I was standing in line at the grocery store the other day and plopped a package of chicken wings up onto the conveyor belt. The cashier made some sort of smalltalk – I think she asked whether I liked wings — which prompted me to say, “Oh, the chicken is for my dog, Julia.”

She looked at me, eyebrows raised. “For your dog?”

“Yep, Joogie loves her wings.”

“So, what you’re saying is that your dog is a person.”

I could see where this was going and began to smile, asking her to explain her observation. Which she did:

“Well, chicken is people food. So, if you’re feeding your dog chicken, then that means your dog … is actually a person.”

And there you are… quod erat demonstrandum.  She said this with all of the seriousness of a professor stating a mathematical proof.

*     *     *

It’s a funny story, and I of course knew that she was just joking around. In fact, for today’s purposes, that’s all I really wanted to say publicly. However, instead of ending the post here, I’d like to “think out loud” about the story a bit more. None of my observations will be truly scientific, so take them for whatever they’re worth.

While there was certainly some kind of surface-level statement in there referencing the widely held conviction that meat is an appropriate food for humans (the part I found amusing), I feel that a deeper motive of her observation was in fact an economic frustration, a commentary on the frivolity of what she perceived as waste on my part. In other words, the perception of “spending considerably more money than is necessary on behalf of an animal” would be consistent with an ideology in which animals are nothing more than food. 

Further down the rabbit hole, one might speculate that this kind of economic statement stems from yet something else — in this case, I suspect, a kind of deep-rooted, almost resentful, desire to be in a position to live to excess (a prime example being my apparently lavishing an animal with needlessly costly food). In other words, frankly, jealousy (but, again, unconscious jealousy – and also misplaced jealousy, as living with the means to purchase copious amounts of meat is really nothing to be jealous of).

On a very zen level, there are of course lessons for all here, one of which is to exercise caution when assessing others’ motives. In reality, this woman knows very little about my economic situation or my reasons for purchasing any of the items I did.

Likewise, I must concede that everything I’m writing here is conjecture. The difference is that I’m doing this exercise intuitively and consciously — an important detail because, by doing something consciously, a space is created in which I can maintain more of an open mind about it, open to outside influence, dialogue, and directional change at all times. This is really an example of that surface-level emotional consciousness that we speak of in raw lifestyle articles from time to time, the intentional act of processing information and emotions in real-time, on the surface, instead of “self-medicating” with processed starches and sugars, which I think is a learned avoidance behavior.  But, let’s take this even further:

The story is also jam-packed with irony because the furthest desire from my/our consciousness at the moment is to live wastefully. As anyone who has read this blog for a long period of time can attest, in our case, one of the strongest cravings we’ve experienced since going raw has nothing to do with food; rather, it’s a desire to live more simply, closer to nature. The only things we want in excess right now are life, love, happiness, laughter, and excitement!

In trying to really get down to the root of the clerk’s joke, I can’t help but see a connection between the type of mentality described and one’s diet. It seems that a toxic diet manifests (not always, but sometimes) as the desire for wealth in order to be able to live as wastefully and ego-centrically as possible, whereas an optimally healthy diet manifests as a desire for health in order to be able to live as tastefully and universally aware as possible.

Another thing I wanted to discuss was my remark, “Yep, Joogie loves her wings.”  To me, this is one of the most powerful demonstrations I can imagine regarding our diet. As a dog – an omnivore, yet definitely a member of the Carnivora order – Joogie may in fact be pre-programmed to absolutely drool over raw chicken wings, but do you?  In its natural raw state, do you crave flesh? Do you look on it as food?  If you were hungry and saw a pile of raw hamburger near a plate of raw strawberries, which one would you naturally eat?

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