On June 6, 2005 I stopped eating
meat products. It occurred to me that I ought to make a simple record of my
experiences before and after this watershed event.
The route to this singular decision
was rather long (58 years long, to be precise) and somewhat convoluted. From
my earliest days, I’ve never been that big into the "eating thing". Even when
the occasional opportunity arose to savor some especially delightful culinary
offering, I’ve not been particularly enthusiastic about it. My
mom* wasn't the greatest cook on the planet; and to compound that, as a child I was a
damn picky eater. I was skinny as a rail. There were a lot of foods that I
simply wouldn’t eat, no matter how much I was scolded. (It was especially
awful if the various foods on the plate were actually allowed to touch
one another.) At some point very early on, I began to feel a vague sense of
wrongness about the whole concept of eating. At the extreme
bottom line, I came to the notion that it was the horrifying act of animals
eating each other. If there were a simple pill you could take to fulfill the
appetite, I would have gladly swallowed it in lieu of ingesting "real" food.
Basically, a totally weird kid.
Maybe it had something to do with
watching my father* gorge himself -- loudly and, to me, disgustingly -- every
night at the opposite end of our tiny kitchen table. It sickened me to
hear the sound of his mastication – it seemed almost obscene. As I watched him
shovel food into his huge jowls, and listened to his noisy munching, I could only think of a
fat, hungry swine at
a trough. It literally made me want to vomit.
Well, I eventually left that scene
and got into one that was slightly more conducive to getting food down my
throat without gagging. Back then, MacDonald’stm had not quite
reached even the modest bragging rights of "a million burgers served"
-- and I still remember when their store signs changed from noting the
specific number of billions sold, to ultimately read "billions and
billions sold". I began to help them hit that
mark, and more. I found that even "mystery meat" in the college dorm cafeteria
wasn’t nearly so bad as the fare I had grown up with. There was, incredibly,
an entire universe of better food out there. From skinny, I managed
to get merely thin.
After I got married, I learned that
the taste of food had a lot to do with the quality of the starting
ingredients. That explained a lot about the awful food I ate as a child:
quality equals cost. And cost (i.e., the cost of everything and anything) was
a real issue in my family. From day #1, I made my wife -- each of them, in
their applicable succession -- swear that never, ever would margarine
be brought into the house instead of butter. To reinforce it, I emphasized
that extremely painful capital punishment would be sure to follow any
transgression of that rule. And never again would I eat cheap, tough
cuts of meat.
Eventually, decent restaurants
began to sprout up within driving distance in our little burg, and I took
advantage of them. Over the years, I grew from thin to approximately normal
size. There were a lot more juicy, marbled steaks and greasy hamburgers eaten
throughout that time. Nevertheless, I can’t say that I ever got to the
position of enjoying
eating for its own sake. There was still that notion of something not right
about eating, left over from my childhood.
Even though I managed to get past
the more extreme edges of my early eating dysfunction, I’ve never eaten breakfast or
lunch on a daily basis. The only exceptions have been while traveling or on
vacation. Judging from others, I think this is perhaps extremely unusual. But
with loads of solid and liquid carbohydrates and meat protein eaten at and
after dinnertime, and my typical sedentary behavior in the evening, I managed
to go from normal size to 20 lbs. overweight over the last 15 years or so.
Despite that, I never actually felt overweight. Hell, it wasn’t much
more than the equivalent of a tenpin bowling ball to carry around all the
time. A piece of cake (though I never really liked cake or sweets that much).
The fact is, I never could quite
shake the nagging sense of guilt about eating meat -- animals eating animals. Nobody likes to dwell on the
thought of how meat products are raised and slaughtered for human consumption.
It’s better not to ponder that subject while you’re eating
your tasty fried chicken or crisp pork chop. Anyone smarter than a boxful of
hammers has some slight knowledge of
how things operate in the abattoirs and
big-industry "factory farms". It’s worse than any horror movie you’ve ever seen. It’s
easy for most people to repress that -- but not me. For many folks, it’s a
matter of assigning some special place for human beings in the chain of
being, and refusing to admit that other animals have any kind of true emotional life and
feelings – and souls. Or to revile the notion that humans are just another
type of animal. Again, not me.
What precisely is the definition of
agony? Is agony a concept whose ownership is restricted to human beings? What do you do
about a person (or an institution) that causes agony in another human being? Or
in an infant or small child? Or in a
dog? Or a cat? A bunny, a hamster, or a lab rat? A lamb, a calf, a chicken? These questions have
always plagued me.
