Me Eat Meat, by John Ostrander

John Ostrander

John Ostrander started his career as a professional writer as a playwright. His best known effort, Bloody Bess, was directed by Stuart Gordon, and starred Dennis Franz, Joe Mantegna, William J. Norris, Meshach Taylor and Joe Mantegna. He has written some of the most important influential comic books of the past 25 years, including Batman, The Spectre, Manhunter, Firestorm, Hawkman, Suicide Squad, Wasteland, X-Men, and The Punisher, as well as Star Wars comics for Dark Horse. New episodes of his creator-owned series, GrimJack, which was first published by First Comics in the 1980s, appear every week on ComicMix.

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28 Responses

  1. Martha Thomases says:

    The vegans I know are not so evangelical about it. They eat what they eat because it makes them feel better. As for me, I don't eat much red meat (I refuse to say I won't eat it, because then I would want it all the time), and it makes me feel better. Maybe I won't live forever, but I'll be happier while I'm here.

  2. mike weber says:

    Interesting thing about the "eat locally-produced foods" bit – saw an article (on "Huffington Post", maybe?) a while back in which a guy actually looked into the costs associated with that concept and discovered that, on average, buying the evil global conglomerate products was actually less expensive in terms of production and environmental effects…

    • Mike Gold says:

      Good point. A lot of the "solutions" advocated by the Health Police are more expensive — sometimes far more expensive — than the common offerings and the common diet. That's fine if you can afford it and you want to go that way, but these overseers of humanity have got to get it through their heads that a whole lotta people aren't as well off as they are.This elitist attitude is what bothers me about the about the Food Nazis. Just because some people choose to make different decisions doesn't mean they are stupid; even the Food Nazis make decisions that are contrary to their "best" interests.And before I get a shitload of comments, no, I'm not saying all Vegans or all vegetarians are Food Nazis. Just those elitist bastards who look down their nose at those of us who, as Glenn Hauman, Frank McLaughlin, Linda Gold and I will do tonight, choose to have us some awesomely slow-cooked home made barbecue brisket.Hey, it was John's idea!

  3. mike baron says:

    I eat roadkill. I expect Grell does too. It's got to be fresh! We are not barbarians.

    • John Ostrander says:

      There use to be a cookbook of how you could cook your meat on he carbarator of your car or some such. Had to wrap it up in lots of aluminum foil and you had to have a long trip to make sure everything got cooked. Still, fresh roadkill cooked on the carbarator? I bet you there's some good eating there, Mike. And fresh!

  4. Vinnie Bartilucci says:

    My dream T-shirt is "Anything stupider than me is food".My rule is simple. If a member of a species can tell me in a language I can clearly understand that they don't want to be eaten, I won't. I'll accept one animal speaking for the race so unlike Sean McKeever, I won't eat babies merely because they can't speak to voice their disagreement.There's a lot of meat I won't eat, either because of cultural dictates (dog leaps to mind) or just because there ain't enough meat on them to make it worth it (rabbit, squirrel, etc). Far as I'm concerned, Lobster is the ultimate act of a carnivore. You walk into a restaurant and actually CHOOSE the animal to be killed and cooked for you at your whim. And unlike a steak where there's no real visual connection to the cow that it came from, they bring you the whole lobster, and you rip it open and eat it. Yeah. Mastery over the Earth indeed.

    • Mike Gold says:

      Ever see Peter Davison in the television version (the one worth watching) of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

      • Vinnie Bartilucci says:

        Pretty much why I use that criteria. I would be there so fast…before PETA came along and said it was bad to eat the poor thing.IMHO, I found the TV version of HHG (while still superior to the film, alas) to be very slow and plodding. A lot of uncomfortable silences in between lines for no reason. A far cry from the rapid patter of the radio show. It's almost as if the TV show had to be a bit longer but they were loath to add any new material, so they just stretched to script out a bit.And Johnathan (The other one) – Seek out a copy of the Arrogant Worms' song "Carrot Juice Is Murder".The House of Sinanju condenses the entire lesson into one phrase – "Death feeds life". It explains both the food chain and why the Master of Sinanju must sell his services as the greatest assassin in the world to feed his humble fishing village.

