Eating Animals

A couple of weeks ago, we were leaving the Bird-in-Hand Family Restaurant after our Saturday morning breakfast, heading across the road to the milk farm and Amish health food store to stock up. I was thinking two things: that I shouldn't have eaten so much bacon; and what I was going to fix for our dinner party that night. Lamb? Just then, Michael said, "Look! New baby lambs!" There's a small field with pasture and fruit trees that we always pass, and several sheep graze there. This time, they had their new lambs with them. And in that moment, I realized that I had to stop eating meat.

Well, maybe not all meat, but all cruel meat: factory-farmed animals for sure, and even locally, humanely raised animals like lamb-- maybe it sounds crazy, but as a mother I just can't see eating that new little baby creature. No more bacon-- no more meat at all unless I know it was humanely raised. We buy ground beef from the dairy where we buy our milk; the cows are grass-fed, and when they're done milking and have had a reasonable life, then we eat them. I guess they still have a somewhat bleak life, but at least they are able to be cows and do their cow thing, and I'm just not prepared to be a vegan for now.

This sudden change of heart really took me by surprise. For years, I've been trying to eat only a small amount of humanely-raised meat at home, but I haven't worried about it when eating out. And I've never been a particularly sentimental animal lover or a food faddist. But there it is: a strong feeling that this is the right thing to do. The second surprise has been the difficulty in sticking to this resolution. Vegetarianism is pretty common in my circles and in my regular cooking, so it doesn't seem like a particularly dramatic change-- until you're in a restaurant. The first time I ate out after my new resolution, I vacillated about what to order and somehow ended up with... a steak! Wha...? I realized that to be a vegetarian in a restaurant is to be a freak; I was just not prepared for how abnormal it is, how you'll end up selecting from two or three choices or having a starter for a main course. The second time I ate out, I was more mentally prepared, but as I scanned the list of "dinner salads" on the menu, I saw that EVERY ONE had meat in it. When I ordered a caesar salad, the waitress asked, "would you like some kind of protein with that? chicken, steak...?" Yes, I have to admit it: I've become a freak. To which Michael says, "you're just realizing that now?"

Henry remains an enthusiastic meat-eater. Today, on our weekly trip out to Bird-in-Hand (where he ate his usual pile of meat and fruit), he noticed as we passed a seafood restaurant: "Mama! I just saw a sign, and they had pictures of every type of aminal that lives under the sea! Mama, do all undersea aminals have meat? And if they don't have meat, like, maybe, a water beetle, then what do they have?" We got into a discussion of endoskeletons and exoskeletons, muscle and organs, but I realized that the question was also about cultural expectations of what is edible. We eat octopus, and it's rubbery, I told Henry, but we don't eat water beetles-- or maybe, some people do... I was getting very vague. "Mama, I would like to get a whole fish, with the head and the tail on it, and eat that. Mama, I would like to eat an octopus. Mama, what about a crab? Can you cut the shell with a knife? The meat is inside, right? You've got to be careful when you eat a crab, or it might pinch you and run away."

I don't know which is more natural and which is more freakish, Henry's enthusiasm for eating animals, or my reluctance.