my books. my life.

Tomorrow I am going to post my review of Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Before I really began reading this book, I wrote down my views on eating meat at that point and  my own personal history/struggle with eating animals.. They have changed due to the reading of this book, but I will discuss that with my review. So here is me as of January 2010:

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Currently, and for the last two years or so, I have become a partial vegetarian. I gave up beef and pork but I still eat poultry and fish.  And I still eat dairy.  People are very confused about the line that I’ve drawn even though we all draw a line somewhere.  Even the most hardcore carnivores among us would turn their nose at a serving of dog, right?  My line is actually much clearer: no mammals.  But somehow this puzzles people even more than straight vegetarianism.

It was a long road to get to this place and I fully expect my place on the vegetarian-carnivore spectrum to change in the future.  I grew up in a meat and potato family.  Every night.  My dad once bought half a cow and a freezer to store it in.  It was 1995 when I first questioned eating meat (I actually  grew up down the street from a veal farm and somehow managed to not understand what all those baby cows were for until I was in my late teens. I think if I had known, I would have become a vegetarian at an early age).  I was in 7^th grade which meant reading A Day No Pigs Would Die, dissecting fetal pigs, and the theatrical release of Babe.  This combination led to my renunciation of pork for almost 6 years.  I even wanted a potbellied pig as a pet (and convinced my Grandpa to get me one at a 4-H fair but my mom caught him just as he was about to exchange money with the seller).  I’m sure there were some instances during that period that I ate pork, but they were rare.  And I went on random no beef diets from time to time as well.  When I was 13, I went to South Africa and we were served all kinds of exotic meat.  I ate the giraffe and the wildebeest but still refrained from any pork.  I was a pretty committed kid even if I wasn’t really sure why I was doing it.

And then I went to college and started dating my now-husband.  In college, I ate what was given to me because I had no money.  I often ate the vegan meals in the cafeteria, but outside of that dorm, it was a no-holds-barred diet. And Ben loves his meat.  He got me to eat steak which I had never really liked and to eat it pretty consistently.  So for the next period of my life, I really wouldn’t refuse any kind of meat.

And then one day, I decided that I couldn’t do it anymore.  I stopped eating beef for 3 reasons: (1) the environmental impact – if you can’t give up your car, the next best thing to do is to stop eating beef; (2) the world hunger impact – the amount of food we give to a cow to feed one person could feed 10 people if we gave it to them directly; and (3) the cruelty issue – the part of my conscience that had been nagging me since 7^th grade finally took hold when I saw a news piece about a “farm” abusing its cows.  I gave up pork too because it made sense to do together and even though I ate it, I never really liked it and I still think pigs are adorable.

Throughout all of this, I consistently ate poultry with a few caveats.  I won’t eat at KFC because of its cruelty issues.  Same with Tyson chicken.  I can send you all video links if you want but will not subject anyone to them in this post unasked.  I tell people I want to be a vegetarian but I’m just not ready to take that step.  If I lived on my own, I might do it sooner.  And if I cooked more often I might do it.  But those are my excuses and I have to live with those choices until the day I decide to be a vegetarian.  And then, of course, I’ll have to consider the next step of becoming vegan (but how I would miss my ice cream!).  And I’ll always have to consider going back to being a regular, old, meat-eating American.

This is all my way-too-wordy explanation of my state going into Eating Animals.  I wanted to post this first because it would be too lengthy to do in a review and because I wanted to do it before my thoughts were tainted by the book.

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Look for my review tomorrow.