How to Eat Meat
I come from a long line of fraudulent eaters. Late in college I began to identify as a vegan, not precisely dietarily but certainly politically. Two ballerinas upstairs had come under the influence of those mammalian snuff films used to influence the feeling into giving up being what you eat. Sometimes I’d like to be a dandelion, for sure—and some days, I admit, I’d like to be a cow.
My brother and I have a secret: we saw a bullfight in Seville on the Catholic feast day of the Corpus—we were ten minutes late and missed the explanation of the rules, I’m sure, and the rhetoric, so we took for granted that we had already been convinced of propriety of the ritual. One bull we watched win by refusing to fight. They led him out by introducing four belled and winking cows to the ring, which he followed away to live with forever in elysium, on sweet grass. I guess it’s the original way to worship, a little uncreative but certainly effective, to kill and eat.
My brother, a day later, got anus worms from having a five euro foot-long at a Subway by the Basilica. That morning I finally had to admit I was unable to walk, my feet were so mangled by the process of breaking in Birkenstocks, purchased especially for this trip. The bottoms of my feet are perfectly flat and uncommonly thin and the cork sole of the sandal was stained red after a week of openly bleeding on the cobblestone, in scorched plazas, on buses, in newstands, and on the stairwells of antique towers. Because the European foot is the product of sensible portion sizes, occasional famine, and a politesse that prizes the svelte, there are no size thirteen shoes below Austria. Ravenous, I hobbled out that evening with my feet wrapped in toilet paper to find something plain to eat which my brother could stomach. By the arena the restaurants were grilling outside the bull from that night’s fight, mostly symbolically for the mothers of the matadors to take home wrapped in thick brown paper. We ate this horrible, tough, stringy meat to settle what had so clearly upset our stomachs, and beyond.
As children, my brother and I were “bad eaters”—me for an extreme omnivorousness (off the floor, from stranger’s passed tables at restaurants) and a taste for the supreme assortment of junk that peaked during my culinary coming-of-age. Never before has sugar taken so many sublime forms in its crystalline perfection. My brother was a bad eater for the opposite reason: he was “picky.”
Due to spontaneous lectures by my health-pervert grandfather, my brother became a vegetarian between the ages of eleven and fourteen to the alarm of my parents and grandmother on the other side. Grandpa Syd was so addicted to health that he even gave up cigarettes when his doctor told him he would die otherwise. My grandmother had properly inherited and transmitted the Depression-era worship of protein that required six hot dogs as the food pyramid’s foundation. It was Jewish slaves who built that too, in America this time, getting whipped by the giddy culture of glut after the grueling diets of extreme weight loss in Europe’s camps and killing fields. She innovated for my brother’s nourishment a recipe of “meatless meatloaf” that he gorged on in those supposed-to-be salad years and was only revealed deep into his adulthood to have been named with the truth-value of a pun: the primary ingredient being ground turkey.
Some old men date young women. My father, 71, aspires to the cholesterol of a 25-year-old. My mother is capable of ordering a pork chop for the smell alone. Listening to them at a restaurant is to hear the received wisdom of a thousand dietary superstitions, pressured out of doctors and synthesized cautiously from decades of contradictory op-eds and health headlines. Their orders are so intricate with alternation (down to the molecular preparation of a cut of meat) that they have surely pioneered more dishes than many star chefs. Flaubert writes, in the Dictionary of Received of Ideas, “If we knew how our body is made, we wouldn’t dare move.” Isn’t this how the generations go? Our parents now picky eaters and my brother and I the good ones?
The horrible truth is this: all living things are good to eat. Typical of the ongoing slaughters of our world, this one goes by inertia. Evolutionarily, even Napoleonically, the cow is one of the most successful species on the globe: on six continents propagated far beyond the wildest dreams of bovine destiny that first mooed and lowed on a subcontinental plain. To eat meat, you chew.
Gary Snyder writes with ecological magnanimity: “That was the wash of the waves on the island out in San Francisco Bay with the seabirds, and the feeding and schooling of the little fish—that’s going on. The real work is eating each other, I suppose.”
I once visited my parents visiting friends of theirs in Florida during a period when I was avoiding red meat. After my mother virtuosically altered the menu’s chicken and waffles to resemble precisely shrimp souvlaki over the rookie waiter’s squashed protestations, I turned down the corned beef sandwich the restaurant was known for in favor of a wedge salad. My mother was disappointed. My stomach is supposed to bear vicariously the burden that their arteries can no longer handle: in this small way every parent achieves immortality. And yet her reproach cut right to my central doubt. She said: “Who do you think you are not to become cow this afternoon?”