spend their lives confined to cramped living quarters, and undergo systematic mutilation without the use of anaesthesia – tail docking, castration, and de-beaking, in the case of chickens.

These practices are considered industry standard and are perfectly legal in Canada. As soon as animals raised for meat have put on enough weight, or when dairy cows and laying hens are no longer producing enough, they are loaded onto trucks to embark on a painful and lengthy journey to the slaughterhouse.

Now that the suffering inherent in current farming practices has been established, can this suffering be deemed necessary? The question of what constitutes necessity is subject to debate, but if the term is to have any meaning at all, then it must exclude acts committed purely for pleasure, habit, or convenience.

Easy access to meat, dairy, and egg alternatives has dramatically increased in the past few years.

These products are now readily available, not only in health food stores, but also in large supermarket chains, even in rural areas.

Specialists agree that well-balanced vegan diets are just as capable of satisfying our bodies’ nutritional needs as omnivorous diets.

Vegetables, beans, nuts, grains, and

soy products are excellent sources of protein, iron, calcium, and even omega threes. Not only are vegan diets safe, most experts consider them healthier than diets containing meat. Studies consistently show that eliminating meat from one’s diet is associated with a reduced risk of developing cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, and certain cancers. Thus, for the great majority of Canadians, the consumption of meat and other animal products does not constitute a nutritional necessity.

In fact, it may even be detrimental to our health.

Clearly, current farming practices result in tremendous suffering on the part of farm animals, and that eating meat and other animal products is not, in any meaningful sense, necessary. The only justifications for imposing suffering on farm animals are pleasure and habit. We are shocked and outraged by animal cruelty cases that make headlines – and rightly so – but what is the difference between a sadist torturing and killing an animal for entertainment and the

systematic, intensive confinement and mutilation that millions of farm animals are subject to daily for our gustative pleasure?

Our morally schizophrenic attitudes toward other animals are probably best illustrated by our differential treatment of certain species: the ones we consider pets. We love our dogs and cats and treat them like members of the family. Yet, there exists no significant difference, in terms of sensitivity to pain or cognitive capacity, between dogs and cats on the one hand, and pigs, cows, and chickens on the other. What makes us love the former and not care in the slightest about the latter?

Being vegan seems weird and extreme to most people, but it isn’t.

It’s simply an attempt to live life in a way that is coherent with the moral attitudes that most of us share.

Veganism is the cure to our moral schizophrenia.

Sophie Gaillard is a Law I student and a Master’s ‘07 Speech-Language Pathology grad. She can be reached at sophie.gaillard@mail.mcgill.ca.

12 Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Welcome to 3-D vegetarianism Douglas Jack

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egetarianism grows in a three-dimensional community – a word derived from the Latin words for “together” and “gift or service” – while meat-eating festers in two-dimensional isolation from lack of mutual aid. I became a vegetarian 36 years ago, while living among 45,000 vegetarian Dukobours, as well as Mennonite, Quaker, and First Nations pacifist communities in British Columbia. I improved my athletic performance with a vegetarian diet and switched from artificial to life-active sports such as treeplanting, fruit picking, organic farming, orcharding, immersing myself in nature’s streams, and bicycling.

I helped organize Natural Food Co-operative networks in B.C. and Quebec, and networked links across North America with 500,000 members. And 20 years ago, I became vegan.

As vegetarians and environmentalists coming from the 2-D school, with TV and monetary institutional training, we have difficulty grouping together, utilizing internal resources or labour, and supporting each other.

We’re more focused on one-way information campaigns than on twoway community interaction. Many are afraid and insular, rather than compassionate and welcoming. This can lead to people abandoning vegetarian principles in the 2-D isolation of suburban homes, nuclear family relationships, and mainstream life.

In much of the American preColumbian heritage – 3-D “sylvalization” (derived from the Latin words for “tree” and culture”) – large urban populations existed among orchards and included extensive vegetarianism. This was based on the nurturing and harvesting of the abundant oak, hickory, butternut, hazelnut, peach, cherry, spruce, and other green, nut or fruit trees, as well as corn, beans and squash – yielding complementary protein and complex nutrients.

The Mohawk “Longhouse,” measuring about 30 by 10 metres, is sometimes divided up into private family and collected family cooking, meeting, crafting, and other functions. The word “Longhouse” implies “place of the extended rafters,” or the will to welcome or make room and work for all who come and live according to the principles of the Great Law of Peace.

As European disease and aggression swept continents, 3-D planning by families, villages, nations, and confederacies to systematically welcome and adopt other displaced First Nations people kept communities strong.

Focusing on a person’s needs for housing, clothing, warmth, and health is essential for sustaining vegetarianism. Several households planning together with regular spending on rent and mortgages can buy apart-

ment buildings or town-house complexes, earn a source of livelihood, and develop critical-mass economies in every domain. Holistic accounting for all contributions establishes inclusive systems for giving and receiving.

Organizing a community dining-hall can reduce food costs by one-third.

When Canadian and U.S. government grants ended in the late 1980s, natural food co-ops fell, largely from linear one-way planning only for food.

Volunteer co-ops focused on giving without receiving in balance. We had economies, expertise, markets, distribution networks, warehouses, and stores, but didn’t account for the whole person in their various roles as founder, worker, supplier, and consumer.

The “indigenous” (from the Latin, “generated from within”) world also had its own accounting practices.

String-shell beads laced on strings manufactured from sea shells were widely employed to document complex systems of progressive ownership from apprentice to elder. Consider that the Celtic word “druid” means “wisdom of the oak or tree.” Romans conquered Europe by destroying their abundant orchards. “Civilization” is a 5,000 yearold failed imperial control grab, built on 2-D scarcity of agriculture, elimination of orchards, and desertification.

Contrary to the modern agriculture-civilization myth, multi-level orchards can produce some 100 times the goods and services of field crops by absorbing 92 to 98 per cent of solar energy, through leaf photosynthesis and root-pumping of water, minerals, and nutrients from depths of ten to hundreds of feet. Cereal and field crops absorb two to eight per cent of solar energy and root scant inches or feet. Moisture-laden ocean winds are drawn to the “energy-vacuum” of orcharded continents where leafsurface-condensation provides most water transfer. Sea-winds reverse when trees are cut for fields, and unabsorbed solar energy pushes out from bared land.

Under First Nations governance, Montreal Island held oak (reported by Jacques Cartier) orchards and teemed with 45 rivers and ten lakes. Colonial tree cutting caused fall drying and spring flooding as well as uprooting First Nation villages and thousands of orchard animals. “Exogenous” economy (i.e. the suburban lawn) diminishes harvest and toxifies rivers, exploitation of indigenous lands around the world.

Two-dimensional fear destroys indigenous peoples worldwide and reduces biodiversity to a fragment of creatures and creation. The third dimension is love expressed in welcome.

Douglas Jack is an ecological and ergonomic designer from Montreal– Tiohtiake, and has worked on projects with students from the McGill School of Urban Planning through the non-profit Sustainable Development Corporation. He can be reach at ecomontreal@mcgill.ca.

Improving campus sustainability Andrea Maldonado

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n Saturday, October 18, McGill hosted the remarkable environmentalist James Speth, Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, as guest speaker for the Beatty Memorial Lecture. Dr. Speth’s lecture presentation brought forth innovate ideas on environmental protection, and proposed fundamental changes in the way world economies work and how we conceptualize progress.

It was far from the first presentation on the environment that I had attended, and I had heard all the dire statistics before – irrefutable evidence of the urgency of environmental devastation and climate change.

Afterward, I felt hopeful yet pessimistic, more aware but with more questions, inspired and at the same time daunted as to what my part can be in bringing about change.

One particular question began to form in my mind as I left the lecture and biked through McGill campus.

What is McGill currently doing and what more can be done to confront the global climate crisis? Also, if the administration respects the expertise and foresight of a prominent environmentalist, educator, and researcher such as Dr. Speth enough to invite him to speak at our University, will

it therefore heed his calls for urgent radical action? Will they take on the necessary leadership and make the crisis of the environment a top priority? How exciting it would be if the whole McGill community, all students and staff, collaborated to quickly bring this important issue front and centre getting everyone working collectively on solutions. I ponder how I could get fellow students to be more passionate and active on this issue.

On the day of the federal election, I gave a lecture for a fourth year nutrition course on the topic of food security and community food programs, during which I asked the class of approximately 60 students what they thought could be done to end poverty in Canada. Disappointingly, only two students offered any suggestions while the rest stared blankly. How could it be that a class full of young educated adults had no thoughts on a critical issue facing their country on the day of an election? It seems that the majority of our students are not reflecting on important current issues that affect them and their future. From this experience, I was left feeling skeptical whether higher education institutions such as McGill are really teaching young people to be independent, critical thinkers, and proactive problem solvers, or rather shaping young people to perpetuate the status quo.

For the fifth year in a row, McGill University was named one of the top 25 universities in the world, and was the highest ranking Canadian univer-

sity. Considering our proven capabilities and many bright minds, can we now become the leading sustainable university in Canada and an international model of environmental sustainability and activism? I believe we can achieve this if our students and staff become more informed and active, and are encouraged and supported to “go green.”

Also, the administration needs to treat the environmental crisis appropriately and push to have this issue at the top of the agenda for every faculty, school, and department. Perhaps we can establish a one or two-week period where all teaching and administrative activities are centred on addressing problems of the environment.

This may seem impractical, but as Dr. Speth said, “We need impractical answers.” Without exception, environmental experts are telling us we have reached the final hour and the world is precariously teetering on the point of no return. Let’s continue to improve McGill’s environmental progress – as student groups like Sustainable McGill Project, Gorilla Composting, Organic Campus, Midnight Kitchen, Greening McGill, and others have already done – and strive to lead Canadian universities in sustainability efforts.

Andrea Maldonado is a Master’s candidate in the School of Dietetics and Human Nutrition. To get involved, contact sm.project@ mcgill.ca, or see organiccampus.blogspot.com or gorilla.mcgill.ca.

Finding solutions to red tape Lynne Champoux-Williams

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hen I began to run for a SSMU exec position in March, I was appalled by the amount of red tape surrounding the Students’ Society elections.

