Last night I went to a book reading by Gene Baur, the co-founder of Farm Sanctuary and the book Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food. What struck me about his talk is that the reasons for choosing food wisely are the same as they were when I became a vegetarian 30 years ago, and even far more imperative. What made sense to me at seven years old still makes sense. Here's a history of how the parental influence can have life-long effects on a child:
When I was four years old, my mother and I lived in a yellow rented house in Pike, NH with her boyfriend and some other people. That year they had decided to raise a pig, a common practice in rural areas. I called him Little Pig, and he was my friend. As he grew, it was clear that he could no longer be called Little Pig, so I called him Little Big Pig. He was part of the family to me. I would to try to ride on his back, perhaps wishing he was a horse. One day he was gone and became Bacon. I remember staring at paper-wrapped packages in the freezer and trying to comprehend that Little Big Pig had turned into food.
A few years later, my mother began a relationship with the owner of the yellow house. I soon began calling him Papa, and we moved to the Colonial Inn in Bath, NH. He had traveled around the country quite a bit and was more knoweledgeable about what the "hippies" were doing to affect their footprint on the planet. He wanted us to be vegetarians. But he also smoked cigarrettes, which Cheryl, my mother, didn't like. So they made a deal: she would become vegetarian if he quit smoking. At the Colonial, Cheryl began putting whole wheat flour in the pizza crust, and he found her a cookbook with a recipe for soyburgers, which started showing up on the menu. People tried them and apparently liked them. Papa and I had a soyburger eating contest, and I won.
Papa, Cheryl, and their friends talked much land it takes to raise a cow (in terms of growing feed) versus how much land it takes to grow plants. Adequate protein, the primary arguement against vegetarianism in those days, could be gotten from soybeans and other plants. Factory farming kept animals in tightly enclosed spaces, and they were fed antibiotics and hormones which made them grow faster. Girls were supposedly developing too fast because of hormones in milk. There would be no hunger in the world if people didn't eat meat. This was the talk in the late 70s and early 80s, and it made sense to me. Dairy farming was one of the primary industries in our area of New Hampshire and Vermont and I had grown up around farm animals. I liked them. I saw that the cows existed happily grazing in fields and going to the barn to be milked. I could not fathom factory farms with thousands of cows standing in their own waste.
But still I snitched pepperoni from the pizza-making line-up in the Colonial's kitchen. One time I begged Cheryl to cook a hot dog for me, even though we were no longer eating meat together as a family. Pepperoni and sausage seemed far removed from animals. At some point I heard about how hot dogs are made, which put an end to those cravings.
When we went on the road after leaving the Colonial, sometimes we would pass trucks full of animals - pigs or calves or chickens in crates, probably on their way to be slaughtered. The suffering emanating from a truckload of calves in crates is palpable to a child. I had the sense of a system of injustice that I could do nothing about.
When we moved to Arkansas in 1980, Cheryl started seriously engaging in vegan cooking. She made gluten roast for Thanksgiving and tofu from scratch, using The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook as her guide. The Farm was a vegan commune in Tennessee that inspired hippies all across the country. From that book, I learned that I was not alone in our alternative lifestyle. Going to home school, sitting on the floor to eat, eating with chopsticks, and making and eating tofu were things that other people did too, even if I didn't know any of them personally. The men had long hair and beards and the women had unshaved armpits, just like my parents.
One Arkansas evening we went to have dinner with Papa's boss and family. We hadn't eaten red meat since the Colonial, but I guess we were still open to eating chicken, if only to be accommodating to hosts. The boss' wife served fried chicken. It was greasy and undercooked. We all had a hard time eating it. On the way home, I said, "Let's stop eating chicken." Cheryl and Papa agreed. I was in 4th grade and haven't eaten intentionally eaten chicken or red meat since.
Every once and while I find myself at a restaurant sitting across the table from someone (usually a man) eating ribs or a steak with a big bone. I am unable to look at it without thinking about an animal, who probably lived and died barely seeing the light of day, or perhaps never breathing fresh air that didn't smell of its own manure, and then being led down a line and slaughtered by an unhappy person wearing a white plastic coat smeared with blood, and then carved up on an assembly line of more unhappy people armed with industrial-strength saws made for cutting through bone. These people are surrounded by death all day. The suffering they experience on the job cannot but pervade their lives at home. As I try to ignore the images of suffering and concentrate on the conversation at the dinner table, I look at my friend from the nose up. I avoid glancing down to his hands or his plate as he oohs and ahhs about the tastiness of the pieces of dead animal he is putting inside his mouth. I have no problem with my friends eating meat, but I have learned to never go to a steakhouse, a barbecue joint, or a place known for its ribs.
The one piece of the argument for being vegetarian that has become more imperative in the past 30 years is the meat industry's dependence on petroleum and its contribution to global warming. Raising a cow is a highly petroleum dependent process - petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides are used to grow the feed, and gasoline is used to run the tractors and transport the animals before and after slaughter. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock production worldwide is responsible for 18 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gases. That's more than cars. If you care about your contribution to global warming, read this article from Audubon Magazine, "The Low-Carbon Diet."
My parents eventually went back to eating meat after I left the house. Cheryl eats chicken but not red meat, and Papa eats red meat regularly now. Sometimes they act surprised that I am still a vegetarian. I don't know how to be any different. Better yet, I don't remember what it tastes like.
Here's a picture of me at a farm, I honestly don't remember where or when, but I look about 7 or 8.
Thank you, Gene, for reminding me of my history, reaffirming my beliefs, and inspiring me to post again. "If you have something to say, say it."
