Sir, – I was drawn to Catherine Cleary’s “Eating Out” column (Magazine, September 10th), but for all the wrong reasons.
First, does Ms Cleary see nothing wrong with spending €367.56 on a single meal for one person – a figure that would, if spent on an “Oxfam Unwrapped” gift, provide food for 16 families? Her facetious comment that it’s “dinner with a generous dollop of added guilt” just serves (no pun intended) to make it worse.
Second, I agree completely with my 12-year-old daughter who responded “sick”, when I read aloud Ms Cleary’s description of eating a live shrimp: “When I lift it by the tail, it surprises me by flinching with such strength that I yelp. I am not brave enough to let it move in my mouth. I bite down through the shell after dipping it in burnt butter mayonnaise”.
What distresses me most about the shrimp episode is not that there are many insensitive individuals out there who have no problem doing this (it is, apparently, almost impossible to get a table in the restaurant in question), but that The Irish Timesis also insensitive enough to use the above quote as a teaser on its front page.
Eating live animals is, quite simply, barbaric and incredibly cruel, whether it’s done by a reviewer in a “quality” newspaper or a participant in a reality TV show.
Ms Cleary finishes by describing the whole culinary experience as “profound and jokey . . . music and memory in the mouth”. I doubt the shrimp would agree. – Yours, etc,