Emeril Cooks Calf Shins

Oh, it's so hard to take sometimes.
I've spent the day putting the finishing touches to the handouts sheets for the tofu demonstration I'm giving this weekend; listened to one of Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's podcasts ( a heart breaking one on a ewe's forgiveness of humans) while driving into town to make some copies. Experimented further with more tofu ( I brought home 15 pounds of various sorts earlier this week ! ), making some Oatmeal Peanut Butter cookies from the PPK website. Not that there is a ton of tofu in it, but I was looking for a recipe for oatey p butter cookies and this one came up, so I figured I HAD to use it ! ( http://www.theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/index.php?RecipeID=31 ). I also made some fabulous burgers this morning...consisting mostly of oats, garbanzo flour, sesame seeds, walnuts...lots of seasonings. Browned one up in a pan and sat down to a fantastic meal of two open-faced samis,with dijon mustard and some of the last tomatoes from our garden. But I forgot to add the final touch, the herb that carries Summer's sunshine in its very cells and holds it till you get it on your warm sandwich, between the veggie burger and the heavy tomato slice....ah. I'm feeling pretty positive about things ! So, I turn on the tube , and what the heck, maybe today's the day that Emeril's gone vegan...let's take a look ! And we were happily surprised to see him doing a segment on Asian noodles, even soaking some big sheets of kelp for a soup...oh, oh...maybe he's going to go a little further and do something with tofu ! ...but no...out comes of all things, veal shanks...cross sections of a calves's legs. All I could think of was the pain and deprivation of the creatures that brought those body parts to the Food Network. Emeril's picking them up, squeezing them, talking about how fresh and lovely they are. A dark bluish purplish blotch on the white skin encircling the pale pink flesh on one of the pieces revealed the little animal had had a badly bruised shin. Was it sustained while be transported hundreds of miles to its slaughter, in a filthy truck overcrowded with fellow undernourished calves ? Or perhaps it happened while on the kill floor at the slaughter house.
Oh...it's so hard to look sometimes.