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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=575413" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Beef Epitaph</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">This is what it was: Sometime in the recent but until now unrecorded<br>past, it was decided by certain ingenious and commercially forward-looking<br>cattle-ranchers in a certain large, modern Western nation which prides itself<br>on being nutritionally forward-looking, that since people are increasingly<br>nutrition-conscious, and increasingly insistent that &quot;you are what you<br>eat,&quot; all cattle on the way to market were to be marked with brief<br>descriptive tags noting the favorite food of each animal; and also stating<br>approximately how much each ate of it. This, it was felt, would both delight<br>the diner and comfort the nutrition-conscious consumer: people would be able to<br>tell exactly what kind of flavor and texture of beef they were purchasing<br>beforehand, and always be able to secure exactly the kind of product most<br>likely to delight their taste, since they would know a whole lot more than ever<br>before about the quality and kind of nourishment which the animal had received<br>(it was a little like our own, well-established, present-day modern American<br>system of catering to preferences for light and dark meat in chicken--by<br>supplying each part shrink-wrapped in a separate bag in the supermarkets). The<br>system set up by those ingenious and commercially forward-looking<br>cattle-ranchers was remarkably efficient; and seemed--at least at first--to be<br>destined for success. This is how it worked: First, on each animal's<br>last day on the ranch, they attached the main, or so-called &quot;parent&quot;<br>tag--made out according to information provided by each rancher, or their hired<br>hands, or even (in some cases) their immediate family--to each head of<br>livestock. The information contained on each tag would be of course be<br>definitive, since it was compiled just before the two or three days required<br>for shipment of the animal to the slaughterhouse--during which travel time, of<br>course, the animal customarily doesn't eat anything, anyway.... Once at the<br>slaughterhouse, they carefully removed the &quot;parent tags&quot;; and during<br>the slaughtering, mechanically duplicated them numerous times, preparing<br>perhaps hundreds of tiny labels for each animal. Immediately afterwards, at the<br>packing plant, these miniature, or &quot;baby&quot; tags were affixed,<br>respectively to the proper bodily parts--each section of each animal being<br>separately and appropriately tagged, each as if with an epitaph. But then<br>something went wrong with this means of delighting the diner, and of comforting<br>the nutrition-conscious consumer. At first, quite predictably, the tags came<br>out reading things like &quot;Much grass, a little moss, medium grain&quot; and<br>&quot;Much grass, much grain, generally ate a lot.&quot; And this, as one might<br>expect, proved (at least at first), a great pleasure to purchasers! But then<br>tags began coming through reading things like &quot;A little grass, a little<br>grain, many diverse scraps from our table&quot;; and &quot;She was our favorite<br>pet--gave her all we had to give&quot;; and there was even one (featured at<br>dinnertime one evening on network television news) which was tear-stained and<br>which said, in a child's handwriting, &quot;Good-bye, Little Blackie Lamb,<br>sorry you had to grow up--I'll sure miss you!&quot; And so, gradually, despite<br>its efficiency, this system somehow ceased to delight the diner, and comfort<br>the nutrition-conscious consumer. And this is how the practise of The Beef<br>Epitaph became generally neglected over the course of time; and how the members<br>of a large, nutrition-conscious, and otherwise generally quite sophisticated<br>modern nation very much like our own, came to eat their beef--as indeed they<br>still do today--partially or even totally blindfolded.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Michael+Benedikt">Michael Benedikt</a><div class=q>
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past, it was decided by certain ingenious and commercially forward-looking
cattle-ranchers in a certain large, modern Western nation which prides itself
on being nutritionally fo..."></div>
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