Читать книгу The Vegetarian's Guide to Eating Meat - Marissa Landrigan - Страница 6

Chapter Three

Meet Your Meat

BY THE TIME I turned eighteen, I was ready to go, ready for something bigger than Merrimack. Although I’d never lived anywhere else, the thought of staying in New Hampshire for college never appealed to me: I was hungry for something new, and I found that at Ithaca College.

Ithaca is a vibrant place, an idyllic campus in New York’s Finger Lakes region, four hours removed from the bustle of Manhattan, set atop a hill overlooking a swirling city of brilliant academics, hungry young entrepreneurs, and Burning Man enthusiasts. Within fifteen minutes, I could walk across campus: pristine green quads full of barefoot young men playing Hacky Sack and strumming Dave Matthews songs on their guitars. Originally founded as a music conservatory and now with a strong reputation in journalism, the college had a population that was both intelligent and engaged: theater majors alongside communications majors with minors in business or political science.

But it was the city below that I loved: the pedestrians-only Commons full of Thai restaurants, divey sports bars, and head shops; the Mexican restaurant painted turquoise and orange; Moosewood Restaurant, tucked in a basement-level spot inside a mall, its window glowing yellow onto the street outside. Walking along the Commons, I could forget the freezing sting of the Finger Lakes wind. This was a place of energy, a place I felt a young girl could come alive. Sometimes, I just drove around the city, getting lost on purpose on the winding side streets, finding my way up the other hill to Cornell’s college town neighborhood, to a stone tower I’d never seen before, or a massive waterfall. Ithaca was a city of constant surprises: a church flying a gay pride flag, a house painted purple.

By the beginning of my second year at Ithaca, I’d embraced how different I’d become from my family, forced the wedge further, and had fully adopted the part of the neophyte radical. Having just recently been dumped by the first boy I fell in love with, I’d chopped my hair off and pierced my lip, and I was skipping class fairly regularly to spend as much time as possible with my two closest friends, Caity and Meghan. They were endlessly fascinating. Caity: a film and photography major who’d grown up in a brownstone in Yonkers, with porcelain skin and a strong Greek nose, her nearly black hair cropped short and straight around her stunning face. Meghan: a sociology major fixated on Mexican culture, quickly developing her now-fluent Spanish, with curly hair and always a soft, blissful smile while dancing. Both introduced me to exciting new music: the punk-pop of Saves the Day, the hard thrashing of Converge, the upbeat salsa of Celia Cruz.

I was a young activist who hadn’t quite figured out yet what that meant, but I knew I had a big heart that seemed to be splitting with all the suffering I was learning existed in the world. I wanted to work with orphans rescued from sex slavery in Cambodia, and I wanted to write plays protesting the unfair labor practices of Walmart. I volunteered at the exhibit when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was on display. I ran for student government and helped draft a resolution opposing the Iraq War, made anti-war mix CDs for the rallies we held, and attended die-ins.

This is the young woman I was when, in the first semester of my second year, Professor Bob screened PETA’s Meet Your Meat film for a class on the rhetoric of persuasive arguments. I sat in a college classroom while images I’d never seen, images I hadn’t had the capacity to imagine, flickered, slightly grainy and over-pixelated, on the wall in front of me.

Giant metal chutes spat a flurry of white into a caged truck, like laundry, like garbage dumped from the window of an upper-level apartment. The sounds were deafening, a thousand birds tweeting, layered on top and on top of each other, the random bangs of a swinging metal door, the flutter of a thousand pairs of wings.

A suspended black rubber belt orbited a silver tank slowly, white masses dangling, swinging gently. At first, the rotating conveyor belt looked like it was at any other factory. An assembly line.

But then, I realized they were bodies. The white hanging masses. They were chickens, stunned into unconsciousness; they were my frozen, prepackaged, breaded chicken nuggets. And the swinging metal arm that gently brushed up against each body as it passed, so slowly, was actually slitting their throats.

