A while back my son and I visited the aquarium. After taking the train downtown, walking six blocks, peering through blue-green glass at the scores of aquatic life and completely exhausting the use of "whoa" and "that’s cool!", we were pretty darn hungry. And, as I’m a dad and am not biologically wired to plan ahead like mom does, our only option was to eat at the obscenely overpriced food court in the basement of the aquarium. But I shouldn’t criticize their price structure too much – they’re simply following the trend. Museum, aquarium, zoo, amusement park – not one of them can seem to produce a skinny, dry hamburger at a cost of less than $5.25. They probably need to offset the loss they take by only charging me $12 admission and $9 for parking. So, what delicacy can we pick here to empty my wallet? I started on the long, arduous task of getting my son to tell me what he would like for lunch. I swear, sometimes I think the CIA has an easier time extracting information from a captured terrorist. The usually simple question of "so, what do you want to eat?" goes nowhere with my kid and leads to the obligatory, "I don’t know". The only effective way is for me to read off the menu and let him pick. And by pick I mean steer him into the proper choice. "Do you want the grilled chicken?" "Hot dog." "How about the grilled chicken?" "Hot dog." "They have grilled chicken." And so on.
So, I went down the list. "Cheeseburger? Veggie burger? Hot dog? Fish sand…wich?" It was one of those moments when you wish your words were on a string so you could suck them back into your mouth like spaghetti before they reached anyone’s ears. I knew exactly what was coming next. "Fish sandwich? You mean like the fishies out there? You eat ‘em?" my son inquired. "Well, no, not the fish out there – o.k., sorta like the fish out there, maybe distant relatives…" I was not helping. The woman behind the counter gives us her oh-so-charming "will you hurry the hell up and order?" look. "You’re gonna cook the fishies?" he asked her. "What’s that, you want a fish sandwich?" She was not helping either. "No! I don’t wanna eat the fishies! I love them!" He ran off back towards the tanks repeating this rather loudly. Sigh. Next time I bring our own PB and J.
This whole incident got me thinking. As inquisitive as my son is, we have never really discussed the origins of food. I’m sure if you ask him, he would say "the store", or "a restaurant". Vegetables are an easy concept to grasp. They grow from the ground like trees, grass, and flowers. ‘Nuff said. But what about the slippery minefield of explaining meat? To him steak does not equal cow, pork chops do not equal piggy, chicken does not equal… wait a minute, chicken does equal chicken. I guess he doesn’t give a flying !@#$% about chickens because he eats my BBQ chicken legs with a voracious appetite. Probably something to do with their usual absence at petting zoos. So how do I explain to him that a hamburger is really processed and butchered bovine flesh? The first step might be not phrasing it in quite that way. Why do I get the feeling he is going to turn vegetarian for a while? In fact, PETA should use this strategy to recruit the young tots for their cause. Currently, on the
kid’s portion of their website, the first paragraph reads, "What’s wrong with eating animals? Well, because it’s just not cool." This seems about as effective as telling teenagers not to smoke because their parents don’t want them to. A grownup telling a kid something is not cool is an immediate confirmation of the opposite. Just hearing adults even use the word "cool" makes most kids cringe. What PETA really should do is show a doe-eyed cow and say, "Aw, isn’t this cow cute? See that hamburger you’re eating? It came from right about… there." An animated knife cuts a hamburger-sized portion out of the cow’s rear and plops it on a bun. The cow then moans in pain as streaming tears fall from his sad eyes begging you to put an end to the misery from his exploited, tortured body and soul. That would get the lil’ buggers to swear off meat for a while. And it also demonstrates why my career designing children’s websites never really took off.
Since we are not a meat-free household, I’m reluctant to have the conversation with him about where his dinner came from. Then again, like sex, I don’t know if this is info I want him to learn from the street, either. I envision standing out at the backyard grill with some one-inch thick rib-eyes, and my son accosting me in front of all the neighbors. "You know what I just found out from Jimmy down the street? How could you feed me slaughtered cow my entire life and not tell me? You bastard!" OK, so perhaps I’m being rather dramatic, and maybe my usual avoidance of conflict is, in my mind, making this a bigger deal than it is. But, still…
It appears that in this instance, ignorance may indeed be bliss. It’s amazing that our children take our word for things so readily and easily. I could serve up the family cat for dinner, and my son would probably eat it without question. He believes that what I serve him for dinner is good, right, and in his best interest. While he doesn’t think of it in quite those terms, he knows he can eat it simply because it comes from his dad. When I think of it that way, maybe it’s wrong of me to plop a steak in front of him without his having the full knowledge of what it is and where it came from. What if he had that knowledge, and he would make the conscious choice not to eat it if he knew? Do our children have that right? Should I stop serving meat until I get up the guts to tell him? Ah, another one of those fun family conundrums.
I’m starving… will you pass the falafel?
