Atheist Eating Babies. For Real.

It’s an animal. It’s food. Get over it, already.

it may be gross but there’s no moral code that says one animal life is worth more than any other, and since we are content to eat animals in all their other forms we should feel free to eat them in fetus form as well.

Can I reiterate though that this is really gross.

I’m going to play the “that’s disgusting” card right now, thank you very much. I don’t see any difference from it being a adult cow you’re eating, so MORALLY it’s fine but…gross. Gross.

As for flynn, yeah, it’s possible to get the internet without killing animals, actually. Silicon is non-biological, and since even a crappy cell phone can get the internet now…
So in other words: You’re right that animal death is everywhere.
But your example, and the way you state your points annoyingly? They are
FAIL.

We do worse things to chickens (and newly born baby chicks, if they’re male) so if there’s an ethical problem, I don’t think this represents the forefront of the problem. I think the problem is the way we treat food-animals like chickens and cows while they’re still alive. I have no problem eating food that comes from cows or pigs or chickens, so long as they were treated humanely while alive and killed with as little pain and suffering as possible.

That said, I can’t imagine why anyone with access to alternate forms of nutrition would eat balut. Other than for Survivor challenges, I mean.

There are many things in life I find gross and would never personally engage in, but do not consider a matter of moral judgement. Certain sexual acts between consenting adults, certain elective surgical practises and certain, er, culinary delights. This is one of them.
As to why it’s different from abortion, well, I’ve known at least one person who could not bring herself to abort but had no problem with other women doing so. Same thing.

I am also disturbed by this story, and I hate that it is associated with atheists. As if there weren’t already enough misperceptions about us floating around. However, I want to address the question of how I can justify being pro-choice.

Whether it is legal or not, abortion is not going to go away. In fact, a tide of illegal and often botched abortions helped propel Wade v. Roe into law.

I have never had an abortion, nor do I think I would choose to have one, but I do not have the right to decide how another woman deals with an unplanned pregnancy. Moreover, an abortion is a medical procedure that should be performed in a hospital. If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned, a glut of back-alley abortionists will spring up very quickly because until we can ensure that every pregnancy is planned and every child is wanted, the demand for this procedure will always be with us.

I don’t have a problem with balut as an idea, but I don’t think I’d like that showing up on my plate any time soon.

As far as equating this food with being pro-choice, I don’t know of any country where abortion is legal that they then serve up the fetus with a nice Hollandaise. So, I’m not entirely sure you can compare the two things equally.

I would contend that this is no more disgusting than eating any other kind of meat. Fully grown adult animals suffer a lot more than this little fetus did.

Why is the eating of a fetus morally wrong while it is okay to eat a fully grown cow, or a zygote?

As far as the negativity of this being associated with atheists, how about it’s association with the cultures that commonly eat this dish (Phillipino and Asians)?

Obviously, I injected some humor and snark into the post, but if you read it, you’ll see I write about some of the dilemmas associated with eating it.

And why.. why is it disgusting, especially when compared to the consumption of other bits of animals? I just don’t get it. It’s the same as any other animal we eat.

I can, however, completely understand the moral objections to balut if you’re a vegetarian. But they should be the same moral objections as eating any other meat.

No thx! Ick. I’ll eat just about anything, octopus tentacles, bugs, haggis, etc. but I would not eat that.

My girlfriend loves this stuff. Of course, most Filipinos eat the younger, more indistinguishable eggs. Apparently the smell is strong and the amniotic fluid adds an interesting flavor.

I’m looking forward to the day I try it. I do think though that I’ll stick to the younger eggs though.

I wanted to add that many Filipinos “don’t care” for it. I put don’t care in quotes because of how jovial that might sound to us westerners.

Well, I agree with previous posters, in that it looks pretty gross, but ethically, it’s no different than eating fully-grown animals. And as for being pro-choice, I really fail to see the how the two compare. Terminating a human pregnancy for medical or personal reasons =/= eating a non-human fetus as a delicacy.

@ Hemant:

I find it very coincidental that you were raised Hindu and now refuse to eat meat. Many atheists, especially those from a background where religion and culture are intertwined, reject the ostensibly ridiculous metaphysical claims of religion, such as belief in God, but still hold on to the more cultural aspects, such as not eating meat.

There are pseudo-religions that many parents teach their children alongside the spiritual ones. Vegetarianism seems to be a prevalent example of this, especially within the Indian community.

We have a Phillipino friend, and we once asked him about balut. He said it wasn’t so bad, except that the beak scratches on the way down.

I don’t mind if other people eat this. I don’t see it as worse than the turkey I’ll be cooking in a couple of days. But I don’t want to watch anybody eat balut either.

Am I the only one who got hungry looking at those pics? My wife thinks I’m crazy when I start drooling during reality show food challenges.

I wouldn’t be interested in eating it, but I fail to see why it’s okay to eat the egg and to eat the chicken but unethical in the intervening stage. What’s more, I definitely don’t think there’s an ethical justification for preventing other people from eating it, even if you yourself choose not to. In that sense (but in no other) is it related to being pro-choice: whatever your personal feelings are, you should recognize that others have an equal right to make that choice for themselves.

Uh, what does this have to do with abortion? Like at all? If someone had an ethical problem with this, they’d surely have far more of a problem with the inhumane conditions and routine slaughtering of live, adult cows/pigs/chickens/etc who would be more likely to feel pain than a tiny duck fetus, if you want to go that route on the ethics question.