I even decided not to run for SSMU exec partly because of it, and to devote my time to creating tools to help other candidates instead. Now that I’ve popped my McGill bubble and stepped into the real world, I’ve had another chance to run in an election, as the Green Party candidate in Lévis-Bellechasse, a federal riding on the south shore of Quebec City. Now I understand that the electoral rules at McGill are not that different from the Canadian ones.

I’ll explain the basics, step-bystep: federal government, under our democracy, is made out of elected members of parliaments. To run the country, they use laws. These must be complied with and enforced.

To facilitate compliance, forms are devised. When there are too many forms to fill, it becomes red tape, or administrative burden. A way used to help people cope with it is tools,

whether they be software, supporting documents, reminder lists, etc.

Some people will get out of the system altogether, aiming to avoid red tape to save time or money. Others will develop a mentality of finding the weaknesses of the rules to make the best of it. Then neverending arm’s race ensues.

I’m self-employed and have a contract with Quebec’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Fauna (MRNF). Even inside the box, I found that there is enough red tape to make anyone turn anarchist. The Ministry has really wonderful organization charts, which McGill cruelly lacks for the non-senior administration. Unless one has established a good network, one is really likely to get stuck in a web of phone calls before finding the necessary information, because location within the administration – but not the job title – is included within their staff directory, unlike McGill’s.

Once the federal elections were over, I reminded SSMU Councillor and AUS VP External Hanchu Chen, of my ideas about the SSMU electoral regulations. Despite the overwhelming thickness of the Canadian Electoral Law and the numerous forms to fill before and after the

elections, Elections Canada digests the information and supports candidates throughout the process (print kits given by the returning officers, DVD of documents and a software, explanatory power points and videos, the website, etc.). Elections McGill can improve a lot, if only by building a support package to help candidates comply with their regulations.

My red tape-cutting ideas are a way for me to give back to the political life at McGill. Networking with the many environmental groups on campus, being a Senator for the Arts Faculty, and taking a look at some of the rules defining our student societies definitely helped me to run under the Green banner and gave me a good understanding of organizational behaviour, which I apply to the MRNF. To paraphrase Adrian Angus, last year’s SSMU VP University Affairs, finding the weak spots of the system allows one to hit at the right place in order to make it run again. Problemsolving is empowering; have a crack at it by becoming involved before you graduate.

Lynne Champoux-Williams is a BA ‘08 School of Environment graduate.

Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Letters: Semantics, Speling, and Intra-Daily mail Letters A semantic battle Re: “Resister? More like deserter” | Commentary | Oct. 9 Mike Prebil correctly noted in his letter that Jeremy Hinzman, if deported from Canada, would likely face a U.S. court martial for the crime of desertion.

However, Prebil also claimed that referring to Hinzman as “war resister” instead of “Army deserter” was inaccurate, and implied “the existence of a decidedly political dimension... where there is none to be found.”

I’m writing to weigh in on this semantic squabble.

First, note that the term “war resister” is frequently used by diverse news agencies, such as The Toronto Star, CTV, and Agence France-Presse.

If the term is invalid, so much for their coverage.

But I would argue that the phrase is more accurate than “deserter” because it suggests a side of the story that is essentially political.

Going AWOL, for many soldiers, is an act of political resistance to the Iraq war. “War resister” is employed to distinguish these soldiers from those who deserted for nonpolitical reasons.

Hinzman has described the U.S.led war in Iraq as “a criminal enterprise.” Many U.S. soldiers deserted the army because of their political opposition to unilateral aggressive war. The term “war resisters” acknowledges this political choice more clearly than “deserters.”

Note that during the sentencing hearing of war resister Robin Long, the prosecution used his public opposition to the war in Iraq as evidence against him.

However, the term “war resister” was not meant to suggest that Long was prosecuted for his opposition to the war alone. He is in jail for desertion, and I hope that was clear to readers.

David G. Koch U3 Political Science Daily staff writer

Choose Life and SACOMSS should work together Re: “Clearing up a couple SACOMSS issues” | Commentary | Oct. 23 I’m writing to clear up Choose Life’s stance on abortion in the case of sexual assault for SACOMSS and The Daily. National Campus Life

Network encourages and works with campus pro-life groups, but the groups themselves, such as Choose Life, are autonomous from NCLN. That said, our stance on this issue does not differ much.

Condoning ending the life of an innocent child conceived in rape is not consistent with Choose Life’s mandate to promote respect for human life and human rights from conception. Choose Life recognizes that regardless of how it happens, at fertilization, a unique, living human being is created. If it happens from sexual assault, we recognize that both the woman and unborn child are victims and need support. We would be more than happy to work with SACOMSS to help any survivor get the support and resources she would need to carry her pregnancy to term and choose to either raise her child or look into adoption.

Natalie Fohl U2 Biology & Political Science Founder of Choose Life

Abortion debaters should sit down and talk Re: “Freedom of speech does not trump womens rights” | Commentary | Oct. 16 It is a sad day when pro-life advocates are placed on par with whitesupremacist groups in consideration of the beliefs they hold. The point that pro-life advocates are in fact anti-choice is reflective of a small minority of radical proponents for the rights of the “unborn child” over those of the mother.

The problem with the entire abortion debate is that neither side is willing to realistically sit down and discuss the positions and arguments of the other side with the objective of trying to find a solution that takes both value sets into consideration.

Being pro-life should not mean disregarding completely the right of a women in the process of birth, it is equally disgraceful for a pro-choice group to promote the ubiquity of abortions without considering the gravity of such a decision.

If advocating for the rights of the fetus is socially and morally wrong, there should be no reason to fear allowing it a voice, especially in an institution of higher education – moraly corrupt messages tend to self-destruct over time. Allowing a dialogue on the other hand, is important for the potential of establishing a voice for considering the implications and options that a large portion of the population consider to be preferable – something the pro-choice movement tends to fail in providing.

Access to abortion is a legally established right in Canada that is not going to disappear, but in an age

of unrestricted access, it is foolish to deny a voice for prudence. The denial of any speech but hate speech is a tact of those who fear the legitimacy of the opposition’s argument. The moderate pro-lifer position is not a position against a women’s right to choose as much as it is simply a call to take the life, or potential for life of the fetus, into consideration. A far cry from hate speech.

As a close friend of mine has said, “Rights are not synonymous with a moral code,” and the right to an abortion, should not de facto make it an ethical action.

Philip Holdsworth U4 Political Science & International Development Studies

Vice’s wisdom on the working class Re: “Mind the gap: Borough on the brink” | Culture | Oct. 23 I would like to invite a comparison between Aditi Ohri’s treatment of the neighbourhood I live in and the immortal words of conceptual artist Nayland Blake, as cited in the most recent issue of Vice Magazine: “I grew up lower-middle-class and I’m kind of overeducated, and my tendency is to fetishize working-class guys.”

Please stop writing about St. Henri.

Sarah Allux U3 Geography (Urban Systems)

wear a hijab, a turban, or phylacteries, and that’s what makes this country great.

This is an appeal for realism, to examine this subject from a rational perspective. Basically, Saeed claims that the hijab does express a woman’s sexuality, and I’m here to disagree. In theory the hijab is sexy.

It hides a woman’s sexuality from the world. Conversely, many Western women are going out of their way to express their sexuality (through miniskirts and tight jeans and such) which makes the hijab inversely sexy, and therefore sexy.

But in reality I can’t be burdened with such philosophical undertakings when I see a Muslim woman crossing the street. To me, a hijab expresses sexuality in much the same way as a nun’s habit.

However, I do agree with Saeed on some points; some Western women have forgotten the meaning of the word tact and are being a little over aggressive in expressing their sexuality. I also agree that Girlicious is a lousy show with a frightening host who’s had way too much cosmetic surgery. But one thing that Western girls do possess is the freedom to present themselves as they see fit.

One day a girl might be in the mood to flaunt traditional sensibilities and tart herself up to the nines, and the next she might be completely asexual in a pair of old sweatpants and an overcoat. The point is: why hide your beauty everyday? Let your beauty shine the way nature intended it and before the weather intervenes.

Ezra Black U4 History

It’s S-a-e-e-d, asshole Re: “Call me vague” | Commentary | Oct. 16

Sex is more than giving and receiving

I’m offended by Mr. Silverman’s inability to spell my last name after having known me for three years.

Re: “Guttural mind: The Story of O-No” | Mind & Body | Oct. 9

Sana Saeed U3 Honours Political Science and Middle East Studies Daily columnist

Thoughts on the hijab’s sexyness Re: Aristotle’s Lackey: To Shake Or Not To Shake? | Commentary | Oct. 20 In response to Sana Saeed’s article, I am not, nor would I ever ask you to shake your ass to assert your sexual liberation – well at least not every day and of course never without your complete assent. Nor am I writing this letter to The Daily with the purpose of inciting criticism for the practice of wearing a hijab. In Canada, anybody anywhere is free to

Ms. Alsop, I enjoyed your article, but you seem to simplify sex and that is a dangerous thing to do. I appreciate that you are trying to even out the battle and open some eyes, but it is a message that has exhausted receptive ears for several decades.

The only men that haven’t heard it yet shouldn’t be consorted with, but regular Daily readers know the facts (as do all McGill students...I hope). It may have been better to argue for a more balanced relationship, where both “parties” become involved. Men have suffered too long under the yoke of “good sex,” and I think that it’s important to tell all men: don’t be afraid to ask for some favours in return.

Sex is extremely complicated, and simply using different tools (your argument for the existence of the ten omnipotent pseudo-penises, for example) cannot be the answer. If it

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isn’t working out, a better resolution may be to re-evaluate the relationship.

Simplifying sex to “good” and “bad” has really given it a feminine connotation; what we should strive for with sex performed between a man and a woman is an act both performed, and criticized, by both people. “Good sex” is not realized when the woman comes – partners have to go above and beyond orgasm. Both partners must have a great night. Your POV (point of view) may be that PIV (penis-in-vagina) satisfies all of a man’s desires. Well, it doesn’t. Ejaculating is not all that men want and need. Women have to reciprocate; it is frustrating to spend a night getting a girlfriend to come and not receiving anything in return.

Your preachings, words I have heard many times over, have caused sex to become a give-and-take, where men give and women take.

Aaron Vansintjan U0 Arts Daily production & design editor

The Daily received more letters than it could print this issue. They will appear in the next issue. Send your letters to letters@mcgilldaily. com, and keep them to 300 words.

