Lamb Bites

The history of eating little lambs for dinner is long and complicated, especially among the ovine community.

Some sources state that lamb is the least popular red meat sold in the United States--although I have a funny feeling that really that distinction belongs to things like the muskrat or the porcupine which are considered red meat on the basis of their being mammals but aren't always terribly nice to eat. And, no I have no idea how rabbits got to be white meat.

(Right... and left Spam through the ages. Images copyrighted by Hormel. Use of low
resolution images may qualifiy under fair use as they do not imapct the market value of the product or substantially impinge on current trademarks.)

In any event, little lambs get eaten for dinner, particularly in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine, which is one reason why the famed M*A*S*H "Spam lamb" came from Greece. Check out the Spam web site...but be careful--it's loud! Personally, I like a nice lamb dinner from time to time, and I was enjoying a yummy lamb saute from a local Pocono establishment just last night when one of my fellow diners began to talk about how cute and fuzzy and cuddly lambs are.

And they are. But I felt guilty. Because eating cute fuzzy cuddly things is pretty mean...even polar bears eat relatively uncute animals, and, as Sarah Palin warned us, polar bears can be bad news. Just take a gander at Lost. Once the polar bears were removed form their fish-biscuit puzzle cages, they went pretty hog wild and adopted some really troublesome behaviors, like eating airline passengers and possibly suitcases. Those fish biscuits must have had calming qualities. (Above--fish biscuit from a really cool blog by Kung Foodie )

So, I invoked the food lamb. (Not to be comfused with Harriet Lamb, who could also be considered a food lamb). The food lamb is a bad-tempered, fanged creature that bites its keepers and generally deserves to be made into burgers, sautes, and chops. Food lambs are bad news, boy.

My fellow diners felt that the food lamb idea was somehow ... "silly." Personally, I was shocked at their attitude.

As it turns out, one of my friends has been "keeping company" with a nice (and fairly buff) farmer. I was a bit surprised to learn that, although they have been seeing each other socially for over a month, she had no idea whether he had ever been bitten by a food lamb. I was alarmed, because those bites can be nasty. Luckily, her friend is a vegetable farmer, an added benefit of which is that his farm is not a possible vector for pandemic influenza mutations, since he does not have chickens, pigs, or other poultry, none of which is, according to him, a vegetable.

whew!

Now I just have to check the food pyramid for replacement vegetables.... (left--flu vector. Public domain image.)

Psycho Panda Psychic Incident

In the earliest version of the fairy tale "Snow White," the evil queen is not a stepmother but the little princess's own mother, which is pretty creepy when you consider that the whole reason Snow White was so very fetching was that she was her mother's daughter. Those Brothers Grimm were not terribly cheerful guys, methinks. Of course, they lived in a different time and perhaps didn't get out much, which may have been depressing for them. And I suppose that their stories do clean up nicely for Disney films.

Above. Evil Queen.

Illustration from Snow White (Mjallhvít) from an 1852 icelandic translation of the Grimm-version fairytale. Landsbókasafn Íslands w:Project Gutenberg eText 16846 Drawing believed to be by Theodor Hosemann. Image is in the public domain because it was published over 100 years ago.

For me, the idea that the evil queen was able to detect her daughter's whereabouts only through the agency of the magic mirror bears some examination. Would a real mother really need a magic mirror to detect her daughter or might they have a psychic link that the Brothers Grimm changed into a magic mirror for purposes of marketing and suchlike? Perhaps a simple 19th century marketing decision led to the development of the evil stepmother.

(Left) This image is a screenshot made from a public domain movie trailer. Trailers for movies released before 1964 are in the Public Domain because they were never separately copyrighted.

Case in point: The Incident of the Psycho Panda.

This Thanksgiving, while my family and I were eating lamb with my sister-in-law's parents (who are really super nice), my mother suddenly related with the story of a crazed panda that grabbed some guy's jacket and ripped it off. Interestingly enough, only days before, I had posted a link to the video of the panda incident in this very blog. Coincidence?

Maybe.

Perhaps, however, it's evidence of psychic connections.

But it's just possible that Snow White's mom was really just a bad cook and a lousy dressmaker. What if Snow White's mother came to her senses and was trying to make amends with some really cool magic combs and a tasty beauty apple and just mixed up the recipe? Sure, it could have still been subliminal murder activity, and it would detract from the Disney movie (although I think the dwarves would carry it without Snow White), but maybe the first queen wasn't quite as bad as she's made out to be.

Thankslambing

This Thanksgiving, my brother made a lamb for dinner. It was the first time he made dinner for a family holiday, and his wife made the Yorkshire pudding to go with the lamb. The food was yummy in general, and the lamb was yummy in particular. Yum.

When I got back to school after the holiday, I was informed that the consumption of Thanksgiving lamb was yet another example of my lack of conformity to usual practices.

I wondered if it was really fair to note that I was being nonconformist. After all, I always make a turkey when I host Thanksgiving. Can I help it if my family is full of renegades?

(left) Lamb. Image by Peter Shanks from Lithgow, Australia. This work was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Of course, I could have pretended that I had really only had turkey, which may have been the point....