The reason I consider venison a delicacy is probably because of the circumstances under which I first had it. We were in Africa at the time and a deer had been shot in the palm grove of a person we knew. He invited a whole bunch of people and we all traveled from the coast, into the hinterland, just for the pleasure of eating deer. But I wasn't going into all that. ``Maybe it is just Hindu guilt,'' I told them. Being Catholics, they understood immediately. Catholics know all about guilt.
Hindu guilt is probably the last reason why I avoid beef. There are, to me, more convincing and pressing reasons. Beef, after all, is red meat and has loads of cholestrol. If you eat too much beef, it will line your arteries with thick gooey stuff that will make the arteries as thin as strawweeds. Your poor little heart will try to pump blood through those pinholes so hard that it will finally give up in disgust one day. Sorry for the graphic explanation. Some people just don't get it.
If you are like me, you're thinking, ``yes, but I can go ahead and hire a new heart when this one gives out.'' True, so I will give you a second reason.
Raising cattle is an extremely wasteful process. Have you seen the size of a cattle ranch? More land (much of it federal, all of it subsidized by you the taxpayer) is used to raise one cow than to grow corn or rice a hundred times its weight. Is beef a hundred times more expensive? No. Because the public as a whole pays for the loss in value to the land that is denuded by the cattle raisers. The next time you buy a burger, ask yourself whether you feel comfortable extracting $300 from the world that we hold in trust for our children.