The Daily edits for style and brevity, and does not publish letters that are homophobic, sexist, racist, or otherwise hateful. So just don’t try it.

Errata In “Quebec dismisses fired TAs’ grievances” (News, Oct. 23), The Daily reported that some teaching assistants (TAs) were unionized in their secondary positions; in fact, no TAs were unionized in these jobs.

The Daily also reported that since the strike the relationship between the union and the University is hostile and was aggravated by the recent decision on the TAs’ grievances.

In fact, the decision has not affected the union’s relationship with the University, and it is the general campus climate toward labour that is hostile.

The article stated that McGill and AGSEM could have reached an agreement enabling TAs to keep their jobs. In fact, this was a decision that could only have been decided at a legal level.

Lastly, The Daily stated that Hink believes that the commission’s ruling was meant to maintain a “balance of power” between the University and the union. In fact, the comment referred to the Labour Code and AGSEM’s arguments, not to the Commissioner’s ruling.

14 Features

Pigeons were among the most interested parties in Alex Cowan’s film project, which involved strewing meat around the city to provoke public reaction.

Courtesy of Alex Cowan

Art in the flesh The Daily’s Whitney Mallett gets a taste for meat as medium and muse

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magine you’re hanging from a meat hook.” A dance teacher made this analogy to me years ago, and I will never forget it. There is something eerily beautiful about the suspension of raw meat. Of course, this beauty is matched with the discomfort that comes from visualizing yourself as a hanging carcass. Painter Francis Bacon would have probably liked the idea. He once said, “Hams, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale – how unbelievably surrealistic!”

Bacon often painted hanging meat. He was not the first artist to be seduced by the texture, colour, and marbling of raw flesh. Rembrandt painted his famous Carcass of Beef centuries before and, during Bacon’s own lifetime, Chaim Soutine rendered a more modern, bloodier version of Rembrandt’s suspended ox.

In the later part of the 20th century, meat made a transition from the subject of art works to the very fabric of them. In 1987, Canadian artist and Concordia graduate Jana Sterbak first showed her dress constructed of 50 pounds of salted flank steak in Montreal. Over the course of the exhibit, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic transformed from raw to cured state, in some ways imitating the human aging process. Sterbak followed up her meaty success with another in 1996: Chair Apollinaire, a

chair made from over 150 pounds of steak, also cured. The piece is a pun on the French word for flesh: chair.

Fittingly, Sterbak strongly emphasizes that her works are not about meat, but about flesh.

“And flesh is what we are!” she adds. A steak’s muscle, fat, and tissue, when juxtaposed against human flesh, encourage us to consider our own animality – something that usually escapes our consciousness. When meat’s typical function is perverted, and it is presented as flesh and not food, it becomes prime material for self-reflection.

Chinese artist Zhang Huan donned a meat suit in his piece My New York to explore his complex relationship with his adopted city. The suit, made of raw steaks, was shaped to give Huan a brawny body-builder aesthetic, but its flayed surface contrasted strength with vulnerability. During the performance piece, Huan released doves, alluding to the Buddhist tradition amassing grace by freeing live animals.

Huan’s piece was an attempt to reconcile the culture he came from with a culture thrust upon him. He explains that although a bodybuilder slowly builds up muscle, he adopts the aesthetic overnight. Donning the meat suit parallels his forced adoption of American culture.

The connotations of red meat as a conspicuous example of American society’s disproportionate

consumption cannot be ignored in the piece.

Meat is not just flesh used to explore mortality and self-reflection; for Huan, it is undoubtedly also a symbol of a culture whose habits of consumption differ drastically from the rest of the world.

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n a 2005 interview with Jonas Storsve, Sterbak explained: “The two most evident connotations of flesh, but not necessarily of meat, are the sexual and the mortal.” The relationship between carnage and carnality is explored in some of the earliest recorded art using meat.

Carol Schneeman’s 1964 performance Meat Joy – shown first in Paris and then again in New York City – was a Dionysian piece in which eight partially nude figures danced and played in raw fish and chicken, sausage, paint, and paper. It was meant to celebrate flesh as a material.

The same year, American performance artist Robert Delford Brown’s Meat Show also used meat to invoke sexuality. In the Washington Meat Market, he created brothel-like rooms out of tons of blood and raw meat strewn with yards and yards of sheer fabric suggestive of lingerie. Visitors walked through the decorated meat locker in white coats and were then fed sausages. Brown, notorious for invoking shock and scandal in his avant-garde art, located the viewers’ own consumption of meat while meat

surrounded them. The show only lasted three days.

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eat goes bad fast. Meat art often has to be performed or captured on film because otherwise it will rot. Its impermanence reminds us of our own mortality – one day, we too, will rot. Sterbak cures steak to prevent her work from putrefying, but the piece’s transformation from fleshy and raw to its shrivelled, salted state recalls changes that take place in our bodies over time. “Art, when successful, comes close to resembling life; and life, as well as love, is ephemeral, perishable, and fleeting,” she professes.

Pinar Yolacan also uses meat to explore human decay. For Perishables, she photographed elderly women wearing garments constructed from poultry and tripe – each piece imitates the individual subject’s wrinkled face.

The state of the aging women and their perishing garb is immortalized in the photographs. In an interview with The New York Times in 2004, Yolacan commented on her choice of material: “I’ve always been interested in the impermanence of things,” she said.

While Sterbak and Yolacan prevented their pieces from going rancid, Jan Fabre exploits the rotting process in his installation piece, Temples of Meat. The project involved wrap-

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Meat art through the ages 1683 Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef depicts a hanging heifer evoking Christ’s crucifixion.

1900 ping columns at Ghent University in Belgium with 200 pounds of decaying steak, bacon, and minced meat to make them “come alive” by attracting flies. Meat is essentially lifeless, but at once becomes a source of life, and a metaphor for life’s transient nature.

Meat’s expiration illustrates life’s impermanence, and its decomposition exemplifies the cyclical nature of life and death. Whether it’s rotting or not, meat can be disgusting. Meat evokes a visceral reaction: being confronted by a material representation of death can instinctively repel us. But most of us also depend on meat for survival. When it is presented before us as art, this complex relationship is explored.

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eat exposes us to what is below the skin’s surface. We are often disconnected from our own insides; for whatever reason, we are revolted when confronted with a suggestion of the body turned inside-out. Viewers were repulsed by Chilean artist Gabriela Rivera’s 2005 film Efímero: she covered herself in raw meat strips to construct a metaphor for the relationship people have with their mirror image. Meat is intimately related to the body.

It resembles our own flesh; it even becomes a part of us when we ingest it. Disguised in meat, Rivera’s flayed, Frankenstein-like figure provoked her audience members to examine their own body images. However, many people were just shocked and repulsed by the film.

McGill student Alex Cowan is also interested in meat as provocation. He strewed rotting scraps around public spaces in Montreal – what he thought would be a foolproof plan to invoke some sort of reaction. But only a congregation of seagulls and pigeons seemed to take notice.

“Some people looked disgusted; most people were entirely indifferent. Most people tuned it right out of their consciousness,” he explains.

Indifference toward this display of meat suggests society’s disconnect between groundup meat in a Styrofoam container and the concept of a dead animal. Sterbak notes the linguistic dichotomy: “Consider that in many languages the name of the animal changes when it arrives on your plate. For example, cow becomes beef; pig becomes pork.” Meat is defined by our consumption of it. “In the abstract, idealized world that we live in most people don’t want to make the connection between meat and a pig. Humans create their own world. We have developed meat as a commodity because that’s what we think it ought to be,” says Cowan.

The commodification of meat has reached the point that it has become a symbol of objectification. Ann Simonton wore a bologna dress to protest women being treated as meat. The phrase “treated as meat” connotes a complete

lack of respect and devaluation.

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rt can provoke us to question the disconnection between the process and the product. The transition from dead animal to food, however, can itself be an art. Michelle Boubis, a butcher at Jean Talon Market, argues that butchery is an art form “because it ennobles the animal, giving value to what we eat.” Treating butchery as an art means treating the animal like a living thing, and not merely as objectified, consumer-defined, meat.

This type of processing is rare today. While Boubis receives animals whole, directly from the farm, most meat is packed in industrial factories. The meat hanging from butchers’ windows that Bacon found so beautiful is becoming less and less common. Instead, packaging appeases our conceptualized ideal of meat.

“Many people, myself amongst them, have doubts about meat consumption, and, above all, the way our society takes care of its livestock intended for mass consumption…. This is why meat does not resemble itself in the effort to divorce it from any appearance that may recall our own flesh,” Sterbak stated in an interview with Storsve.

These concerns are not new. In his 1924 silent film Kino-Glaz, Dzia Vertov critically examines industrial meat processing. He playfully presents the sequence of a cow’s slaughter in reverse, inspiring both delight and horror in the viewer. Life springs from the materiality of death lying on the slaughterhouse floor. A dead ox appears to be sewn back up by mechanical knives, leaps to its feet, and is driven backward to the pasture.

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he relationship between meat and art has manifested itself in different ways. A New York Times article from 1909 titled “Meat Packers and Art” describes meat as a currency to purchase treasured European art. The article reports fearsw that the art would be exchanged for $2-million “accumulated in meat packing.”

Historic European works were said to be dangled before the “covetous, meat-packing eyes” of American millionaires, contrasting modern industrial society with established artistic tradition. Both art and meat were marketed as commodities then, just as they are now. The market was ascribing the two equivalent values for exchange before artists were using meat to draw metaphors in their art.

Whether hanging in a butchers’ window or on display in art gallery, meat is for our consumption. As food, or as art, meat is a product – whether it ends up on our plate or not. It isn’t hard to engage critically with meat when it’s presented subversively as art. But hopefully we can begin to consume it as critically with our mouths as we do with our eyes.

1924 Dzia Vertov’s Kino-Glaz

1925 The stench from the rotting subject of Chaim Soutine’s painting Carcass of Beef drives horrified neighbours to call the police.

1954 Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat “Flesh and meat are life!

If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful,” he said.

1996 Sterback’s Chair Apollinaire Damien Hirst uses steel, glass, and formaldehyde to present a dissected cow in 12 separate tanks.

