Sometimes I’m lucky and what I want is meatless.
I have been a vegetarian, semivegetarian and old-fashioned carnivore.
Right now, I eat everythingbut with a pervasive sense of unease.
But it hasn’t.
I’m more torn than ever.
In the beginning,I must confess that I was motivated more by a concern for calories than animals.
When I went to college, everyone assured me that I would inevitably gain 15 pounds.
I lost 10 pounds and became addicted to the attention (“You’re so skinny.
“), along with the moral superiority our fat-hating culture affords the thin.
If my diet saved animals, all the better.
Not that I didn’t take a certain amount of flak.
Non-vegetarians don’t like to have vegetarians to dinner.
(They settled on lobster stuffed with crabmeat.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that wasn’t strictly vegetarian, either.)
Friends didn’t appreciate forgoing pepperoni on their pizza because one person in the groupmecouldn’t eat it.
And there was a certain wacko label that went with the whole thing.
But it was a boyfriend who prompted my first flip-flop.
They were so good, I couldn’t stop eating them.
I learned to love meat again.
I felt slightly guilty, but my boyfriend’s approval was ample compensation.
The way I ate didn’t make people uncomfortable anymore.
Plus, I just plain liked the taste of meat.
I accommodated the extra calories by stepping up my running regimen.
The boyfriend lastedless than a year, but he changed my relationship with food.
So you’d think I’d simply decide I was an omnivore and be done with it.
I tried, for a while.
Although I’d always been a dog lover, I never felt any special affinity for cows and sheep.
I saw something that looked unnervingly like fleshflesh not all that different from my own.
This tugged my mind to uncomfortable comparisons.
Skinned and butchered, how different would I look on a plate?
How different was this piece of meat from me?
I didn’t know.
But the idea bothered me enough to launch myself back into vegetarianism, at least sporadically.
Part of it was, again, not wanting to be the squeaky wheel.
(My mother is a big eye roller.)
Fish may feel pain.
Sheep could distinguish the faces of their peersand even human caretakersfrom strangers.
Chickens were able to utter different calls to communicate the ups and downs of life.
Grandin creates techniques that make the slaughtering process less stressful for the animals.
Grandin’s methods have been lauded for making the process of slaughtering cattle more humane.
And I’m sure they have.
But the need for them made me feel even worse.
Clearly these are not dumb, insensible creatures who are oblivious to whether they live or die.
Does it matter that they can’t think their way through a tricky calculus problem or write a symphony?
I couldn’t help but empathize with them.
Because wouldn’t I, too, feel hysteria if I knew my seconds were numbered?
What made me so different from these animals?
Just because we turn our back on the situation doesn’t mean it isn’t there anymore.
But what is our responsibility?
Or, at the very least, what is mine?
But I don’t believe that’s true.
That would presume real vegetarians, by some fluke of biology, have an easier time of it.
What does this say about me?
Am I incapable of exercising empathy when it’s inconvenient?
Every time I pick up a menu.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Kantor
