I became a vegetarian during my freshman year of college. The transition from meat-eater to herbivore didn’t happen gradually, but rather all at once when in my freshman year Biology class I was presented with a frog and my very own mini-guillotine with which to dispense of my frog. I didn’t have access to a farm as a child and my father was an avowed animal lover (saver of stray dogs and misguided turtles) and so I found myself wholly unprepared for the moral dilemma that results when one creature takes the life of another.
This isn’t to say I have never killed anything. I had surely slapped a persistent mosquito, probably stepped on a few bugs and I am sorry to say, I vaguely recall gluing ants to the sidewalk as a child, but I had never killed any thing in my adult life with such purpose and forethought. In truth, I am much more apt to scoop up an errant spider and dump it outside, than to step on it.
I felt a certain dread and distaste standing there at my lab bench eyeing my speckled, green frog, but all of my peers were getting on with business. After all, I rationalized to myself, I want to be a doctor and killing my frog was about education. Unfortunately, this rationalization comforted me right up until the point when I let the blade drop, at which point my classmates were treated to an entertaining display of tears.
Killing my frog forced me to confront the question of whether I had the right to do so (and was it really necessary in the first place). It was a feeling that I was forced to reexamine again a year later when I entertained the idea of accepting a research internship in the Plasma Division of the Red Cross. The position required a certain amount of experimentation on rats – procedures that I was fairly certain I would grow comfortable with over time, but would I want to?
Since the idea of taking another creature’s life was clearly bothersome to me, it just seemed morally reprehensible to eat things that I would not feel comfortable killing myself. After all, when we go to the supermarket and buy a neatly shrink-wrapped parcel of hamburger meat, the last thing on our mind is what that meat looked like before it was hamburger. For those of us who are not hunters, eating meat is about living in denial — we don’t want to imagine what it looked like, where it came from, or what kind of life it had before it materialized in our shopping cart. At that point, I felt like I had no choice but to stop eating meat.
Being vegetarian became an inextricable part of my identity. After 12 years I don’t really remember what a steak tastes like and I am okay with that. A friend recently told me that the hardest part about not eating meat is the social part (in fact, he is vegan which makes the social part even more difficult). Here in California being a vegetarian is easy, and even well tolerated. There are multitudes of restaurants that cater to whole subcultures of vegetarians, so it isn’t hard to find choices in keeping with any given dietary restriction — what is more difficult however, is finding understanding.
In general, I take comments about my food preferences with a grain of salt – I chuckle when strangers tell me that I wouldn’t survive in the wild or launch into a diatribe about the length of the human alimentary canal or the shape of human teeth. I do find it interesting though that often times strangers feel it their duty (or privilege) to comment on not what I choose to eat, but rather what I don’t. As my friend said, being vegan is not about what you choose or don’t choose to eat, but more about what you believe.
The truth is that I have been a pretty lazy vegetarian in the past 4 years – I ate fish, chicken stock and even the occasional pepperoni. Saying I was vegetarian was a great way to make sure I didn’t end up in the uncomfortable situation of having to choke down a steak at a friend’s dinner party. I still connected with the same ideas about why I stopped eating meat in the first place, but let’s face it – it is so much easier to go out to eat or to go to someone’s house for dinner if you eat fish.
This month however, I abruptly stopped eating both fish and eggs. It wasn’t a hard choice for me, ideologically, at least. The decision was spurred by a series of events which culminated in the reading of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. It is a really well-written, well-researched book in which Pollan covers the natural history of four meals: a meal from McDonalds eaten at 60 m.p.h., an organic meal in which the constituents were purchased from Whole Foods (a.k.a. Whole Paycheck), a meal containing animals that were raised on a small, sustainable, independent farm and a meal composed only of ingredients he hunted or gathered himself.
I wasn’t sure really what to expect when I started reading the book. I suppose I expected that he would make an impassioned case for vegetarianism, which isn’t the case at all. Pollan’s thesis was actually very simple – know where your food comes from. He discusses the economics and biology of corn in depth and urges us to consider the real cost of our food choices, not just the one on the price tag at the supermarket. Pollan traces the source of his McDonald’s hamburger all the way back to the corn fields and analyzes the cost industrial farming exacts on our health and the environment.
Think about what you eat. It is such a simple thing really, but something I hardly ever do. It isn’t often that I sit down and ponder all the ingredients in the myriad of processed food items I consume during the day. It isn’t often that I actually want to. The truth is though, that we should and there are a lot of good reasons why. I highly recommend reading this book, even if you are an avowed meat-eater and you only eat to live. It really is an incredible read.
