I Like Babies
by Anne Loucks
Babies are delicious. The flesh of a baby has not had time to become tough, stringy, and unpleasant. Many of the best meals I have ever eaten were simple affairs: some baby meat, with a nice salad of young greens, French bread, and a glass of red wine. Few things are quite as delectable.
My favorite sort of babies are lambs, skinned and slow roasted. I cannot eat a whole one in a single sitting, but they are wonderful. I am also quite fond of young carrots, chicken ovum, apple placenta, and peanut fetuses. Where would we be without babies to consume? I suppose we could limit ourselves to fully grown plants and animals, but few people wish to eat a cherry tree, piece of hay, or elderly rooster.
With certain organisms, removing and eating their baby allows us to harvest and use a great deal of delicious mammary excretions originally meant for the offspring. Milk can be drunk straight or perhaps with a bit of flower nectar regurgitated by a bee. My favorite use for mammalian breast discharge involves curdling it, and leaving those curds out to be carefully rotted by various bacterias and molds. I love a good cheese with a nice hunk of french bread.
Now, some people may call bread the staff of life, but staff of genocide is more like it. For a single loaf, thousands of helpless wheat zygotes are crushed, and then repeatedly mashed together with water until they become sticky and glutinous. These are then fed upon by billions of vulture-like yeast who fart carbon dioxide, creating lovely bubble homes within the raw dough. For a while it seems like the slaughter of so many potential wheat plants has a silver lining, the happy fungi living out their lives as they please. Then, the entire colony is placed in an oven where all life within the bread is extinguished by fiery heat. After which, the resulting mountain of cooked corpses is devoured by slavering humans like you and me.
This talk of everyday slaughter might bother some people, but it is making me hungry. I'm off to eat some boiled rice fetuses mixed with fat separated from the mammary discharge of a cow and sprinkled with saffron uterus. I'll also be drinking a glass of yeast urine made from the amniotic fluid of a grape.
