Every vegetarian, pescetarian and vegan will be used to being asked, in tones ranging from baffled curiosity to indignant condescension, why it is that they choose to so dramatically limit their diet, cutting out what is, for many, the core of any true meal. Living in America, where vegetarianism is still relatively uncommon (or at least seems to be) this question comes around even more often than back in England. On my wedding day I had to send back my dinner twice, first because there was some hot flesh (cow I think) on the plate, an honest mistake, and second because it seemed that the vegetarian option still included beef gravy. Finally I was served the meal sans easily discernible animal chunks and the waiting staff were very good about the whole thing. In such situations, particularly in countries like America, the vegetarian is often left with the feeling of having been unnecessarily picky. This feeling is even more uncomfortable when the meal in question has been prepared by a good and conscientious host. It is at these times in particular when I, as a fairly relaxed though not entirely guilt-free pescetarian am forced to wonder which is the greater offense, that to my principles or to my host. Most often somebody who I am with will point out for me that, for my own private reasons, I choose to reject the delicious and lovingly prepared meal before me and it is simply left to me to apologize, for the thousandth time, for my pickiness and munch contentedly at whatever alternative is available whilst eyeing with uncontrollable envy the plates of my fellow diners.
Why are we vegetarian? By now it's pretty clear that there are many, many good reasons to choose from and sometimes, if only out of a reluctance to repeat myself, I choose more or less at random from the options available:
There are the health benefits. These are almost always the most heavily contested by omnivorous antagonists. If I had a dollar for every time I had looked down to see a short, fat man or woman tell me that my diet has stunted my growth I would have at least twenty dollars.
There is the environmental impact. Here both sides tend to buckshot information half-remembered from articles or, more often, made up on the spot with little ground being won on either side.
There is emotional opposition towards the killing of animals. This is, despite being the least scientific and probably the most simple of any argument, the one which is able to win some ground for the vegetarian. Apart from a few meat eaters who feel it is either their god-given or evolutionary right to consume all lesser mortals most are forced to admit that deep down they do feel bad for the animals, but are able to put this emotion aside at the first whiff of bacon. I consider this but a small victory.
There are probably plenty more good reasons for not eating meat, but I'm not going to list them here, or at your dinner table because, in honesty, I can't really lay claim to any of them. Though I myself have not been victim of the universally feared stunting of growth which apparently afflicts any who eschew the hen or swine, I am told that many vegetarians do suffer from a lack of protein that is difficult and expensive to make up and if my vegetarianism is to be thanked for my six foot four of rippling sinew it is probably only because, though I search and search, its hard to find tasty fried vegetarian snacks at three in the morning.
The environmental approach is an attractive one, but those who know my habits at all would not be fooled by my claiming to make such an apparently tremendous change of lifestyle because of a deep passion for the preservation of Earth's dwindling resources. No, that wouldn't fly.
The inherent cruelty of the meat industry is an easy one, if you talk passionately and graphically enough about the mass destruction of anything from germ cultures to human cultures you can generally provoke a reaction, but the fact is that every meat eater is aware, despite the efforts of meat retailers, that what they eat was once an animal-shaped living thing until it was decapitated and had its gizzards torn out by blood-stained machines and... (ack, it is tempting). People who eat meat have already made that decision, that their meal is 100% more important than the life it once was and making people feel guilty about their food, or describing its grossness, is not kind or helpful (especially while they are eating it, even more so if they have prepared some for you).
No, the reason I continually choose not to eat meat isn't as good as any of these. It hasn't any real data behind it, nor is it easy to explain. Indeed, until stumbling across a certain passage in Walden yesterday I had never really considered that my stance was anything more than a feeling of creepiness dressed up as an intellectual position. It begins with a dinner party.
Hospitality is an almost magical thing. It is at once the core of civilization and the most basic form of charity. It is not surprising that many of the great philosophers of the twentieth century after dealing with the ins and outs of the sign or discourse-power end their lives in contemplation of this most human of tendencies. Hospitality is a universal practice and the gathering about a meal is probably the central idea behind it. It's an ancient sort of feeling, to be a guest at a meal, and there is the comfortable knowledge that people have been doing similar for as long as there has been society. It is this ancientness which, particularly male, meat eaters often grab a hold of and I often feel quite sadly that I have disrupted a chain of life and death which has stretched back for thousands of years when I settle for potatoes and greens. Its a feeling of inauthenticity akin to the youtube video of a roaring fire which my friends and I would often play as the backdrop to our "dinner parties", though without the funny side. Its during such times that I come closest to abandoning my vegetarianism and often persuade a reluctant diner to part with a morsel of gammon which, despite its wonderful taste, always leaves me with a feeling of shame beyond that of an abandonment of principles. This post is, I guess, about that shame.
I had often, particularly in my teens, professed with an arrogance only slightly tempered with good humor that the reason I do not eat meat is that, basically, I consider myself too highly evolved to do so. Ack, I know. But wait, what does this mean? Henry David Thoreau, who will be accompanying us on this exploration, describes a gradually growing distaste for meat(and wine and cheese and just about everything else, but we'll stick to meat for the moment) in terms of a caterpillar who, whilst in his larval state munches down a huge amount of raw, ragged plant matter but upon his ascension to the butterfly community eats only the refined sugars produced by the flower itself. "The gross feeder" says Thoreau "is a man in the larval state; and there are whole nations in that condition... whose vast abdomens betray them". Sound at all familiar? Here we have two teleologies at work, the single creature who through its life gradually goes off meat and the species who, through a mastery of the natural world arrives at a state where it can eat any animal yet chooses not to, sometimes. Thoreau, unlike my teenage self, is happy to admit that the greater part of this growing discomfort lies in a disgust at the uncleanliness of animal products and their waste. A bad vibe. Lets look at it.
