Meat: A Love Story
“. . . And the calf that you carve with a smile
Is MURDER
And the turkey you festively slice
Is MURDER
Do you know how animals die?”
So sang The Smiths back in 1985, inspiring a legion of teenage vegetarian-converts to verbally abuse their mother’s pot roast with Indie-pop stoked passion. A forward-thinking teenager at the time, I flirted briefly with the meat-free way of life myself, but it didn’t last long. (I had a passion of my own, and it involved the siren song of bacon and cheese and char-grilling.)
But these days, as a forward-thinking adult, I find myself again contemplating the vegetarian life. Not because of rousing, overwrought lyrics about “beautiful creatures” going under “screaming knives” to fill our kitchens with the smell of “sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder” (gulp). This time, there’s something a little more sobering motivating my unease.
Some time ago, shortly after midnight, I found myself in my garden, picking nocturnal slugs and bugs off my bush beans and basil plants and dropping - that is (cringe) drowning - them in a cup of soapy water. Honestly, I’m squeamish about killing anything. I don’t squish spiders I find in the house; I trap them in Dixie cups and send them back outside. But as much as I hate killing leaf-decimating insects, I hate having lost all seven of my basil plants even more.
This experience led me to think about the fact that this is really the closest I’ve ever come to killing anything for food. I’ve never even caught a fish worth keeping, let alone eating. And that being the case, I had to ask myself the hard question: If I had to kill a cow or a pig to eat its flesh, could I? And further, if I could not, should I rightfully be eating it? I mean, if the animal is making the supreme sacrifice, shouldn’t I be prepared to give a little something up too? Step outside my comfort zone and acknowledge that sacrifice with a sacrifice of my own? Tough questions.
In Meat: A Love Story, Susan Bourette asks herself essentially the same thing, whittling the question down to its core: “Isn’t there a way to have my meat and clear conscience too?” And she travels quite a path to find the answer.
She works undercover in the “by-products” department of a meatpacking plant, divesting pigs’ heads of their jowls. She embarks on a traditional whale hunt with Inupiat Alaskans. She dresses chickens in a New York butcher shop, makes sausage in Cajun country, and hunts moose in Canada. And, bless her, she eats things both cooked and raw that would probably make a hyena a bit dyspeptic.
Bourette emerges from her short stint (she doesn’t last the week) at the meatpacking plant with some seriously unpleasant memories and the realization that the experience, as grotesque as it was, had not turned her into a vegetarian, but “rather a kinder, gentler, more thoughtful carnivore.” And with this insight, she sets off on her quest to make peace with the food that requires the end of one life to sustain another.
And although I’ve never eaten whale meat or been in attendance at a raw-meat potluck, I found that much in Bourette’s book resonated with me. Especially one line, near the end, where she concludes that all that she’s learned on her quest leads her to the conviction that, “If I were to eat an animal, to take another creature’s life in order to nourish mine, I had a responsibility to do it in good conscience.” And for her - for many, if not most, of us - that means a sea change in shopping and consumption habits.
Meat: A Love Story is not a diatribe either for or against eating meat, though it does have passages that inspired me, briefly, to tip in either direction. Reading through this, I was forced to think again about whether I could kill an animal to eat it. But as Bourette shows us alternatives to factory farming and industrial slaughterhouses, I began to think that maybe it’s okay if someone else - someone equipped philosophically and physically - takes care of the respectful, humane slaughter part. Maybe my part is something different . . . maybe I’m not strong enough to kill a cow, but perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps my job is just to buy my meat from the right source.
Thought-provoking, humorous, and accessible, Meat: A Love Story is an enlightening and enjoyable read.
Image courtesy of Penguin Group.
