The hardest part about being vegetarian is explaining my vegetarianism. I don’t like uncomfortable conversations or confrontations, and by its very nature, vegetarianism is controversial. People love food. They take it personally when you have something negative to say about what they like to put in their mouths. I love food, too. My passionate relationship with food has made this transition more difficult, and yet, all the more important to me.
My “food relationship” has changed a lot over the years. As a kid, I was a picky eater. The fact that my mom wasn’t exactly a great cook didn’t help. By the time I was in high school, I hated food. I only ate because it was necessary to sustain my being, and I used food (or lack thereof) as a way to feel in control of my life. I remember thinking once that it would be much easier if no one had to eat at all and we could take pills instead of suffering through a plate filled with my arch-enemy.
In college, I didn’t know how important food was to my health—I spent my freshman year fulfilling my dream of living on sugary cereal and Hostess cupcakes. After I was diagnosed with mononucleosis and human parvo, I suspected that my diet wasn’t what it should be. I stopped taking my health for granted, but I still didn’t like food much.
Along came a man who could cook. One of our first dates was on St. Patrick’s Day, and he invited me to his tiny apartment, where he cooked me the traditional meal of corned beef and cabbage. On our next date he cooked the best burgers I’d ever eaten. Meal after meal, I grew more interested in food. Before I knew it, I was enjoying onions and garlic, two wonderful ingredients I thought I disliked. Also before I knew it, I’d married that man, and I was on my honeymoon, snarfing down coconut shrimp, plantain chips, clam chowder, and everything else the Cayman Islands had to offer. I was enjoying the culinary world like never before.
To date, my husband and I have spent years together in the kitchen, chopping, dicing, sautéing, pureeing, seasoning, grilling, and exploring food together. I’ve discovered a love for everything from gourmet sushi to barbecued pulled pork. We have shelves filled with well-used cookbooks, and we love few things as much as dinner parties and good wine.
Then came Eating Animals. We saw Jonathan Safran Foer on The Ellen Show, and weeks later, his exact words may have been forgotten, but his message was still in our heads. My husband ordered the book online. He read it first, and I watched as tears rolled down his face—twice. I’ve rarely seen him cry. He told me about some of the things he’d read and we started cooking vegetarian meals. Away from home, however, I was still eating meat and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I put off reading the book. “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t want to know because I’m afraid I’ll stop eating meat, and I like meat.”
Several months (and one meat-filled vacation to Alabama) later, I made the decision to read Eating Animals. Safran Foer is an excellent writer, and it’s an easy read. But nothing about the topic is easy. I cried in the bathtub when I read the letter from Frank Reese, the last "truly independent"poultry farmer:
“I don’t allow baby turkeys to be shipped through the mail… I care. All my animals get as much pasture as they want, and I never mutilate or drug them. I don’t manipulate lighting or starve them to cycle unnaturally. I don’t allow my turkeys to be moved if it’s too cold or too hot. And I have them transported at night, so they’ll be calmer… I pay them twice as much to do it half as fast. They have to get the turkeys off the trailers safely. No broken bones and no unnecessary stress…
People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, can't escape their waste, and never see the sun... People focus on that last second of death. I want them to focus on the entire life of the animal” (114-115).
I cringed when I read that more than 95 percent of chickens are infected with E. coli, and 70 to 90 percent are infected with campylobacter (131). And the process for killing chickens is anything but pleasant. People don’t want to know that the chicken they are eating was killed by dragging it through an electrified water bath (the bird is now immobile but still conscious), an automatic throat slitter, and a scalding tank, at which point their heads and feet are removed, and a machine makes a vertical incision to remove their guts. Contamination typically occurs here, “releasing feces into the bird’s body cavities” (134). Apparently the cooling tank is referred to as “fecal soup” due to all the bacteria and feces floating around. No wonder so much of the chicken purchased at the supermarket is contaminated.
Safran Foer devotes an entire chapter to “shit.” That’s right, I’m talking about feces again. He states that “farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population—roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second” (174). No one is treating this waste like sewage, either, and creating waste-treatment centers. Nope. It just sits in a huge open-air pit, sometimes referred to as a “toxic lagoon,” where it seeps into rivers, lakes, and oceans (178). Yes, farmers have fertilized their crops with manure for centuries, but this is more manure than could ever be absorbed by crops.
I won’t go into detail about how cows are killed, or how often they are alive during this process. Let’s just say I’ll never look at a hamburger the same way again. That part of the book was among the most difficult to read, but there’s no need to belabor the point.
So what is the point? After all the reading and learning I’ve done over the past six months, I could write a whole book about the negative environmental impacts of factory farming, or about the health benefits of a vegetarian or vegan diet. I could go on and on, but I don’t need to—if you are at all interested, I highly recommend both Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Food Revolution by John Robbins. Both of these books changed my life, my husband’s life, and the life of any children we may choose to have someday.
My relationship with food now is completely different than it was even a year ago. The funny part is, I don’t miss meat much. I’ve enjoyed exploring a new world of food filled with myriad vegetables and interesting new ingredients. I don’t go hungry nor am I unhealthy—quite the contrary, in fact. My husband and I are creating new food traditions for our family while doing our part to make the world a better place. We still make flavorful, fantastic dishes, we still have great dinner parties, and we feel great.
My decision to be vegetarian (almost vegan, really) is a personal choice, and it has made me a happier, healthier person. I don’t need to justify that to anyone.
Works Cited
Safran Foer, Jonathan. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print.
Robbins, Johnn. The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Conari Press, 2011. Print.
