"The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh"
About this Quote
Albini frames romance as a conversion narrative, but the punchline is really about taste and power: he didn’t just win her over, he rewired her palate. The line “currently crazy about” sounds casually affectionate, yet it also treats the relationship like a temporary obsession, a consumer mood. That sets up the rest: vegetarianism isn’t presented as an ethic but as a solvable technical problem, one that the right man with the right grill can fix.
The subtext is classic Albini: contrarian, materially minded, suspicious of sanctimony, and ready to puncture lifestyle identities. He collapses a moral or political stance into a critique of supply chains and preparation methods. “Properly prepared meat” versus “commercially packaged…abused flesh” smuggles in a real argument about industrial food while still dunking on vegetarians as naive consumers who simply haven’t had the premium experience. It’s a rhetorical judo move: he sounds like he’s defending animals (against “abuse”) while defending meat eating even harder.
Context matters. Albini’s public persona has long traded in abrasive honesty, anti-bourgeois posturing, and an allergy to polite consensus. In the 90s and 2000s, vegetarianism in music scenes often read as both ethical commitment and subcultural badge. Albini needles that badge, implying it’s less conviction than deprivation plus bad product.
There’s also a gendered edge: her choice becomes a before-and-after story with him as catalyst. The wit lands because it’s blunt, but it also exposes the assumption underneath: values are negotiable if dinner is good enough.
The subtext is classic Albini: contrarian, materially minded, suspicious of sanctimony, and ready to puncture lifestyle identities. He collapses a moral or political stance into a critique of supply chains and preparation methods. “Properly prepared meat” versus “commercially packaged…abused flesh” smuggles in a real argument about industrial food while still dunking on vegetarians as naive consumers who simply haven’t had the premium experience. It’s a rhetorical judo move: he sounds like he’s defending animals (against “abuse”) while defending meat eating even harder.
Context matters. Albini’s public persona has long traded in abrasive honesty, anti-bourgeois posturing, and an allergy to polite consensus. In the 90s and 2000s, vegetarianism in music scenes often read as both ethical commitment and subcultural badge. Albini needles that badge, implying it’s less conviction than deprivation plus bad product.
There’s also a gendered edge: her choice becomes a before-and-after story with him as catalyst. The wit lands because it’s blunt, but it also exposes the assumption underneath: values are negotiable if dinner is good enough.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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