Over the last week I've decided to cut one type of meat from my diet forever: Octopus. I've eaten octopus before, It doesn't taste that much different from squid or other types of shellfish, but I could tell it was octopus because of the suction cups that were attached to the tentacles. Unfortuantely Japan has a long tradition of eating octopus in a popular street food called "takoyaki," fried octopus balls, and then Chinese poeple are known for eating almost anything, which is where the wet market theory of how Covid started came up (it was bats in that instance). I'm pretty sure I've also seen octopus at select Hmart locations or Chinese supermakets like 99 ranch in one of those pools, although definitely not as prominent as lobsters, crabs, or fish just wading around waiting to be eaten. It's all kind of sad, actually, and makes me wonder whether my hesitance towards eating red meat (I've pretty much cut out most pork, beef, etc. from my diet) should extend to seafood. Just because it feels like there are many more, infinite amounts of shrimp in the ocean doesn't mean I should eat all of them, right? Especially if I have the same hesitancy towards eating other animals. It's tricky, this ethics of eating.
My resolution came after reading the book "Secrets of the Octopus" by Sy Montgomery, which detailed her experiences with various octopuses throughout her career. Octopuses seem really smart, able to understand concepts like delayed gratification (they did a version of the Stanford marshmallow test on the octopus and they learned to essentially wait and eat 2 marshmallows!) They're also very sense-utilizing creatures in that they try to touch everything around them by getting their tentacles around it, which can be misunderstood as creepy and nefarious but is just their way of understanding what's around them, like MJ touching me constantly for warmth and affection. Octopus also suffer the snake's curse of being a slithering animal that's typically depicted as a villain in our media, usually the bad guy or evil-looking creature (although, not really in Finding Dory the movie) when in fact there's no way an octopus could hurt a human being (it'd have to be a huge octopus to do anything dangerous anyway) except by poison, usually from the blue-ringed octopus; many survive anyway, so it's not like stingrays stinging you or other wild sea creatures that are far more dangerous;
And it's "octopuses!" Not "octopi!" I learned from Jeopardy that octopuses have 3 hearts.... I guess 2 for backup? More likely because they have more distant places like arms and tentacles to pump the blood to. And they bleed blue. Oh and they cannibalize themselves, sometimes during lovemaking! (The females start eating the males during germinzation). It's a weird thing, learning about how animals have brains and thought processes and emotions, and in the case of elephants, memories that are better than humans. MJ, Emily (my sister) and I went to the zoo over the weekend and the most memorable scene was the elephants in their pen trying to get back indoors where presumably there was food waiting for them. They were all facing the door waiting to let back in, sadly at the whim of humans. Or they were just waiting for food like us humans waiting for McDonald's to open. For the same reason as I wouldn't eat any elephant, I probably won't eat any more octopuses.
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