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Squirrel: it’s what’s for dinner

Brainiac

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 13, 2012|By Joshua Rothman

(GLobe Staff Illustration )

Squirrel, it’s what’s for dinner

During Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign, ads claimed that previous Republican presidents had “put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot.’” So what had been in the pot before then? Writing in the environmental magazine Grist, Heather Smith says that it was squirrel — once a more commonly served meat in America than chicken.

Until the mid-20th century, Smith explains, squirrel hunting was a perfectly normal part of American life. From the 1700s through the mid-19th century, many Americans were expert squirrel-hunters. In fact, Smith writes, “the ideal shot was aimed not at the squirrel, but at the tree branch directly below it,” so that the squirrel would fall stunned to the ground below. (It’s called “barking” a squirrel.) After you’d killed one, recipes were easy to come by: Squirrel recipes, accompanied by a diagram showing you how to skin the animals, were featured in many editions of “The Joy of Cooking.”

Today, squirrel hunting is still with us in parts of the American South; some immigrant groups, like the Hmong, also hunt them and cook them up in traditional ways. And, Smith suggests, it might not be a bad idea to re-squirrelify the American diet. “It’s hard to imagine more sustainable local game,” she points out: Squirrels are everywhere. And “they’re also delicious, mostly because they eat nuts.”

Built for speed

By using vivid colors to paint various lengths and sizes of PVC pipe, Korean sculptor Kang Duck Bong has created sculptures that appear to be moving at high speed. On the one hand, they’re surprising and delightful; on the other, Kang writes, they’re about how “we care too much about how we are seen through other people’s eyes, rather than focusing on who we really are.” The sculptures are part of a show called “Disguise,” on display at Gallery 4Walls in Seoul.

A fate just as bad as death

Is it morally wrong to kill someone? That question, strange enough on its own, is downright bizarre when it’s asked in the Journal of Medical Ethics. But in “What makes killing wrong?” a paper in the journal’s January issue, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a philosopher at Duke, and Franklin Miller, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, argue that we need to revise our ideas about killing. In fact, they argue, killing is only incidentally bad, because of one of its consequences, “total disability.”

Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller start with a thought experiment: “Imagine that Abe robs Betty and shoots her in the head so that she will not testify against him if he is caught. As a result, Betty dies. It is clearly immoral for Abe to shoot Betty. Why?”