Because really, when you think about it,
you're
eating actual
flesh. You're paying a company you've probably never heard of to kill something, rip the muscle from the bones and rip the skin off and get the veins out as best they can, and smash it into a shape and then you grind it up in your mouth and swallow it.
People ask if it's hard to be a vegetarian.
It's really not. (Most of the time. When you get really hungry, sometimes the only thing you can think about is a Wendy's cheeseburger. But usually a nice green salad and some blue cheese takes care of it.)
And don't I know that carnivores don't like to be told that it's bad that they're carnivores; I know this, I used to be one and I used to feel vaguely insulted by the mere existence of vegetarians, as if they would look at me and think I was bad because I ate meat. And I'd resent them for that. All through high school, I had a group of friends who were vegetarians and a group of friends who weren't, and I didn't want to become a vegetarian because I didn't want to admit that I agreed with them, for one thing. I didn't want to think about it, for another. I didn't want it to seem like I just did it because my friends did it.
I became a vegetarian almost two years ago, years after those vegetarian friends were out of my life. My non-vegetarian friend commented, when she heard, "God, seems like everyone's a vegetarian." And I tried not to let that bother me, because I really felt like I was doing the right thing.
People react to me in a funny way when they hear I'm a vegetarian. They usually tell my why they're not. As if they want me to know they've given it thought, and find themselves justified in their meat-eating ways. As if they think maybe they should give up meat, but don't want to. I don't know. Maybe it's just to make conversation.
I wonder if I used to do that.
I've thought about it a lot, and I'm not ready to say that "meat is murder" or that eating meat is fundamentally wrong. Because, really, I don't think that it is. I think that if I lived on a farm and raised my own animals humanely and killed them myself and cut and cooked them myself, that there really wouldn't be anything wrong with that. This is partially because meat-eating seems to be a natural part of the way the world works. Explain lions if meat-eating is fundamentally wrong. Damn immoral lions? Nah.
The cages, the feces, chickens being fed ground-up chicken parts, the slaughterhouses, the gushing blood and slow deaths, pigs chewing off the tails of the pigs in front of them because they've gone insane... These things are why I do not eat meat. I don't even want to think about meat, much less put it in my mouth and grind it up and swallow it.
I've heard stories about people who started eating meat again after 14 years of being a vegetarian. I wonder if I will. I wonder what would have to happen for me to make that decision. One person, having gone back to meat-eating after 8 years, said that the limited options for vegetarians just finally got to her. Luckily, I have an enormous capacity for dietary monotony. But maybe something will happen and I'll go back. (Maybe I'll buy a farm and some animals.) But even if I do, I think that every day that I refused meat will have added something good to the world.
And because I am a stranger, a single voice from out of nowhere, never to be known, I exhort you: become a vegetarian. Try it tomorrow. Then, in a month or so, become a one-day a week vegetarian. Don't eat meat on Tuesdays. Don't eat meat on Saturdays. Think how much death you would save eating no meet 52 days out of the year. Don't eat meat before noon every day. Start small. Stay small, hell, just do something.
I know that something keeping me from doing it before I did was thinking about how people would look at me if I said I was a vegetarian. It has this quality of moral righteousness, doesn't it? Like, oh, look at me, I'm so great. I know that feeling. I've had to tell my very much meat-eating parents that I've sworn it off. I was really surprised when, about a year into it, my mom told me that she was really proud of the fact that I was a vegetarian. I was stunned. I expected them to just be like, "oh, look, how cute, she has ideals." But they took me seriously. And they actually supported me.
But it does have this hippie-ish zoned out California connotation. My recommendation, if you have friends who wouldn't react well to you becoming a vegetarian, is simply to lie. Say that it's for health reasons. Your doctor wants you to try it. You've heard it's a good way to lose weight. You have a special medical condition in which any gastrointestinal exposure to Mad Cow disease would kill you instantly. You've developed an allergy to poultry.
I always felt powerless before -- people starving in Africa, people starving in Indonesia, sweatshops, rainforests, abused animals, global warming, Cambodia... But each of us individually have a very small amount of power, this being a consumer society and we being consumers. Every meal you go without chicken on your salad is an instance where you've used your tiny bit of power to say something, and have a tiny little ripple effect in the economy and in the life of a chicken somewhere. Imagine what you can do if you go a whole day here and there without meat. A week. A month. If you swear it off entirely, imagine what a lifetime of meat you haven't eaten would look like. And not just you alone. You and me, and my buddy Nicole, and Kyle, and Brian. That's five of us. Imagine that pile of meat we haven't eaten.
It may not seem huge, but combined, and over lifetimes, it can be.