A dancing circle of swinging, dead chickens, wings splayed, spun under its own weight, with gravity, like ten feather dusters gathered at the handle. Over a two-ton vat of purple blood, they hung, swaying in a postmortem ballet.

I watched the images, fading in and out, seeing only flashes: A disembodied hand, from the wrist up, gripped a struggling hen and lifted her to a blue metal gate, a miniature guillotine. A little trap door wrapped itself around the hen’s beak, a small movement, like a long slow pinch. It didn’t look painful. It didn’t look like anything. But the hen tensed, beady black eyes pinched shut, wings flapping frantically, useless yellow-clawed feet scratching at the empty air. When the hen emerged, her once-white beak was pink and bent, half the size and curved downward, drooping towards her chin.

A twitching cow, pushed with a forklift.

A piglet’s skull bashed against the concrete floor.

When Professor Bob flipped on the lights at the end of the film, he asked us to comment on the rhetorical strategies at play in the video. I blinked in the harsh light, chewed my lower lip, listened silently.

Professor Bob, my professor and a new mentor, was a vegan, skinny and funny, with a long gaunt face. His typical teaching outfit was khakis and a plaid button-down shirt, and he was perpetually a day behind on shaving, like a slightly polished lumberjack. He’d spent a year digging trenches with the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, before quitting to return home and marry his wife. They were both volunteers at the local animal shelter, and in addition to full-time teaching jobs, they taught creative writing workshops at a nearby penitentiary. He was a nerd and a smart one, making Star Wars reference alongside Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, and I thought he and his wife were exactly the kind of adults I hoped to become in college: worldly and opinionated, rife with stories, and able to hold up their end of a political debate at a cocktail party.

In his classroom, I saw something for the first time, and so did many of my classmates. When I tuned back in to the conversation, they were scrambling to come to terms with the violence of the film, to justify their diets, their family farms, their love of bacon.

It’s not like that everywhere.

and

My family raises dairy cows.

and

Can they even feel pain?

and

Whatever, steak is good.

and

Protein is good for you.

and

So we should just set the animals free?

and

What about hunting?

and

What about medical testing? That’s necessary.

and

What, so we should just all become vegetarian?

Since starting college, I’d been working hard to expand my perspectives: I had recently declared a minor in sociology, and I took classes like Sex and Gender in the Third World, seminars on media and politics. I was a member of the Young Democratic Socialists, the environmental club, the feminist organization, born shiny and new into radical idealism.

But I was starting to come to the uncomfortable realization that I’d never spent any significant amount of time thinking about the fact that food grew somewhere. Food, as far as I was concerned, came from the grocery store. I was used to fluorescent-lit aisles and shrink-wrapped meat, miles of shelves stocked with dozens of brands of chips, and cheese sliced off a massive block by a woman wearing a hairnet.

I thought back to a week in February, when I was seven or eight, that my family spent on a farm in Vermont, the childhood home of my mother’s best friend, which was still in operation and run by her parents, Red and Judy. Every morning there, I rose early, peeling back the handmade quilt on the twin-sized bed in the attic, slipping my tiny cold feet into heavy brown boots, and clomping down the stairs, shivering and grinning, to help with chores.

Although at my own house we had a big backyard, thick with rows of spindly pine trees, I was a suburban girl. Our block had fenced-in pools and power lines and a school bus stop in my front yard and a sign that read Slow Children (no comma). We played outside often, building tree forts and raking pine needles into houses, and I may have worn red flannel button-downs, but I was not a farm girl. My week on the farm was a vacation from suburbia, at a magical place where a little girl could carry metal buckets heavy with sap through the snow into the warm sugaring shack to make maple syrup, where she could throw bread to geese that roamed the front yard, where she could pat the warm haunch of a cow on her way to the river.

One morning that week, Judy asked me to help her gather eggs for breakfast. We crunched outside over shorn, frosted grass into a hay-stuffed laying barn, the early-morning geese caws outside muffled by the padded plywood walls. The barn felt warm, insulated, as if I could fall down anywhere and not get hurt, just bounce softly, and giggle. The hens slept hunkered down in laying boxes, feathers puffed, invisible beaks tucked beneath one wing. I watched them inhale and exhale, quivering with slight snores. Judy called them her “little mamas.”

