Fishing for Food
So this past weekend I caught the first fish that I took home and ate. It was a flounder that I caught under the Lesner bridge in Virginia Beach, from the sand dunes below the bridge. It measured 18 inches in length, I don’t how much it weighed and I forgot to measure how wide it was, I wish now that I had.
How I ended up fishing is a long story but I started fishing (again) with Kelly’s Dad last October during striper season, albeit with minimal success. I caught some fish but nothing to write home about. All reasonable size and all fun to catch but aside from catching a shark, nothing really notable and even the shark wasn’t all that, cause apparently people catch them all the time off the sandbridge pier. But this past Sunday I caught a Flounder that was big enough to consider taking home.
So I did.
Kelly’s Dad (Ron) caught four flounder but none over 17 inches so none he could take home. Well before even getting the fish home that night I felt a little conflicted about it. It was a weird sort of feeling catching this fish, and then keeping this fish with the intent to take him home and eat him. Knowing just hours earlier he was swimming around in the ocean and now he was to become a meal on my plate.
After I got him home it was hard to look at him as anything more than a meal while I filleted him. If I thought about the fact I had caught him, I again felt bad. Now don’t get me wrong I won’t be going vegetarian anytime soon and in fact I might be eating the next fish too, if he’s large enough to keep. It was just a tinge of sadness that I felt when eating this one. But I have the same sort of tinge of sadness when I am driving down the road and see an animal such as a squirrel somebody has hit/driven over. Deep down I really care for animals, but I still feel as though eating them is okay.
How can one care about animals and yet still eat them. Well I am not sure, it probably helps to be insulated from the act of killing them, to be able to continue to eat animals, I should never go near a slaughter house or else maybe I would become a vegetarian. But knowing that, I will certainly not be going anywhere near a slaughter house. That is if I have any say in it.
But maybe the reason I can eat meat is in some ways because these feelings are more about respect. Maybe that makes it a little better, for me at least, I can feel good about eating animals personally cause I don’t take the fact that I have good fresh food to eat for granted. In fact quite the opposite I love to eat good food and I love to eat well prepared food, I hate the drudgery of eating just because I am hungry and now I need to nourish my body cause it requires nutrients. And I hate even more “Fast Food” the idea of pulling into a drive thru window and ordering anything through a speaker is the antithesis of what I enjoy about a meal. Anyway I digress, the gist of this whole post is that in some ways I was incredibly proud of the fact that I could catch my own food. I could live without a grocery store. I have proven to myself over the years that I can grow vegetables, hunt and now fish. I can feed myself if necessary, but until it becomes absolutely necessary I am going to continue to go to the grocery store for my food.
How I ended up fishing is a long story but I started fishing (again) with Kelly’s Dad last October during striper season, albeit with minimal success. I caught some fish but nothing to write home about. All reasonable size and all fun to catch but aside from catching a shark, nothing really notable and even the shark wasn’t all that, cause apparently people catch them all the time off the sandbridge pier. But this past Sunday I caught a Flounder that was big enough to consider taking home.
So I did.
Kelly’s Dad (Ron) caught four flounder but none over 17 inches so none he could take home. Well before even getting the fish home that night I felt a little conflicted about it. It was a weird sort of feeling catching this fish, and then keeping this fish with the intent to take him home and eat him. Knowing just hours earlier he was swimming around in the ocean and now he was to become a meal on my plate.
After I got him home it was hard to look at him as anything more than a meal while I filleted him. If I thought about the fact I had caught him, I again felt bad. Now don’t get me wrong I won’t be going vegetarian anytime soon and in fact I might be eating the next fish too, if he’s large enough to keep. It was just a tinge of sadness that I felt when eating this one. But I have the same sort of tinge of sadness when I am driving down the road and see an animal such as a squirrel somebody has hit/driven over. Deep down I really care for animals, but I still feel as though eating them is okay.
How can one care about animals and yet still eat them. Well I am not sure, it probably helps to be insulated from the act of killing them, to be able to continue to eat animals, I should never go near a slaughter house or else maybe I would become a vegetarian. But knowing that, I will certainly not be going anywhere near a slaughter house. That is if I have any say in it.
But maybe the reason I can eat meat is in some ways because these feelings are more about respect. Maybe that makes it a little better, for me at least, I can feel good about eating animals personally cause I don’t take the fact that I have good fresh food to eat for granted. In fact quite the opposite I love to eat good food and I love to eat well prepared food, I hate the drudgery of eating just because I am hungry and now I need to nourish my body cause it requires nutrients. And I hate even more “Fast Food” the idea of pulling into a drive thru window and ordering anything through a speaker is the antithesis of what I enjoy about a meal. Anyway I digress, the gist of this whole post is that in some ways I was incredibly proud of the fact that I could catch my own food. I could live without a grocery store. I have proven to myself over the years that I can grow vegetables, hunt and now fish. I can feed myself if necessary, but until it becomes absolutely necessary I am going to continue to go to the grocery store for my food.
posted by The Information Officer at 7:45 AM
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