An Inordinate Fondness, or Vegetarianism

The Centro Cultural de Belém rose above me, impersonal and thick with square white windows, a bright banner strung across the entryway reading “Interspeech 2005, Lisboa”. Interspeech is a yearly conference on speech technology, one of many that have dragged me around the world since birth to revel in the air of a world unknown to me. Why there, then? I wonder belatedly, trying to recall the calm, sunny terrace, the bustlingly shady arch of the entryway, the adjacent park where I spent the mornings, stretched across the grass and side-by-side with the Count of Monte Cristo. There was something about the white-grey of the paving stones, the Atlantic sun, that pulled me out of my mundane, cornfield-encased world at home and forced me to reflect between paragraphs and pigeon-watching breaks. I had done it before, for a year when I was between eight and nine years, before I failed, failed miserably and reverted to the altogether simpler usual household diet. What was so different about the newly-turned eleven that gave me the courage and the audacity to try it again, in the middle of Portugal, where fish as cuisine frankly outrank all other things? But I was impulsive, and very suddenly convinced. I informed, eagerly, my parents of my new conviction. My father's response was a restrainedly diplomatic, “Can't you wait until we get home?” I shook my head. No. Personal change was a beautiful thing, and I dared not make it wait. That was the first day. I have not knowingly eaten meat, or any slaughter by-product, since.

Beyond anything, I loved animals as a child. I never grew out of that, although now I call it a fascination for biology, to match a more scholarly application. When I was very young, I had no pets, but my parents were casual hikers, and we travelled out on weekends to the wilds of New Jersey, where I jumped and ran and fulfilled that childhood dream of getting completely, utterly coated in mud as I searched for salamanders and wood frogs under logs, songbirds in the trees, and elegant, white-tailed deer in the brush. In Hong Kong one year, I spied a group of workers draining a pond, and fearlessly, as I must have been back then, I waded in to the dwindling water, bucket in hand, to save the fish. Somehow, I attracted a small crowd of local children and their respective pails, and eventually even the workers conceded to assist, scooping up little fish by the netful and dumping them into the nearest child's rapidly filling bucket. Such adventures roughly paralleled the more mundane scene of the earthworm-scattered pavement after a rain, which I scurried across on the tips of my toes, bending to grasp each squirming worm between my index finger and thumb and hurry it to the relative safety of the dewy grass before it could be stepped on. That was my childhood, wild turkeys in the summer and foxes in the snow. With the naivete of a very small child, though, I did not connect the living things I adored with the foodstuffs we ate until later. I almost wish I could remember how the realisation came about: if it was in one sudden moment of terrible epiphany, or if it came by in months, slowly sinking in. Regardless, it was that, the love, the incapability of distancing myself, especially then but even now, that was my reasoning, more than any real conception, at the time, of, say, the factory farming industry or varying health implications.

The night we drove home from the airport, none of us had eaten for a full day of travel. The tiny restaurant we stopped at was half-empty and brightly lit in my memory, and perhaps vaguely reminiscent of some of the shiftier New Jersey diners that occasionally popped up through my childhood, with its cracked chair cushions and mustily foot-printed floor. The waitress was impersonal, her apron slightly stained, and my father glared into his dishwater coffee, too tired to refuse it. I read and reread the menu furiously, wondering if I was missing something obvious. My mother's brow was furrowed, and she asked the question before I did. “Do you have any vegetarian food?” she asked, her glance up imploring. On occasion, she still does this. The waitress frowned. “What?” “Vegetarian—food without meat in it,” she answered. “My daughter doesn't eat meat.” The waitress' eyes landed on me, and her frown deepened, etched into her face as if in stone. Somehow, the answer was no. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head, still grippingly zealous in my determination. “No, thank you, then,” I managed, rolling my icy water cup between my palms. I downed three glasses of water that evening and tried to ignore the irritable sloshing of my stomach until the next few hours brought us home and to sleep.

It's strange how we become used to things. The first weeks were battles of craving and denial, and I was young enough that I was unused to trials on that scale. My parents half-heartedly followed my lead on most days, but on the odd nights that they seared salmon and offered me lemon slices, or roasted chicken and the scent permeated the house, I took my steamed broccoli and retreated to another room, willing away an unwelcome invasion of my ethic. It was not for me to expect anybody else to change. I had to change. And somehow, slowly, slowly, I did. I taught myself to cook that year, and from the days of shaking and poring over recipes, from wincing at the snarling of hot oil, from checking the water by the minute, afraid it had somehow boiled dry, I became easy and confident, even fascinated and attracted by a new world and art that had opened itself to me. There was no loss, I realised at some point, in vegetarianism. In these days of microbial rennet and rising soybean popularity, it is no longer even an inconvenience. And now I wonder if I even notice meat any more, the vast majority of the time, because I rather imagine a switch in my mind has gone off, and I can no longer regard it even as food, no matter how I distance it from its animal source. I read cookbooks cover-to-cover, I casually follow cooking blogs—my distinct fascination with food preparation has lingered behind my interests in everything from history to biochemistry to art, and somehow a world that was painful for me, if only briefly, years ago, is alive with beauty and possibility. On vegetarianism, though—the morality of the predator is still something I dare not attempt, especially in text. To say, as Benjamin Franklin did, that (paraphrased) because a fish eats a fish, it is reasonable to, oneself, eat the former, is the justification of another. I do not challenge it, because I can no more wish a lion to starve than I can want a gazelle to die—which is really to say simply, the preciousness of life is not quantifiable. Or I am blinded by a love for the living, so I make a choice to try (and to speak as honestly as possible, it must be said, incompletely), whether or not true success is attainable, to match this sector of my own personal morality with action. A universal morality, or rather, societal morality seems unattainable until we are able to see through the eyes, truly, of the cows, or the chickens, the pigs that live, even now, in their pens and cages, whom we do not, cannot understand because we are humans, with our human points of view, and naturally equate our selves with the height of animal brilliance and sensitivity. We must be fooling ourselves, for who is to say? What paragon of universal truth is there to unmistakably assure us that we are truly superior, and most certainly have the right to cage and dispatch at will? So this matter lies inherently incomplete, for a pure incapability of knowing anything. I hope always to the height of my efforts, then, I strive, I try. I abstain.