“Mama,” I whispered into the morning air, the gray smoke of the word drifting slowly away from me in the cold.

Judy handed me a woven wooden basket with a metal handle. “Go ahead,” she said.

When I imagine myself in that moment, I laugh a little at the pathetic look on my suburban face, small blonde eyebrows gathered in confusion, static-charged bangs floating over my thick glasses. I had no idea how to gather eggs. Judy showed me, smiling, using the back of her left hand to lift the sleeping hen and her right to reach beneath the body, pulling out a warm, brown-flecked egg. I trembled when I reached beneath my first hen, terrified of the horror I was sure would befall me if I woke the mama hen. But then I held a perfect, smooth egg in my hand and felt the impossible heat emanating from within. We went row by row, filling two buckets with the eggs from just one wall of the laying barn. When I crossed to the other side, Judy shook her head and whispered a gentle no.

“No,” she said, “those mamas are hatching.”

I only spent a handful of days at the farm as a kid. I barely knew Judy before that day, and I haven’t seen her in decades. But when I conjure this memory, I feel an immense gratitude towards her, a childlike sense of protected warmth. Because she let me in on a secret. In that private moment we shared in the laying barn, she pulled back the curtain and took my hand and showed me how something sacred happened.

Red and Judy’s farm, it took me fifteen more years to learn, was not what a farm really looks like anymore. Our food was as suburban as my neighborhood, and the result was that I was twenty years old and in college before I saw the kind of farm that raised the meat I ate five nights a week.

IN PROFESSOR BOB’S classroom, one of my classmates raised his hand to speak. He, a skinny vegetarian, was the editor for Buzzsaw Haircut, the independent campus magazine for which I occasionally wrote angry op-eds about electoral politics and the media’s culture of violence, so when he spoke, I listened. And he said that he really respected people who had the courage to hunt and kill their own meat. That the real problem was how the rest of us got our meat, and how we were reacting to the video.

“I think,” he said, “if you turn away from the thought of the death in order to eat meat, you’re just letting someone else do the dirty work for you.”

And I started to remember things.

I remembered how I hated working at a seafood restaurant in high school, hated the screaming sounds the lobsters made when thrown alive into the pots of boiling water, which all the bearded cooks in the dirty kitchen told me was not, in fact, a scream of pain, but still, I remembered how it scratched its way down my spine and under my skin like fingernails bent backwards.

And I remembered that on my first and only fishing trip, I refused to use bait because I didn’t want to kill the worm by stabbing it onto the metal hook, so I caught only a floating piece of cardboard. I remembered the bloody gash through the gill of the fish my friend caught, from where he yanked the hook from its mouth.

But mostly what I thought of, when I sat in Professor Bob’s classroom, mulling over the reality of factory farming I had just witnessed, was something my father said once, on a family vacation to London. The five of us sat around a white-clothed table, under silver, dim candlelight flickering in the dark wood-paneled steakhouse in Battersea Park. I pointed, shaking my head, up at the mounted head of a steer on a wooden plaque like a hunting trophy near the room’s crown molding.

“Why,” I asked my father, “would anyone want to think about the cow while they’re trying to enjoy a nice filet mignon?”

“Well,” my father replied, “that’s what it is.”

THAT’S WHAT IT IS, I thought, when I choked on the gruesome images from the PETA movie. When I tried to reconcile my celebratory birthday chicken potpies with the heavy grinding sound of a wood chipper slowed by fifteen thousand squirming bodies tossed in for disposal as mulch, the bodies of chickens too sick for slaughter, too sick to ever be eaten.

The tough rubber of those words in my mind, like ripping the meat off a chicken wing with my teeth, like chewing through it.

It would be another seven years before I ate meat again.

