food for thought

To make you think over this holiday (and to horrify you a little), I present to you two mythical creatures I came across recently:

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary was is a fictional creature that fictionally grew in Central Asia. The story goes that this is a lamb that grows from a fruit, half animal and half plant. Starting from a seed, the lamb grew and was connected to the earth by a stem like an umbilical cord. The sheep part of this creature would then graze on all the plants growing around it, but would die when the plants were gone or the animal was separated from the stem. The meat of the animal was supposed to taste sweet, like honey.

Then there is the barnacle goose. The barnacle goose is a legitimate animal, but people got really confused as to why they were never seen during the summer. And because something like migration would have been a totally outlandish theory, people decided that the sudden disappearance of the geese was attributed to the fact that they were developing underwater after they fell from the barnacle goose tree.
To make things even stranger, Irish clerics briefly declared these creatures to not be fowl because they were grown from trees, which allowed religious people to eat goose during fasts.


So this Thanksgiving, remember to eat your veggies.



much love,
hedgie