  5. Anonymous says:

    The connections between meat consumption and obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are well-documented. Also, Drs. Barnard, Ornish, and Esselstyn, via peer-reviewed research, have successfully reversed diabetes AND the biggest killer of Americans of all: heart disease, through a low-fat vegan diet.Even the National Cancer Institute, no bastion of vegans, recognizes that red meat consumption is related to many cancers (go to their website).But, let's not get science involved in what is a personal decision, right?Which is more expensive, eating organic or local plant-based foods or health care? Which is more radical, cutting open a person's chest for a bypass or avoiding meat?Bon appetite!

    • John Ostrander says:

      You make the choice black and white, i.e. if you eat meat, you will have a bypass. if that were true, Wal-Mart would be offering cut-rate bypasses with every half a cow you buy.

  6. Jonathan (the other says:

    Meat is murder – and right tasty murder, at that!Hey, I've raised my own beef and pork, raised and slaughtered my own rabbits and chickens (and discovered that skinning the chicken during slaughter is a *much* more efficient method of getting the feathers off than the traditional, bad-smelling "boiling" method) – I readily admit that I like meat, and that something has to die in order for me to eat it.And the same is true of vegetables! Are plants not living beings? Are we supposed to ignore their innate right to existence, simply because they can't walk away? Thousands of heads of lettuce are ripped mercilessly from their roots every day, to satisfy the barbaric appetites of the vegetarians for their plant-death salads. (Some brands of lettuce even brag that their product is still alive! You don't even kill it before eating it!)I grew up in a heavily-forested region. One of the early lessons I learned by observing it is that all life exists at the expense of other life. Little songbirds eat insects. Cats eat mice and songbirds. Even baby trees grow best when rooted in the fallen corpses of their predecessors (euphemistically called "nurse trees"). Why should I feel guilty because I prefer motile non-sentients to sessile?

  7. Mary Mitchell says:

    Back in the days when millions of bison roamed free, millions of wildebeest and the great caribou herds frolicked, when elephants were in large numbers or even further back with the woolly mastodons, mammoths, rhino and all those other big sized herd mammals….there had to be a lot of farting going on. How is it that cows are going to be the demise of us all with their methane output when there were more bigger grass eaters back then and in huge mind boggling numbers? numbers before the invention of repeating rifle. I think cows are getting a bad rap, I think someone’s trying to frame them! I think it’s like people who eat beans and then blame the dog for the stink . I lived on a cattle farm too and I’m the first to admit that the smell a flatulent cow can make your nose hairs fall right out of your head…..but it isn’t as scary as the smells that comes out of Gary Illinois and Newark NJ. ….who started and got paid money for doing this cow fart study?

    • Mike Gold says:

      Ahhh… if we could only harness that force for good!

    • Mary Mitchell says:

      oops, meant Gary Indiana!

      • Alan Coil says:

        I think the cattle farts and belches are just the thing that gets the blame instead of the real argument, which is that millions of acres of forest and jungle have been lost in order to make grazing land for cattle.And who is to say that the dinosaurs DIDN'T become extinct because of gaseous emissions?

  8. Anonymous says:

    My problem with eating meat (pork, chicken, goat, mutton, beef, turkey), dairy and eggs is the environmental pressures placed on having to feed the livestock. Meat is ecologically wasteful, as livestock such as cows only retain 3% of the energy they acquire from food (the rest of the energy is excreted). It makes much more sense to eat insects (as many people do throughout the world), small-scale aquatic life (i.e. dried anchovies/sardines, oyesters, shrimp etc.) and peanuts as sources of protein. The smaller an organism is, the more energy efficient it is (insects retain 20-30% of the energy they acquire from food). Grasshoppers I heard taste like shrimp, mopane worms have three times the protein value as beef per unit weight and sago grubs I heard taste like pork fat.Now, once the supermarkets start selling grasshoppers, then I will start eating insects.