When I was twenty, I watched a video and decided to become a vegetarian. I couldn’t stomach what I’d seen. I couldn’t be a part of it. Looking back, I see it as an impulse born of youth and indignation, a snap judgment, but I was starting to understand the word “privilege.” I was discovering an enormous amount of suffering that happened behind closed doors, in the name of my convenience—cheap clothes and massive landfills and supermarket steaks. This, I realized, was what’s been missing from my family’s communal approach to food—an acknowledgment of how our choices had an impact beyond our home. And I didn’t know what else to do but say no.

I called my mother and told her Thanksgiving had better be good, because it would be my last meal eating meat.

She said, “I am going to have to learn to cook all over again.”

JUST A FEW months later, I was drinking cheap beer from cans with Meghan and Caity outside a house beaten by age and heavy partying. We’d met the four men who lived there just a month or so before, at a bar where their band was playing, when we went back to their place and stayed up all night, smoking cigarettes and playing Trivial Pursuit. Now, it was late March, in the middle of a warm streak. The night smelled like the air would burst into bloom. We were punchy in the way people who live through long dark winters get at the first hints of warmth. Aran, the smallest of the boys, short and absolutely covered in tattoos, had just stolen a motorized shopping cart from the grocery store down the street and ridden it the entire two miles back to his house, at about half a mile an hour. He had a lit time bomb inked onto his forearm, the red-orange flame looking as if it burned his skin. He sat in the open windowsill, feet dangling into the night, and watched us.

Meghan was supposed to be giving me a trim with the clippers we’d borrowed from the boys. Like many twenty-year-olds who are angry at the world and don’t know where to put it, I had developed an intense love of punk, hardcore, and metal music, and their fuck-you stylings. I’d always kept my hair long, but by the end of my freshman year, my roommate had chopped it off for me—with the scissors from her desk—into a short pixie. Now, this DIY do was getting too long in the back. Some eighties basement-club punk rock was blaring through the open window, and I was sitting on a concrete step with a towel draped around my shoulders when Meghan said, “Hey, do you mind if I try something?”

I bit my lip and looked back over my shoulder at her. “Go for it.”

Aran jumped up and scrambled into the house through the window. “Hang on,” he shouted over the music and into the night, into our looming summer. “Let me get a before picture!”

The hum of the clippers against my scalp felt good, and I leaned into it, and a few minutes later, all that remained was a thin layer of peach fuzz and bangs. Alone in the dirty bathroom, I leaned towards the skim of the mirror and examined myself: mostly-shaved head, two lip piercings, vegetarian—me. I didn’t know yet how I would become the agent of change I so desperately wanted to be, but now I looked the part.

THE NEXT FEW years were a blur of dingy apartments and dingy dorm rooms, gray carpet and any number of obscurely acquired sagging and spotted couches, listening to boys strum acoustic guitars, watching tattooed crowds thrash to loud bands I’d never heard of but moved me to an anger I’d somehow always felt, beginning to think the word “revolution” on a regular basis, new piercings and sociology class discussions, and binges on Smirnoff Ice.

It was in a dorm room the fall after I shaved my head, on a night with warm cheap beer and indie folk music coming from the speakers, showing off my first tattoo—an ampersand between my breasts, to keep it a secret from my parents—that I met the guy who would one day leave me for the West.

He was tall and thin, with glasses with thick brown rims and shaggy ski-bum hair. I’d seen him for months around campus: pilled elbow-patch sweaters from the Salvation Army and a vintage Minolta always around his neck. He seemed to be the perfect blend of sexy and artsy and nerdy when I first laid eyes on him, sitting alone in the dining hall, wearing the hoodie of one of my favorite obscure indie bands, long fingers wrapped around a book. I had a distant lusty crush on him for months before I discovered he—Kevin—shared a dorm room with my friend Matt. The first night we met, as we talked shyly into our cans of Milwaukee’s Best, my hopes of starting something up with him flared and then faded, as he told me he planned to leave Ithaca soon, to transfer by the end of the semester to a college in Montana.

