Wednesday 13 June 2007

Pic of the day: My Sims eat burgers too, but they grow hungry again after a few hours.

Baconburger night

Yesterday I not only bought the insect-eating lantern, but also a baconburger. I am not Jewish, so I don't have any particular problems with eating swine, as long as they are processed enough that they don't look like dead people. (This is a problem I have with all mammals, but perhaps more so with swine. According to former cannibals from Papua New Guinea, pigs are the animals most similar to human meat, and I don't find this hard to believe.)

For this reason or others, the fact is that I eat far less meat than the average for a Norwegian, not to mention Americans. I suspect that very few non-vegetarians eat as little meat as I do. Perhaps some widows who have inherited a large house and have only a small pension to keep it in shape, and who are afraid to borrow money. Yeah. There are probably a few. There are certainly not many, not here in Norway, one of the extremely few places on Earth where poverty is largely voluntary. Of course, if not eating meat is a sign of poverty, then there isn't much of it in Europe at all. Perhaps America has some. Probably not a lot there either, or people wouldn't be literally dying to get in there with only their clothes.

Anyway, the USA is the land of cheap hamburgers. To some extent this may have to do with the people who serve them. Here in Norway they are intelligent, polite young people... at least at McDonalds, the only major chain represented in Kristiansand. The hamburgers are made from Norwegian raw materials as much as possible, and the hygiene is admirable. It is not an exaggeration to say that I feel safer eating their food than being a dinner guest at a family dinner. (Not that this happens often anyway.) It is probably no surprise then that hamburgers here are somewhat more expensive than in the Land of Golden Arches.

Yesterday was the day I ate baconburger. I don't eat burgers every month, but probably every other month or so on average. I probably don't write about it here every time, but I'd say most of the time. Anyway, it was definitely a baconburger: I found a tiny bit of bacon in it. It didn't taste all that bad for a dead animal, either. So why don't I do this more often?

Perhaps because in the small hours of the night, I still felt stuffed from the burger and had problems going to sleep. Even though burgers are not as fat here as they are in America, they clearly take a long time to digest. So eating a burger for lunch one day means being tired the next.

But at least I didn't get sick. And the heat wave is really over. Woo!