Dear John,

I need to start off this letter by stating that I acknowledge your struggle. I can’t even imagine how difficult its been for you to continue in your carnivorous behavior when all of your friends religiously eat kale for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But really, how can you live with yourself — your body a burial ground? We don’t eat kale for our own benefit you know! It isn’t particularly delicious or even that good for us (I recently read that kale leaves may contain super high levels of heavy metals!!). We eat kale because it is not a poor defenseless little animal. John, I… our friends, we change lives with every meal, sweet little helpless animal lives, by not eating meat!

Those eggs you all too eagerly shoveled into your wicked gullet at Sunday brunch? I shudder to think of how you gorged yourself on that filth while we sat beside you peacefully sipping our banana-­kale­-chia­-Earth smoothies. Honestly, it was embarrassing to be seen with someone so clearly disinterested in appearing ethical.

I mean really, the 7­-year­-old Ecuadorian child, who picked bananas for my smoothie, made a choice to do that job unlike the hen who laid those eggs. Humans make choices, and that is why I am imploring you to quit eating meat and recognize that animals are friends not food.

And another thing. Bacon?? How can you even relish one single bite of that local smoked bacon you put on everything? Can I tell you where I get my fat? One word, avocados. I eat one avocado every day and seriously I am glowing. You know who isn’t glowing from your fatty food craving? Pigs. And don’t even try to get back at me with that local versus imported crap! The stories about drug cartels controlling Mexican avocado farms are myths, and even if they weren’t myths it wouldn’t be an issue because those farmers decided to get involved with the wrong people. Just like I decided to eat kale for every meal.

But John, the straw that broke the ever-­innocent camel’s back, was your recent trip to that farm just thirty minutes outside of the city. You went there to slaughter your own chicken so that you could experience what it is like to take the life of a creature and then eat it. You are a brute. Plain and simple. At least supermarket meat is so removed from looking animalesque that one could be forgiven for consuming it. Honestly, I will never be able to look at you the same way again. Our friends agree. That chicken never had a chance — unlike those Bolivian quinoa farmers you’re always defending. They are mired in their quinoa­-induced­-agricultural crisis by choice.

This is your last chance John. A chance to follow an ethical path of consumption. To spare defenseless animals and partake in non­-sentient food. When you own up to your capability as a human, to make the decision to be like us, my famous kale and quinoa brownies will be waiting. You don’t even have to stop wearing leather.

Forever a defender of the animals,

Jenny

As a born and bred Manhattanite, I know how to avoid tourist traps. So when my parents (who were visiting me in France where I now work) and I made the decision to go to Paris’s first “cat cafe,” Café des Chats, we knew it was going to be bad but not this bad. So we made a reservation online for the following day at one-thirty.

Upon finding the restaurant we entered into a small vestibule with a desk and a seating area. The woman behind the desk ushered us up from the comfy couches to explain that we had to sanitize our hands before entering the restaurant, that we could not bother the cats if they were sleeping and finally, to please not feed the cats.

We descended the stairs to be greeted by no one, this was not a surprise — I have become inured to France’s lackadaisical approach to customer service. As we stood at the bottom of the stairs in a state of confusion, other customers pointed us towards the back of the subterranean level where we found an open couch and chairs. We were pleased to find a big blue-gray cat at the end of the couch, whose name we later discovered was Ringo. A waitress appeared, gave us our menus, and quickly returned to take our orders. This seemed a good omen — perhaps I should have been more suspicious. I ordered a fresh-pressed orange juice and tartiflette,* my mother ordered a cappuccino and a salad, and my father ordered sparkling water and a charcuterie plate. Our drinks arrived to our table quickly as well, but this delight was undercut by the fact that my mother’s cappuccino tasted like dirty dishwater.

While we contemplated the benefits of returning the cappuccino I was overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt — I was after all blessed by the presence of Ringo — as a young girl at the neighboring table sporadically turned around in her chair to gaze longingly at our cat companion as he sat beside me on the couch. As the girl milled around the restaurant looking for cats that were not asleep or preoccupied with other customers her food arrived, as did her mother’s.

