You Are What You eat

I thought I had to share this. The first, a truly remarkable story from the Middle East, and the second, my take on the theory based on Argentina.

Email from Pricey:

Every now and again I catch a glimpse of something so brilliant on Arabic TV that I just have to share it.......

On Saturday I was channel flicking on TV when I paused on a picture of a packed auditorium of smartly dish-dashed gents being spoken to by a local Iman (of undisclosed nationality!). He was speaking in English on an Arabic channel and mid-way through his clearly thought provoking diatribe, this is what I caught:

"Many great writers and poets throughout history have philosophised that WE ARE WHAT WE EAT. This explains so many aspects of our cultures and societies. The reason that we as Muslims are so peaceful is that we eat peaceful animals, like cows, sheep and goats. However, our enemies eat vicious and violent animals like..............PIGS (!!), WOLVES and .....................(wait for it)..............TIGERS"!!!!!!!!!!!!

Absolutely brilliant! I would stay and chat but Sarah's got a full shoulder of Tiger roasting in the oven............

Case Study. Argentina.
You are what you eat? Case Study 2: The Argentine.

Argentines are made almost entirely of cow. As such, they should make an excellent Case Study, unpolluted as they are to extraneous factors that would colour the study, such as fruit, vegetables or others meats such as chicken, wolf or tiger.

At first, I thought that is was actually hard to think of an animal that reflects the average Argentine worse than the cow.

Cows are, after all, slow and dim witted, whilst your Argentine is a sharp witted and intellectually aggressive character: I have never heard a cow getting angry over politics, for example.

Cows are not talkative, even monosyllabic, and spend far less than 2 hours a day in front of the mirror.

Cows are systematically abandoned at birth without any obvious signs of trauma, whereas an Argentine will spend half their life in therapy based on no more than an implied sense of parental abandonment as they were only breastfed for 22 months, rather than the 9 years they so craved.

Cows are rubbish at football, and not that good looking.

But then I thought some more.

Cows are, I reflected, notoriously work shy. Bulls are a different matter, but they don't eat bulls! Cow are happy to stand around all days eating grass and talking crap. Moo? Like that means anything. Maté, the national drink, is after all, not much more than dried grass. And when did you last see a Cow, or for that matter an Argentine, returning home from the office past 8pm, I asked myself?

Argentines, like cows, do spend a lot of their time blocking roads. Furthermore, Argentines, like Cows, show wilful disregard for the rules of the road, wandering acorss the lanes without ever indicating or showing respect for rights of ways, as is particularly evident in India.

Then there is the President who is, after all, almost entirely skinned in leather and has a singularly bovine intelligence. And she, like Cows, shows nothing but comtept and dislike for the farmers who, she believes, are trying to steal her milk then bleed her to death.

And to answer a previously unsolvable question of these people: how does one process the staggering amounts of meat the average Argentine eats in a year? You're there before me. 4 stomachs.

You know what? Your sciency bloke may be on to something...