Lettuce ladies urge Kazakhs to go vegetarian
Two British animal rights campaigners clad in nothing more than bikinis made of lettuce leaves braved freezing temperatures on Tuesday to urge the people of Kazakhstan to stop eating horses and go vegetarian.
“Whereas Borat is ridiculing the country, we’re trying to come here with a positive message,” Yvonne Taylor, 35, told Reuters. “We’re saying that going vegetarian is the best thing people can do for their health and to stop animals suffering.”
Kazakhstan’s national cuisine is almost entirely meat-based. Horse sausage and boiled sheep’s head are delicacies while lamb and offal are part of the staple diet.
The reaction on the street?
Passers-by, including groups of schoolchildren visiting the monument, gave the PETA campaigners a mixed reaction.
“I guess they are trying to encourage kids to eat their greens which is okay,” Tursunai, a school teacher, said as she watched the campaigners, who call themselves “Lettuce Ladies”, hand Russian-language leaflets to the children.
But pensioner Maria Amantayeva, walking past the monument with her husband, was less impressed. She said the only problem with meat in Kazakhstan was it was now too expensive. “Kazakhs have eaten meat for generations and many have lived into their 90s or to 100,” she said. “Why are men so weak today? I’ll tell you, they don’t eat enough meat.”
Speaking of Borat, my “local paper”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/12/14/entertainment/e105858S82.DTL&hw=borat&sn=001&sc=1000.
_Few realize that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s wacky comedic creation, Borat Sagdiyev, is not speaking Kazakh or even gibberish, but rather Hebrew, the biblical language of the Jewish people._
_The 35-year-old British comedian is no stranger to Israel. He is an observant Jew, his mother was born in Israel and his grandmother still lives in Haifa. In high school, he belonged to a Zionist Jewish youth group, Habonim Dror, and upon graduation spent a year working and studying on a kibbutz, or collective farm, in northern Israel. He has since returned for several visits, his Hebrew is excellent and his understanding of Israeli culture superb._
I wonder if the lettuce ladies were studied by Kazakh government scientist, Dr. Yarmulke, who proved that a woman’s brain is the size of a squirrel’s?
Skinny English girls. What’s not to like? Oh, wait. I suppose I do disagree with their ideas.
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Here is the latest Kazakhstan reaction to Lettuce Ladies.
The article is in russian. Two kazakh girls dressed in woolskin campaigned for eating meat under slogans “Meat helps us in study and live” and “Let the goats eat cabbage”.
Apparently, they received much warmer reaction from passers-by in Kazakhstan.