    • John Ostrander says:

      You "heard" that them bugs tastes like those goodies, huh? Come back when you've put 'em in your own mouth, grubwrangler.

      • Marilee J. Layman says:

        I've had sauteed grasshoppers and some kind of grubs. Plus chocolate-covered ants. They were all good. The key, I think, for people who haven't had them before, is to cook them in some kind of fat.

  9. Marilee J. Layman says:

    I grew up in the Ring of Fire and the first time I saw plates with slabs of meat on them, I couldn't figure out why people would like that.John, I have three cookbooks to recommend. None of them are vegetarian, but they all rely more on grains and veggies than meat: The Spice Is Right – Easy Indian Cooking for Today, Extending the Table (World Community Cookbook), and Bean, Pea & Lentil Cookbook. That last appears to be out of print.

  10. Stephen Bergstrom says:

    Man, it boggles the mind to think that the mass extinction of about (maybe, I'm not googling it, ya bastards) 65 million years ago could have been not the result of a meteor strike, but an excess of dino-flatulence.Me, I'm a card-carrying member of P.E.T.A. (People Eating Tasty Animals). In fact, just reading this op/ed piece is giving me the steak cravings.Thanks to my wife, we do try to shop for local, organic beef (as opposed to all the inorganic stuff out there), but I'm pretty sure that Jack In The Box doesn't do that, and there's just no way in the Nine Worlds that I'm giving up my Ultimate Cheeseburger for the sake of the planet Earth. Sorry, guys.

  11. Michael Davis says:

    I L I K E B A C O N!

    • Dan says:

      The first thing my Dad taught me to cook (at 10 yrs old) was that most wonderful of the breakfast meats, bacon. I treat myself to a bacon and peanut butter sandwich on toasted wheat bread (make sure to butter the toast!) whenever I want a childhood delicacy. Nitrates be damned. To echo Michael: I L I K E B A C O N!

    • Marilee J. Layman says:

      Yes, me too, but even when I could cook, I got burned too often, so I usually had it out.

  12. Hilary Barta says:

    Johhny, A meat-eatin' man after my own heart–or is that my lower intestine? I'm on my way out to Khan Barbeque on Devon–a Pakistani charred meat palace, and I ain't orderin' the spinach. I do use meat "as a flavoring" a lot at home–a little goes a long way to flavor a sauce–but mostly I do it because I'm an artist and perpetually poor. If I won the lottery I'd fly to Hong Kong tommorrow and live on Peking Duck and spicy beef. But I do worry about the flesh-eating rivers of pork run-off…

  13. Sean Meiers says:

    1) I recently heard somewhere (and no, I don't feel like googling either) that (I believe it was Greenpeace) was recommending that Australia kill off almost all of the herds of kangaroos that are bouncing around the outback in order to reduce the amount of greeenhouse gases (and why are they called greenhouse gases anyways? Any greenhouse I've ever been in didn't have them inside) from their burping and farting. As of when I heard this story there had been no comment from PETA (not Stephen's, the opther one)…2) I always found it interesting that we had all those herds of buffalo provided by God here in America, a much healthier source of red meat than cattle, and yet man, in our infinite wisdom and superiority, replaced them with cattle. Food for thought, so to speak.

    • Mike Gold says:

      Ted Turner's opened up a chain of somewhat-overpriced restaurants that features buffalo meat. I've been wanting to check it out, but the ones I've seen always seem to be around the corner from my favorite cattle joint, Weber Grill — owned by Weber grill and grilled on same.

  14. Anonymous says:

    My favorite shirt of all time had the following written on it: Meat is Murder. Tasty, Tasty, Murder.