Personally, it seems a little gross to me but I have no moral qualms about it. Same thing with foods like blood pudding, escargot, scrapple, etc. I’m not gonna eat it, but hey, whatever you want to do, it’s food.

And, as the other commenter said, late-term abortions are incredibly rare compared to the entire number of abortions performed, and are only performed in the most extreme of circumstances, not because a woman suddenly decided she wanted to kill her baby 8 months into a pregnancy. And beyond the ethics of late-term abortions, there are like 2 doctors in the U.S. who perform them. It’s not done casually, at all.

I wouldn’t say it’s gross. I’d say that for Western culinary habits, it’s unusual, but that’s only because most people either except either a fully formed duckling to come out of an egg, or a mass of white and yolk. The fact is that if we could see through the egg while the fetus was still developing, we’d still think it was gross to look at. So personally I don’t think the eating has anything to do with it. It’s just general squeamishness about the middle stages of development.

Oh come on people.

This has absolutely nothing to do with abortion.

There is nothing unethical about this in any way. A vegetarian diet is NOT a morally superior diet. While vegetarian advocates debate whether bonobos are persons, they seem to forget that humans are animals. We are all food!

Those who think this is gross should have their cultural blinders checked. This is simply unfamiliar to you.

What is gross about it anyway? How is this different from eating an egg? Do you just prefer the aesthetics of texture of scrambled eggs over balut? How is this different from eating a fully developed bird.. like.. chicken wings? Do you prefer it breaded, deep fried and covered in BBQ sauce? Or can you pretend the plate of wings you ordered isn’t the wings off of a bunch of chickens?

We like to forget that we’re animals too. Adam and Eve and the Agricultural Revolution have trained us to think we are somehow not animals…

Everything we eat is a life. If you’re not concerned about vegetable rights, consider the carrot that you’re taking out of a rabbits mouth. Consider the natural ecosystems destroyed by the continuous growth of agro industries in order to plant that wheat.

You can’t not take life when you eat. That’s okay, though, because we’re part of the system.

We are all food.

A friend of a friend was once an egg-eating vegetarian, until someone asked her, at 3 in the morning in a Denny’s restaurant, of her Grand Slam:

“How are you enjoying your aborted chicken fetuses?”

I’m told she broke into tears and bolted to the facilities to vomit. But you know how stories go.

In all seriousness, though, unless you’re a vegetarian for moral reasons, there’s little practical parallel between abortion and egg consumption. Me, I’m just chalking it up to some cultures enjoying things that other cultures find, well, nasty.

Really, really, really nasty.

Chicken Eggs != Chicken Fetuses for the most part. Unless you bought your eggs from some farmers market where a hen might have actually seen a rooster, your eggs are nothing more than eggs, and would under no circumstances grow to be a chicken. Therefore, most, if not all, of the chicken eggs you will encounter in your lifetime, are as alive as say, human sperm.

I’ll let your imagination continue from there.

However, this Balut stuff. Well, I wouldn’t eat it given a choice. But hey, to each their own.

Hemant I respect you and the things you do for our community – but give me a frackin break.

Balut is food. End of story. Your squeamishness is cultural, not logical, and it has ZERO to do with being “pro choice”.

Ziztur’s post was funny, tongue-in-beak (heh) humor riffing on the “baby eating atheist” zinger we all hear from time to time.

I enjoyed the post, and the pictures made me hungry. I have never been one of those people who divorces the actual killing, rendering, and preparing of animals from the end product. I know EXACTLY what goes into making a steak out of the quivering, warm, bloody muscle tissue of a freshly killed steer – because I’ve done it myself since I was a kid. I also love eggs, and I have eaten balut before and enjoyed it.

In any case, try to rise above your own inhibitions a bit. This is no different than eating a drumstick, an omelet, a hamburger, or sucking the heads off a mess of crawfish. (Yum, BTW.)

Hi Hemant,

Sorry I missed this comment! I forgot to check mark the dang “notify me of follow-up comments” option.

That’s what is strange to me. Why are drumsticks “ok” but baluts “disgusting”?

That’s an easy one – it’s the little face. We have been conditioned to find any tiny little baby animal with a face, cute. Think about it – we remove the head of almost all of our food – even the wildly non-human food, like shrimp or crawfish.

Here’s an example. In April we attended the annual backyard luau thrown by our best friends. The day before, Mrs. Inscrutable and I picked up the pig from the meat packing plant out in our end of the Valley, and took it over to the house. We prepared it traditionally, wrapped in leaves with an apple in it’s mouth, then buried it in a pit with the coals from a fire we had been burning all day long.

The day of the luau came, and the smell was incredibly mouth-watering coming from the pit. Everyone showed up, happy and remarking about the delicious smell. We pulled the pig out of the pit and un-wrapped it, and I heard from the crowd, “Aw… That’s so mean…”

There were quite a few folks that would not touch the pork (which was delicious, btw), because the meat wasn’t sufficiently distanced from the poor, cute widdle piggy with the apple in it’s mouth. They watched us raise it out of the ground, cut it into pieces, and place the meat on the serving tray – and this was waaay too much information for some. Enough so that they became ill, and wouldn’t eat.

Weird, but understandable, I suppose. Like I said, “cultural”. The American culture has created a social group of humans who find the killing and rendering of food animals disgusting – but as long as they don’t actually have to see it happening, they’ll eat it.

That’s why burgers don’t have faces. 🙂