Strange things can happen to you while you blog. You might even change your mind.
Months ago I described my vegetarian desires that I had given up for love. Whenever Ted travelled, I would make meatless dishes and imagine what life could be like without butcher bills. I wasn’t that excited about my marriage compromise to be a carnivore and hoped somehow I could turn Ted onto tofu.
But now, as I’ve posted recent pieces describing carpaccio appetizer and Burger King vocabulary, I am becoming more comfortable with my carnivorous practices. I’ll even confess I have cravings. Hey, I eat meat! It’s the way we live. It fits our family.
Living without meat is more than just tofu (we rarely eat it and when we do it, it sure isn’t that wobbly white stuff you see in the dairy case).
We don’t eat meat for a variety of reasons, some related to health, some economic (not whether we can afford meat but if the planet can afford it), some ethical.
I grew up eating all kinds of animal parts, meats and organs, and while it may not have done me any harm, it’s a different world today. The way animals are raised (the fact that we pay other people to raise animals for slaughter, something we wouldn’t or couldn’t do ourselves) is part of it: the antibiotic feeds, the conditions of feedlots — veal pens, anyone? — are all things we don’t want to subsidize just to satisfy a craving.
Those issues touch on health and ethics concerns. The economics are another issue: what if 1.1 billion Chinese decided they needed a steak or burger everyday? What if 1 billion Indians gave up their traditional diets for our American — not Western: this is an American phenomenon, not European — diet? As it is in this country, much of the beef cattle are grazed on subsidized public lands with subsidized irrigation as well as fed subsidized corn and grains in the feedlots: the romance of “where the buffalo roam” is just that — a lot of idealized nonsense. So we — my household and others like us — are subsidizing the slaughterhouse industry, whether we like it or not. (This could be tied back to the old Red State/Blue State divide of late, where it was revealed that the rugged individualists of the Red States couldn’t live without the largesse contributed by the effete Blue States: I’m not going there, other than to point out the connection.)
I don’t want to moralize or lecture, especially another adult who is raising their own family in a conscious and thoughtful way, but to adopt a practice you don’t agree with out of love for another, even while that practice might be harming the ones you love and yourself, doesn’t make sense.