As an adult, it seems strange that there was a time when I did not know that the meat on my plate once mooed or bleated or clucked, but there it was. There is always the time before we knew something, and that time, in this case, was uncomplicated-ly delicious. I ate hot dogs and hamburgers and Christmas turkey, and I deep-fried potatoes in their leftover fat. It was food, and it was good.
Then, in grade two, a kid at school changed my relationship with meat forever.
There I was, just wandering down the hallway in that directionless way I had when I was seven, running my hand along the wall and hoping there were some new Nanook of the North books in the library, when I walked right into Jason, knocking him back a little. He dropped the bag, which landed with a bass thunk on the floor. I was scared he was going to punch me, because Jason was fiery little kid, but instead he looked pleased to have an excuse to show me his treasure.
“Look what I found for Show and Tell,” he said.
I looked down at the bag and saw a collection of parts that seemed familiar. I had seen this kind of a thing before, and as my mind slowly worked the pieces together to make sense of the thing, I began to feel sick. The top of the plastic bag had fallen away, revealing a clouded eye, vacant and dull yet somehow fixed on my expression of blank horror. The eye, the once soft muzzle pushed into the corner of the bag, the protruding antlers: it was a severed deer’s head.
“Jason, you’re going to get into trouble,” I said as I leaned myself against the wall. The floor suddenly felt impossibly close to my head.
“Why? It’s cool! I found it in an alley on the way to school.”
“It’s dead,” I said.
“So?” he said.
I wasn’t surprised at his nonchalance. I had always assumed that his parents were questionable. It was obvious that his mother didn’t do laundry by the constant grubbiness of his knees and elbows. His home room teacher wiped his face down every morning. I had seen her do it in the coat room.
While I leaned, the hallway filled with adults. The librarian, the vice principal, and a group of teachers crowded around Jason and the head in the bag. I could tell that they thought something was wrong with Jason, but no one was taking the bag away. While they all conferred over him about who to call and what to do — Should we call his parents? No, they won’t do anything. Tell the police? Maybe. Where do we put the head? I don’t know. — I swayed against the wall in time to Jason’s lazy sway of the bag left and then right, right and then left, against his leg, banging the animal’s head against his thigh and catching the protruding antlers on the hems of everyone’s clothing. Suit jackets and skirts fluttered around his shoulders.
All I could think about for days was how that head, a head that was once a thinking and moving head, was now just a pile of meat, but not a pile of meat we would eat, and how that head used to be attached to a body that was probably now a pile of meat we would eat. As a city kid who had never experienced having her future meals look her full in the eye, this was a horror movie of a revelation: I ate things that thought and felt and moved and had babies.
Ever since that day when the deer’s dull eye fixed on my own, my relationship with meat has been complicated. In high school, I listened to The Smiths’ “Meat Is Murder” as though it were a religious hymn while still grabbing beef tacos at the mall. I embraced vegetarianism in my early twenties and seriously contemplated veganism before finding out I would have to give up real cheese. I love bacon but am occasionally too wracked with guilt about the pigs to put it in my mouth. I read about the evils of factory farming and the appalling reality of abattoirs but have a weakness for A&W’s mozza burger.
I am a wishy-washy, emotional, meat-is-murder meat-eater who believes in animal rights but tosses her ethics over at the sight of a tasty, tasty round of breakfast pancetta and a plate of rare steak with enough blood to mix into her mashed potatoes.
I realize that I have imposed my own sense of humanity on she who is not human, but I cannot shake the idea that there is a far more personal relationship between us, the human and the animal-become-food, than we generally acknowledge. I saw her, I felt the reality of her, I experienced that deer as an individual being, and I cannot shake the feeling that most of our present practices with regard to farming the animals we eat and hunting them down not only denies their lives a deserved level of dignity and respect but also our own lives for having forfeited our hearts in the pursuit of convenience and money and a cheap hunk of meat.
I think about that deer’s severed head and her milky eye. I think about how it didn’t matter that the plastic bag covered her nose. I think about how she didn’t have to be shot and dragged off in a truck and beheaded and discarded in an alley.
Meat became much more than just meat for me that day. It has become a real and living issue about love and humanity and a concern about how the way we extend ourselves into the world becomes, in turn, what we are. We become what we do, and what we do is terrible.
My relationship with meat is an issue about which I have yet to find a clear answer, and so I continue to waffle between different styles of eating and shopping for the food I consume. As a result, I am curious about other people and their relationship to their food.
- Are you an omnivore, a vegetarian, or a vegan? Why?
- Is it a choice you make or simply a matter of habit?
- Do you believe that there are ethical, philosophical, or spiritual components when it comes to the food we eat?
- If you are an omnivore and have concerns about our consumption of animals, how do you reconcile yourself with your eating habits?
Photo Credits
“found photo of a severed deer head” Schmutzie @ Flickr.com. All Rights Reserved.
“mounted elk head” Schmutzie @ Flickr.com. All Rights Reserved.
Feature photo by ClatieK Creative Commons
I’m an omnivore, although I’ve often said I could be a vegetarian if I tried. Meat has never been one of my favorite foods, but I eat it because it tastes good to me sometimes. After watching Food, Inc. it’s hard to look at the steaks in the grocery store the same way.