Montana might as well have been Mongolia to me. I had never been to Montana, had practically never heard of Montana, so distant and strange its frontier name seemed compared with the quietly padded forests of my northeastern home.

“What’s in Montana?” I asked him, thinking his explanation would be practical—he had friends or family there, they offered a major in a program he really wanted to study.

Instead, his face lit up with a smile wide enough to shrug his glasses up on his cheeks, eyes grown distant with fantasy. “Really big mountains,” he replied.

I was in love.

And soon, Kevin and I decided we were young enough for a three-month, no-strings-attached, leaving-on-a-jet-plane fling. He had stopped eating red meat years earlier, and within the first month of our dating, he too was a vegetarian. We were all becoming vegetarians then, in our early twenties, in Ithaca and beyond. My high school friends off on their own campuses in New Hampshire and Connecticut and Maine were stumbling across PETA brochures and discovering Thai food and abandoning Tater Tot casserole. We did it just to see if we could, just to see what else would change in our worlds when we discarded our parents’ paradigms about what food is, why we ate it, and how it made us feel.

On one winter break at home, Caity told her mother she was considering becoming vegetarian too. Her mother, a short-haired doctor specializing in HIV/AIDS research, who had raised her three daughters in a house where nudity was common, surrounded by an alliance of gay and lesbian artists and poets, sent Caity back to school with her copy of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. We flipped hungrily through the book, its dog-eared pages unfolding a story we were shocked and appalled to learn. No one had ever told us how wasteful the industrial meat system was, how much land was eaten up by corn and soy to feed cattle whose digestive systems were never meant to eat anything but grass, or how much more tofu could be produced on the same amount of land. In a world we were just beginning to see was so increasingly fueled by greed, in a world of oil and revenge and excess, we couldn’t imagine being part of a system that allowed so much hunger. I remember us so clearly, cross-legged on her dorm room bed, reading passages back and forth to each other, while the last season of Friends played on the television behind us. I’m not sure we realized the book was written in 1971.

I BEGAN MY foray into vegetarianism in the Ithaca College dining halls, a shining palace where dietary preferences were welcomed and celebrated. Silver chafing dishes warmed kosher entrées, and little laminated cards labeled vegetarian options; the salad bar always had marinated tofu along with tuna and chicken salads. What I didn’t know at the time was that the dining halls on my campus were operated by Sodexo, the food services industry giant notorious for its low minimum wage and private prison contracts with the U.S. military.¹ All I saw was the vegan cooking station—its own booth with a separate cooking surface and a chef whose hands were not contaminated with the meat of other dishes.

The vegan station served veggie burgers made with brown rice and black beans. I imagined them soft in someone’s hands, rolled around and flattened, the way Nona’s raw meatballs felt in my palm before they were baked. A twentysomething Ithaca native with flowers tattooed on the backs of his plastic-gloved hands tossed burgers onto a slatted grill, then wrapped them in red-and-white checked paper and placed them in a cardboard container, next to a side of the coveted sweet potato fries. We loved the Sodexo sweet potato fries, the perfect layer of corn-syrup crispy on the outside, a delicate crust that broke open into the soft, tanning-salon orange flesh of the fry, always just this side of too hot, crumbling and sweet.

Looking back, I suppose I felt I had already done the difficult part: I had made the decision. By giving up meat, I had declared my membership in this new group of budding revolutionaries. We sat around the generic beige tables in our private-school dining hall, us white, upper-middle-class kids with our shaved heads, and discussed serious things, discussed free trade and facial piercings, our naïve fingers shoving handfuls of greasy sweet potato fries into our mouths. We were safe in our convictions. We were happy to let someone else do the cooking.

I HAVE A photograph of myself from around this time, unwashed hair in pigtails glinting red under a late-October sun. I am squinting into the camera, the Washington Monument in the background. Two fingers of my left hand form a V, and in my right hand I hold a poster mounted on a wooden stick, the grayed image of a young girl’s body, half-buried in stony rubble, stark white block letters reading, No Blood for Oil. And I am smiling.