(pseudo)-Scientifically we can say that meat waste produces a worse odor, attracts more maggoty things and is generally going to be more poisonous for you than its equivalent quantity of vegetable waste. Many plants have parts which shouldn't be eaten (though very few come with sacks of warm excrement which have to be removed before consumption.)
Clearly the first reaction to this is that in the day to day almost nobody in the UK or America actually has to get involved at the business end of meat production. Here we can turn again to Thoreau: "most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner... as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and... are not true men and women." Now, the terminology needs a little push here and there, though there may be, and perhaps should be, shame involved in the preparation of certain foods, I think grossness will here suffice. All of the trauma and grossness and most of the danger of meat production (vegetable food production too, but there is unquestionably less of this) takes place at a great distance from the table. What does this mean for the happy beef guzzler (or even the less happy beef) at my hypothetical dinner party? Well, quite a lot actually. I claimed that the sad feeling of rejecting good meat stems from a sense of disruption to timeless rites; the ugly introduction of the simulation. However, considering the above it becomes clear that in fact this disruption has already occurred. Severed from the dynamic of hunter and hunted, the meat on the table is shown to be itself a stand-in for the very primeval event which it represents.
This has its most profound implications for the tedious association of masculinity with meat- yes, for thousands and thousands of years it has usually been men who go out and spear and clean and eat animals (still, as we all know today, furnishing normally less than 20% of the food intake of any given society). Meat is the reward for a difficult, dangerous and tiring pursuit and the prize of a brutal battle of life and death. For most of human history when served meat we are also served a violent and tangible symbol for what has gone into its harvesting and thus the skill, and emotional toughness, of its hunter. Here the gap between the symbol and what is symbolized is almost zero, we swallow the meaning with the blood and the fat. In light of this, the achievement of merely eating a steak, even a very large steak which, perhaps, comes with a tee-shirt for he who can eat it in one sitting, seems frail and embarrassing. Most of the time today, at least in my experience, the cook lays no such claims to danger and strength and when the steak acts as symbol it does so subtly, writing its message in greasy smells in your nose and throat. Yet still any ancientness, any "authenticity" is void- bereft of any tangible relationship to nature it forfeits its ability to signify for society.
I am often reminded by omnivorous friends of the presence of canine teeth in my mouth, as though the presence on the body of a tool necessitates its use. I also am equipped with the remainder of a tail, and appendix and luscious armpit hair with which to maximize my musk, yet I do perfectly well without making use of any of these and even, in the case of the latter, take steps to mitigate its uncontrollable presence with soap and suchlike. There was certainly a time when all of these tools came in very handy, but that time has passed. Are we less human for it? Are we less animal? Perhaps, but we manage not to trouble ourselves unduly about their redundant presence and I feel that we can be equally content to let our canines tackle mushrooms and potatoes in peace. Not too long ago to be a vegetarian in England would, almost certainly, have meant to be malnourished and probably dead. A little longer ago in some long forgotten jungle to walk on two legs and do without a tail would have caused similar problems, not to mention the increased likelihood of becoming a meal oneself. Today, often, we feel ashamed when we stink. We would feel ashamed to defecate on the floor as we walked (despite being amply outfitted for the pursuit). These are animal behaviors which we no longer need and, further, have proven to be detrimental to our health, the former a sign of dirtiness and the presence of germs, the latter attracting flies and disease. Thoreau writes, "I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes [eek...] have left off eating one another when they came in contact with the more civilized". This is troubling for a number of reasons which I am sure need no explanation, but perhaps we can humor Thoreau and take his comment metaphorically. We continue animalistic practices (like those listed above) for as long as they are useful and necessary, when a more "civilized" (here meaning, more or less, less messy and violent) option comes along we discard them. Part of becoming human is, perhaps, finding shame in the perpetuation of redundant and dangerous behaviors.
So here is the other part of the shame. In the idealized meal the brutality of the practice of eating meat is justified twofold, first by the above mentioned connection to a meaningful history of similar mealtimes and secondly according to an acknowledgment of the necessity of the practice. When the first is shown to be no more authentic than its vegetarian alternative and the latter, basically, outdated there is the shame, that of shitting on the floor, and most obviously of posturing over an unnecessary show of violence. It puts me in mind of the scene from Six Feet Under in which Nate, roaring and growling, clubs a snake to death, thinking that he is protecting his family. When the snake is revealed to be a harmless one and it is clear that a little care could have stood in for extreme violence he is humiliated (though doesn't accept it)- the essential (both innate and totally necessary) animal within him has poked its head out in the wrong place. Another example might be the common naming of weapons of war after things like vipers and tigers. It is humiliating because in reaching into the past (the natural world) for its justification it crosses a void of non-signification, even nonsense, which like an X-ray which reveals the feeble and easily broken supports within the apparently sturdy exterior.
Like I say, if you know your data and your figures and you're willing to go head to head with an agriculture student, go for it and good luck. For my part, I'm pretty sure that this feeling, which keeps me from puffing up my chest in front of women, marking my territory with piss and entering into mortal combat with the cat will keep me quite safely on the vegetarian wagon. Until someone serves smoked salmon or mussels and you can watch my beak and claws grow.
Note: Yes, everything I've said about meat applies to fish and seafood too and yes, like Thoreau, I feel a shame in eating these too. I'm working on it.
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