I reconcile my feelings of guilt by eating local produce and meat whenever possible, and by generally consuming less meat than the average American… but I could always do better.
I’m late to the Omnivore’s dilemma, but I basically eat low on the food chain because it’s much kinder on the environment, kinder to other species, and can be more nutritional and healthy. The Trephine summed up my feelings on it:
http://www.thetrephine.com/2010/06/03/i-am-an-oil-spill-and-so-are-you/
If everyone just cut meat and milk consumption a little bit, the world would immediately be a better place.
I am an omnivore, with a confused conscience.
I try to eat organic, cage free, grass fed, local meats and fish when I can, but I know I could do better.
The guilt regarding my taste for ‘flesh’ gets to me, but my lack of funding is the biggest thing holding me back from being the sort of meat consumer I wish to be.
Why does it have to be so expensive to be good to our earth?
Omnivore. Although I do have serious reservations about the way food animals are treated, I’m not always entirely sure how I can make a difference. I don’t have the income to ensure the meat I buy is organic or not from a factory farm. Hopefully this will change some day. The only way I can speak about it is through my vote, which I have done whenever a food industry-related measure comes on the ballot. My daughter is 3 and we always talk about where food comes from. She’s seen chickens (pictures, TV, books) and the whole plucked chickens we buy and cut up. Beef is from cows, bacon from pigs, etc. But I also stress that it’s important for us (i.e. people) to treat animals kindly while they are alive.
I call myself a vegetarian wanna-be. I think we don’t need to eat animals, and I believe it’s healthier not to. Yet I learned to like meat as I grew up, and now I do like the taste of some of it. I can eat a steak if I don’t think about the animal it comes from— if I disconnect, in my mind, the flesh on my plate from the living, breathing animal it was. Usually, remembering that ruins my appetite for the meat. Somehow the small shape on my plate does not always call out the big picture of what it really is. However, I can do without eating meat most of the time.
I think I’d be healthier and happier if I didn’t eat dead animals, yet I do eat them. I am not strong-willed enough to live up to my own ideals. I don’t beat myself up for this. I think that one day my ingrained eating habits will change, will naturally adjust to follow my intellectual beliefs and my heart. I try not to feel guilty for what I feel is my weakness; that would be counterproductive and might even entrench my meat-eating habits.
PETA once showed a photo of a calf, and underneath it a caption “Good intentions are not enough.” If I put this on my fridge door it would probably make a huge difference.
My husband raises beef organically with his parents and brother. They have around 200 animals, and those animals are well looked after. Most of them are known by name; they are put on grass when it’s the season; they’re fed grain only in the winter (and they love it; they’ll ignore grass if you give them grain, I think); they’re helped when they have trouble calving;when a cow loses a calf and grieves, the farmers feel sorry for her; the cattle are cared for when they get sick; and they come when they’re called, almost like pets. They are scratched on the head and behind the ears. They don’t live the factory-farm life at all.
Schmutzie, you nailed my feelings exactly. When people ask me what I am, I say I’m a lapsed vegan. 90% of the time, I follow a anally-orchestrated vegan diet, but sometimes, I just get the itch. And then really, I feel initially satisfied, then guilty, then sick to my stomach. I think the sickness is half due to the weight of the food (and dairy not exactly agreeing with me), and half, ethical. But I keep going back, occasionally.
This is a tough one. I think the label “conflicted omnivore” nails it.. For me, it’s the devaluing of life that really gets to me.. to live here in this world we consume the life energy of other beings, whether plant or animal. To confine animals concentration-camp style and feed them grain when they crave the grass is a cruelty I can’t dismiss. Not to mention all the other horrors of that industry. And yet I still eat a little meat, and try to get it from the local co-op to optimize the less-cruelty angle. It’s a pretty penny, but at a cost more reflective of the life sacrificed.
There’s the golden rule common to religions around the world: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think the line between human and animal is really a human construction that gives us the illusion of separateness. So.. yes, I feel a black mark on my soul when I buy the $1 cheeseburger, and don’t do it very often.
speaking of…..
“I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it’s such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.”
Ellen DeGeneres
I was so moved by the intelligence,sense of fun and personalities of the animals I worked with on Babe that by the end of the film I was a vegetarian.
~ James Cromwell
“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”
— Leo Tolstoy
Excellent quotes, especially the one by Leo Tolstoy. Maybe I’ll stick that on my fridge door.
We once passed one of those huge trucks full of cows being taken away to somewhere I try not to think about, and in passing I looked into the truck, and locked eyes with a cow with light caramel-colored hair. She LOOKED at me. I could not take my eyes off that huge dark eye. It said as plainly as anything I have ever heard out loud: Help me. Save me. Please, please. And we pulled on past the truck, and I wept for an hour after. My husband thought I was nuts. If he comes into the room where I write this now, and sees these tears coming as I remember this, he’ll probably think so again! (Twenty five years later). But then, I probably am!
I’ve had that connection, and some people think you’re nuts and delusional, but I, for one, do not. We are animals, too, after all.
I used to be vegan, but now I get meat and cheese with the ‘under-the-coat’ discount. *cough*. I get my disgusting animal products and deprive the industry at the same time.