An hour had passed since we had ordered our food, my dish being presumably the only one of our three that could possibly take a long time to make, as a cold salad and a cold charcuterie plate probably average a maximum preparation time of about 2 minutes each in a professional kitchen. I asked our waitress if it was possible to cancel our orders if they had not been prepared yet and she promptly went missing for a short while.

The mother-daughter pair left after eating about half of their food which was, naturally, left unattended on the table for about ten minutes. A gang of cats swarmed the table of half-eaten meats like a pack of chic Parisian rats, an image I could not shake despite being despicably fond of cats (as if choosing to go to this restaurant were not enough of an indication). In the absence of the waitress, we, the customers, were left to swat the cats away from the food. However, after ten minutes we all just resorted to taking pictures of the cats eating, since none of us were.

When the waitress arrived to clear off the abandoned food she thanked us all for our valiant efforts but nonetheless made a strong show of ignoring my attempts to get her attention.

Finally my parents’ food arrived. I was told that mine would take a little bit more time. I mentioned to the waitress that my mother’s cappuccino tasted woefully. She nodded in understanding but left the cup of now-tepid sludge on our table. My parents ate their meals, and my father bit into what he assumed was a hunk of paté, but which he claims was spam. Luckily my father likes spam. He was just shocked to find that it was available in a cafe in Paris.

My tartiflette arrived and I hungrily dipped into it with my fork, to only be met with a hunk of cold potato. At this point I was deeply pissed. It was a beautiful day in Paris and we had lost it to this miserable excuse for a restaurant, cats or no cats. I got the waitress’ attention and apologetically said in French, “I am sorry, I am not trying to create problems, but this is cold.” She took the plate away unapologetically and wordlessly. As the fiendish mischief of ratcats no longer had any tasty morsels to gorge themselves on, they began crowding me. I believe they sensed my emotional distress. Cats are very shrewd, at least more so than the average French cat-restaurant waitress.

After waiting another five or seven minutes my “new” food had not yet arrived, and so we decided to make our exit. As we ascended the stairs the waitress emerged from some hidden nook and shouted “Merci! Bonne Journée!” …Okay, thanks?

The desk lady was now overwhelmed by the amount of people waiting to be seated and as I mentioned to her in French that my food was cold and uneaten and that my mother’s cappuccino tasted wretched, she, wordlessly too, did not charge us for these items. That was nice at least.

*Tartiflette is a traditional dish composed of potatoes, cheese, white wine, onions, cheese and bacon. Its melty, simple and delicious and the perfect meal for a cold day. Emphasis on simple.

Café des Chats

REGRETTABLE, no stars

16 Rue Michel le Comte Paris, France, +33 09 73 53 35 81, www.lecafedeschats.fr/.

Service: surprisingly bad, even for France.

Atmosphere: dark and a little furry.

Cats: overworked, grumpy, and slightly verminous in nature, but still the highlight of the experience.

“THE HARDEST [WORKING] MAN IN SHOWBIZ” is five feet and six inches tall and nine and three-quarter inches long. This man’s name is Ron Jeremy and his whopper of a willy has garnered him the title of “top porn star of all time.” You may also recognize the hedgehog, as he is lovingly called, from the children’s series Bone Chillers, where he played the role of Blisterface — however, it is more likely you saw him in the Boondock Saints, Zombiegeddon or in Ghostbusters as an extra — or perhaps you recognize his baby-blues from the horror film One Eyed Monster, where Jeremy’s penis is taken over by aliens and begins killing people indiscriminately in desolated forests? However, the sixty “mainstream” films Jeremy has participated in pale in comparison to the one thousand seven hundred (at least) pornographies he has starred in, sharing the screen with at least four thousand different sex partners. Although he is infamous for his great endurance, it appears his libido could not last, leaving Ron Jeremy with the only option of pulling on some pants and going on down to Wall Street to swim with the big fish.