Let’s walk along this particular continuum of
pathos for a moment. Cows actually have it pretty good in a relative sense: a couple
of bad days being transported to their penultimate holding pens, and a few moments of
abject terror
while being herded into a narrow, dark, blood-reeking corridor until they
receive their final skull-smashing reward. But at least they had some good
years in the field. Pigs are not so lucky, confined and unnaturally pumped-up.
A slit throat while dangling by a hind leg on an overhead drag-line conveyor
chain is their life’s reward. The way
veal is produced is unquestionably a crime and a sin on any universal plane
you wish to name, with calves confined so tightly soon after birth that they can’t
even turn around. But the way poultry is raised and harvested is probably the
most heinous example of animal cruelty. The animals’ entire life is one of
unnatural existence, extreme suffering and endless misery. I wonder how it feels to
live so crammed together with others, hardly able to move around freely? And to
ultimately have your head chopped off, or to be hung upside-down and have your
jugular vein sliced open?
I don’t have as much of a problem
with fish or seafood harvesting. Excepting aquafarming (which I know
little about), fish live a life of natural freedom – until the point that
they’re snagged in a net or caught on a hook. Bad luck for them -- but at
least they don’t have to suffer too awfully long. It’s not like their whole
life is characterized by incarceration, terror and the unending stress of living in an unnatural
environment. Only trouble is, I hate the taste and smell of fish, and can’t
get near ‘em! But I could justify eating hunted game of any sort, for
the same reason noted above. And at this point I'd rather maintain
"plausible deniability" about the way milk products are produced.
Surely, they have to keep dairy cows somewhat content to get the
product from them -- don't they? I have
to draw the line somewhere! But eggs are right out, since I know a
little more than I want to about that industry. But I cut way back on
eggs years ago anyway, mainly for health reasons.
To make matters worse, I've never
been
particularly fond of vegetables or fruit. That’s presents a rather big dilemma
when you go off meat. Potatoes are OK. Rice is OK. Beer is great, good
nutritional value
in that commodity. But you can't survive on carbohydrates alone, can you? So I reckon I
have to learn to like vegetables and fruit. I can do it.
I can do it. (Keep repeating that…)
Here is what I’ve experienced after
only one week of meatless existence:
● My rate of flatulence has risen
10-fold (or so it seems).
● You would not believe the
increased volume of feces that I’m producing, and the rate at which they are
being produced. (Already this is way more than you wanted to hear, right?)
● I’m getting a lot stupider than
I was. (This is not really too surprising. You are what you eat. My mentality is digressing from
that of a cow to that of a vegetable.)
● My persistent heartburn is a
bit better.
● My Karma doesn’t yet feel
lighter. (Considering that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of Wendy’s
Doublestm and MacD's Quarter-Pounderstm in my past to atone for, this is not
entirely surprising.)
● My doctor, during a
pre-scheduled physical exam this week, said I oughtn’t to make this change so
drastically. (But I never listen to him anyway.)
● My nighttime dreams are…
somehow different. Maybe more interesting. Possibly related to the sex
dreams that a plant pollen might have, wafting in the breeze or being
transported by a bee to a deliriously wonderful rendezvous with a pretty stamen. I’ll
get back to you later on that…
OK, the truth is, I might just bag
this odd tack tomorrow and get back into the "normal" American
meat-eating regime. It’s a
one-day-at-a-time type thing. I can conceive that for every week I persevere, maybe
I can take a chicken out of the commerce stream. And in a year, perhaps a pig
or two, and a cow. You might think it all seems rather foolish and futile;
that my little program can't possibly make any difference at all in the grand totality
of things. But that’s not my point, or my reason. It’s my personal moral sense
and Karmic destiny that I’m dealing with here. As for everyone else…you can damn
well do as you like.
Back to Essays...
* Rest in Peace. Although, if by some unthinkable stretch of religious dogma
my mother and father were actually once again joined together in Heaven, I
reckon I would be held guilty of extreme, unsympathetic sarcasm in rendering that comment.
See this excellently written
book review by David Pearce of Taking Animals Seriously -- Mental Life
and Moral Status (author: David DeGrazia).
One thing that has always distressed me is having to pass (or be passed by) a truck
carrying caged hogs to slaughter. I dream about those pink snouts
sticking out for days afterward.
