A university has banned beef to help fight climate change

[Kawshik Rahman]

We Texans generally are proud of eating high-palate-heat foods, but these folks also had great mastery of making food picante, but as a complementary instead of overpowering flavor component. That was the first time I ate curry, they let me know in conversation that the chicken in the curry cost them $5.00 / chicken through an arrangement the Middle Eastern students had with a meat supplier in Houston. A whole chicken cost $1.50 or so in a standard US supermarket back then. It reinforced the degree of respect and camaraderie they had extended to me. They didn't have the typical US college experience, not partaking in alcohol and having classes & exams during Ramadan, maintaining their routine. Kingsville, TX had and still has very little in common with Austin, TX other than both having a university. They let me know in Malaysia, body modesty is a strong cultural component, beaches were segregated by gender. They could never know what it was like to have a family day at the beach, or take a girl to the beach as a date. But they never tried to force any such things on us, and as fellow young men, didn't mind the eye candy available but weren't rude anout it. During one all-nighter Ed McMahon's Star Search program came on TV, with a typical "Most Photogenic" category with of course a stunning young lady in beachwear. The guys said nothing like that was shown on TV in Malaysia, as broadcasting media was government controlled, and only the rich & politically connected were granted permits for satellite dishes. Their equivalent of locker room talk was to joke about how they would never know what a specific girl looked like without her clothes until after they were married! I can't emphasize enough how I never experienced any treatment or hear any comments about US culture being wrong, or evil, in any way, simply different.

Mr. Zorg
You truly are a person who has seen a wide spectrum of this world. I live in Bangladesh and fortunately ( due to it being a secular country ) , there are no gender segregations in beaches and public places . And l pray that it always remains that way .
I am an advocate of male and female children being educated in the same school ( co education ) , like currently practiced in my country . My hypothesis is that males who were educated in co educational facilities are more likely to respect females , because they grow up working with them , studying with them and seeing them as team mates , class peers , friends and equals from a very young age.
In contrast males from boys only schools in my country , do not grow up seeing any women other than their mothers and sisters in their house and so generally do not know how to act properly around women in their career lives after adolescence . Their only idea on how to treat women is based on how they saw there father treat their mother.
In a study conducted by Dhaka University in 2017 , it was reported that males who grew up in co educational facilities are far less likely to become rapists or domestic abusers than males who grew up in a boys only school .

 

[Opposite Pole]

I love Malaysian food. I really miss it, there is nothing of the sort where I’m living now. Nasi Lemak served with Sambal Udang or Sambal Sotong... Or Murtabak, man I’m drooling!

 

[sgt_zim]

Your classmates notwithstanding, there is a virulent strain of Islamism in Malaysia. My dad experienced it when we were living just outside of KL in the late 60s/early 70s. Dad was warned by a couple guys he worked with (guys who are like your classmates) about the guys, especially the boss, who were not like your classmates. And at the end of the (very successful) project they were working on, the whole thing run by Americans, mostly from LSU, the Islamists running the show took all the credit, and made absolutely zero mention of the huge contribution of Dad and his team. Without their work, the project would never have even gotten off the ground, let alone come to a successful conclusion.

And it was a simple thing, really. Dad and his team (all agricultural experts of one stripe or another) were there to teach them how to grow the humble potato.

The Malaysians you went to school with, the ones who warned my dad about the bad ones, @Kawshik Rahman, a Pakistani I work with...they are, or rather they should be, the exemplars. Unfortunately for both themselves and us, they are not.

 

[Mr. Zorg]

Fortunately I suppose, the extremists aren't the ones that, at that time anyway, were sponsored by the Malaysian government to attend a co-educational university in sumny South Texas (Kingsville to be precise). Texas A&I, when I attended and graduated from there, was the least expensive u iversity to attend to pursue engineering degrees, and had (and still has) a specialist Natural Gas Engineering department.

There is always a negative element that pursues and obtains the most media coverage in every society. Timothy McVeigh, born a few years after my little sister, is an example that always leaps to my mind for the USA.

@Kawshik Rahman, I find your hypothesis sound, and it's not a bad thing for science-minded young males like I once was to find themselves equaled and bested in some such areas by females. My wife is also a Chemical Engineer who works with ultra complex computer programs I can't even begin to accurately describe in a super-specialist work group.

 

[steve white]

But...if you don't eat beef, the cows are still out there farting! (btw most auto accidents involving women are because they were farding as they drove along--fard being a French word meaning to apply makeup to the face.