I meant to write this like a year ago. So here it is, one year late.
There are quite a few reasons that I gave up meat, and those reasons continue to grow more complex as the journey goes on. Obviously this only applies to me, and this path isn't for everybody or every body. Choosing what to eat is such a personal journey because food is so personal.
I lived on a farm for eight years. It was a little bit of a hobby farm, but we grew our own vegetables and put up our own animals. "Put up" animals means to kill animals and wrap them up in freezer paper. We put up fifty chickens in the fall, a pig twice (if I remember right), and had a cow "done" (butchered) a few times. I never thought about it before, but the language is interesting; we never said "kill." Usually I wasn't the one actually doing the deed; we, the kids, got to process the carcasses, cut them up, clean out little bits of lungs or kidneys stuck in the ribcage, wrap them in plastic bags and freezer paper. We were actually kind of removed from the whole process. I can remember the days. I wish I was a better writer so I could accurately convey the smell, the sound, the sunshine. We used to make the headless chickens dance in the sink and laugh. It made us feel better. I wish I could write about the twinge of guilt, the feeling of pride as the packages piled up. The way the cats hung around to eat the leftovers. The incredible joints on a chicken's leg. The realization that my joints were the same.
But all that wasn't the reason that I stopped eating meat. The taste of the meat was the first reason. Not the taste of the farm stuff. That tasted great. You've never had a steak until you've had the steak of your own cow, carefully raised in a low-stress environment with enough grass and room to spread out, and a little bit of corn for a treat (but never as primary feed). The chicken was always tender, albeit genetically modified. And the homemade pork sausage was to die for.
It was the taste of the meat after we moved back to a city, and I started college. The grocery store meat was full of gristle, and I'd forgotten what that was after eight years of home-grown muscle mass. It tasted wrong, but I'm not sure how to explain how it tasted wrong. In retrospect, it probably had something to do with the grain and recycled-meat feed, the lack of exercise, or the antibiotics. It was just disturbing to me on some fundamental level. I stopped cooking meat when I moved into my own place, and started seeing sources everywhere about how eating meat is not an eco-friendly way of gaining nutrients. I started thinking about what I'd seen of factory farming in the midwest, and the aspects of factory farming that are generally kept way more secret than the small feed lot across the road from where we lived.
When I went to grad school, I went through a brief phase as a pepperoni vegetarian (that is, a "vegetarian" whose only foray into the meated world is pepperoni. I know. Ridic). I realize now and realized then that pepperoni is everything that is bad about meat, ground up and spiced and compressed for my pleasure, but I needed that few months to get everything in order in my head and make the commitment. Like Jonathan Safran Foer's book discusses, a big part of being vegetarian is how it affects you socially, among your friends and family. That was what I needed time to think about.
And then, finally, I quit eating chicken, pork, beef, deer, turducken, and anything that walks on land. As much as I'd love to say that I finally gave it up because of some pristine ideal of how I was going to make the world a better place and reduce water pollution and save the fish in the Gulf of Mexico and spare one cow per year from a traumatic and untimely death, I can't. When I finally made the leap, it was actually for financial reasons. I was eating out too much, and I hypothesized that if I gave up meat, my options would be so limited that I would be forced to pack my lunch for school every day. It worked. I saved over $150 in the first month, and it was like the money had appeared out of nowhere. (Side note: often the least expensive dish when I do eat out is vegetarian.) Being vegetarian was a fun challenge, and I loved altering all my favorite recipes. I think maybe the reason I stuck with it is because I made Mexican food one night early on, and replaced the ground beef with black beans. It was amazing. I decided to not go back, maybe not permanently, but for a while. That was in January 2007.
Since then, my veggieness has changed a lot. Being vegetarian (or pescatarian, to be more precise) feels natural. It's a total delight to go to vegetarian or vegan restaurants, and it's a new realization each time that I can order anything on the menu. I feel better, controlling my weight is less of an issue. We shop at the public market, and our grocery bill is mostly negligible: $10-$15 a week, each. The social eating sometimes still feels nervous - maybe I forget to mention that I don't eat meat, or maybe I forget to thank someone for going out of their way to exclude meat from the meal. Maybe I forget to thank someone for coming over and eating my meatless cooking. It's still a process.
My reasons have changed, too. The financial reasons for giving up meat seem so ingrained now that my inner focus has shifted more toward the ecological footprint reduction of eating a plant-based diet, the health benefits, and (the newest and most difficult to swallow reason) cruelty toward living beings during their lifetimes and during their deaths. I don't believe that we as a society should allow our animals to be treated so cruelly. We're better than that. It's such a small price to pay, to eat less meat, to ensure that fewer animals will live their lives in such an unnatural and harmful (to them, to the environment, to us) way. I know that I still make mistakes, and I'm still not 100% aligned with my own beliefs. I'm rethinking eating fish, and have cut down my intake a lot- this is part of my journey and struggle and growth.
Obviously the story is a lot more complicated than this. There was adjusting, counting of nutrients and grams of protein, discovery of wheat gluten and French lentils. There was the day when I figured out that chopped walnuts taste great in pasta sauce, and that cumin makes sauteed mushrooms taste a little bit meaty. This is just the basics.
