Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

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Hey. I certainly don't want to ruin that article for you. For me (German, haven't left the country except for random vacations to France, NL, CH, IT or something and a year in IL) that was well-known. I've been in the UK once, in London, for two days. Guess that's a matter of which trivia based games you play or something.. ;-)

Michigan: No idea about that, that WAS news to me. But the article is about "Why don't we eat swans" and the Michigan part is really a bad example. So ... it's a pest? No hunting season though? And no explanation?

Frankly, I like swans. I regularly met and fed a couple of swans in Cologne in Germany here, checking on the young ones if the season was right.

I'd love to eat them though.

The article, for me at least, fails to deliver at least a hint of an answer to the question it proposed. That's just a bad format for me. If your main subject is a question, you need to at least try to answer it (and "yeah, they might be cute" isn't it).

What I got from it, while not a conclusive answer, was that because of the historical ban for anyone but the royal to eat swan, there is no tradition anywhere in the western world for it. Also people don't like to eat "cute" animals, like seals or squirrels. And lastly, when something is classified as a pest, people don't want to think of it on their dining room table.

While the article doesn't explicitly say the exact reason why, I think these were the main points. So I guess that is badly formatting on the article writers side.

But the premise is already weird. Who is "We" as in "Why don't we eat swans"? And who considers swans 'cute'?

I mean, I consider cats cute, lots of people consider dogs cute - and both animals are eaten in this world. Better example: Horses are cherished as companions and pets for some people and I _regularly_ like to eat them. There's even a dish local to the Rhine area in Germany [1] that (used to, it is replaced by beef quite often by now) is based on horse meat.

People tend to love dolphins. Asian cultures eat them. "They are cute" is not an argument here. That might explain a bias, but not why there's (according to the article) no swan to be found on any menu?

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauerbraten

"We" would presumably be the types of people who read the magazine. According to the about, that would be:

"window-herb growers, career farmers, people who have chickens, people who want to have chickens and anyone who wants to know more about how food reaches their plate"

and given the staff members are all US oriented, it's most likely assuming a US readership and US food culture.

Thus we, who are random fly-by strangers to the magazine, shouldn't really criticize harshly when they don't take an unexpected audience into account.

>> I'd love to eat them though.

This sentence you wrote exonerates the article in it's entirety. You would dearly love to eat a swan, but have not and will not, and you present no compelling reason on why you have not eaten one.

You embody the entire cognitive dissonance around swans.

Being from the UK all I know is that swans belong to my old boss and we teach children that a swan is powerful enough to break your arm if it feels threatened so stay away from them.

I would have no problem cooking and eating a swan but I imagine the majority of UK society would struggle to see the swan as anything other than a majestic, un-eatable animal rather than just an alternative to goose, duck, chicken, turkey or even pigeon.

Ducks, also, are both friendly and delicious.

And cute. Yet many of us (myself included) quite happily eat them.

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