Hungry Enough To Eat A Horse? Do It.

One awesome thing about the Internet is that we can research things that are held as commonly known facts in order to open our minds and objectively review consensus reality. We all know about the horse meat scandal that happened worldwide earlier this year and instead of blindly following the disgust and uproar that it has caused, I have decided to research the subject. I believe that we shouldn't take anything for granted and EVERYTHING should be questioned.

I recently found this infographic and it got the cogs turning.

So why don't we eat it?

Well actually a large portion of the world's population do. In China it is dried and made into biltong (jerky to you non-South Africans) and dried sausage. Japan serves thinly-sliced raw horse as a sort of sushi called Basahi. In France (its capital is also considered the world's food capital) they often prepare horse meat into steaks called Viande le Cheval. Belgium, Kazakhstan,Russia, Mexico, Mongolia, Argentina, and Sardinia ALL consider Horse meat an integral part of their diet.

So why don't WE eat it? I think it comes down to what my ex boyfriend calls "the pet factor" and what a friend of mine explained to me as the 'matter out of place' theory.

This theory simply says: In life we put things into categories and people don't like to combine these categories. For instance, horses have been used for transport, farm work and companionship for most of recorded history (obviously not in the countries I wrote about earlier) and this makes it hard for us to regard them as food. This could also be for health reasons as it is our natural instinct to avoid eating things that don't fit into the 'food' category in our head which is why it could feel unnatural. Similarly, although a bit off topic, cats don't generally like to drink water from those two in one food and water bowls as it is hardwired into them that water found near their food source/prey is usually contaminated.

 The same friend who educated me on this theory suggested that since we call cows beef and pigs pork, why don't we call horse meat "Heef" to reduce the stigma associated with it? It is a good idea although personally I think that having an alternative name for animals that we eat is ridiculous and just fuels our ignorance about the food we eat.

In a perfect world I would like to hunt my own food because I feel that if we are going to eat meat we should be able to kill it ourselves and watch that animal die while honoring them and giving thanks. We like to pretend that the meat we buy has very little to do with the adorable animals that we gush over on the internet. Supermarkets make this very easy for us by packaging meat like they do so we don't even have to give the life of that animal a second thought.

But back to horses...

I was wondering what horse meat tasted like and after some web surfing I found the following horse meat reviews:

"Horse is a versatile meat that lends itself to a variety of preparations. It has more protein, and less fat than lean beef. It tastes somewhat like a mix between beef and venison. It can be a bit sweeter than other red meats, yet still possesses a dense meat flavor with a hint of gaminess."

- The Huffington post

"It is half the price of beef and undeniably delicious. I went to a steak tasting at Edinburgh's L'Escargot Bleu bistro at the height of the scandal. Chef and patron Fred Berkmillar had packed in 12 Scottish foodies, cooks, and meat suppliers and gave us rump steaks to try. One was the best 30-day-aged Orkney beef, the other Comtois horse, farmed in the Dordogne.

You could have confused the horse with beef, but its steak — juicy, tender, just slightly gamey — won the fry-off by 12 votes to none."

-Alex Renton from The Guardian

"Horse meat is a bit sweet in taste. Some think it is a blend between beef (a cow) and venison (deer). People use it similar to the way they use beef, putting it in sandwiches, or serving it in a slab." 

-The International Bussiness Times

All in all it sounds pretty damn delicious!

If you are health conscious you will be pleased to note that horse meat contains 25% less fat, nearly 20% less sodium, double the iron and less cholesterol than high quality beef cuts, and when compared to ground beef 25% less fat, 30% less cholesterol and 27% less sodium. VIVA LA HEEF!

The problem of course was the fact that companies lied about what was in their meat products. If I pay for beef I want beef- by the same token, if I pay for horse I WANT HORSE. Another problem is that the horse meat that was used came from animals that were never intended or raised for eating. Horses raised for racing and companionship are pumped full of medication and chemicals that stay in their meat. If it was accepted in our society it would be properly regulated and that would not be a problem.

Availability of meat is subject to supply and demand and due to horse meat taboo here in South Africa and in places such as England and America. It is unlikely that we will see horse meat being sold in shops (unless it is disguised as ham).

The biggest problem I have with this uproar and categorical rejection of horse meat as an acceptable food source is that people want to push their illogical morality us and tell us that eating horse meat is disgusting and taboo.