2003 Victoria Reynold’s technically exquisite oil paintings of meat explore sensuality, attraction, and repulsion.

1964 Carol Shcneeman’s Meat Joy Robert Delford Brown’s Meat Show

1982 Ann Simonton wears a 35-pound bologna dress outside a beauty pageant to protest the objectification of women.

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2002 Zhang Huan’s My New York

2004 Pinar Yolacan’s Perishables 2005 Gabriela Rivera’s Efímero

2006 Jean Fabre’s Temples of Meat 2008 Alex Cowan: “‘You can have all the meat you want,’ the butcher told us.”

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Mind&Body

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

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Anne Haldane for The McGill Daily

Taking a bite out of fetish An examination of what we talk about when we talk about sex(y)

Guttural mind Julie Alsop

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lip ‘em the hot beef injection.

Hide the salami. Put the beef in the taco. Look at that ass, that’s grade A, top choice, meat. Bite me off a piece of that. Sometimes when I talk about sex without actually talking about sex, I get confused. Am I talking about doing lunch or doing it? A really nice steak or a really great ass?

Rack of ribs or rack of tits? People, I prefer straight-up terms, like “fucking,” to Porky-style euphemisms. But hey, that’s just me.

For a certain sect of fetishists known as Vores – short for Vorarephilia – a carnal act is often the same as a carnivorous one. Vores get an erotic charge out of eating

someone or being eaten. For some readers this may seem weird, sick, and remind them of waking up in cold-sweats after seeing Silence of the Lambs – understandable responses. For others, viewing Silence of the Lambs meant that Hannibal Lecter replaced Nick Carter as the pin-up poster above their bed.

The cannibal narrative is a common one: foreigner gets captured in a strange land, tied to a spit, and then threatened with becoming the main course for the whole village. A cauldron or a flame gets hotter and hotter, people start sweating, and usually a rescue occurs. It’s almost as generic as a Meg Ryan movie, and

who doesn’t think she’s cute?

The Encyclopedia of Cannibal Movies On-Line has over 500 entries from a wide range of genres: horror flicks, porn, and French New Wave are all represented. A Google search of “cannibal fetish” yields about 393, 000 hits. Clearly, this fetish is not so niche as it may seem at first glance. As with any fetish, it’s actually fairly culturally pervasive.

At least in my mind, talking about a sexual object as if it were a piece of meat is simply a hop, skip, and a jump from wishing someone was a piece of meat. Maybe people who find weird things sexy are just better at reading subtext than others. It is the sexualisation of the narrative and not the narrative itself which is deemed to be perverse.

Society draws lines when it comes to what’s culturally accepted as sexy. On closer look, these lines prove to be drawn in sand – constantly changing and easily washed away. Is there really that big of a gap between eating someone out and fantasizing about actually eating

them? Vampires eat people all the time and boy, are they ever considered sex symbols.

Vore-ism stands at the crossroads of many fetishes. There’s your good ol’ bondage-style vore-ism, where the person who is served as the main meal is hog-tied or gagged with an apple, or it can go further, to humiliation fetishism, when the person is basted and stuffed. Furries may enjoy the idea of eating a certain animal; necrophiliacs may just like the fact that they’re dead. But as in most fetishes, the main theme is power.

Vore fetishists who fantasize about being eaten talk about being completely subsumed. They liken it to returning to the womb. Those who fantasize about eating think of it as the ultimate submission. You do not simply control the other person; they become a part of you. These themes of power and submission resonate through almost all sexual encounters, mainstream or not.

The difference between fetishes that society commonly accepts and those it labels perverse is that one

is ubiquitous and the other requires reading between the lines. People are rarely asked why they find lingerie sexy. It’s not that it’s natural (what’s natural about lacy undergarments and push-up bras?), but because it is constantly sold as the epitome of “sexy.” Someone with a fetish, however, is subject to questions. But I think a deep philosophical querying of why something makes you cream your panties is healthy. If you don’t have a fetish, or find vore-ism just too strange, go home and ask yourself why you think tying someone to a bed is sexy as opposed to tying someone to a spit. The answer may surprise you. For Freud, the only unusual sexual behavior is none at all. As long as it’s safe, sane, and consensual then I don’t see anything wrong with it. But hey, that’s just me.

Has Julie whet your appetite?

Satisfy your craving every other Thursday in the Mind&Body section.

Or you can send her your deepest philosophical querying of fetish to gutturalmind@mcgilldaily.com.

Mind&Body

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

All hopped up Joseph Watts

T A match made in heaven Lucy Segal for The McGill Daily

A portrait of the author: enjoying some beer ‘n barbeque ribs in the park.

here are many theories as to why beer goes so well with barbeque.

They range from the scientific (I’ve actually read that beer can absorb carcinogens on meat cooked over charcoal), to the sociological (the connection between working class food and drink), to the culinary (“if something tastes good, don’t question it”).

I like to think that beer should be drunk with barbeque because the two share an amazing regional quality.

Ribs, like beer, are unique to wherever it’s made. Each regional variation of barbeque has its own sauce, and the belief that all others are inferior. In North Carolina, vinegar-based sauce is king, whereas South Carolinian barbeque has a mustard-base; that familiar tomato-y stuff most of us think of as “Bar-B-Q sauce” hails from Memphis.

As a Yankee with no sauce to pledge allegiance to, when I chow down on ‘que I try as many as possible with hopes of chancing upon just the right combination of flavours. The same approach

should be taken to pairing beer with barbeque, and with all food. We need to go beyond the image of a suburban dad manning the grill, “kiss the cook” apron on, ice-cold light beer in hand.

As a general rule, when pairing food and beer try for a good match: hearty food requires hearty beer, more delicate food needs a pilsner or similar lager. You’ll soon find most food has a beer that will enhance its experience. For barbeque, it’s ale.

To test this theory I paired two beers against a spread of chicken, beef ribs, and pork ribs, all from Bofinger Barbeque Smokehouse (5667 Sherbrooke O.).

A trip to the ultimate beer depanneur, Super Marché Rahman – known to many as “La Paradis de la Bière” (151 Laurier O.) – yielded an imperial IPA brewed especially for Rahman by Au Maître Brasseur in Laval: La Paradisiac Cuivrée. It is a strong, hoppy beer that can stand up to the intense flavours of Bofinger’s ribs. At 7.5 per cent alcohol

17

by volume (ABV), La Paradisiac Cuivrée has plenty of malty body to answer the intensely smoky meat, while the strong bitterness from the hops plays well with the flavourful sauce.

To eat with the chicken, which had a sweeter, apple cider vinegar sauce, I broke out the spoils of a recent trip to the States. Brother Adam’s Bragget Ale is a barleywine brewed with honey from Atlantic Brewing Company in Bar Harbor, Maine. Barleywines are very potent beers packed with malt, known for their alcohol and sweetness. The honey in Brother Adam’s Bragget keeps this sweetness in the foreground while an 11.8 ABV gives it enough balls for barbeque.

An equally appropriate, local choice is La Brune au Miel, from Microbrasserie du Lièvre. Though not a barleywine, this honey brown ale provides the answer to any finger-lickin’ sauce and a 6.5 ABV provides a little oomph.

Next time you head to Bofinger, or any barbeque joint, put some thought into what you’ll be drinking as you tuck into that smokey goodness. Sure Bofinger Moosehead on draft, but hopefully by now you will agree that such wimpy beers will hardly suffice.

Send tips on where to buy a sweet “kiss the cook” apron to allhoppedup@gmail.com.

In defense of fat: Jennifer McLagan on her newest cookbook Fat. It’s not a pretty word in the North American vocabulary. It is, however, the subject of Jennifer McLagan’s newest cookbook: Fat, an Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient: with Recipes. Compared to the swirl of “low-carb,” “low-fat,” and other trend diets, McLagan’s ideas are more stripped down: “Eat real food. Cook in real fats. Enjoy yourself.” McLagan sat down with The McGill Daily to have a chat about continental diets, the merits of animal fat, and why everyone should put a little flavour back in their lives.

The McGill Daily: What was the inspiration for Fat? Jennifer McLagan: It started as a joke, but when I thought about it a bit more, I realized that even as a foodie I would see a really fatty piece of pork or steak and feel a pang of guilt, a little voice saying, “it can’t be good for me.”

I started researching, and realized that fat wasn’t all bad. I wanted to remind people of all those wonderful recipes using fat that they had forgotten – foie gras, chicken fried in lard, potatoes cooked in duck fat, etc.

MD: Why do you think the transition to fat substitutes caught on and what are the implications?

JM: Researchers [once] proposed a link between animal fat and increased risk of heart disease, but this was never proven. Even the U.S. government urged people to cut their intake of animal fat, so people turned to vegetable and hydrogenated oils.

These were new scientific marvels [of the time] and people loved them, but more recently we’ve discovered that these aren’t good for us.

Now, animal fats have been found to be beneficial. For instance, chicken fat has properties that boost the immune system. Your grandmother said that chicken soup was good for you, and there you go, she was right.

Ukrainians love their salo, the Italians, lardo, and the Chinese use pork fat extensively. I think there is a schizophrenic relationship to food in North America, and I’m afraid we’re exporting our neurosis around the world. We need to put pleasure back into our diet in North America. We have very little pleasure left when we eat, and that’s a shame.

MD: What do you see as the prevalent social attitudes toward fat?

JM: For the last 30 years we’ve reduced the amount of animal fats we use, but not the amount of fat in our diet in general. In fact, we consume more fat today, but they’re the polyunsaturated kind, or trans fat.

It’s true that meats have saturated fats, but there has never been a proven link between eating saturated fat and increased cholesterol and heart disease.

You know, the French Paradox is what everyone talks about these days – how the French can eat such fatty foods and still stay slim and healthy. But it’s true for the Inuit too; traditionally they ate a lot of saturated fat, and animal fat, but it’s only since they’ve adopted a North American diet that they’ve developed serious health problems.

MD: You mention the role of the media in your book. What do you think the media’s influence is in promoting good attitudes toward foods?

JM: We’re more inclined to take the advice of a celebrity with a diet book rather than our grandmother. I think that’s crazy. We need to think carefully about what we hear – it is usually only snippets of information.

The human body is very complex, and science doesn’t fully understand how it works or what makes someone fat or healthy. But I think that if people weren’t meant to eat animal fat, we would have died out long ago.

To quote A.A. Gill, “most people today are food literate; they can read a menu in three languages, but they can’t make food on their own.”

This is the problem: people are into food trends, but they can’t roast a chicken. We all need to be able to cook.