Back on the farm, we had two kinds of chickens. Our laying chickens were yellow, and our eating chickens were white. One year, we decided to keep an eating chicken past the six or seven weeks when we would have normally slaughtered it. We took her home and put her in the coop with the laying hens. She made it about a month, and then the weight of her genetically modified body became too much for her legs, and she couldn't walk. She couldn't fly up to the roost with the rest of the birds. She moved by dragging herself around with her wings, and the underside of her body was caked with mud and feces. It was grotesque and heartbreaking all at once. We had to kill her because it was cruel not to. At some point it clicked for me that the amount of meat we consume was feeding (literally) the need to produce birds that were this way- birds that can't stop eating and can't stop gaining weight, that can't live a normal lifespan because of their genes. At that moment, it seemed so much more simple to me, for my life, to just eat some beans.
 |
| Redneck caviar, and veggie chimechangas in the background (a recent meal). And egg-dying supplies. |
There are quite a few reasons that I gave up meat, and those reasons continue to grow more complex as the journey goes on. Obviously this only applies to me, and this path isn't for everybody or every body. Choosing what to eat is such a personal journey because food is so personal.
I lived on a farm for eight years. It was a little bit of a hobby farm, but we grew our own vegetables and put up our own animals. "Put up" animals means to kill animals and wrap them up in freezer paper. We put up fifty chickens in the fall, a pig twice (if I remember right), and had a cow "done" (butchered) a few times. I never thought about it before, but the language is interesting; we never said "kill." Usually I wasn't the one actually doing the deed; we, the kids, got to process the carcasses, cut them up, clean out little bits of lungs or kidneys stuck in the ribcage, wrap them in plastic bags and freezer paper. We were actually kind of removed from the whole process. I can remember the days. I wish I was a better writer so I could accurately convey the smell, the sound, the sunshine. We used to make the headless chickens dance in the sink and laugh. It made us feel better. I wish I could write about the twinge of guilt, the feeling of pride as the packages piled up. The way the cats hung around to eat the leftovers. The incredible joints on a chicken's leg. The realization that my joints were the same.
But all that wasn't the reason that I stopped eating meat. The taste of the meat was the first reason. Not the taste of the farm stuff. That tasted great. You've never had a steak until you've had the steak of your own cow, carefully raised in a low-stress environment with enough grass and room to spread out, and a little bit of corn for a treat (but never as primary feed). The chicken was always tender, albeit genetically modified. And the homemade pork sausage was to die for.
It was the taste of the meat after we moved back to a city, and I started college. The grocery store meat was full of gristle, and I'd forgotten what that was after eight years of home-grown muscle mass. It tasted wrong, but I'm not sure how to explain how it tasted wrong. In retrospect, it probably had something to do with the grain and recycled-meat feed, the lack of exercise, or the antibiotics. It was just disturbing to me on some fundamental level. I stopped cooking meat when I moved into my own place, and started seeing sources everywhere about how eating meat is not an eco-friendly way of gaining nutrients. I started thinking about what I'd seen of factory farming in the midwest, and the aspects of factory farming that are generally kept way more secret than the small feed lot across the road from where we lived.
When I went to grad school, I went through a brief phase as a pepperoni vegetarian (that is, a "vegetarian" whose only foray into the meated world is pepperoni. I know. Ridic). I realize now and realized then that pepperoni is everything that is bad about meat, ground up and spiced and compressed for my pleasure, but I needed that few months to get everything in order in my head and make the commitment. Like Jonathan Safran Foer's book discusses, a big part of being vegetarian is how it affects you socially, among your friends and family. That was what I needed time to think about.
 |
| McMoogets? |
Since then, my veggieness has changed a lot. Being vegetarian (or pescatarian, to be more precise) feels natural. It's a total delight to go to vegetarian or vegan restaurants, and it's a new realization each time that I can order anything on the menu. I feel better, controlling my weight is less of an issue. We shop at the public market, and our grocery bill is mostly negligible: $10-$15 a week, each. The social eating sometimes still feels nervous - maybe I forget to mention that I don't eat meat, or maybe I forget to thank someone for going out of their way to exclude meat from the meal. Maybe I forget to thank someone for coming over and eating my meatless cooking. It's still a process.
My reasons have changed, too. The financial reasons for giving up meat seem so ingrained now that my inner focus has shifted more toward the ecological footprint reduction of eating a plant-based diet, the health benefits, and (the newest and most difficult to swallow reason) cruelty toward living beings during their lifetimes and during their deaths. I don't believe that we as a society should allow our animals to be treated so cruelly. We're better than that. It's such a small price to pay, to eat less meat, to ensure that fewer animals will live their lives in such an unnatural and harmful (to them, to the environment, to us) way. I know that I still make mistakes, and I'm still not 100% aligned with my own beliefs. I'm rethinking eating fish, and have cut down my intake a lot- this is part of my journey and struggle and growth.
 |
| Broccoli, wild rice, French lentils cooked in vegetable broth and baked with an egg, green tomatoes, and gruyere. And a beer. Can't forget that part. :-) Great for a cold day. |
Obviously the story is a lot more complicated than this. There was adjusting, counting of nutrients and grams of protein, discovery of wheat gluten and French lentils. There was the day when I figured out that chopped walnuts taste great in pasta sauce, and that cumin makes sauteed mushrooms taste a little bit meaty. This is just the basics.
Back on the farm, we had two kinds of chickens. Our laying chickens were yellow, and our eating chickens were white. One year, we decided to keep an eating chicken past the six or seven weeks when we would have normally slaughtered it. We took her home and put her in the coop with the laying hens. She made it about a month, and then the weight of her genetically modified body became too much for her legs, and she couldn't walk. She couldn't fly up to the roost with the rest of the birds. She moved by dragging herself around with her wings, and the underside of her body was caked with mud and feces. It was grotesque and heartbreaking all at once. We had to kill her because it was cruel not to. At some point it clicked for me that the amount of meat we consume was feeding (literally) the need to produce birds that were this way- birds that can't stop eating and can't stop gaining weight, that can't live a normal lifespan because of their genes. At that moment, it seemed so much more simple to me, for my life, to just eat some beans.