The Death of Dialogue

As a kid I didn’t have many friends but soon found that I preferred books anyway. I soaked up facts and character histories like a sponge at a swimming pool convention. I didn’t need to experience things to know them. Instead I read hundreds of other people’s experiences and considered myself an expert. I felt superior because I knew more arbitrary information than most kids my age and quite a few adults.

 I’m pretty sure you can all see that that sort of attitude wouldn’t be very beneficial to me at school. While I was building my random thought library through hours of reading, it soon became apparent that the part of my brain in charge of social interaction was being neglected (Which is why at the age of 24 I still think it is perfectly appropriate to flirt with a guy by telling him that the price of pistachios is directly related to the fact that they can spontaneously combust and thus are a danger to transport). For a person who talks so much, I have sadly had few true conversations.

Recently somebody brought to my attention that most conversations were intersecting monologues instead of dialogues. This means that instead of really listening to what someone is saying, taking a moment to mull it over and then forming a response, we tend to half listen and then formulate what we are going to say based on our vast internal library before that person has even finished speaking. We are so used to soaking up information through reading monologues that a lot of us have forgotten the art of true dialogue. I know that I am guilty of it.

The Greek philosopher, Socrates (469-399 BC), had a very interesting view on knowledge. He strongly objected to writing, worrying that if relied on that it would destroy memory. More importantly he feared that those who learnt from reading would be misled into thinking that what they had was knowledge when in fact all they really had was data. He believed that real knowledge could only come from dialogues which require both questions and answers. Dialogue allows one to form and interrogate ideas so that actual knowledge can be extracted and truly understood. This suggests that a book could never really give you knowledge unless you had access to the author to dissect the ideas written about. In essence, all writing presents itself as a monologue.

Socrates himself never wrote down any of his thoughts but his protégé Plato (a philosopher in his own right) recorded all of his dialogues. This is one of the dialogues on the deficiencies of writing.

“[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”

With the invention of the printing press and then the internet, writing is everywhere and everyone has access to it. There is so much information available and thrust upon us on a daily basis, from television programmes, Google to social media.  Instead of learning from actual experiences and teachers, we can get all our information off the internet and through the media. There is no need to commit things to memory because we know that we can refer to the internet for any of our information needs. Some say that we are “outsourcing our brain to the cloud” implying that technology is making us dumber because we don’t need to think for ourselves. 

So in order to combat this we need to be able to dialogue and find true knowledge – thoughts that have been dissected and proven through your own means. I think we also have to be a lot more discerning with what information we take in. An information snob if you will. 

Sherlock Holmes summed it up quite beautifully while explaining how he ‘furnished his brain attic’:

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

To avoid the inevitable brain clutter that we tend to pick up while reading endless amounts of 9gag, Reddit, news articles and the like, I offer you a piece of advice that I gleaned from a site called Pocket Anarchy. Treat journeys into cyberspace like most men do supermarket shopping trips: get a list, get in, buy what you need, then get out!

I think that the internet and print media is incredibly ingrained in all of our lives and it would be damn near impossible to avoid it completely. However, I don’t think that we need to be slaves to it. If we start to use technology as an aid to gaining knowledge and not as a source of knowledge then I think we will be ok. I think the trick is to truly understand the effect of mass media in order to gain power over it. Resurrect the almost lost art of dialogue and de-clutter your brain attic. 

This is what we are trying to avoid people!

The Friend Zone: Time to put on your big boy/girl pants.

“I do so much for this person, I listen to them and I am here when they need me. I am nice and I make an effort but they don’t notice me and just want to be my friend. All (insert gender here) suck.”

I see variations of this comment very often, the internet is full of friend zone references. There are forums dedicated to it, memes outlining the pure injustice of it all and many WikiHelp articles telling us how to GTFO* of this dreaded purgatory-like state and into the arms/heart/bed of that special someone. As such, the friend zone has become steeped in negative connotations.

As a woman that has both been ‘friend zoned’ more than once in her life and as someone who has had to friend zone quite a few men lately, I would like to say that this mentality is frankly quite pathetic. So you got rejected by someone? Yes it hurts, but we all go through it and is it really their fault for not being attracted to you? Oh, so they want to be your friend because they actually care about you? What a shitty thing for them to do!

This meme is called Friend Zone Fiona. The top caption typically shows something that someone would say to their love interest and then contrasted by the bottom line that shows that she is actually just a friend. It is a passive aggressive way for men (women have other memes) to bitch about how unfair the friend zone is. I personally think that these men should pull up their big boy pants and see that this chick actually sounds like a pretty legit friend.  