This was the fall of 2002, my sophomore year, about a month after I stopped eating meat, and my friends and I had driven eight hours through the night from Ithaca to attend a protest in Washington, D.C. When I see the shiny-faced radical optimist in the photograph, I can’t help but smile along with her. I feel a surge of pride for the unabashed hope in her expression; I remember the churning in her stomach, the sense of purpose. But I can’t look at the beaming smile on her face without also remembering that six months later, despite our protests, President Bush authorized the invasion of Iraq, a war we are still fighting. I became a vegetarian in the swirl of this same controversy, born of the same belief in the power of protest. In the time before the war, decidedly, vocally, against.

But my face in the photograph is not angry, not defiant—it is joyful. I celebrated my boycotts, treasured them as a part of this new, radical identity I was crafting for myself, an identity that I hoped would take me away from the suburban convenience, the enclave of desensitization. The girl in the photograph, who smiled out for peace even as she held the image of a dead body in her hand, looked in only one direction. Outward, forward, away.

IN PREPARATION FOR Christmas dinner later that year, my father and I performed our usual non-cooking-related kitchen duties: inserting the double leaf into the cherrywood table, carefully draping the red-and-green plaid tablecloth over it, laying the real silver flatware alongside the goose-patterned china. We folded the napkins and lined a basket with paper towels for the rolls. Everyone clattered into the kitchen as the last of the food made its way from counter to table. My grandfather, right elbow hiked up over his shoulder, finished carving the roast beef and laid the slices delicately on a large crystal platter. Nana’s small knotted fingers gingerly plucked warm Pillsbury crescent rolls from baking sheet to basket. My mother surveyed the scene: she grabbed a spoon for the gravy boat, ladled green beans into the flowered vegetable dish, pointed at my sisters to pour water, wine. Then we sat, the seven of us, around the table in our traditional Christmas seating arrangement, held hands, and bowed our heads to give thanks. All of this, just the same as every year.

But as we began passing full serving platters around the table, or serving each other heaps of mashed potatoes or dripping roast beef, tossing rolls to our neighbors, licking drops of gravy from our fingertips, differences emerged. Dad preferred the ends of the roast, blackened to a crisp on the outside; gray, tough meat on the inside. Caitlin made a little divot in her mashed potatoes and then filled it, a small gravy volcano spilling over the edges. Nana took just two mouthfuls of everything, nothing more, and wouldn’t finish even that. Gampi loved the fat and gristle of the roast, keeping it in the corner of his mouth and gnawing long after the meal was done. And my plate that year held two crescent rolls, several forkfuls of green beans, and an extra-large serving of mashed potatoes. No meat, no gravy, not this time.

This was my first Christmas as a vegetarian, the first ceremonial family meal since I’d stopped eating meat, and I was not at all prepared for the alienation I felt sitting at that table, looking around at the others’ plates, passing meat along, smiling awkwardly at my own sisters as if apologetic. I finished eating before everyone else for the first time in my life and saw then how unlike the rest of my family I had become.

My whole life, my family had believed that the dinner table was a place you came together, that eating was a crucial, collective activity. But when I sat, pierced and protesting, at my family’s Christmas dinner table that year, I remembered the little girl building a fort of books to shield herself from the kitchen noise, the nights with pizza and my father. When I imagined myself through their eyes, a newborn radical fresh home from her hippie college, bearing strange new habits and restrictions, I didn’t think they understood anything I did anymore. And I took that as a challenge. Tension in my shoulders, I settled into the role of outsider. Perhaps, I thought, this was inevitable, that the redheaded eldest daughter would one day splinter apart from her Italian family heritage.

Food had been the bedrock of my family, the solid foundation onto which all of our connection was built, the means of expression, the reason. When I discovered the bloody, complex truth behind our family meals, the battery cages and the electric stunners. I saw cracks in what I thought had been a solid foundation. I decided to build my own.