I set the pedestal too high

Anthony Bourdain is something of a culinary and cultural hero of mine. Or maybe he was. No, he still is, but his armor's a little tarnished in places.

There's an episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations that I had not seen in its entirety. In fact, I still haven't. I just caught a little more of it tonight.

It's the episode in Argentina that includes, among other things, a barbeque with 150 cows crucified over trench fires and a walk on a Patagonian glacier with a couple of Gouchos.

There is a scene, the one I had missed previously, on an estancia (a ranch to you and me) where Tony witnesses first-hand the process of cutting spring calves. There's the winnowing out of calves from their mothers, the branding, and some fairly graphic castration. This particular estancia favors a Hereford variant that lacks noticeable horns so Tony was spared the sawing and the ensuing bloody skulls.

Tony's little tummy got upset.

Two decades of slapping meat on a grill; a lifetime of derision spewed at vegetarians and all it takes to shake him to tears is the sight of a little blood.

Welcome to my entire childhood.

I don't claim to speak for my kin or anyone else who raised a show calf, lamb, hog, rabbit, turkey, or chicken. I can only speak for myself.

If you don't eat meat, you're a grazer. If you've never taken the life of an animal and put its carcass to your nourishment, you're just another vulture eating cellophane-wrapped carrion. I'm not saying for a second that I'm any better but to see a chef get all misty-eyed at the process of producing his raw materials seems a little naive.

If you're going to eat meat, something has got to die. For the meat to be any good, it's going to have to be castrated as a toddler and slaughtered as a pre-teen. Calves are usually harvested within a month or two of losing their baby teeth. And Tony's mistaken about the reason that the balls are taken; it does make the males more docile but, more importantly, it robs the body of testosterone which toughens the meat and leaves an abundance of estrogen which causes the body to store intramuscular fat; that delicious material known as "marbling" in the rendered product.

Food doesn't come from the grocery store. It comes from the ground. Grab some perspective. It ain't Nagasaki and you ain't Oppenheimer. It's a cow; you're a cook. Have enough respect for the creature to hold back your tears when you realize what it gets put through to make a decent meal.

Sugarpants.