'Juicy meat', bloody corpse

My life a labyrinth, my weekends a quest. An emptiness that desperately needs to be filled. Images, words, these endless thoughts. The third weekend in a row the railroads lead me to Leuven and Brussels. My country. Brussels, my capital. Leuven, the student's heart. I was a tourist in the Katholic University of Leuven, taking pictures during the Anthropology and Disability lecture, executing my own anthropological research of 'the Belgian anthropology student'as a participant observer. One desillussion richer?

I don't know. What I know is that my first impression of the boy with the colourful South-American bag was disrupted after 2 minutes. He was sitting next to me, totally in line with my positive prejudice of the alternative, open-minded 'I love culture'-student. But then he grabbed a paper bag. I could smell the odour of baked dead corpses. Suddenly I tried to distant myself from the situation, imagine myself in a fake world. He became a wild animal, clawing his fingers in the dead flesh of another animal that he didn't even kill himself Ribs. Í've seen people eating 'meat' before, 22 years long. But never so close, never so particulary devouring, never during an Anthropology of the Body lecture while a confused professor talked incessantly about the traditions and symbols of the Himba-tribe in Namibia. The boy kept tearing the muscles, skin, veins, fat from the animals bones. Cooked and baked of course, the mimicry of seasoning and deformation, but that didn't fool my eyes to see the animal inside. The boy, a coward lion, licking his lips by putting the body parts of another's pray in his mouth. A pray that was still alive some days before. A pray he probably wouldn't have want to touch with his lips and tongue when she (the animal) was still an innocent victim in a factory farm, a pray he wouldn't have dared to kill. How many people would eat animals if they had to kill them with their bare hands and devour them uncooked without the sauce of transformation. An absent referent. When the dead animal corpse becomes 'meat'. The lion/boy kept putting pieces of animal in his mouth for about half an hour. There was a girl sitting next to him. His girlfriend? "Wilt ge ook een stukske? (do you also want a piece?) he asked her. She took over the half eaten skeleton and ripped a bite a flesh from the bones. You could almost hear the muscles break. The female lion gets the left-overs, the male takes the lion's part.
When there were only bones left, he put it back in the bag. The bag on the writing desk in front of his chair. Too make it worse he told his friends how 'tasty' and ' juicy' the flesh around the animal ribs tasted. The girl confirmed as a faithful female lion does. Maybe I wouldn't be a good anthropologist anyway. Even my 'own culture' takes me to the edge of vomiting from time to time...

(me, reading The sexual politics of Meat on the train)