I Wouldn't Eat An Otter...If There Was Another Available Source Of Protein

We ate at a Chinese restaurant the other day. My sons went with old standards.

My eldest ordered the sweet and sour chicken. He eats these like McNuggets, sauce on the side, occasionally dipping a fried ball of white meat into it. Of course, this is a much better alternative than the french fries and packets of crackers that he used to eat when we went out to a restaurant. He’s come a long way. He’ll even eat red meat occasionally, which makes me very proud.

And speaking of proud red meat eaters, my youngest ordered the teriyaki beef. He’s the one who has been ordering burgers since he had teeth. He’s the one who loves steak so much already that he refers to them by cut.

“I like ribeyes, daddy, but I like filets better.”

He’s also the one who wants to try whatever is on your plate, especially if it looks like there may still be any pink or reddish juice left inside. So, when he decided he was bored with his beef and the leftovers of his brother’s chicken, he turned to the most notorious eater of red meat in our family. He sought out the person who he thought had the greatest likelihood of having a steak on his plate.

“What are you having, daddy?”

“Duck with noodles,” I smiled and encouraged him to come take a look.

He walked over to my side of the table and peered into my bowl.

“It’s very good,” I said. “It’s kind of sweet. Want to try some?”

I offered some on my fork (no I don’t use chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant for three reasons, 1 – I suck at using them, 2 – I don’t enjoy looking like an idiot, 3 – I’m used to ordering my meat so rare that I instinctively use a fork in order to stab whatever I’m eating and make sure it’s dead) and he readily tasted it. After chewing thoughtfully for a moment, concentrating like a sommelier evaluating a vintage Cabernet, he decided he liked duck.

Over the next few minutes, I picked extra pieces out of my dish and gave him his own plate which he immediately wolfed down. As my wife joked with him across the table saying, “Quack, quack! Don’t eat me! Quack, oh no!” I imagined that an actual wolf might devour an actual duck in a similar manner.

The real story here comes from the conversation between my sons in the car afterward.

“You should have tried the duck,” my youngest told his older brother. “It was so good.”

“I didn’t want to,” my eldest responded and added quietly, “Poor ducky.”

It was then that I realized what may be holding my older son back from eating more meat. Chicken being the exception because it’s relatively plain and he’s been eating since before being able to talk, he tends not to eat something when he pictures the animal it comes from. Meats with names like bacon, steak and hamburger don’t cause you to immediately picture the animal being slaughtered for your culinary enjoyment.

Duck is a little different. Nature lover that he is, we see ducks all the time while on our fishing trips. He feeds families of them with handfuls of corn and leaves the unused bread from the end of the week out for them. The thought of dining on one of the little fellows obviously bothered him.

At first, I wanted to tell him a few simple rules of life as an omnivore. First, man cannot live on vegetables alone (well, I guess plenty of people have, but that’s no way to live, at least not for any son of mine). Second, if it’s raised on a farm, it’s delicious. Third, if it walks, swims or flies and is not human or endangered, it’s food (and if it is endangered, it’s too expensive). Then I figured it would be a good time to go home and watch a few episodes of Man vs. Wild and witness Bear Grylls bite the heads off of small living creatures.

“See, son, it’s all about survival.”

Instead, I tried to do something to console him as he looked sad in the back seat.

“You know, it wasn’t one of the exact same ducks we see on the lake,” I said, technically not knowing if that were true.

My wife, figuring her quacking during the meal did nothing to help the current situation spoke up. “You eat cows and pigs and chickens all the time. It’s no big deal.”

“But I don’t care about those animals,” he said, a few tears visible in his eyes.

“Well daddy said it’s not like the ducks from the lake,” said his little brother. “Those are the cute ducks. This was an ugly kind of duck.”

And like that, the tears stopped. When we got home, we all watched Charlotte’s Web and had a good laugh. What an uplifting movie