The Cannibal’s Guide to Ethical Living by Mykle Hansen
My rating: 4/5 cats
mykle hansen hates rich assholes. when he isn’t making bears eat them, he makes chefs and gourmands do the dirty work. but that’s fine, i have run up against my share of rich, entitled new yorkers, and while i have wanted to bitch-slap them on a number of occasions, i had never considered the possibility of just…eating them. but mykle has shown me, with this book, that this is not only a viable option, but the correct one. this is the A Modest Proposal for our generation.
because, seriously, there are too many millionaires. someone should occupy them or something. what, exactly, does kim kardashian do, except be orange and wear tight dresses? (although i would not recommend eating kim kardashian. just like i would not recommend dabbling your bare hands in medical waste.)
mykle addresses this uselessness of millionaires:
Many of them are smart, competent, but no match for you or I. An entire second generation of them appear remarkably inept and unsuited to anything. They share a powerful mutual instinct for self-preservation that serves them well, but this glorious structure, this social weave that protects them like a castle on a mountain, this is a building they inherited. The geniuses who designed it are long dead, Louis. The foundation is crumbling, but the millionaires can’t see that yet. The millionaires are blind to the coming collapse. They look at everything they have, every advantage tilted toward them, and they tell themselves: I made this, I deserve it, only I could have achieved it, my condition is just and correct. For am I not the mastermind who, armed with tremendous financial and social advantages, managed to go from rich to even richer? And isn’t that just the most remarkable, poetic, blessed form of righteousness there is? And how could such a wonderful state of affairs ever end??
mykle will tell you how, and it is delicious!
his argument is that eating millionaires is morally correct. they have not been constrained in holding pens with hundreds of their kind:
They were not raised in stacked boxes, unable to stand, injected with growth hormones and forced to shit upon one another. Millionaires are the definition of free-ranging; they’re as ethically clean as they are flavorful and nutritious.
i am sold on his logic!
on their benefits to the human body:
…their composition is almost exactly the same as our own. Any other food, the teeth must first grind it to paste, the stomach then has to boil it in acids to break it down further, down to the simplest amines and scraps of protein, and then out of that molecular wreckage the body must painstakingly stitch together the distinctly human cells and hormones and juices and bones. But millionaires offer plug-and-play nutrition; all the microscopic building blocks of human tissue arrive properly sized, stacked, and numbered. To the human gut it’s the difference between a seven-course restaurant meal and chewing on a raw, dead rodent, bones and all.
i am being swayed once more!
but that’s just the practical. there is also the sheer gustatory enjoyment:
There is so much to explore with this material. The skins, the bones, the hair, the teeth, it’s all such fabulous first-class stuff. Every single part of a millionaire is impregnated with the essence of wealth. Science needs to study the supernatural effects of this food. It is like eating angels plucked from clouds.
angels plucked from clouds??? sign me up! where do i get me a millionaire soup?
but lest you think this is all manifesto with no plot, understand that this is also a book in which there are uprisings and murder and betrayal. and a trap.
and mykle doesn’t just write about this, he also practices what he preaches. i once ate thai food with him, and even though he claims to be a vegetarian, he surreptitiously removed a small, foil-wrapped package from his pocket, and shook the contents onto his noodles. he claimed it was homemade seitan, but i know the truth of it. who makes seitan? your secret is safe with me, mykle… and now, with the internet. shh, internet.
read the book. you have a lot to learn.
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