by Akim Reinhardt
No longer eating meat was similar to no longer believing in God. I can’t pinpoint a moment when it ended, for abstinence did not come upon me suddenly. Rather, what had once been a bedrock of my existence slipped away after years of contemplation. Some time in 1995, I realized it was no longer part of my life. This coincided with me moving to Nebraska, which did not make giving it up any easier. Meat, that is. God was a few years earlier.
But why?
More and more it seemed to me that the differences between dogs and cows and monkeys and horses and pigs and cats and us were not so vast. Mammals were too much like each other for me to feel okay about killing and consuming them for pleasure, as it were, since I didn’t need to eat meat. If it were 18th century America, of course I would. What alternative would I have? But with the 21st century rapidly approaching, meat was a luxury I could forego. And it felt hypocritical to ask someone else, anonymous minimum wage workers on slaughterhouse assembly lines, to slay and gut animals for me if I were now unwilling to do that myself.
I still enjoyed fishing once in a rare while, so I went on eating seafood. Fish still seemed like creatures from another world. But I could look most any mammal in the eye and see a little bit of myself in there.
Or a piece of you.
And so it was that I had drifted into a new diet of my own choosing for my own reasons. Not something to proselytize to others, or even talk about unless someone asked me. For the next twenty-seven years, I did not eat red meat or poultry, save for the rare instance when a restaurant got an order wrong; no point sending it back if it just ends up in the garbage, and then the animal has died in vain. I continued consuming dairy on the grounds that cows didn’t have to die to produce milk.
Sometimes people were vaguely confused about why I had stopped eating meat. The reasons didn’t add up for them. Why would you do this, they would ask with tones of pity, confusion, or even faint admiration once in a while. Sometimes they wondered what to call me since I ate some animals and animal products, but not others. They needed to label me. I don’t remember whom or when, but someone once told me I was an ovo-lacto-pescatarian, eating fish, eggs and dairy but no mammals or poultry.
Okay, sure.
I was living my life on my terms for my reasons and the labels didn’t matter to me. But ignore the labels as I might, I could not ignore the fact that I had an ideology: a set of ideas and ideals that shaped my behavior. And if you subscribe to an ideology, I think it’s important that you periodically reexamine it, lest ideology calcify into dogma. Just because I had asked some tough questions and reached some new answers hardly meant I’d asked all the tough questions and discovered all the answers. So as time went by, I continued to ponder and learn.
Back in 1995, I was unaware of the health benefits that came from not eating meat. That was a post-facto plus. Though eventually I came to understand that dairy is at least as bad for you, if not worse, than meat. Call it a wash, especially since my dairy consumption spiked after I stopped eating mammals; my body was craving animal fats.
What made far more of an impression on me as the years went by was learning about the horrors of factory farming. The treatment of factory farmed swine, cattle, and poultry is, in my opinion, utterly horrific. I need not list the many abuses these animals suffer so that Americans can consume about 35 million cattle, about 130 million swine, 8–10 billion chickens, and somewhere in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a trillion eggs per year. The conditions under which most of these animals live and die are, I believe, a stunning grotesquerie that is surreal to contemplate, and apparently almost impossible to endure for long: the worker turnover rate in U.S. slaughterhouses is 75–100% per year.
Learning about the health benefits of my new diet, and the profound and deeply disturbing elements of the meat industry, only reinforced my decision to not eat meat. What’s more, I began to question my ongoing consumption of dairy. I came to understand that the dairy industry drives the veal industry. Dairy cows have to calf once per year to keep producing milk. The girls of course grow up to become the next generation of milk cows, now bred to the point of freakishness with utters so large that their gait is unseemly. But the boys? You need only so many bulls to stud the cows; most of them become veal.
So how did I eventually go back to eating meat?
In 1995, ignorant of how industrial farming works, I had developed what I thought was a diet that conformed to my particular concerns. But upon learning that dairy begets calf slaughter and bovine genetic freakishness, I knew I had to reassess. I spent several years contemplating what to do. My thoughts were girded by a general sense that something had to change.
The obvious solution to my concerns, the one that rectifies just about all issues regarding the treatment of animals, is to simply stop consuming them in any form. Become vegan. And I seriously considered it. However, I eventually accepted that I just don’t have what it takes. Not by a lot, just by a small margin, but that’s enough. I’m a little too lazy. A little too fond of certain flavors. A little too uncommitted to doing everything I can to stop the unholy terror of modern factory farming.
Just a little. But that’s all it takes. I will never be a full time vegan. Perhaps it’s my great shortcoming, but I will live with myself.
So what, then, would be next for me? After all, I was determined to change in some way that felt, if not perfect, at least more right.
