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My thoughts on the tuna controversy
Wow! When I wrote about a funny conversation I had with a co-worker, I figured only my very small number of readers would see it. But the amount of traffic I have received since Thursday is amazing.
My wife thought the post was funny, so she passed it along to her Twitter friends and submitted it to StumbleUpon. Since then, I have had more than 10,000 visitors (and counting). Most of these have been from StumbleUpon, but some have visited from Reddit, Digg and a sprinkling of sites I had not previously heard of. The post also sparked several lively discussions, with 50+ comments on this blog, 19 reviews at StumbleUpon and 10 more comments at Reddit.
I responded to a few of the comments, but mostly I just watched as they kept coming in. For two days, almost every time I checked my e-mail I had more comments to moderate. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion, and I’d like to talk a bit about some of the responses I received, as well as why I posted the conversation in the first place.
A few commenters said I was closed-minded, snobbish and sarcastic. I agree with the sarcastic part. Heck, anyone who knows me will agree with the sarcastic part. My “Chicken of the Sea” comment was intended to be funny but sarcastic. As for the close-minded comments, I honestly think vegetarianism is such a hot-button issue that some could not see past that. They thought I was criticizing all meat eaters and labeling them all as unintelligent. And that’s simply not the case.
This was one conversation with one individual who showed an amazing lack of knowledge about the world she lives in and what she eats. As I’ve said in previous posts and comments, my wife is not a vegetarian. Neither are my parents, my daughter, my brother, most of my friends and relatives and many others I respect a great deal.
One of the things I was not trying to convey in this post is that some people think fish and chicken are part of a vegetarian diet (and no, by the way, they are not). If I posted on the Internet every time that happened, I’d be posting about it multiple times a day. The two things that stood out about this particular conversation were a) the person’s lack of understanding that tuna are fish … which are animals (this still blows me away) … and b) the following bacon comment:
Me: “Um, no. Bacon is meat.”
Coworker: “Really?”
Me: “Yeah. It comes from a pig. What did you think it was?”
Coworker: “I don’t know. Food?”
How can I not find some humor in these comments? Vegetarian or not, it’s funny (sad, but funny) that someone could have no idea what bacon is, other than “food.” I could eat bacon at every meal and still find that funny.
In the end, I appreciated all the responses to my post and enjoyed every one of them — especially the ones I disagreed with.