Having rather shrewdly capitalized on the fact that his given name translates to “rum” in Spanish, Ron Jeremyhas invested his time, money, and notoriously ugly mien, by joining the spirits industry and proffering “Ron deJeremy Rum: The Adult Rum” to the world. In one of his promotional videos, that have yet to appear anywhere but http://www.rondejeremy.com/, Jeremy seductively states that, “Long and smooth,” his rum is, “perfect naked.” For the most part however, it appears that much like amateur porn, Ron de Jeremy is cheaply and furtively marketed solely on the world wide web. In fact, it seems that Mr. Jeremy is so lacking in funds that his website mainly serves as a sultry infomercial urging web-surfers everywhere to buy a share of Ron de Jeremy; “Ron invites all his friends to rum business. This is crowd investing. With cojones.” If you pretend that you aren’t mildly perturbed by the lack of articles in the first sentence of Jeremy’s invitation, just fork over one thousand euro,* in order to crowd invest with cojones. Crowd investment, according to Ron Jeremy’s PR Team, entails regular meetings with Ron Jeremy, and “bragging rights at your local bar.” The Team even gambles thatRon de Jeremy is the best rum on earth, if not the “coolest spirits brand.” However, a 2007 article, on the man with the mondo schlong, states that Jeremy considers himself to be, “A nice Jewish boy who never smoked, hardly drinks and loves his parents”; which begs the question, is buying this share actually going to be remunerative?

Ron de Jeremy comes spiced, with vanilla and “spices” as the website claims, and plain. Oddly, enough, the rum seems to be a decent liquor, even though it is advertised as complementing “Ron’s many signature drinxxx.” The rum is aged in oak casks in Panama for seven years, under the scrupulous eye of “Seventy-two year old Cuban Master Distiller Francisco ‘Don Pancho’ Fernandez.” A cursory search for the definition of “pancho” reveals that Fernandez is the professor (“don”) of either being potbellied, calm or annoyed. Nonetheless, the ambiguous title does not stop the “Master Distiller” from individually selecting his finest barrels of rum to become part of theRon de Jeremy franchise.

More importantly, are you still wondering what “drinxxx” are? If you have yet to intuit that, “drinxxx” are drinks “The Ron style,” you need wait no longer! Thankfully, “Ron has made fourteen signature DRINXXX for you”: Ron on the Rocks, Roniriña, Ronicane, Ron & Cola, Ronalibre, Long Ron’s Iced Tea, Ronito, Ron and Ginger, Ronacolada, Ronarita, Ronquiri, and lastly El Ron. Somehow not even the punny boozy beverage names augur well for Ron de Jeremy. The Ronicane recipe, for example, suggests, among other things, one half grenadine syrup, no unit of measure indicated, and “a squeeze of limes.” The whole “tongue-in-cheek” schtick doesn’t presage well either — can a respectable capital venture rely on a product produced by a company named “One-Eyed Spirits” — especially if you keep in mind that the adjective “one-eyed” does not describe a Cyclops or basilisk, and that the rum is advertised as having “Long, Smooth Taste”? Perhaps this is why prestigious online persona, RumDood, gives Ron de Jeremy a rating of only “two bottles of rum out of five.”

Ron Jeremy is not the first C-list celebrity to jump on the self-commodification bandwagon. Bottles of Ron deJeremy in liquor stores everywhere will have ample company in the hooch department, amongst Timbaland’s sparkling liqueur “LeSUTRA”, Danny DeVito’s “Danny DeVito Premium Limoncello”, Donald Trump’s “Trump Super Premium Vodka”, Lil John’s “Little Jonathan Winery”, Chinese Basketball Sensation Yao Ming’s “Yao Family Wines”, Puff Daddy’s “Ciroc Vodka”, Dan Ackroyd’s “Crystal Head Vodka”, Ludacris’s “Conjure Cognac”, Marilyn Manson’s absinthe, aptly named “Mansinthe” or Pharrell Williams’ “Qream Liqueur,” apparently designed specifically for female gustatory satisfaction. At least Ron Jeremy can put the furry handcuffs and anal beads in storage knowing that the “Long and Smooth” Ron de Jeremy is infinitely more enticing than any bottle of “Qream” could ever be, whether strawberry or peach “crème” flavored.

*At this time no explanation exists for why an American porn star is selling shares of his American spirits brand in Euros.