Pop culture describes the ‘friend zone’ as a platonic relationship where one person wishes to enter into a romantic or sexual relationship while the other doesn’t. It is generally considered to be a rather lamentable situation by the one that wants more (and let’s face it, unrequited love always is pretty lamentable). The term 'friend zone' was coined by the writers of Friends way back in 1994 in an episode called 'The Blackout' where Joey refers to Ross as "The mayor of the friend zone" when describing his relationship with Rachel. As someone who has been a fan of the gang from Central Perk since I was 8, I am forced to forgive the writers since I am convinced that they didn't know what they were starting.

I am not denying that there are many selfish people who intentionally lead you on so that they can keep you around to stroke their ego, those people are douche-bags and you are better off far away from them. I am not wasting my energy talking about them.

Some men and women who claim to be in the friend zone believe that they are entitled to relationship because they have been kind and caring and then place blame on the other person for not wanting a relationship. What crap is that? Everyone has a right to choice in that situation. There should be no pressure or feelings of obligation to return those feelings. Similarly, if someone does say no to you, it doesn’t make them an awful person- especially if you two are supposedly friends. 

Here is an example of the negative ranting about this dreaded friend zone that is littered throughout the Web.

 (as seen on Urban Dictionary).

 There are so many reasons that someone may not want to start a romantic or sexual relationship with you and surprisingly enough, some of those reasons aren’t even personal. Sometimes people are going through issues and actually cannot deal with the thought of being in a relationship, or maybe they are looking for a boyfriend or girlfriend to play a different role than the one you can provide (or maybe you should just stop wearing that ultra-lame fedora). 

I love my male friends. I have held them through the worst times, listened to every girl problem under the sun and will do nearly anything for them without expecting anything in return. Assuming or wanting sex to happen with a friend show that your motives are not friendship based and maybe you should re-evaluate your view of what being friends actually means. If you don’t want to be in someone’s friend zone then DON’T be their friend. Friendship is a beautiful gift; the friend zone is a choice.

I apologise if I come off sounding a bit harsh but I am sick of guys and girls complaining about being ‘put in the friend zone’. If we didn’t ‘friend-zone’ most men/women then we would all be considered Slutty mcWhoresons and we wouldn’t have many friends.

It could be for the best. Who wants to be with someone that doesn't want to be with them?

Now don’t get me wrong, I know it is hard and heart breaking to be passed over as a romantic interest. I have done my time in a thought prison built on “what ifs” (this is coming from a girl who has read 'He's Just Not That Into You' about 10 times). But I think there comes a time where one needs to cut out for the sake of self-preservation. Maybe downgrade your ‘friend’ status to that of an acquaintance- your ‘friend’ could be offended or confused by your actions but you can’t control how you feel just like they can’t control how they feel and you can explain it to them if needs be.

Also consider the fact that you are tying up your feelings by staying friends with someone who doesn’t want anything more. You could possibly be passing up the opportunity of developing another relationship with someone who is going to give you what you deserve by staying in this victim-like state. Do you really want to be filled with jealousy and frustration when you see him/her enjoying life with someone else?  Nope? Didn’t think so.

*Get the fuck out 

Paying Attention To Distraction

 "There's no shell script, there's no fancy pen, there's no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that's gonna help you figure out why the fuck you're here. That's on you" - Merlin Mann

Ok Kelly, close your email tab. Good girl… Now just check to see if there are any comments on Facebook since you checked 3 seconds ago. Close that too. Nearly there!  Now just kill 9gag, Twitter, Reddit and that article about the origin of Nyan cat and then you’ll be all set. All gone? Well done. Now you can sit down and concentrate on writing your blog post about distraction. Ironic, isn’t it? 

I am going through a breakup. As you all know, they can be pretty tough. My usual way of dealing with this sort of thing is to immerse myself in cute but forgettable images of baby animals in various human disguises, or to post statuses with painfully transparent lyrics in an attempt to get my friends to understand the depths of my agony. Other times I would form new Facebook based friendships and immerse myself in them. These distractions allow me to avoid the obvious unpleasant realities.

The good news is that I am older and a little bit wiser (I would like to think) and I have enough brains to question whether my old methods served me well or whether I should try something new. The question on my mind is: are distractions always a bad thing? 

