That 'meat' you're eating was once an animal

I was mulling over names for this blog, all of them variations using the word "meat." A couple of years ago, I wrote something called Meat: A Memoir, so it had to be "meatmatters.com" (taken), "meatyoueat.com" (redundant, and too easily confused with a porn site), or "themeatquestion.com." I'd settled on the latter but decided to sleep on it.

I woke up this morning realizing that I'd taken the animals out of the equation. What I mean is, once an animal becomes "meat," it's edible. Call it the semantics of cognitive dissonance. In order to make Lulubelle the cow mentally digestible, she must become meat.

So, I'm bringing back the animal in question, the cow or pig or chicken or wildlife that lived and breathed before making it to our dinner tables. Yes, that's right. I said OUR. I'm no righteous vegetarian who would begrudge you your free-range chicken breast. I just ate one the other day.

No, I'm as full of contradictions as the average urbanite, guzzling soy milk one minute and woofing down a perfectly good piece of pork the next. I was a vegetarian for 13 years and a vegan for many of those -- until food allergies drove me to meat-eating. I've written a book for a 100-year-old dairy farm, a family farm that nonetheless kept its chickens in cages, because they believed that was the humane thing to do. I edited the West Coast's oldest fishing publication, where I learned that the best way to bleed a salmon is with the casing of a plastic Bic pen. I've even advised Web-savvy travelers on how to hunt and field-dress wild game animals in Alaska.

Yet I still can't drink cow's milk unless it's non-fat and hiding in a latte. I prefer tofu to tartare; my fridge is stocked with vegetables; there are three fruit bowls in the house. The best thing I've tasted in the last month was a piece of raw scallop sushi, but my main source of protein is beans and nuts.

I think about the morals of meat all the time, at every meal, in fact. I'm not really a vegetarian anymore, and some part of me is appalled at my cavalier ingestion of animals. Ironically, living in liberal Seattle makes it hard for me to retain a strict vegetarian diet because there's so much guilt-free meat to be had here, meat from organic grass-fed, free-range animals who led a humane existence and were brought to a humane end. It was easier in the Midwest, when the only meat to eat was from factory farms.

So I'm sitting on the fence, peering down into both sides of the feed lot. I suppose I should make up my mind about this, decide once and for all whether to be a vegetarian and argue for it -- or not. I'm sure there are others of you out there, former or wanna-be vegetarians, ovo-lacto and vegan alike. Maybe you're like me, maybe you went veg in the early 90s (or earlier, or later) and now aren't sure what you are. It's probably one of the greatest questions of the modern age: Should we eat animals?

I can't promise I'll stumble upon any definitive answers, but it's worth a try. Let's go.

Comments

[Lisa Albers]

Why "Lulubelle" for hypothetical name for a cow, I wonder? Not Bessie?