Cooking isn’t a competitive sport; it’s just making something to eat, a simple skill we should all possess.

MD: Do you think the North American outlook on food is unique, or is it a worldwide trend?

JM: I think the fear of fat is most prevalent in North America, but it’s spreading around the world. We are continually being told that fat is bad.

But many cultures celebrate fat: the

MD: Do you see your book as advocating for more balance in our diets?

JM: You can make the case that

too much of anything will kill you, not just fat. Life is all about moderation.

Maybe that’s boring, but it’s a fact.

The messages in my book are simple. Eat real food. Cook in real fats. Enjoy yourself. Relax about what you’re eating. You’ll probably loose weight if you’re satisfied when you’ve eaten, and that’s what fat does, it satisfies you, as well as adding all that wonderful flavour and taste.

Mostly, I see my book as a defense

of animal fats. It’s an attempt to give them some good press, when they’ve been getting such bad press for so long.

There are lots of good animal, natural fats out there that we should be eating.

People need to look at fat again.

They need to reevaluate what they’re eating. Fat is where the taste and the flavour is. Dinner should be a pleasure, not a minefield.

– compiled by Nadja Popovich

Duck Fat and Grapefruit Salad Dressing Serves 4 2 grapefruit 6 cups / 300 g shredded napa cabbage 1/4 cup / 13/4 oz. / 50 g duck fat 1 tbsp finely chopped shallot 1 tbsp sherry vinegar Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper Finely grate 2 tsp of zest from 1 grapefruit and set aside. Cut a thick slice off the top and bottom of both grapefruit to expose the flesh. Stand the fruit on a cutting board and cut away both the skin and the pith. Holding the fruit over a bowl, cut along either side of each segment to the centre to free it from the membranes. Squeeze the juice from the spent membranes. Measure 1/4 cup / 60 ml of the juice, pour into a bowl, add the zest, grapefruit segments, and set aside.

Place the shredded cabbage in a serving bowl.

Heat 1 tbsp of the duck fat in a small frying pan over medium heat. Add the shallot and cook until softened and just beginning to colour. Add the remaining duck fat and the grapefruit zest, segments and juice to the pan and stir until hot. Add the vinegar and season well with salt and pepper.

Pour the hot dressing over the shredded cabbage and toss to mix.

Serve immediately.

From Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes

by Jennifer McLagan. In stores now. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Science+Technology

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

18

McGill Prof Levitin writes book, toots own horn Catherine Howells Sci+tech writer

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s un-scientific as it is, I started out reading The World in Six Songs with a bias. I had taken the author’s – Daniel Levitin – class on cognition and read his previous book, This is Your Brain on Music.

Levitin, it appears, has many famous friends – musicians and psychologists alike – whose names he casually drops into both class lectures and book chapters with a little too much frequency.

My opinion of Levitin, therefore, was not based on his work, but what I thought of his ego. His first book made him into something of a celebrity, which only encouraged my distaste. but I decided to review The World in Six Songs to give him another chance.

Though the subject matter of his newest publication fascinated me, I was distracted by the author’s bragging, and before I knew it, familiar snide thoughts infiltrated my mind.

I found it easy at first to deride his main idea, that the social function of every lyrical song created by human beings can fall into one of six categories: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. It was preposterous, I thought, to try to lump the immense wealth of songs that exist across the world into a measly six groups.

I decided before I had finished the first chapter that the success of his first book had prompted him to publish a second too quickly, and with too little substance, as happens with so many sequels. But as Levitin delved more into the meaning and significance of each song type, I began to appreciate his ideas. The basic concept laid out in the book is that musical abilities, both in terms of perception and production, evolved in humans hundreds of thousands of years ago. Levitin posits that skills leading to musical abilities enhanced social communication, faithfulness to one’s partner, impressive memory, deep feelings of hope and faith, and powerful friendships in primitive humans, and developed in humans over time.

Music didn’t create these social qualities, of course; the potential for them already existed in our primate ancestors, as they existed in many other animals. Music simply helped humans to explore and expand them, playing, in Levitin’s opinion, a cru-

cial role in our social and psychological development and helping us to reach the complexity we have.

Levitin knows his stuff. The World in Six Songs offers provoking perspectives to contribute to both psychology and a general understanding of music. But his knowledge is overpowered by selfimportance. Every time Levitin flaunted having lunch with Joni Mitchell or discussing the origins of music with Sting, I cringed. Seeking reprieve, I took a peek at Levitin’s web site, but the experience only confirmed my suspicion; this man loves himself. The site featured a slideshow of Levitin through the ages, one of him posing with a saxophone, links to songs he wrote, a list of the tracks on his iPod, and even which superhero he would be – Spiderman.

Still, I came to appre-

ciate the way Levitin organized his ideas, interweaving personal anecdotes with scientific revelations, and relevant tidbits about observations that one sees and hears in everyday life. Furthermore, his musical references kept me scrolling through my iTunes library, listening for the particularly appealing chord progression or emotional lyric he cited. Slowly, Levitin won me over.

I recognized the immense amount of scientific work backing up his hypotheses, and before I had even finished, I

reached the reluctant conclusion that Levitin is an expert in his field, and experienced with several areas of music – be it discovery, exploration, performance, or shoulder rubbing. And who am I kidding. If I had chatted with David Byrne, I’d probably mention it too. Just don’t let it get to your head, Daniel.

Lindsay Waterman / The McGill Daily

Milky Way may be full of meat Scientists develop new techniques to detect life on planets orbiting distant stars Patrick Janukavicius Sci+tech writer

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cientists have their sights aimed on planets teeming with alien life – their telescope sights, that is. In just a decade, astronomers have found over 300 planets orbiting distant stars, and a telescope due for launch in 2013 is expected to find many more.

According to Dr. Zachary Medin, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill, scientists are learning that planets are probably common throughout the galaxy.

“We’re finding that the number

of stars with planets is pretty high. It could even be near 100 per cent of them,” he said.

Medin says that most of the 300 planets – called exoplanets – detected so far are behemoths, because distant earths are too small to detect.

“You can’t look at the planet directly; you have to look at the star.

You can see a wobble of the star due to the gravitational interaction between the planet and the star, and the bigger the planet the more of an effect it’s going to have,” he said. “If you look at our solar system, the earth doesn’t affect the sun very much. It’s easier to detect a planet the size of Jupiter, which will have a

bigger effect.”

Yet there is hope for the discovery of small planets using the star-wobble technique. Swiss astronomers found an exoplanet just four times the size of earth. And the 2013 telescope will be much more sensitive to smaller planets’ signatures.

The question many are dying to have answered is whether we’ll be able to detect life on another planet.

According to Medin, we are very limited in what we can see from Earth.

“The problem is that it’s really hard to see anything other than the star,” said Medin. “The star really overwhelms everything around it.

It would also be very difficult to fly

to these planets. It would take thousands of years.”

Yet there may be other solutions for detecting extra-terrestrial life.

Take Earth. Although our planet’s plants reflect a small amount of green light in the visible spectrum, they absorb almost all other visible light that hits them. However, plants do not absorb infrared light, which is not visible to the human eye. So anyone looking at Earth from a distant planet wouldn’t see green; they would see no reflected light at all in the visible spectrum, but with a special sensory would perceive a large amount of reflected infrared light. According to Dr. Robert E. Blankenship, a chem-

ist at the University of Washington, such a jump of intensity, called the “red edge,” might be seen reflected from far-off exoplanets – but we’ll only catch it if we pay attention to the stars that shine on them.

“Photosynthesis has evolved to match the sun’s most intense output, which is the visible spectrum,” Blankenship said. “On another star, maybe a cooler star, you would have the curve shifted to longer wavelengths. Any photosynthetic organisms on a planet orbiting that star would have absorption spectra that take advantage of that distribution. A high red edge is a potential biosignature you might see.”

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Photos by Komal Ali Urban exploration in Montreal

Photo Essay

19

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

20

A chicken in every pot

Andrew Chau for The McGill Daily

Daniel Lametti searches for the Plateau’s best Portuguese chicken erbert Hoover, while campaigning in the 1928 presidential election, promised Americans a “chicken in every pot.” Unfortunately for Hoover, shortly after his election the stock market crashed, America tumbled into the Great Depression, and chicken quickly became impossible for the average

person to afford. Americans, enraged by their chickenless pots, quickly gave Hoover the boot and elected Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 election by a landslide. Three Roosevelt terms later, chicken was once again cheap and plentiful. Luckily for us in Canada, some of the best and cheapest chicken restaurants sprung up in Montreal.

One of the first chicken restaurants in the Montreal area was St-Hubert. Originally founded in 1951, there are now more than a hundred St-Hubert restaurants scattered throughout Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick.

Indeed, the business has become massive; last year St-Hubert’s Montreal call centre took more that 1.9 million orders.

“Barbecue chicken, as a commercial phenomenon,

seemed to originate [with St-Hubert] and then it spread across the country,” says McGill’s Nathalie Cooke, a professor in the faculty of arts and a researcher of Canadian food history. Fried chicken was more of an American story; “It was a marriage between ‘the Colonel’ and George Gardiner, who developed the Scott’s Chicken Villas in the 1960s,” says Cooke.

In the Plateau, Kentucky Fried Chicken and St-Hubert franchises are hard to come by, whereas family-run Portuguese chicken restaurants dominate the local takeout scene. And amongst those that frequent Plateau Portuguese chicken restaurants, rumor has it that three particular establishments are head and shoulders – or should I say, “beak and breasts” – above the competition.

Romados

Coco Rico

Rotisserie Portugalia

On the corner of de Bullion and Rachel sits Romados, one of the Plateau’s most popular chicken restaurants.

Founded in 1994, the restaurant claims to cook almost 300 chickens per day and recommends placing orders by phone at least an hour in advance. Romados, which doubles as a Portuguese bakery, serves barbecued chicken and fries out of a greasy takeout window at the back of the store. But along with serving up some tasty chicken, the restaurant is also known for serving up a long line.

“The count against Romados is that they have the stupidest fucking takeout system I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” says Sam Solomon, a frequent patron of Romados and a self-described chicken expert. “It’s worse than Schwartz’s,” he says. “If you call ahead, they tell you to come at a certain time and you get there and you just have to stand in a different line than you usually would.”

