Bless your heart. You and all Iowans are in my prayers for a prosperous year. May Mother Nature now bless you and your fellow restauranteurs and your farmer friends crops.

Glad to hear as in New Orleans restaurants are leading the way to help with the recovery. I hope the farmers markets are open soon and the farmers recover soon as well.

My thanks to mtvyfan and latenac for your kind thoughts.  Indeed, latenac, my contacts in NOLA tell me that folks down there have been eager to give back - and so they will begin with a fundraising lunch at the Crescent City Market tomorrow.

Namaste,
kmf

to MTVyFan, and LATenAC, and KMF.

Thanks also to the unacknowledged vegetarian South Asians who provided KMF with the salutation "Namaste."

Thanks especially to the rescuers of flood-endangered animals in Iowa, who do not seem to receive much recognition from KMF.

Well, at least we can rely on KMF to come up with duck-jokes.

Let them eat cake!  Or trout mousse.  I hope they're farmed trout.  It would be a waste to put brook trout into a blender.

John,

Our trout comes from an organic farm in Wisconsin - it's linked in the recipe.

must you ruin every food post with your religious zeal?

What is your problem, LATenAC, with pointing out simple facts?:

Animals die in misery;

People do not care.

If you think that that kind of observation is disturbing, or "ruinous," then maybe Somebody Up Above, or Somebody Deep Within, is trying to tell you something, that you have been trying to avoid.

I find it annoying that apparently no other discussion about food can take place on Grist without fundamentalist vegans coming in and crying "what about the animals you heartless good for nothing humans?" I think there are  more issues about food and the environment than animal welfare. I think the destruction of a burgeoning slow food movement with small organic farmers and the restaurants who support them was the actual point of this article.

Perhaps you could write for Grist and write all the animal welfare articles you want? Or maybe you could just convince them to write more articles about it.

You are right, LATenAC, to blame me for not appreciating what the thread is about.  Sorry.  I have indeed teased KMF before in the past; but I agree with you that what he is trying to do at his restaurant is noble, beautiful and necessary.

One would certainly like him to be as nice to ducks as when he is dragooning them to provide him with a cute metaphor ...  : )

FYI, I am no kind of "fundamentalist"; that would be against my religion.  Nor have I ever claimed to be vegan.  The hard-core animal-rightsists would in fact surely look on my near-vegan-but-not-quite diet with disdain, and consider my open mind a sign of ethical namby-pambiness.

For that matter, I do not think there is anyone who could be called "fundamentalist vegan" who regularly comments in Gristmill.  If you were referring to little ol' me as the human-beings-basher, you must have me confused with someone else.  I love human beings, and wish them nothing but good.  Of course, part of that is that I wish them to feel free and confident enough to exercise their ethical faculties to the full, and not be entrapped and held captive by traditional attitudes about their food.  But I know myself to be the first and greatest of sinners, and so I accuse no one.

As for my writing on animal-related issues for Grist: why, what a lovely thought!  They have only to ask.  But I strongly doubt it would fit their general hard-nosed energy-ist-alles editorial direction.

is impersonating you in other threads about food where your impersonator ignores the topic at hand and exclaims, "think about the animals!" and claims there's no such thing as an omnivore. So since you're near vegan that could make you a carnivore as well, right?

Words have both a strict, legal, literal definition, and an often more meaningful connotation.  The point I think I made elsewhere (but I do not remember very clearly if I did) was that it is fair to call those people "carnivores" who eat meat in some form daily, and, more important, whose meals are defined by the central, dominant presence of meat, even if they eat other kinds of food as well.  By contrast, "omnivore" may reasonably be used for those people who do indeed eat meat, but in a rather more opportunistic way, so that the presence of meat is not so centrally important.

By the way, I do not very much care what Latenac or anyone else eats.  And I criticize neither Latenac for eating meat, nor KMF for preparing it at his restaurant.  But I do care that we all should be encouraged to think, at least a little, about crucially important ethical issues, especially those that we might otherwise neglect or ignore.  The human-imposed suffering of animals is one such issue.

Canis, I'm not sure you realize how strident you can come across as being. I'm sure your position seems moderate to you (who could be for the de facto torture of our fellow creatures, after all?), but your choice of words and contexts often makes you seem much like a fundamentalist in the animal rights arena - even if you do appreciate the occasional trout mousse.

But you're not nearly as bad as some other folks who post here, and you have much better-founded positions.

I think of carnivores as obligate carnivores (cats, dolphins, etc.) who can only eat meat. Humans are omnivores, except for vegans and hard-core Inuits, but I understand even they don't just eat blubber anymore.

I appreciate your criticism, and I apologize, and repent, and hope to do better in the future.

Some online animal-rightsists can indeed reach this level of stridency: "People like you should be castrated; and if you have any children, they should all be rounded up and drowned before your eyes."  That is pretty close to an exact quote; and it is sadly not a unique example from the online forum in which I read it.  But hopefully everyone realizes that that is not my style at all ...

On "carnivore" and "omnivore" again: You are right to give the definition of "carnivore" that you do, so long as we understand that that is just one of several, which all can work well in their respective contexts.  Being members of Order Carnivora (like your "obligate carnivores" the cats, as well as weasels and, I think, hyenas, and dogs too, though a bit less strictly), grizzly bears and giant pandas can be referred to as "carnivores," even though the former are quite omnivorous, shifting what they eat seasonally through the year, and coping nicely with human garbage, while the latter have so evolved as to be at present very narrowly herbivorous.

As for human "carnivores," we all know that nouns of agency can be tricky: a "liar" may often tell the truth; a "thief" may often pay the requested fee for merchandise; a "speeder" may often drive no faster than the speed limit; a "commander" may often take commands.  And yet we refer to those persons by those nouns, because the respective actions implied in them are attributable to the persons in an especially important and characteristic way.  If I were the sort who could not sit down to lunch or dinner without insisting on there being pork chops or ribs or roast beef or roast chicken or swordfish steak, etc., for me to dine on, I would certainly not object to being called a "carnivore," in spite of all the potatoes, carrots, broccoli, etc., that might be served alongside.