Redneck Sustainability: Eating your Pets

Before you gag from the title of this blog, let me explain that my pets growing up included a pig, a few dozen rabbits, some ducks, a few hamsters, an occasional cat, a dog, a calf and a guinea pig. I’ll let your imagination tell you which ones I ate and witch ones I didn’t. But why should eating pets be such a bad thing?

If anything is out of whack, it’s that we’ve manipulated animal breeding, not that we eat them. What’s worse? Eating domesticated animals or breeding them to belch methane into old age and die a pointless life? There’s a chin scratcher.

Natives to North America, First Peoples if you will, knew that we should have a healthy connection with the food we eat, sometimes even asking the noble beasts permission to extinguish their souls. Now whacking a domesticated pet in the head as it stares up at you with trusting eyes might not be quite the same as hunting a noble beast, but none the less, it’s good to have an intimate connection with our food.

On that note, let’s take another lesson in sustainability from the redneck play book of life.

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What’s a Granola?

Granola ad circa 1893
Granola ad circa 1893
The legend has long stood that an aging hippie relic, the last of his kind, found solace in the arms of a sister of the Poor Clares living alone in a forgotten convent deep in the mountains of Saskatchewan. After teaching each other their dying arts and a long winter of tender lovemaking, the forbidden union produced the world’s first granola.

I am that granola.

No, just kidding. But I think the truth is not far off. (No, I’m not Canadian.) People often ask me (at least I like to think they would if anyone ever talked to me), “David, what’s a Granola?” It’s a serious question, so I would like to take a moment to give it a serious answer.

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Hunting the Texas German-Redneck

German immigrants, circa 1911
German immigrants, circa 1911

In Texas some necks are red. Some necks are German. And a select few necks are both. While my experience with German-Americans is limited, I am married to one and so feel entitled to make sweeping generalizations. The chief of which is that German-Americans are the practical, hardworking sort of folk that know a spade from a shovel.

Having originated from Middle America (or Germany itself) and transmogrified in the hill country of Texas, these mythic German settlers have become a sort of super redneck. Let’s just say that if Crawford Texas was a wee bit further south and west (that is to say a wee more German) then George W. would have figured out a way to increase military spending, bring world peace, cut taxes and balance the budget all while discovering a better-adapted wine grape, and all in his first term.

But alas, these super rednecks of German heritage (let’s call them ROGHs) prefer a behind the scenes sort of benevolence, and so few have heard of them.

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