Skip to main content

Tag: hunting

How to Talk to Hunters (or anyone with whom you disagree)

Posted in Food For Thought Podcast.

WARNING: Radical ideas fill this episode — the most popular of Food for Thought episodes — centering around the suggestion that we try to have compassion for people with whom we disagree or who participate in behavior we find abhorrent. That’s the thing about compassion: it’s gotta be equal opportunity or it’s just inauthentic. It’s easy to be compassionate towards like-minded people; the challenge is choosing to have compassion towards those with whom we disagree. Check out this episode for tips and suggestions on communicating with compassion – but only if you want to create change in the world.

Old English Pigs and Old French Pork: The Linguistic Cleaving of Animals

Posted in Animalogy Podcast.

Roughly 10,000 new words entered the English language during the Norman occupation and assimilation, particularly those having to do with the world of the ruling class.

The effects of the linguistic class division are most apparent in the culinary realm, where words used by the aristocracy have French origins and words used by the commoners have Germanic origins.

This is evident even today in the way we talk about certain animals, particularly those typically eaten by Westerners, with words rooted in Anglo-Saxon / Old English to indicate the living animals and words rooted in Old French to indicate the slaughtered animal as flesh for consumption.