“I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty years”, John, our tattoo artist, said as he buzzed away at Dan’s ribcage Sunday afternoon. The only thing he won’t eat, he said, was tofurky. I’m pretty sure I’d be happy to avoid that the rest of my life, too.
My brother rolled his eyes as I folded my arms and talked about the frighteningly rapid growth of factory farming in the past two decades, which has not only contributed to global warming and the demise of our planet, but has simultaneously pumped us full of the flesh of unhealthy, antibiotic-treated animals. “Don’t worry, we’re still eating meat,” my brother assured me, making a “stop-that-bullshit” hand gesture in my direction.
I’ve been ready to go meatless for about a year or two, but it’s been necessary to premeditate more than I anticipated. Plus, I love chicken.
A couple of weeks ago, the DVD of
Food, Inc. (2009) arrived at our apartment via Netflix, and Dan sighed as he opened the envelope. It won’t be that bad, I told him. A coworker told me it would just make me more “conscious” about what we eat. But I had my motives. We had just finished scarfing beef tacos and steak sandwiches at Blue Moon when we sat down to watch it.
Food, Inc. begins with the fundamental problems with our local grocery stores, where there are no seasons, all items are always available, and at a low price. Grocery stores are completely out of sync with nature, and since we are a part of nature, we’re not meant to eat what they offer. Michael Pollan, author of
The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006) and Eric Schlosser, author of
Fast Food Nation (Harper Perennial, 2002), walk us through the different subjects of the film, which include the millions of uses for corn (high-fructose, anyone?), genetically modified organisms (GMO) in the soybean industry, and, of course, the terrible reality of factory farming. They charge the rise of McDonalds with the conception of factory farming (rightfully so), which ultimately enabled the creation and growth of other fast-food chains, and the high-demand, fast-food style of eating in the US.
Then came the footage that everyone (especially me) wants to avoid: hundreds of chickens packed into dark houses with no ventilation and bird shit everywhere. The pink, sausage-shaped bodies of pigs pushed up against each other, heads in each other’s asses, squealing like crying children. Cows wading through feet of feces, and eating corn, a food that’s cheap but increases the amount of e-coli in its system.
At this point of the movie, I turned to Dan. “You know this means I’m never buying meat at a grocery store ever again. Like, ever.” We saw one meat company spray conveyor belts of whitish, pasty ground beef with antibiotics, to kill the e-coli. I can’t support a system that treats animals like garbage, and then feeds the garbage to the people, and the people get sick and die. That’s fucking scary.
Last week, my lovely friend Shakira Croce, media coordinator at the NYC headquarters of
PETA, held an interview with Dr. Molly Barrow on
Progressive Radio Network. Shakira and Dr. Molly Barrow cover the essentials in animal cruelty issues: fur, captive animals (including the
incident at SeaWorld), puppy mills, and, of course the problems of meat. Shakira has been a veg since age 12, and after meeting her family, I can tell it was a difficult thing for her to pull off. Once, during a family trip to Italy, her brothers placed cooked rabbit heads on her plate. Years later, sitting with her father over drinks and deciding where to have lunch, he asks me, “Do you eat everything? Good, you’re normal.” I loved her dad, regardless, but I admire her persistence and strength despite the familial taunting.
I moved out of my parents’ house last year, leaving my mother (a devoted burgerista) and my stepfather (likely the highest consumer of meatballs in the US), alone to their carnivorous shenanigans. Meanwhile, my father still relies on the (now mythological)
Atkins diet as a effective route to weight loss. It’s a serious challenge to go veg amongst the hungry and obnoxious meat-lovers, especially when you’re related to them. And as for my hotdog-adoring boyfriend? Let’s put it this way: I cook dinner. He’s slowly converting, as long as what I make is filling and tasty.
The health benefits of a good vegetarian lifestyle are plenty.
The ADA claims it can reduce your chances of getting those ugly American epidemics like heart disease, diabetes and even cancer.
More importantly, ANIMALS ARE FUCKING CUTE. ALL OF THEM. Skinned animals hanging from hooks cause uncontrollable weeping for days (maybe that’s just me). I’ve been raised to love dogs, probably more than I ought to, but to also love chicken parmesan. The pink meat in the package never made me sad, it made me excited for dinner. This is the problem: our culture has separated the meat from the animal. From the life the meat once had. From what it looked like alive. Seeing the packaged meat, we’re trained to think: Won’t that be tasty! Instead of: I wonder how much that poor thing suffered. If it’s cute, I’m not fucking eating it.
And that’s final.
That's what Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues, among other things concerning evolution and cuisine, in his 2009 book, Catching Fire (Basic Books). Witty, comprehensive, and highly enlightenting, Wrangham's book discusses the theory that our departure from primitive beings and speedy evolution into hairless, upright, big-brained humans is all due to the invention and diffusion of cooking. Hell yeah, people who can cook are AWESOME. But this is a bit more sophisticated than that, of course. At times Wrangham is hard to follow, but his ultimate argument is: globally speaking, the development of our physiology, our character, and even our society, is because of cooking and eating cooked food.
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The dinner was on Tuesday night at 7:00, and when we arrived we were seated in a private room at the back of the restaurant. As I twiddled our thumbs in anticipation and eyed the evening's menu, 