But despite a wait that can sometimes hit 20 minutes, Solomon prefers Romados chicken to the other Portuguese chicken he’s had in the plateau. Chicken from Coco Rico, he claims, looks too much like an actual chicken: “You could imagine it flying away.” And he says that the employees at Romados are the most entertaining. “The lady serving chicken always gives you a wink and calls you mon cheri.”

At $10.99 for a whole chicken, a meal from Romados is tasty and relatively cheap.

Walking southwest from Romados one soon reaches Coco Rico at the corner of St. Laurent and Napolean. Coco Rico is one of several chicken restaurants in Montreal that is owned by the Castanheira family. The Castanheiras opened Janos, beside Schwartz’s, in the 1970s and Coco Rico a short time later. And they recently opened a third rotisserie joint at the corner of Mont Royal and St. Laurent.

Coco Rico, which sells at least 300 chickens per day and sometimes more on the weekends, is the Castanheiras’ busiest restaurant. Unlike Romados, Coco Rico’s chicken is cooked on a spit in a rotisserie oven. The action of the rotisserie makes the chicken’s skin golden brown, something you just can’t get with a barbecue. “The way the Coco Rico skin kinda sticks to your teeth,” Ryan Bergen, a freelance writer and frequent Coco Rico customer, says, “I kinda like that.”

Bergen, much like Solomon, considers himself something of a chicken connoisseur. If he has the time to spare he’ll wait for chicken at Romados. But when pressed, Coco Rico, with its speedy service, is not a bad second choice.

“If you want to get your chicken fast, then probably Coco Rico is the way to go,” he says.

At $8.99 per chicken, Coco Rico is the only restaurant in the Plateau where you can get two whole chickens for less than 20 bucks.

Walking north on St. Laurent from Coco Rico and turning left on Rachel, one will soon come across Rotisserie Portugalia – if you can find it, that is. A sign above the door simply reads “restaurant,” and I had to double-check the address to make sure that I was at the right place.

Once inside, patrons are greeted by a small counter top, a single table, and the restaurant’s owner, José Lopes, methodically flipping chicken on a small barbecue.

Lopes doesn’t speak much English, but his nephew Nelson was kind enough to answer my questions. According to Nelson, costumers need to place chicken orders at least four hours in advance during the week and 24 hours in advance on the weekends.

When I placed my order for the next day, Nelson warned me that it might not be ready on time. “Don’t expect it to be ready at seven,” he said, explaining that sometimes things come up and recounting a story about one time when the restaurant suddenly and inexplicably filled with smoke.

“We are the exact opposite of McDonald’s,” says Nelson.

“You don’t get a smile, but you leave with good food.” And good food it is. What sets Portugalia apart from the rest is its marinade. All the chicken is marinated for at least 20 minutes before being put on the grill. This gives the chicken a real “piquant” flavour that simply can’t be matched.

At $11 for a whole chicken, with the risk that it might not be ready on time, Portugalia might just be the best the Plateau has to offer.

H

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

21

The meat doesn’t make the man A meatogyny exposé Sean Iacurti

Culture Writer

“He handled my breast as if he were making a meatball.”

– Mary Gordon, Final Payments

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he stage is set. The Mrs. has concocted some pansy-shit koooos-Goose for the girls and Brady-sympathizers. And the pièce de résistance for any fourth of July celebration – the bloody Angus burgers sizzling under the dominion of Joe six-pack.

Determined to make the date a success, she orders her “usual” – the garden salad with only half the dressing. Unabashedly, he orders a T-bone – the perfect accomplice for his beer.

This isn’t you. You did not attend University of Texas. You aren’t an ex-homecoming queen.

Your father doesn’t have a gun room. But before you turn the page, ask yourself: have you ever not ordered a steak for fear of looking butch? Or have you ever found yourself boasting to some friends about the number of hamburgers you have consumed? If your answer to either is yes, you, my friend, are a meatogynist.

Since industrialization, meat has become an appendage of the West’s patriarchal society. The sexualization of meat can be traced to the emotional responses triggered by meat production.

“Meat’s recognizable message arises from patriarchal attitudes including the idea that the end justifies the means, the objectification of others is part of life, and that vio-

lence can and should be masked,” Carol J. Adams states in The Sexual Politics of Meat.

The sheer concept of meat shines a light on man’s primeval core in its links to the “sport” of hunting. In this display of either camaraderie or sheer stupidity, men are able to show their “strength and virility” by the “conquering of beasts,” Deborah Lupton explains in Food, Body, and the Self. Thus, Adams concludes, meat is merely a symbol for “patriarchal control of animals.”

The concept of hunting as a stereotypical male sport should come as no surprise to anyone, and it is no shock that meat continues to register as “men’s food” – though this doesn’t make it justifiable. Meatogyny is intensified by the proclamations of meat being “too heavy” or “too strong” for women at times. This fallacy is only exacerbated by taboos against women eating meat especially during “hyper feminine times, such as menstruation or pregnancy,” as Frederick J. Simoons writes.

So why does it seem that women often steer (mind the pun) away from food that too closely resembles live animals or fish (examples – raw steaks, lamb, octopus)? Perhaps this stereotype is founded in shared experience. Women can sympathize with the oppression, aggression, and follies of male dominance since they too have been in that situation – not too long ago. By seducing her with “honeyed words,” Zeus subdues, rapes, and swallows Metis in the classic Greek myth. He then claims to

receive her counsel from his belly, where she will remain.

Feminist theorists certainly have a lot to say about this.

Subsequently, alongside the masculinization of meat arises the feminization of vegetarianism. Within Western society, only 30 per cent of vegetarians are male. This is not new; according to James C. Whorton’s article, “Muscular Vegetarianism,” in 1836 – in response to Grahamism, the vegetarian movement of the time – petitioners proclaimed, “emasculation is the first fruit of Grahamism.”

Personally, I do not see a correlation between feminism and vegetarianism. On the contrary, I attribute the high female percentage of vegetarians to a hesitancy from men. Mostly

out of fear of being labeled a “sissy,” a “fruit,” or worse, an over-the-top hippie.

In the 1980s, The New York Times published an article on the masculine nature of meat consumption. Instead of the “John Wayne type,” Adams says, the “epitome of the masculine meat eater,” the new male hero is “vulnerable” – they “might eat fish and chicken, but not red meat.” It’s been over 20 years and it seems this ideology may not have completely vanished.

Nothing says Thanksgiving like a Tofurkey... right?

Michelle Kwok for The McGill Daily

You are what you eat Digesting Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman Alex Knoll

Culture Writer

F

or centuries, humans thought of food as merely a means for survival. In affluent societies where food seems abundant, however, we have entered an era in which food takes on perplexing new meanings: our morals and social status can be judged based on the food we choose to eat.

It seems that a hierarchy of morality is connected to every choice that we need to make, especially in relation to food. The decisions we make have become more and more representative of our views on nature, society, and consumerism. This hierarchy is not necessarily based on external judgements, but more in an internal struggle to decide where we fit in a world where the food we eat becomes a reflection of ourselves.

Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman is a novel that closely examines this phenomenon of food symbolism. The book follows a young woman, Marian McAlpin, who finds her appetite disintegrating as she loses her sanity. McAlpin’s self-scrutiny increases as she begins to notice the social hierarchies all around her,

becoming confused as to where she stops eating all foods she doesn’t fits in. She starts to associate food want to identify with, which evenwith different aspects of social sta- tually leads to eating nothing at all. tus, specifically relating certain foods She feels suffocated by the inescapto the different people in her life and able need to conform, as though she the roles that they play in society. Most importantly, she associates her arroShe associates her arrogant gant, dominating fiancé with meat, which she fiancé with meat, which she feels is a symbol of power, feels is a symbol of power, money, and competition. money, and competition She begins to think that eating meat will mean she is succumbing to his dominance.

After this initial realization, is being “devoured” by society. The McAlpin decides that the consump- book ends with her baking a cake of tion of any food symbolically places herself and eating it.

Atwood describes the world as a her into a social group that she doesn’t want to be in. She quickly “cluster of raw materials” just wait-

“

ing to be “digested into assimilation.”

We are all frightened of being classified with all these “raw materials,” she suggests, and are confused about being placed on the same level as what we eat.

Why has something as natural as eating turned into such a complicated psychological process? It is inevitable for natural hierarchies and social categories to exist, but just because they exist does not mean that our choices must revolve around conforming to them. We might not all be as crazy as Marian McAlpin, but her story offers much to relate to – either on a conscious or subconscious level. I guess these days it’s just rare – pun intended – to do anything, even eating, without contemplating the effect it will have on our social status.

22 Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Night of the living nuggets Provocative pet shop questions the relationship between man and meat Casey McLachlan Culture Writer

I

magine you’re walking down a city street and you see a rabbit perching in a shop window filing its nails before a vanity mirror. In an adjacent window a mother surveillance camera lovingly monitors her vigilant offspring. Above the window a sign reads “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill.” Further inside the shop, breaded fish fingers swim mindlessly in circles around a bowl.

This surreal menagerie would certainly make passersby look again – and it does, because this is Banksy’s newest art installation.

The elusive British street artist Banksy has opened up shop in Greenwich Village, revealing his first official exhibition in New York City.

He is seen as somewhat of an enigma – his carefully guarded identity has never been revealed. Over the past decade, the self-dubbed “art terrorist”

has become famous for provocative, stenciled graffiti on various facades of various cityscapes. He redefined the typical notion of the artist’s canvas by painting on buildings, streets, billboards, vehicles, and even animals.

Animals – and their voicelessness – have always been a primary subject in Banksy’s art. His graffiti often features rats, he has painted on an elephant, and animals are again the focus of his current installation.

Banksy’s exhibit is a mock pet supply shop filled with animatronic creatures. The store imitates the atmosphere of a real pet shop with dimmed lighting, eccentric shopkeepers, and the use of bear urine to enhance the natural smell. Outwardly, it is like any other shop in the Village.

There is no sign of Banksy – except that nothing is for sale, so nothing is commodified. The viewer simply watches the seemingly alive animals and the processed meat “would-be” creatures that have been mechanically reanimated.

“I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming,” Banksy explained in his artist’s statement. In one case, chicken nuggets eagerly dip their beaks into a paper trough of barbecue sauce as fresh nuggets hatch from a nest of eggs. In another terrarium, a new litter of hot dogs slithers sluggishly from their parent sausages, who in turn drink from a bottle of mustard.

