February 16, 2010

It must have been the 6th grade. And I don't know why I did it. I really have no clue. No one in my house was one. No one I knew was one. There was no reason. But, I suspect, even then, I was much brighter than many, myself included, knew. I look back and think that even back then I knew right from wrong.

I was a vegetarian in the 6th grade. And remember I went to school in a suburb of Baltimore. This was no California. This was the late 80s. This was not cool.

But Morrissey was. And he sang that meat is murder and something in those words must have touched me. I was a vegetarian for 7 years. 7 years! It seems so long ago. It seems so odd that I have almost entirely blocked this out. But then it became normal and I never obsessed or fretted over it. I wonder if anyone even remembers me being a vegetarian.

The few memories I have of my vegetarianism, and later, a one-year stint at veganism, do remain. I remember seeking fake Dr. Martens made from vinyl. I remember signing up for PETA at the first Lollapalooza. I remember vegetarian meals at Louie's Bookstore Café. And I remember in my freshman year of college founding a new club on campus, Veggies & Friends. Please forgive the name. I remember a big meal that was put on with the Peace Studies department. I remember an awful Erasure/Lene Lovich song on an animal rights album. I remember the supermodels who'd rather go naked than wear fur.

And I remember the first time I ate meat after that. It was sophomore year. It was close to Christmas and I was at IKEA (of all places!) with Beezer Zepp and I ate a hotdog. After 7 years I ate an IKEA hotdog. WTF?

And then a love affair with meat and cheese and foie gras and fur and leather began. I did not just eat meats and dairy. I obsessed. I gorged. I overate and I consumed. Consumed so, so very much. I was worried about what tasted good. And meat tastes really good. And so does cheese. And so does ice cream. Sour Cream. Fried Chicken. Steaks. Greek Yogurt. Bacon. Oh, dear God, bacon.

And I would once in a blue moon recall my vegetarian past. I'd make ignorant exclamations around vegetarians. I'd point to design and say look at our canines! We were designed to eat meat. What was really happening is that I was defensive. I used my vegetarian past as justification; I thought they were no better than me. I gave 7 years. I said it stopped meaning something to me. I don't know what that meant, but it felt the right thing to say.

And as I grew up and made more money I could afford more luxuries and meats and animals are luxuries and I got even further away from vegetarianism. And I cared not to know. I knew secrets existed. I'd not been blind to stories of the destructive nature meat consumption has, not only on my body, but also on the world. The skies. The water. The animals. And the people. Yes, the human race.

Right before Christmas Georgi and I ate brunch at Cookshop with Monte Albers and Michael Meltzer. We undoubtedly consumed animals. Probably many. And as we walked up 10th Avenue on the way to Brian Babst's birthday party we stopped in an independent bookstore. And I picked up a novel by Nabokov and sat looking at another book, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. I loved the font and color and almost bought the book based on its cover alone.

Let me back up. Months earlier I'd read Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food. And upon reading that on the train back to NYC from Dutchess County, I knew something had awakened. This past summer, while poor and focusing on fitness, I even did several vegan weeks mixed into my normal diet of burgers and cheese and ice cream. I did it then as a way to lose weight, clear my head, wean myself off chemicals in processed food. But the idea of veganism was not foreign. Although just for a few weeks at a time, I'd still embraced the concept.

And then Christmas rolled around and I decided to buy the few people on my list books. I bought Eating Animals for my brother and one copy for me. I don't know why actually. I thought his girlfriend would enjoy it. My brother is a new father and now that I have read Foer's opus I hope my brother has read the book. It is as much about fatherhood than it is about anything.

Eating Animals awakened something in me. Something so deep and powerful and precious that halfway through the book, while dining on New York Strip at an Argentinean steakhouse in San Jose, Cost Rica, I declared to my companions that I was going to go vegan. I was laughed at, obviously.

And I read and read and read. And on the flight back from San Jose to New York City I finished the book. And I made up my mind. This was it.

My last meal made up of animals was airplane food. Awful, tough beef with peppers and onions. It was rough and disgusting. And like that IKEA hotdog it will forever be symbolic.

I could go into everything I learned from the book. I could write about factory farms and tortured animals. I could write about the environment. About pits of pig shit killing humans. About the oceans being raped. About workers being taken advantage of. About species being altered and mutated. About antibiotics being rendered useless. About big business destroying small business. About corporations calling all shots. About the American way. But I won't. Those reasons are undeniable. They cannot be ignored anymore. Not by me. The convenience of forgetting I no longer have. The burden of remembrance is what I carry. And I vow to remember the consequences my actions bring not only to myself and to my brother's daughter but to my lover, my mother, my city, my country, and this world.

Ultimately one paragaph changed my mind. The author writes about cruelty: "But nature isn't cruel. And neither are the animals in nature that kill and occasionally even torture one another. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it."

I choose not to ignore it. And this time around it's more than just childhood innocence fueling the decision. It is a deep love of life that allows it to be one of the easiest decisions I've ever made.