Lately I’ve taken to calling food by its proper animal name for marvelous comic effect, but… Lately I’ve taken to calling food by its proper animal name for marvelous comic effect, but let us begin this tale at the beginning:

It all started the other night when my lady friend, Crystal, and I were in Giant Eagle, and I came upon a can of spiced octopus.

“Spiced octopus!” I thought. “How marvelous!”

Octopus is such a wonderful, strange word, and octopi are such wonderful, strange creatures. How peculiar to be eating one! For the rest of the shopping trip, I tried to trick Crystal into buying a can of it, but she always saw through my scheme.

Now, whenever we go to restaurants, I never order the calamari, even though it’s my favorite fried dish. You see, when you hear the word “calamari,” you think, “ah, an Italian word meaning a type of food.” It’s no different from “french fries” or “potato chips.”

When you hear “squid,” you think, “Good God, that word doesn’t mean food, it means strange creatures living in the squishiest depths of the light-forsaken sea!”

And to suggest to someone, “I will eat these spongy tentacled horrors from the nethermost regions of the earth” — well, you should see the horror and revulsion twisted onto their faces.

It becomes even more sinister when you call meat by its proper name. Don’t take my word for this. Next time you go out for breakfast order the “pig fat and chicken period” and see what reaction you get.

Please don’t take this as some vegetarian tirade. Plant flesh may be different from animal flesh, but it’s still flesh — flesh indeed, one could argue, from a life form far nobler and wiser than most animals. And just because apple tree ovaries taste sweeter than cow ovaries doesn’t make them not ovaries.

“But Steve, what is the purpose of all this horrific reconceptualizing?” the impatient reader asks.

And well, I’m not entirely sure. But maybe the moral is this: eating cow ass and rose penis is more disturbing to me than rump roast and (how fancy!) edible flowers, because when I stop using food words to think about what I’m eating, I’m reminded that I’m eating a being like myself.

This rightly horrifies. But, at the same time, I know that all my non-photosynthetic friends and I must eat someone else to live. I know someone or something must die for me. But perhaps now my sense of morality will force me to pause and consider how they died.

If someone were to eat me, I’d rather be able to live my life up to the part where I am eaten as much by my own free will as possible than spend a brief, painful existence locked inside a tiny box, eating bizarre food like straw and the ground-up remains of other people, with half of my face and probably both of my hands cut off, enduring all of this only to be slaughtered by a machine, have my remains chopped up, frozen, filled with chemicals, and sent to someone on the other side of the world who never even knew me or gave a fig whether I lived or died.

As it is, someone is going to eat me (and you!). Actually, a lot of someones: The worms and bacteria and other decomposers who live beneath the earth in which I will be buried.

Remembering this means I would rather die in some unknown corner of the woods (perhaps killed by a bear?) than some place where well-intentioned family members could find me and have my body filled with poisons and stuffed inside a toxic box, thereby depriving my friends inside the earth (how you should appreciate them — they who make the soil!) deprived of my final and greatest gift.

Keeping this all in mind strips away the last of the contempt I might have had for those whom I must eat. May I be granted the wisdom and mercy to do as much right by them as I can and never take their beautiful and delicious sacrifice for granted.

Sacrifice yourself nobly to Steve Thomas at [email protected].