Ten minutes after reading the chicken-killing/dull-hatchet scene in Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter, I was laying flat on my back in Mt. Sinai’s Vascular Center, my head tilted back on the pillow, chin to the ceiling, having my corotid arteries photographed by a tech who couldn’t have been more than 23. Her cell phone rang and she put her wand down and went to answer it.
“I don’t know–” she said, “how about pizza?”
I rolled my head over to the screen to try and make out something recognizable in that morass of gray and white viscera that was the inside of the outside of my neck. For all I know, they could have been trying to determine the sex of my unborn child.
A few seconds passed.
“Okay then. Fried chicken it is,” she said. “See you soon honey.”
Is this what it comes to when you’re a food writer? You wake up one morning, and it’s God’s little joke on you that no matter how many meat-free products you consume, no matter how many spritz cans filled with aerosol olive oil you use, no matter how many stick proof pans you own, no matter how many porkless piles of greens you eat, you’re sunk: your gene pool coupled with your line of work results in the need to live and eat vicariously, while the real you subsists on steamed vegetables and grains. So I laid there, another in a long line of cardiology patients at Mt. Sinai’s Vascular Center with my head on the medical chopping block, thinking about the sweetbreads that Gabrielle Hamilton serves at Prune, and the fried chicken that this child tech was going to be eating that night, and I imagined that I would just tow the low cholesterol, almost-vegetarian line, and never eat either again for the rest of my life. A tiny, pathetic tear rolled out of the corner of my eye, down the side of my face, and onto the pillow.
Back when I was young and angry, I used to be into dogma, but I stopped after someone with whom I was romantically aligned insisted I refrain from cooking a Christmas roast in the borrowed cottage of some vegetarian friends, lest its soul invade the pores of the house. The end came a few months later, when she insisted I use soy cheese in our vegetarian lasagna, and then accidentally left a mustard-stained, hot dog-perfumed Gray’s Papaya napkin in the pocket of her acid washed jeans when I was doing the laundry. Remember that scene in Chocolat where the repressive mayor was found rolling around in the window of the chocolate shop, the victim of his own frenzied, sensuality-deprived soul? Dogma really only works until human nature and desire kicks in, and then it’s all over. And at that hot dog-sniffing moment, it was, where I was concerned.
But still, it gnaws at me: I’ve written a lot about trying to be a vegetarian both for health as well as ethical reasons; I’m an animal lover. I was incensed (and cried like a baby) when Jon Katz sent his beloved “pet” steer, Elvis, off to slaughter just a few years after buying him from a farmer who didn’t have the heart to put him on The Truck. I also understand the meaning of eating lower on the food chain and why it’s so important from an environmental standpoint, and I know the kind of dreck that gets pumped into CAFO animals and the short, miserable lives they lead, and I know it doesn’t have to be that way.
But I also still love meat; I feel better, physically, if I eat a small amount of meat here and there, every once in a while. And then of course, there is the issue of my carotids, which appear to be so much healthier and happier if I really temper my meat intake. So I do, and just when my ratio of veg to meat is about 80:1 and I start to get all pompous about it to anyone who’ll listen, I think about Gabrielle Hamilton and her damned sweetbreads; or I read an old blog post about someone making spaghetti and meatballs and I turn into David Naughton in American Werewolf in London.
I’ve been pondering culinary dogma a lot these days; is it okay for me not to be dogmatic about, say, vegetarianism, but to be absolute and even extreme in my insistence that people eat real food, to feed it to their children, and to take the time to prepare it? Does being anti-dogma ever become dogmatic? I remember reading an article last year in Orion Magazine by one of my favorite writers, Bill McKibben, who says that he’d be an ass if he turned down meat that was offered to him as a guest of poor people in distant places; in Tony Bourdain’s brilliant Medium Raw, he says essentially the same thing, only with a lot more color. Were they being dogmatic in their implication that humanity trumps animal rights or the concerns of the average, vegetarian, middle aged person who is just trying to eat healthfully? (I honestly don’t know the answer to this, so please don’t flay me for asking the question.)
The more I see the extremes, the more likely I am to travel straight down the middle road, which is all about something that I think we lose sight of in the murkiness of dogma: eating good, real food, sometimes vegetarian.
And sometimes not.
I completely sympathise with your dillemma. I was vego for 10 years until I realised that I didn’t care about any other food ethics issues. In fact, I couldn’t stand the dogma that surrounded sutainable/slow food/veganism/organic food any more than I could millitant vegetarianism. I started to re-evaluate and realised it just wasn’t as important to me as I thought it was. Vegetarianism had become simply a habit.
Of course you can insist that people prepare and eat ‘real food’. But there’s no point preaching to them, you’ll just be the equivalent of the millitant vegetarian at the roast.
I’m sure being anti-dogma can be dogmatic. In fact, that’s probably me. When people start to espouse their passionately-held food beliefs, I just tune out.
Well, I wouldn’t say that I don’t believe in any other food ethics issues; I just don’t think it should be one or the other. And I am a nearly fanatical believer in issues of sustainability.
But but but….how are your carotids?
Good on one side and filled with my bubbe’s chopped liver on the other.
Well said. Finding the middle ground is not easy in a world where pushing and shoving seems to be the norm.
I think the middle ground can actually bring about more change than even well intentioned dogma because it’s more realistic and more accessible. Meatless Mondays has probably done more to encourage the comsumption of plant based foods than any radical vegetarian organization.
I agree, Devra. And that middle ground applies to issues beyond meat. I just wish it was a more popular place to stand in the political arena.
When did it become acceptable for people in doctor’s offices/hospitals to pick up for non-emergency concerns?? It happened to me too and I don’t think I took it as well as you. Aside from that matter, I’m a middle road proponent as well. It is the only road that feels right to me…after struggling with vegetarianism for years and then wanting / craving a bit of meat and how to justify that with concern with animals/environment.