While I personally do not want to kill mammals, I have never thought that one mammal killing and eating another is in itself immoral. Morality is a human invention. It’s not actually real, and no other animal is aware of it. The lion does not ponder the rightness of taking the gnu. Furthermore, all life thrives on death. It is, so far as I know, impossible for a life form to continue living without consuming some other life form. If killing to live is immoral, then life itself is immoral.
I’m not ruling that out; life might be the great blight of the universe. But so be it. Here we all are.
What I initially objected to in foregoing meat was my own unwillingness to kill, gut, and skin certain animals, and the hypocrisy and cowardice of demanding others, strangers I will never meet, do it for me. And what I object to now is the poor treatment of animals bound for our plates.
As was giving up meat all those years ago, finding my new diet was a process. I slowly decided to ease meat back into my diet, while also greatly reducing dairy. It began with meat that I knew the origin of. I have a friend whose father bags a couple of deer every winter. He’s a septuagenarian who goes out into the woods, tracks down a buck, takes it out with one shot if he can, dresses it in the field, hauls it on a sled back to his truck, ties it down, brings it home, and butchers it in the garage.
If my friend makes venison chili from that animal, I’m going to eat it.
From there, I limited myself to meat whose origins I felt confident about. A local butcher taking animals from a small, local farm that treats its animals reasonably well. A restaurant that gets its meat from that butcher. A friend who buys a turkey or a chicken from a farm. Mutton from a small vendor at the state’s sheep and wool festival.
At the same time, I stopped buying milk. I’d long stuck to high grade commercial milk, but I decided that I no longer need animal milk. From a quart per week to none. Finding the right alternative to make breakfast cereal edible took some doing, and the one I settled on may not be any healthier than actual milk given the extensive list of multi-syllabic ingredients, but it was done.
I switched from cow butter to sheep or goat. I’m not sure that makes any ethical difference, but either way, it now takes me about half-a-year to go through a stick butter. Pretty much the only thing I use it for is greasing the pan when I fry eggs.
The eggs are the expensive kind, about seven bucks a dozen. I make sure to get pasture-raised. If I find myself at a farmer’s market, even better.
The only cheese I keep in the house is some kind of hard Italian: Parmesan, Romano, or the like. Anything else will go moldy before I can use it, so I gave them up altogether. A wedge of hard cheese lasts me about a year.
Most meals I make at home are in fact vegan now. Not all of them. Certainly not the buttered eggs I eat a few times a week. Or the occasional pasta dish that gets dusted with freshly grated cheese. But most everything else.
It’s when I eat out that I get furthest away from the pescatarian-ovo-lacto diet that framed most of my adulthood, much less the quasi-veganism I now practice at home.
In the old days, if there weren’t any decent fish or vegetarian options on the menu, I’d get a grilled cheese sandwich or some other dish laden with commercial dairy, and not think twice about it. It wasn’t meat, and that was that.
Now it’s different. I no longer perceive a vast ethical gulf between, say, a fast food hamburger patty and the slice of American cheese atop it. Or the mayonaisse smeared on the bun. There is some difference, yes. But how much? Not enough to define my diet anymore.
If I now find myself in a setting where corporate animal products are the only viable option, I no longer discern between flesh and dairy. I no longer kid myself that a slice of pizza or a milkshake is much superior to a hotdog. At that point I might have the burger.
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During my early twenties, before I gave up meat and when my cooking skills were limited to ramen and mac n cheese, one of my great life goals was to make enough money to eat out any time I liked. It wouldn’t take much, I told myself. I can be frugal. Breakfast at the diner. Lunch at the Korean counter. Pizza or a cheeseburger for dinner. A basic middle class salary, if I could I could gain one, would get me there.
That was thirty years ago. My palate has expanded greatly since then, along with my now-modest but functional culinary skills. I eat-in close to 90% of my meals, and most of them are actually quite healthy. That half-priced burger at pub trivia? The chicken at a friend’s house? The ground pork from the Szechuan place? Perhaps those aren’t quite so healthy. But much more important to me, they are not so ethical. They are born of needless and astonishing suffering. I now partake of them once in a while. Though in the end, I have many more meals devoid of any animal products than I did when I wasn’t eating meat. I am closer to veganism now that I do eat meat. As close as I’m willing to get for now, maybe ever. It’s been two years so far. Maybe it will last less than another year. Perhaps I hold onto it for as long as I have left, however long that might be. But either way, I’m not looking for converts. Not even myself. My diet is thoughtful, but it is not a religion. It is filling but not entirely fulfilling. And this new version of my ideology will not become dogma.
This is whom I am for now, along with all that I ingest. And when I lay down for the final time, let all the world’s other life forms feast upon me as I have feasted upon them.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com