Noun: Meat. Opinion: Like.
I am not a picky eater. In fact, I’m the total opposite–I’m a promiscuous food slut. My entire family comprises food sluts. We’re big eaters who will often have three or four different regional cuisines served during an average family meal. And nary a meal is served that isn’t centered around a protein (a modern euphemism used for meat…yeah, unless you’re vegan you’re not eating more soy than my Asian ass, so don’t front). My mother came from a family of five kids who were all referred to as tiger cubs, if that gives you an idea of how devoutly carnivorous my roots are. My nomadic parents incorporated the culinary heritage of three different continents, and thus I am not squeamish about ingesting most anything…whether it has the funk of a jock strap or still has its head attached, I’ll eat it. And I’ll probably like it.
And yet meat is the one food group that I still struggle with. Not in terms of eating it, I have a stomach of iron; or enjoying it, I drool at the aromatic hint of roasted beast. I’m still struggling with coming up with a good argument for killing sentient animals for my own benefit. I do it, anyway, I just want to be absolved in order to shut my head up.
I am not conflicted about whether it’s natural for people to eat meat or not. I am conflicted as to whether it is moral for us to. Natural law, as I have alluded to in previous posts, doesn’t apply to morality–behaving according to our collective conscience has almost nothing to do with our reptilian brain but resides in our more highly evolved and recently developed frontal lobes. Morality largely emerged as a way to keep our impulses in check; morality isn’t supposed to be about whether it’s convenient or healthy for us, it’s about what we agree to and internalize as good and right. Holding in your pee is supposed to be very bad for your kidneys, but you do it, yes? (Please say yes). Murder is pretty natural, too, but we came up with the conceit of civilization to get away from that kind of stuff (are you listening, Southeast DC?). Morality applies to how we treat each other, how we have sex, how we deal with death–it is not a stretch to believe that it applies to what we eat (case in point: cannibalism). If what we eat is other animals, particularly ones with central nervous systems that allow them to feel physical pain and limbic brains that enable them to feel emotional pain, what does that say about our appetite for brutality and tolerance for suffering? Yeah, yeah, I know…all of Darfur just gave me the middle finger.
I’ve heard all the usual omnivorean arguments: human suffering comes before animal suffering, humans are superior and under separate jurisdiction from animals, we have bigger problems to worry about, animals don’t feel pain the way we do. If you buy into any of the above and it works for you, you may go now, I’m sure you have laundry or something to do. I’m not sold, though. Some of these arguments are completely specious, while others just feel a little…incomplete. None of them resonate with the decisive ring of self-evident truths, the way an inarguable statement does when it enters the ear. Such as the following: “the sun will rise tomorrow,” “Richmond is the capital of Virginia,” or “Jimmy Carter means well.”
No, I have yet to hear an argument that is convincing enough to eradicate the doubt and conflict I experience when I see the tender visage of a wee piglet. Have you seen piglets? They’re like puppies, only naked and thus more vulnerable, and pink and thus more delicate. Farm animals only exist because we make them exist; these are not animals that would stand a snowball’s chance in Hell out in the wild. The least we can do is behave as proper stewards for them until we guillotine their heads off.
But I’m not going to go off on buying grass-finished this and free-range that (I’m more sick of it than you are), because even that is an incomplete argument. The fact is we kill animals that we can be pretty sure feel it, and we wouldn’t want the same thing done to ourselves. It’s a bitchy thing to do, full stop–trying to ignore that fact by buying packaged chicken breast that hold no resemblance to a living entity doesn’t make it any less true. Trying to make yourself feel better about your hypocrisy doesn’t add any more truth or decency to the universe, so you might as well own to what it is you’re doing. Yet animals’ sweet flesh is about the most delectable thing on this planet (hold up while I gurgle on my own saliva) and, more importantly, meat has ineradicable symbolic significance as the center of religious sacrifice and communal values. This, too, carries moral weight, and these two mandates are, at least for me at this particular nanosecond, not reconcilable. I don’t foresee myself eliminating meat from my diet anytime soon. This is just going to be one of those things that I will continue to be conflicted about, and I am going to have to live with that.