My uncle explained to me the theory of unfinished cycles. Humans have a finite amount of attention. When we abandon a process that has caught our attention and go onto the next, we have less attention to devote to a new task. Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else on the web that acts as platforms for interaction can make it impossible to complete certain cycles since you are always waiting for a reaction to something you have posted or a reply to a message. This makes it difficult to be present and fully aware.

With the rise of the internet, which brings with it plenty distraction and oceans of information, people have started to name the situation that we are facing as “The Poverty of Attention”. Years before the inventors of Google were even born, an economist by the name of Herbert A Simon succinctly described our current plight: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”. 

While this argument has merits, I believe that the internet – through the wealth of knowledge it provides – can also offer constructive pathways for focussed change. The internet does not necessarily only consume, it can also give.

 Last week I wrote a post on how social media can kill relationships. In the post I highlighted the importance of being mindful when using the internet to distract from introspection and working on yourself but, during a 3 hour hike, I realised that some form of distractions are not only healthy, but incredibly necessary.

Our primitive brains are always on the lookout for threats, both physical and emotional. Distraction can give you a break from these threats in order to come back to them once you have gathered enough strength to face them. The key is moderation and mindfulness.

Through Facebook I found a free fitness group that was going on a hike the very next day after my break up. I didn’t know anyone that was going but I realised that in order to keep swimming I needed to take my mind on a bit of a holiday and stock up on serotonin. Three hours, 50 gallons of sweat and a mini asthma attack later I was in higher spirits and ready to face reality and sit with my thoughts. Without Facebook, I would not have had this opportunity.

Edward de Bono has a great theory. He said that creativity requires breaking rigid thought patterns. He explained that when you think a certain thought more than once, a neural pathway is created and the more you think that thought (or a similar one) that particular pathway is thickened and strengthened, making it easy to surrender yourself to a certain way of thinking over and over again.

Now what I am trying to communicate here is that when you are going through changes in your life there is a forced breakdown of neural pathways that are nice and thick from daily use. Not automatically using those well-established pathways can be incredibly hard. For example, when I stopped smoking I had to surrender to the neural pathways linked to smoking breaking down. I then had to build new ones by thinking new thoughts until they become natural and the old pathways fell away. So basically, if you keep thinking and doing the same old things, you will never give yourself the opportunity to change. 

While I may be dealing with sadness right now, I am also revelling in the incredible feeling of my mind opening and in a strange way it is kind of beautiful. I can feel the neural pathways that were used to a certain way of living crumbling and collapsing on themselves. I am suddenly forced to be the town planner of my own head.  I can choose which thought patterns I want to get rid of and which I want to develop. It would be a tragedy if I chose to clog my mind up with too many distractions like Nyan cat and baby manatees. On the other hand, habits like hiking and meditation, accessed through the internet, are undoubtedly healthy.

Life changes shouldn’t be ignored by immersing yourself in distractions all the time. These are times to find your own definitions of things without the input of consensus reality (a la Facebook). However, shutting yourself off from the world’s wealth of knowledge and experience can also be detrimental since our jobs and social lives do depend on a degree of connectivity. Let the internet be a tool: use the creative energy that distractions spark to inspire focussed change. Allow yourself the opportunity to do the town planning in your own head.

 

The Dark Side of the Internet: How Social Media can Kill Relationships

How can the depths of your heart be expressed when they are tied up in words and syllables?  
- The book of Mirdad.

Like everything in life, the internet exists in a duality. In this age of information it can be an incredible tool to further your mind but if depended upon for something more, like a distraction from life and introspection or a way of conveying yourself to others, it can become a very real block between yourself and your personal development.

When you create a persona on Facebook or similar, you get to choose what you portray. In real life things like body language and the fact that you are required to act or react in the moment usually means that doing this would be harder than it is on the internet. But on Facebook, you can be the positive, gorgeous model-like god or goddess that you want people to see- even though you may be at home, gripped in depression, hating every single feature of yourself and waiting for the next “like” as if it is a lifeline that provides you with some sort of validation. But what is validation if you have to ask for it? You get so stuck into this image that you want for yourself and you may not give yourself the space and time to embody the beauty that others see in you.

 You may be jealous of how amazing and together people appear on Facebook, but you must also realise that their page is usually a show reel of their life which showcases the highlights and discards the struggles and flaws that everybody suffers through.

