Or more accurately, with some heartbreaking, ads about the production of veal, complete with black-and-white photographs. I found out how veal calves (read: baby cows) were kept in small boxes throughout their abbreviated lives to keep their meat (read: little baby muscles) tender. Life for veal calves was nasty, brutish, and short.
[Although I can't locate an image of the original ad, the Wikipedia entry for "Veal" includes this paragraph:
"A strong animal welfare movement concerning veal started in the 1980s with the release of photographs of veal calves tethered in crates where they could barely move. After the release of these photographs, veal sales have plummeted, and have never recovered."[13] ]
The images were along these lines:
photo source: http://www.mspca.org/programs/animal-protection-legislation/animal-welfare/
farm-animal-welfare/factory-farming/cows/veal-calves-on-a-factory-farm.html
I don't remember where I saw the ads, over a quarter of a century ago. It was the pre-internet era of print, when I regularly read newspapers, weekly news magazines, and wildlife organization mailings. But it affected me profoundly, and I vowed never to eat veal again.
That was easy. How often did I eat veal, anyway? Once in a very blue moon I might order veal parmigiana at a restaurant, but chicken parm was just as good, wasn't it? And less expensive to boot.
Then came lamb.
Lamb was a different story. I genuinely liked the taste of lamb, greasy as it was. I remember as a child eating and enjoying it, cut up in tiny pieces to fit my tiny mouth. But then Roy and I went with friends to a county fair in upstate NY. It was there I discovered that it's very difficult to eat an animal once you've fed it from your hand. Particularly one this cute:
photo credit: http://menna.in/2014/04/lamb-images-2/
I could no longer imagine it like this:
photo credit: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/roasted-rack-of-lamb/
I decided it was just easier on my conscience not to eat baby animals. Period.
And that wasn't so hard, either. I had never cooked lamb myself, and it had been ages since I'd had it at all. I was tempted once, at a party, particularly because I didn't want to offend the hosts. And it smelled soooo good. But I have a very finely honed sense of guilt, and was able to resist. Although I no longer remember whether Roy and I were married at the time, I do recall that I didn't have Dan or Brynn yet, so I can proudly say I have not eaten lamb in over 23 years.
Years passed, and nothing much changed. I still felt guilty about eating meat, but not guilty enough to give up a juicy steak, or a rack of ribs, or a pile of fried chicken. And then, in 2008, this happened:
Warning: graphic images
Source: http://www.humanesociety.org/news/news/2008/01/undercover_investigation_013008.html
It's not as if I didn't know what was going on, though I was always able to ignore it, stuff it under my considerable mental rug. Thanks to an undercover video from the Humane Society, however, I was forced to confront for the first time -- graphically -- how cattle are treated in some so-called "factory" farms. Immediately I decided I wouldn't eat mass-produced beef sourced from giant feedlots; I would only eat grass-fed beef from smaller, family farms.
This is where I ran into trouble. It was clear that pretty much any beef available in any sort of restaurant, unless it specified grass-fed, was out. There would be no fast-food hamburgers, no deli roast beef, no brisket at the in-laws', no backyard hot dogs at the neighbors'.
I comforted myself with buying only grass-fed beef at the market, and it wasn't all that difficult. Whole Foods has a nice selection, of course, but I could also get ground beef and various other cuts that were labeled "grass-fed" at my local Kroger's supermarket, under the Simple Truth brand.
I did fall off the wagon a bit. At the all-you-can-eat Brazilian grill restaurant. At the generous, "I will be offended if you don't eat my home cooking" friend's house. At the "I can't identify what meat this is but it's probably pork" Chinese restaurant.
Ah, pork. Let's talk about pork for a moment.
I was not raised kosher, so eating pork has never been an issue for me. In fact, I'm a huge fan of it: bacon, pork chops, sausage, ribs. Giving up beef -- imperfect as it was -- would be a snap compared to giving up pork. A couple of years back, I did come close to eliminating pork from my diet, when I first visited Michigan and saw a pig transport on the highway, with soft little pig snouts sticking out like this:
photo credit: http://www.naturalchoices.co.uk/
If that didn't get me, I figured nothing would. Yet I was somehow unmoved, and continued eating, and enjoying, pork.
And chicken? I ate a ton of chicken. Once I stopped eating most beef, I replaced all the meals in which I would usually have had beef with chicken. All my favorite dishes are made with chicken, anyway: chicken francese, chicken soup with matzo balls, etc etc etc. I also told myself that chickens are lower are the intelligence/cuddly scale that I used to eliminate the other meats from my diet, which quieted but did not silence my conscience ("What about the pigs?" it asked, metaphorical eyebrow raised). I did my best to buy free-range chicken at the supermarket, including the Simple Truth brand at Kroger's, but it was less important when I was at a restaurant or fast-food joint.
There were significant problems with this way of eating. It made dining out complicated: suddenly I wasn't just declining to eat baby animals, but I couldn't claim vegetarianism either: "I only eat chicken, pork, or grass-fed beef." Talk about hypocrisy, and explaining it to people who didn't understand took a lot of energy and didn't always get the message across. Plus, an article I read in the Animal Welfare Institute's Spring 2014 publication indicates that labeling rules are very lax in the U.S., and there's really no policing of "humanely raised" claims. The photo used to illustrate the story? A package of Simple Truth brand meat. Damn.
The last straw came late one night when I saw this article from Slate.com show up on my Twitter feed: "Why Do We Eat Wilbur But Not Fido?". The writer, Laura Smith, sounds an awful lot like me, or at least that little noble voice in my head that tries to keep me honest. The clincher for me was the following: "Don't meat eaters divide the world into the spared and unspared, but more arbitrarily? Dogs are spared in America. Pigs are not. Horses in America are spared; in Europe, the are not. Rabbit? A gray area." I was forced to confront the notion that my attempts to eat only the non-cute and not-cuddly weren't really going to wash. All of a sudden it seemed to me to be all or nothing. So I chose nothing.
The idea kept me awake all night. I finally decided that I would become a vegetarian, or at the very least, a pescetarian, a neologism so neo that spell-check doesn't recognize it. Wikipedia does, though, and explains concisely my decision to retain fish as an option: "Similarly to vegetarianism, some pescetarians adopt the diet on the basis of ethics, either as a transition to vegetarianism, not treating fish on the same moral level as other animals, or as a compromise to obtain nutrients not found in plants as easily."
So here I sit, a reluctant would-be vegetarian, a pescetarian sure to tire of fish quickly (I'm not really a big fan). I've already slipped up while enjoying s'mores the other night, forgetting that marshmallows are animal in origin It's going to be tough, particularly because I still intend to cook meat for my family (though I did in fact just pass the "juicy barbecued steak" test last night). But I'm trying.
