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 ladyfriend 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 scheming.

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” … 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 spongeous 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 bodily 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 its 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.

Perhaps the moral is this: Eating rose penis and cow-ass 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 makes me stop to think, “Well, what if I was eating human penis and human ass?” Or even worse, “What if someone were eating my penis and my ass?”

This rightly horrifies. But at the same time I know that I and all my non-photosynthetic friends must eat someone else to live. I know someone 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 point at which I am eaten as much according to my own choices as possible, than spend a brief, painful existence locked inside a tiny box fed bizarre food like plastic straw and the ground-up remains of other people, half my face and perhaps my hands as well cut off, at the end of which I will be slaughtered by a machine with no conceivable hope of escape, my remains chopped-up frozen and filled with chemicals then 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 under 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 somewhere well-intentioned family members could find me and have my body filled with poisons and stuffed inside a toxic box, and deprive my friends under the earth (how you should appreciate them! they who make soil!) 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, they-who-must-be-eaten. May I be granted the wisdom and the mercy to do as much right by them as I can, and never take their beautiful and delicious sacrifice for granted.