Baby Eating Atheists

It's time to add a kernel of truth to all of the allegations of the evil things atheists do.

Saint Gasoline, Flimsy and I are baby-eating atheists.

Or maybe a better term is fetus-eating atheists.

It's true. On Sunday afternoon, we dined on balut.

What is balut? To put it simply, balut is a type of egg eaten in the Phillipines and some parts of Asia. It is a duck egg that is left to incubate for a period of days beyond typical, so that what is inside is a partially-formed duck. In other words, it is an aborted duck, a duck fetus.

In places where this dish is common, it is served as a snack, usually with a pinch of salt, or some vinegar sauce, or beer. It is considered by most Americans to be the most terrible thing anyone can put in their mouth. It is the last frontier of food. It is the egg of ultimate darkness. It is a black mark on the face of cuisine.

I admit it, I will eat anything, so long as it's food. It did not bother me to know that I was eating a fetus. Why is a fetus more bothersome to eat than the gastrocnemius muscle of a cow? Why is that more bothersome than chowing down on ground up pork in an encasing made of intestines? We meat-eaters eat whole chickens without compunction. We eat lamb. Veal. Cornish hen. Deer. Spam. Blood. But mention a fetus, and Americans squirm. I suppose it is because we know that this little thing could have grown up to be an adult mallard, swimming free in a lake. I suppose it's because seeing the entire body of a thing we're about to eat brings us closer to our food. We get to stare this potentially living thing in the eye, knowing it's life was thwarted so we could put it in our mouths. All things we eat could otherwise be alive and free. But they aren't. Balut is no different then any egg you've ever eaten, you're just closer mentally to it's potential to be a conscious being.

We boiled our babies to perfection in a pot on my kitchen stove. When they were ready, I put them in a little bowl. They were too hot at first, so for about five minutes we chatted while spinning them around in the shells. When it was time, we crushed the round end of the egg down on our plates, revealing a flat blotch of yellow and dark veins. 

We dissected our little guys without hesitation: We peeled the shells away and broke off pieces of yolk to reveal the fetus within. We pulled them out and they uncoiled in our hands, warm and dripping of amniotic fluid. We set about exploring wings, feathers, beaks, little soft bones, and inner organs. We had to grab some paper towels to clean the juice from our hands.

We ate the little fetuses with the yolk. We tried them by themselves. We tried them with salt.

Most Americans will tell you that the first time you eat balut, it helps if you don't think about exactly what you're eating. Screw that. I knew what I was eating. I stared into it's little cloudy eyes. I gently pulled open its beak and looked at the little tongue inside. Then, I put it in my mouth and felt what my eyes had already seen.

In addition to admitting publicly that we are now officially baby-eating atheists, we have photo proof right here. These are the photos I did not put directly into the blog post because they are slightly more "graphic". Obviously, you won't want to look if you're squeamish. We're not. At all. Squeamish. I warned you.

So how, you might ask, did balut taste? It tasted like duck. We had one chicken balut for comparison, and it tasted like chicken. I liked it. Saint Gasoline said he wouldn't order it for dinner at a restaurant, but it wasn't bad. Flimsy said it tasted like rotten meat, but he also thinks mangoes taste like rotten oranges so I question his tongue.

There is something primal about being this close to your food, holding the warm but lifeless body of another animal in your hand, ready to eat it. It's a far cry from the supermarket hamburger culture we're accustomed to.

Next time your theist buddies complain that atheists are all immoral, unethical, child-raping, baby-eating hedonists, you can sigh and grant them that at least three of us do eat babies.

Okay, and we might be somewhat hedonistic too.