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Thirteen years ago today my cousin Trish had her high-school graduation party. How do I remember this? Because thirteen years ago today, I also became a vegetarian.
I was twelve years old at the time, and for a twelve-year-old, those sorts of family parties are always boring affairs. So I brought a book--okay, a stack of books--with me for company. My family had recently rescued two neglected dogs, and I found myself keenly interested in animal welfare on a sudden, so I'd checked out of the library Ingrid Newkirk's Save the Animals! and Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, expecting--in my twelve-year-old's naivete--that they would mostly be calls to spay and neuter one's pets, bring them inside when it got cold, and feed them regularly, the latter two of which had been problems for our dogs' previous owners.
What I found, instead, was an exposé of a world few civilized people like to consider: What happens to our meat before it reaches our plate? And no, I'm not talking about whether the cook at Outback ascribes to the five-second rule--although that as a former kitchen manager, I think I'm safe in saying that what goes on in many restaurant kitchens also doesn't make for civilized conversation--but what happened up to the moment when our meat went from being "animal" to being "food." Because who likes to think about those sorts of things? And isn't meat a necessary evil?
( The Grass-seed Radical )
I was twelve years old at the time, and for a twelve-year-old, those sorts of family parties are always boring affairs. So I brought a book--okay, a stack of books--with me for company. My family had recently rescued two neglected dogs, and I found myself keenly interested in animal welfare on a sudden, so I'd checked out of the library Ingrid Newkirk's Save the Animals! and Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, expecting--in my twelve-year-old's naivete--that they would mostly be calls to spay and neuter one's pets, bring them inside when it got cold, and feed them regularly, the latter two of which had been problems for our dogs' previous owners.
What I found, instead, was an exposé of a world few civilized people like to consider: What happens to our meat before it reaches our plate? And no, I'm not talking about whether the cook at Outback ascribes to the five-second rule--although that as a former kitchen manager, I think I'm safe in saying that what goes on in many restaurant kitchens also doesn't make for civilized conversation--but what happened up to the moment when our meat went from being "animal" to being "food." Because who likes to think about those sorts of things? And isn't meat a necessary evil?
( The Grass-seed Radical )
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