In a raised birdcage, a melancholy and balding Tweety bird rocks back and forth on its perch. It has abandoned its favourite refrain of “I tawt I taw a puddy tat” for a more gloomy, disillusioned persona. Each creature has been taken out of its usual context in order to demonstrate the exploitative way humans utilize animals.

Like the majority of Banksy’s art, the exhibit is ominously comical as it combines whimsy with more serious issues. The lifelike “pets” are disturbingly vacant; the rabbit emulates human narcissism and the primate

stares numbly at a television screen.

The processed meat, on the other hand, is active and curious. The animatronic meat can be seen as your average Happy Meal with a pulse. Viewers might find this alarming – we expect our fast food to lie acquiescent in its wrapper.

Banksy has staged an absolute role reversal between the pet and the meat.

The inspiration for the exhibition came when Banksy saw a Chihuahua wearing a jeweled collar walking past a homeless person. “New Yorkers don’t care about art they care about pets, so I’m exhibiting them instead,” he later explained. These pets are more privileged than many people on the planet, thus the proliferation of the pet service industry; Banksy’s pet shop aims to comment on this injustice.

In Montreal, one pet pampering business is the hip Westmount boutique Bark & Fitz, a franchise in a 21-unit chain. The shop contains a myriad of pet products, a doggie bakery, a grooming salon, and giftware for the accompanying pet owner.

Michael Page, the CEO of the company, believes that “business is evolving because customers are looking for a more high-end pet experience.”

He then likened his business to other yuppie enterprises when he said “we consider ourselves the Starbucks or Whole Foods of the pet retail business.” In other words, the biscuit has been replaced with the brioche.

Banksy’s creative collision of the pet shop with the supermarket meat aisle is an ingenious representation of human exploitation of animals. Why are some animals cast as companions while others are born for consumption? Love it or hate it, Banksy leaves us with some serious food for thought.

The Village Pet Shop and Charcoal Grill (89 7th Ave S., New York) is open until October 31. Admission is free. Banksy enthusiasts stranded in Montreal can check out thevillagepetstoreandcharcoalgrill.com for videos and more information.

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Mind over meat?

The moral qualms of a conscientious carnivore April Engelberg Culture Writer

L

et’s face it: meat tastes delicious.

Nothing compares to that gratifying first bite into a juicy hamburger – the savory flavour enveloping your taste buds, the hearty texture of beef as you chew, and the satisfaction as the delectable morsel makes its way to your stomach, where it pleasantly proceeds to satisfy your hunger like nothing else can.

As a lifelong carnivore, meat has always been a staple in my diet. It provides the perfect protein to balance an everyday meal, and I find it is the only food that really fills me up. Moreover, meat plays a key role in almost every seasonal celebration I’ve grown up with. It just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, Christmas without a roast, or summer without hotdogs at a barbeque. Appreciation of meat seems to joyfully unite people under a common cause, and it’s been this way for ages.

So what could be so bad about meat that makes some people decide to permanently swear it off? Never having known any vegetarians or vegans until recently, I had always thought of them as animal lovers who couldn’t bear the thought of eating something cute and cuddly. Occasionally, I thought about the repercussions of my evening steak, remembering the gory PETA pamphlets that were posted and subsequently chucked every day at the café where I worked. Mainly I conceded that animals weren’t my thing, and left it at that.

My only problem with the meat industry was how horribly the animals were treated during their short lives, a practice that I figured unfortunately couldn’t be significantly altered by my otherwise indifferent self. I carried this view with me up until last semester, when all my assumptions were suddenly challenged, thanks to our lovely University.

I have always been an advocate of the “renaissance man” ideal, and wish to balance my mind with hard facts and abstract notions. But when I decided last semester to take both an anthropology course on human evolution and a philosophy course on contemporary moral issues, I had no idea how curiously well their ideas would mesh.

I figured I would read Peter Singer’s essay “All Animals are Equal” just as begrudgingly as the seven morally argumentative pieces before it. Maybe because of its compact length, I gave it a little more attention than the others. As I read, my thoughts began to flow with his line of thinking until I came to a startling conclusion: I actually agreed with

this nutjob. His claim was that sentient creatures deserve moral consideration, which involves preventing them unnecessary suffering. This suffering occurs through things like meat production, which is no longer truly necessary to sustain humans.

Instinctively, I wanted to reject Singer’s conclusion. An indescribable frustration arose in me that searched for biological arguments to justify my assurance that eating meat was right – if only because it was the natural preference of humans (why else would we find the taste oh-so-good?)

Yet it was exactly the opposite of biological determinism that I was learning about in my human evolution class. The evolutionary advantage of humans is not, like other animals, related to our position on the food chain; it is based solely on our cranial capacity. If our ability to think abstractly has given our species this position of God-like control over all earthly things, then it makes sense that we must put this natural advantage to use in rejecting biological norms that no longer make moral or environmental sense. We must stop eating animals.

I still hold this view – and yet, puzzlingly, I continue to be a practicing carnivore. As I nod my head in agreement when my vegan roommate discusses the detrimental effects of animal consumption, she remains mystified as to why I have taken no action to revise my lifestyle. And quite frankly, so do I. I find I still enjoy my immoral hamburgers as much as I enjoyed my indifferent hamburgers.

It could be that philosophical arguments just seem so far away from the dinner table. Still, being removed from the issue hasn’t prevented me from boycotting clothing companies whose practices I disapprove of. The only conclusion I can come to is that I am not a strong enough person to swim against the social current and forfeit my fancy for meat.

Meat is something I have grown up with. It is part of my life, my family, and my culture. Yet I know there is something fundamentally wrong with the meat that sits on my plate. The detachment we have from the living animals that are killed for our dinners removes us from the ethics behind their slaughter. Because mainstream culture has made meat-eating the norm and has removed us so far from its origins, it is difficult to oppose its everyday practice, even when one has intellectual reservations with it.

Could I live without meat?

Absolutely, and probably with ease.

Do I think vegetarianism is the moral high ground? I must admit, I do. However, I just can’t seem to get upset when I eat meat. The decision to consume meat is ultimately left to the individual, yet I continue to stand on the ethical precipice, oddly hesitant to join the moral minority.

23

/ The McGill Daily

Top: Kyle Valade / The McGill Daily, Bottom: Roxy Kirschenbaum for The McGill Daily

Smoked meat salvation

Schwartz’s is the holy grail of Montreal’s sandwich circuit Maia Reed

Culture Writer

M

y Bubbie recalls a special perk of growing up on Rue St. Dominique in the 1930s: sharing a ten-cent smoked meat sandwich with her sister. My father still finds it fascinating to sit at the counter with a Cott’s Black Cherry in hand, watching them slice meat and trying to figure out where the fries come from. When I asked my Uncle Mark to share a few thoughts on Schwartz’s, he replied: “Schwartz’s and meat? That’s like an article on the Holy Grail and religion.... When do you need this by?” Needless to say, Schwartz’s deli is deeply rooted in my family history.

To cover the entire history of Schwartz’s in this space would be impossible – there is a feature film, Chez Schwartz, and a book,

Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen: The Story, for that kind of information. However, my investigation led me to some exciting findings. I sat down with Schwartz’s manager Frank Silva, who began working there as a busboy 27 years ago.

Silva told me that they marinade the meat themselves for ten days and smoke it for eight hours, and that the french fries are made three times a day. He tastes the meat every morning to make sure it’s just right, and they begin serving hot meat every morning at 10 a.m.

In Silva’s nearly three decades at Schwartz’s, he’s had a few celebrity encounters – Jean Chretien sat at the counter just last week, Halle Berry waited in line like the rest of us, Angelina sat at the middle table, and Celine Dion calls to make reservations in advance. But Silva won’t shut down the place for any celeb. “What happens when tour-

ists come to wait in line and I have to tell them they can’t come in?”

To accommodate special requests, Schwartz’s caters events. Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and yes, even funerals – for those who make a point to say that their funeral would only be complete if their family and friends ate smoked meat upon the reception.

So there is, after all, a religious aspect to the place. As my uncle explained in the essay he wrote for me on the topic, “For members of the Great Montreal Diaspora, Schwartz’s is a station of the cross. In fact it’s become more and more like the other stations of the cross in Rome or Jerusalem, so full of tourists you can hardly get in.”

For Silva, on the other hand, the most rewarding aspect of his job is seeing regulars return, married and with children. That works for me, the offspring of these true believers.

24 Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Meat substitutes

by Midnight Kitchen

Meat Grilled portobello mushrooms, tofu, seitan (wheat gluten), tempeh, or coconut

1 Egg 1/4 cup applesauce or 1/2 mashed banana or 1 tbsp ground flaxseed   with 3 tbsp water

1/2 Cup Butter 1/2 cup margarine or 1/3 cup vegetable oil

Milk Soy, rice, almond, or oat milk Coconut milk for cooking (for buttermilk add a spoonful of lemon juice)

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

The careful carnivore

25

Making the most of the meat you eat Maeve Clougherty The McGill Daily

We could debate the ethics of eating meat until the cows come home, but most of us can agree on one thing: meat is delicious when cooked properly. If you don’t have the willpower to be a vegetarian, and still feel bad for cute little animals, buy free range meat, but don’t waste a perfectly good animal on a bad meal. Learn how to make delicious meat dishes so those cows and chickens didn’t die in vain.

Amanda Garbutt, host of TV McGill’s new cooking show, The Hot Plate, imparted her meatcooking wisdom to me for this article. Amanda also happens to be my roommate, and I can attest to her expertise firsthand, she’s helped me avoid disaster in the kitchen many a time – hopefully this guide will do the same for you.

First things first: we must discuss how to prepare and store meat. I cannot stress how important this is. If you’ve ever had food poisoning before, you’ll understand. In regular grocery

stores, fresh meat has an expiration date that you should take note of if you plan on cooking your meat immediately or in the next few days. If you plan on freezing it, however, it should last about a month and the expiration date doesn’t matter.

For all you poor students out there, this means you can actually buy the discounted meat with the “special” stickers. Another way to save cash is to buy a ton of meat in bulk and freeze each piece in individual bags (wrenching apart frozen steaks is really hard, trust me).

