Friday, January 19, 2007

My Beef with Eating Meat

Though it’s a bit late for New Year’s resolutions, I’m thinking this maybe the year to quit meat altogether.  I’ve been more or less vegetarian by omission for years anyway:  my grad student budget ruled out shopping at the butcher’s and big slabs of meat don’t appeal.  But, once in a while, I’ll grab a burger and fries.  Still, if it’s seriously wrong to eat meat, then I shouldn’t eat meat ever: intermittent vice doesn’t quite add up to virtue.  What’s holding me back?

In part, my tastes bind me to a carnivorous family past.  The scent of frying bacon wafts me back to a kitchen with my dad on weekend breakfast duty.  His mother’s signature dish was steak and kidney pudding, robed in a steaming suet crust. When I left home, I bought myself the cookbook from which my mum taught herself fancy cooking: French cordon bleu style, with its reductions and glazes of meat juices.  I don’t cook that way, but my mouth still waters to read the recipes.

Then, too, shunning meat often means rejecting treats and hospitality offered.  In many cultures, to honour guests with the best in your household just means giving them meat, the scarcest food.  Being a good guest requires gracious acceptance of whatever is offered, showing trust in your host’s judgment of what is good.  To refuse what is given with a good heart can seem, well, rude:  You’re invited for Thanksgiving, but won’t share the turkey?

I also admit to idleness and greed.  When dining out and faced with a choice between the predictably dreary vegetarian options of pasta primavera or grilled portabella, or “succulent roasted chicken on a bed of garlic mashed potatoes smothered with a reduction of marsala wine and rosemary”... well, I’ll take the chicken, please.  Midwestern chefs do a better job with big hunks of flesh than they manage with roots, fruits and rhizomes.

So, what’s my beef with eating meat?  A recent UN report puts meat and dairy production among the biggest contributors to environmental problems from loss of biodiversity to global climate change; all those burping cows make a lot of methane.  Concentrated animal feedlots, such as that being discussed for St Joe County, produce huge lakes of manure: what does that do to local wells?  Along with all the human-centred worries about working conditions in slaughterhouses, Mad Cow disease, and so on, in the end, I have to face up to the question of what animals deserve.

Most people agree that it’s bad to cause avoidable suffering in the world, but somehow, it’s easy to stop caring when the critter that suffers isn’t one of us humans.  We may admit a few lucky animals into our hearts, fussing over Lassie the dog’s arthritis at the vet’s, yet feel no qualms for Bessie and a hundred other nameless cows as we reach for the ground beef in the supermarket.  But we can read the body’s language of suffering just as well in a pig or cow as in a human infant.

True, animals aren’t as smart as humans in many respects, but I’d never accept the idea that people with low IQs should be treated worse than smarty-pants, let alone served up for dinner.  True, Wilbur the pig has a simpler social and emotional life than my friends, but if he enjoys rootling in the barnyard, he’s got an interest in not being eaten.

So maybe my once-in-a while meat-eating is really about the limits of my mind and heart, not theirs?

Broadcast by Louise Collins on January 19, 2007
Food • Health • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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