 In contrast, others use it as stress release and post to get things off their chests, to relieve their feelings of boredom or to somehow distract from feelings of low self-esteem or despair. All these feelings have a very real and valid purpose and in my opinion need to be sat with, dealt with and shouldn’t always be medicated with crowdsourcing affection or solutions from others whether online or off. I am guilty of doing it too, but recent events in my life have made me realise the detriment that it has to my own personal development which in turn can destroy real relationships with both myself and others.

Relationships are a soft target for social media. The love you feel for another can be expressed to everyone you have ever known with a couple of keystrokes. This is todays equivalent of “shouting it from the roof tops” and begs the question, isn’t them knowing enough? Are you marking your territory? Or substituting real gestures of affection with superficial ones? It can also become a trigger for jealousy for even the most independent of people. For example: your boyfriend is online and he said he was going to bed, maybe you see he has recently added an ex or that a girl has posted a message on his wall that has one too many x’s.  All of these things can make your mind go into overdrive and let you can let yourself fall down black holes in your mind. The truth is that these things, while they CAN be a red flag, often aren’t indicators of infidelity or a lack of love but you reacting badly either outwardly or letting it eat you up can result in what you fear most. Allow your partner the freedom to be him or herself, the freedom to express themselves and don't take your interpretations as truth.

 The fact is that what happens on social media are things that a couple of years ago would have been done in private, and all relationships require privacy and space. You tread a dangerous road when you think that you can correctly interpret your partners (or anybody else for that matter) interactions with others and then react to them.

A lot of undue pressure can be placed on a person from a partner who expects the same sort of affectionate Facebook validation that they see others getting, but it is always good to keep in mind what really matters. The looks you give each other from across a room, the feeling you get when he or she looks at you and tells you they love you, or even the banter you share while cooking supper. It’s not about competing with Sharon from marketing who got a ginormous teddy bear for Valentine’s Day and constantly receives 50 wall messages professing her boyfriend’s undying love.

A lot of people show a great disdain for Instagram and many jokes and judgements are made about people who need to photograph their food even more than they need to salt their meat. Posting photos of every aspect of your life can take you out of the realness of the moment; it could also be fuelled by an ulterior motive like trying to convey how cool your life is or to trigger an emotion from one or more of your 576 “friends” and this puts you in serious danger of not living in the now.

 Not living in the moment can affect your life in so many more ways than is immediately obvious and is often the first step of other issues forming in your life. Everybody is different and by all means please post a picture of the R5000 burger you have saved up for from the most prestigious restaurant in the world; you have probably earned it and genuinely want to share this wonder of gastronomical science with the world.  My point is that it could be a good idea to investigate your need behind posting them and to maybe just trust that experiencing by yourself is enough and in a way, makes it even more special. 

It isn’t just romantic relationships that get affected, friendships and family relations can be affected too. The lack of privacy that Facebook allows means that sometimes, without your consent, somebody could share information about you either tagging you in a location when you would rather it remain unknown (for whatever reason) or in a picture that you know that they know is inappropriate.

 Sometimes friends can feel left out without reason and serious feelings of FOMO (fear of missing out) and insignificance in another’s life can take root. It is easy to be passive aggressive on Facebook and while it may give you superficial or short lived feelings of relief, it is usually a reaction and in life it is often more beneficial to wait, think and then act in a way that is mindful of you and your wellbeing.

Work relationships can also be compromised. The recent FHM debacle springs to mind where a friend of mine, who had been working for FHM,  posted a personal yet controversial status update that was misinterpreted and blown out of proportion by the public and subsequently lost him his job. What you say in your personal capacity to friends should not be something is exploited and used against you in public forum without proper context. This kind of thing can destroy careers and severely alter a person’s life course. 

I am currently trying to take a backseat in terms of social media but it has not been easy. I have managed to set aside times where I just sit and journey inside myself when I would normally use the internet to distract myself from myself.

There is so much more to say on this topic and most of these points have been borne out of my own journey of introspection and change that I have recently embarked upon. I want to bring to light the things that I have found to be true and express the importance of sometimes just putting off the PC, or changing your phones notification settings so that you can just sit and go through the feelings and thoughts that need to be addressed in yourself without public audience. Act, don’t react. 

It is not necessarily about avoiding social media completely, but being mindful. When you have something important to say to someone, make a plan to meet them and to show your heart. I wish I had come to this realisation a little earlier in life, but better late than never!