As for defrosting, it’s best to take out your meat the night before and stick it in the fridge, but if you can’t plan that far ahead, throw it on the counter in the morning and it’ll be ready for dinner. And please, don’t try to defrost rock-solid meat in the microwave; it partially cooks the meat and makes it taste like leather. Never, ever, try to defrost a piece of meat and then refreeze it again.

You and your insides will be very sorry.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of how not to make yourself incredibly sick, we can move on to the fun part.

Fortunately, I’ve had Amanda around the past couple years to stop me before I’m about to do something horribly wrong, but the rest of you kitchen novices have probably made some questionable meat dishes. To avoid another sad meal, follow this foolproof method to get your meat crispy on the outside but juicy on the inside: season, sear, and cook through.

The first step is fundamentally important, though most of us forget to do it : when you take out your piece of meat, rub it with salt and pepper on both sides to lock in flavour. Next, heat some olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat and throw your meat in to sear it. In Amanda’s words, be loving with your meat – don’t toss it around in the pan or it won’t get brown and crispy around the edges. Around five minutes per side, depending on thickness, should get it nice and brown. If you’ve got chicken, move it to the oven for another 15 minutes at 350º Fahrenheit and it will be done to perfection. For your red meat, leave it in the pan until it’s cooked to your liking.

A quick method to test the doneness of your meat is to make a loose fist and poke the area between your thumb and your index finger.

This is what rare meat feels like. Squeeze your fist and that fleshy area feels tougher; this is how well-done meat should feel. Learning to test doneness by pressing on the meat is a skill worth learning, especially if you want to serve meat to guests without cutting a nasty hole into the middle of it.

Lastly, if you’ve got leftovers, meat should always be sealed in Tupperware, or it will make everything else in your fridge smell meaty – vegetarian roommates especially do not appreciate this. Leftovers will only stay fresh for a few more days, so it’s best to use your extras for lunch the next morning.

Check out Amanda’s recipe for lamb shanks below. It’s cheap, easy, and incredibly delicious – we made it last night and I’m still thinking about it. Bon appétit!

Ingredients: 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 2 lamb shanks, preferably from the back limbs since they are meatier 2 sprigs fresh thyme 2 sprigs fresh rosemary 1 spanish onion, coarsely chopped 2 carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped 2 celery stalks, coarsely chopped 8 garlic cloves smashed 2 jalapenos, coarsely chopped 4 c reduced sodium chicken stock 1 ½ tbsp chili powder 1 ⁄ 8 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp ground cumin 1 tsp ground coriander seed ¼ c honey ½ c balsamic vinegar Salt and Pepper

Steps: 1.

Take the lamb shanks out of the fridge 15 minutes prior to cooking, so they can start to get the chill off. Season liberally with salt and pepper.

2. In a large heavy-bottom pot, heat 2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil to high heat. Carefully place the shanks in the pot, allow them to sear (very important), and do not flip until browned. Sear on all sides, which will usually take about 15 minutes.

Remove the lamb shanks to a plate.

3. Add the onion, carrots, celery, and jalapenos, and stir until soft and translucent. This should take about 5 to 8 minutes. Make sure to turn down the heat if they are burning; you don’t want them to brown too much.

4. Add the garlic, spices, fresh herbs, and stir constantly for 1 minute.

5. Pour in the chicken stock and scrape the bottom with a wooden spoon to pick up the yummy brown bits of meat.

6. Place the shanks back in the pot and bring the mixture to a boil over high heat, while seasoning with salt and pepper. Reduce the temperature and simmer covered for 2 to 2 ½ hours.

7.

Remove the shanks to a plate and tent with foil to allow their juices to redistribute through the meat.

8. Strain the juices into a medium pot and, over high heat, add the honey and balsamic vinegar.

Bring to a boil while whisking. Boil until reduced and thickened (about 15 minutes).

9. Serve the lamb on top of your favourite grain, risotto, etc. with some roasted veggies on the side – see below for suggestions. Drizzle with sauce.

Suggested Side Dishes: • Mashed Cheddar Potatoes studded with Corn • Roasted Root Vegetable Medley • Cornbread with Chipotle Mashed Sweet Potatoes Serves two

Graphics by Sally Lin / The McGill Daily

26 Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Madrid “Crótalo Crótalo Crótalo” – Federico Garcia Lorca

And step one pivot on the toe

pause

red lips wave of the skirt

and

then the eyes lock rose in fist step right circling the enemy, the display eyes full Shu Jiang / The McGill Daily

Life between layovers Arrivals, departures, and the transience of airport terminals

of life and the castanet castanet castanet: oyster in the palm, its applause for the

Sara Duplancic Culture Writer

T

wo short months ago you may have been stuck with a heavy backpack at the airport, eight weeks ago, you may have arrived at the doorstep of your residence, and only yesterday you may have been contemplating the reality of life after graduation. The transience of life is striking, especially for university students. This is one of the reasons Kara Fletcher chose to direct Carol Shield’s Departures and Arrivals, currently playing at the TNC Theatre.

Another reason is that Shield’s play is quite hilarious. Divided into approximately 20 vignettes, the play casts its audience, alongside the actors, as travellers waiting in the departures and arrivals lounge of an airport. The explosive opening scene features the hustle and bustle we’ve come to expect at an airport. The six talented actors portray over 20 characters in ten minutes – costume changes and all.

There are business people, vacationers, students, young, old, sweet hellos, bitter goodbyes, tears, geeks, MPs, and the staple pilot and stewardess – I mean – flight attendant. The director, cast, and crew immediately display their agility when it comes to pacing, comedic timing, and colourful character work. Moments such as these, however, are juxtaposed later

in the play with intimate scenes of emotional depth, philosophical pondering, and pure revelry in rare but powerful silence.

The emotionally-charged atmosphere of airports can sometimes lead to a heightened reality; in capturing this, the play has moments resembling Theatre of the Absurd.

Characters can become caricatures, the humour almost slapstick, and stereotypes can be subverted in the cyclical realm of departures and arrivals. Amanda McQueen is hilarious as a self-conscious yet judgmental people-watcher, and brings a quirky animation to many of her characters.

Like each of the other actors, she transforms into 12 different characters throughout the duration of the play. Steve Hersch is also very skilled at playing with the line between character and caricature, especially as the amorous pilot and overworked son.

Upon presenting its more serious themes and scenes, however, the play enters a new realm of intensity and draws the audience in even closer.

Ryan Lauzon and Alixandra Stoicheff strike a particularly poignant tone playing a father and soon-to-be-married daughter. A major challenge the play presents to its actors is the great age range they subsume. Cayleigh Eckhardt does a remarkable job of playing the 60-something grandmother, Mrs. Kitchell. She rises to the challenge by not only playing a character several decades older than

her, but one that remains lovable despite bigoted inclinations. Peter Farrell undergoes a total transformation as the senior Wesley, alongside the plethora of other characters he convincingly portrays.

The play is at its strongest when subtlety of character coincides with seemingly mundane occurrences to open a new portal of understanding. It is evident that this nuance emerged from the actors’ hard work and Fletcher’s capable guidance.

To portray the play’s multitude of physicalities, “We did a lot of body work in rehearsals,” McQueen confirms. Regarding the psychological development of the characters, Lauzon explains, “[We] had to do a lot of background work on the fictional characters. We constructed biographies in order to understand them.”

The lights, music, and set – complete with a luggage chute – accommodate this cast of characters nicely, creating a simple and accurate airport ambiance.

Buy a ticket, board Air TNC, and embark on a journey of laughter and revelation with a quirky bunch of strangely familiar characters. But one word of advice: never underestimate the powers of a janitor.

Departures and Arrivals runs from October 29 to November 1 at the TNC Theatre (3485 McTavish).

Shows start at 8 p.m. and admission is $6 for students.

dance.

And the guitar now weeping for La Mancha and step two three four and one. fingers twist smoke into the air but the castanet castanet castanet, the pearl

– Francesca Bianco

Inkwell

Compendium!

The McGill Daily, Monday, October 27, 2008

Lies, Half-truths, & Hallowe’en content

Zombie life Arie Voorman 1

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Across 1. Automaton 6. Hawaiian tuber 10. Final notice 14. Open, in a way 15. Coloured 16. “You reap what you sow” (acronym) 17. What zombies really want?

19. Decorative case 20. Ford flop 21. Corolla part 22. Bullish 26. “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams has one: Abbr.

28. Charlotte-to-Raleigh dir.

29. Shade provider 30. Like a stuffed shirt 31. Backstabber 32. Elks’ hang out 33. Semi trucks, eg.

35. On the safe side, at sea 36. Coconut liquor 37. “Shoo!”

40. Fearful 42. Belief 43. Good, in the ‘hood 45.

Mix 46. “My!” 47. Hooter 48. Checkers, e.g.

49. Ottoman currency 50. Safari sight

52. Gave out 54. function 55. Grimm story 60. Ball of yarn 61. Harp’s cousin 62. Apply, as pressure 63. Amerada (Fortune 500 company) 64.

-friendly 65. Apprehensive Down 1. Bleed 2. “ moment” 3. “Monty Python” airer 4. Propel, in a way 5. Atropine derivitave 6. Macbeth, for one 7. Em, to Dorothy 8. Advise 9. “ to Billie Joe” 10. Arch type 11. Popular symphony 12. Large lizard 13. Sitting room?

18. Like some vases 21. Beep 22. Indian beat 23. Missing from the Marines, say 24. Romero’s due dates?

25. Star in Orion 27. In use 30. Strength

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33. Deadly post-weekend sickness?

34. Fats 36. At liberty 38. Jewish month 39. Auld lang syne 41. BBs, e.g.

42. Taxable land 43. Beet soup 44. For some time 46. Greasy 49. Cutter 51. Intelligence 53. Cork’s country 55. Bird 56. Can 57. “Malcolm X” director 58. “To is human...”

59. Chester White’s home

Solution to Thanksgiving Leftovers R A B B I

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H I M A L A S P Y K R A O I A M L I B T U M I R A V S R E T

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A M I I G D O L E S A M A B R I M E N C E

M E A S U R E U P

I D S A M B B I R C H

T O R E

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M I R E S

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Ben Peck / The McGill Daily Sally Lin / The McGill Daily

MEAT FILMS: The Slaughter House Rules Tihamic The Beefshank Redemption Conspirameat Theory Jurassic Pork Mean Gills Chickenbusters Some Like it Horse Wet Lamb American Summer Skewering Private Ryan