I don’t eat meat very often, because I can’t really afford it. Also, I don’t cook very well, and if I spend money on a nice piece of beef, I don’t want to ruin it the way I did the last time I attempted to prepare a steak, when I pan-fried it in teriyaki sauce, an ill-conceived experiment that left me with a ruined skillet, first-degree burns on my wrists, a cat suffering from smoke inhalation, and a meal that looked remarkably similar to the asteroid that the parents found in their toaster oven at the end of Time Bandits, so generally I stick to inexpensive and hard-to-screw-up meals like Ramen noodles and spaghetti and toasted cheese with tomato slices. I tell myself that I don’t miss it that much, and then I go to my parents’ house for the weekend and stand in front of the refrigerator, snacking on a meatloaf-and-bologna sandwich with two slices of ham substituted for the bread and waiting for the microwave to finish warming up a chicken leg. I like sprouts and chickpeas well enough, but I could never make it as a vegetarian.

Of course, I had a brief adolescent flirtation with vegetarianism. It seemed like an excellent idea at the time; like most tenth-graders, I felt deeply and personally aggrieved by pretty much the entire world, and like most tenth-graders, I felt that reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and watching one filmstrip on endangered baby seals armed me with adequate information to make An Important Political Statement by abstaining from the consumption of meat, preferably in the most pretentious and martyred manner possible, thus not only gaining the favorable attention of my peers but also annoying the living hell out of my mother at the same time. So, one night at dinner, I announced with great solemnity that I would henceforth no longer eat meat, followed this proclamation with a long-winded and factually porous lecture on the evils of agribusiness, and denounced the meatloaf as a product of murder most foul. My mother informed me evenly that she did not run a restaurant and that if I thought she would prepare special meals for me I should think again. I ate only my vegetables, and sulked. My meatloaf remained untouched on my plate, a devastating indictment (or so I thought) of my heartless and bloodthirsty parents. My heartless and bloodthirsty little brother slathered his murder most foul with A-1 sauce and told me to lighten up because I had leather shoes on. He had a point. My father, who had somehow prevented himself from laughing in my face, made a great show of commenting on my mother’s delicious meatloaf. He too had a point; my mother makes a mean meatloaf. I asked my father to pass the ketchup. My vegetarian “phase” had lasted all of ten minutes. I wish all of the muddle-headed so-called animal-
activist vegetarians of the world would snap out of it so quickly.

Choosing not to eat meat for health reasons – or religious reasons, or financial reasons – makes some sense. But when someone says that she doesn’t eat meat because it contributes to the exploitation of livestock, I have to roll my eyes. First of all, if you want to declare your solidarity with your animal brethren, you might want to leave those Cole Haan loafers and politically incorrect cosmetic products at home, and don’t let me see you wearing a natural-fiber sweater, either. Second of all, wearing hemp from head to toe and using crystal deodorant and conducting night raids on university psych labs to free white mice does not make you committed to the cause; it makes you short-sighted and weird. Yes, I have seen the footage of chickens jammed in twenty to a cage. Yes, I have read the articles about the veal pens. Yes, I object to testing mascara on bunnies. Yes, I saw Babe and I rooted for the pig, and yes, I read Charlotte’s Web and I rooted for the pig. But do I eat bacon? Yes, I do. Welcome to the food chain.

Humans happen to run the world right now. Perhaps we shouldn’t – we haven’t done that thoughtful a job of it so far – but we do. I agree that livestock raised for human consumption suffer terrible discomfort and indignity, but until they grow opposable thumbs, sorry, they don’t have rights. That sounds incredibly cold, I know, but you can’t convince me that animals wouldn’t treat us the same way if they ran things, and I don’t hear anyone clamoring to put goats or stone crabs in charge of the planet. And another thing – nature programs show lions and tigers and wolves ripping the throats out of innocent hoofed creatures all the time. Do animal activists object to this? Of course not. They can’t really get away with calling it “inhumane,” so they do an end run around the argument and call it “natural” instead. Alas, humans represent nature too, and it might not seem that way when you see humans wandering around Disneyworld in flowered shirts and eating ribs on a stick, but evolution doesn’t tend to play favorites.

The same logic applies to the “cute-not cute” issue. Animal activists love to say that certain animals get the shaft because they don’t look as cuddly, and to bemoan the “marginalization” of cows and sheep and whatnot. Perhaps we shouldn’t favor some animals over others, but I don’t see the point of blaming other humans for the fact that cats evolved into sleek and adorable pets that could make themselves useful by catching mice, while cows wound up dumb and ungainly and rather succulent. Plus, you can’t keep Bossy in a Manhattan apartment, period.

I will accept a person’s commitment to the cause of animals, grudgingly, but I myself don’t feel comfortable drawing that kind of line. Do we know for certain that vegetables don’t feel pain? Can we say for sure that a carrot doesn’t scream “NOOOOOO” as it gets pulled out of the ground? Do we have any evidence that potatoes don’t shriek silently at the approach of the peeler that will flay its skin off and poke out its eyes? Can we differentiate between a raisin and an orphaned grape that got baked to death? No, not really. This argument sounds a bit fey, but think about it – in the ground or on the tree, fruits and vegetables live. Then we pick them, and they don’t. See what I mean? Alas, you can’t cuddle fruits and vegetables either, so we don’t see a lot of bumper stickers saying “Adopt A Turnip Today!”

I don’t mean to sound too, uh, heartless and bloodthirsty. I obviously don’t condone breaking the legs of veal calves, or forcing pigs to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in their own filth, or tearing the beaks off of laying hens. I find these practices cruel, depressing, and downright excessive. On the other hand, I find forswearing meat and meat by-products excessive as well. Pardon me while I abdicate all responsibility for my actions, but Mother Nature put us at the top of the food chain, and unless we want to start issuing formal reprimands to sharks for eating surfers, perhaps we should just abide by that.

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