“I think,” he said, “if you turn away from the thought of the death in order to eat meat, you’re just letting someone else do the dirty work for you.”
And I started to remember things.
I remembered how I hated working at a seafood restaurant in high school, hated the screaming sounds the lobsters made when thrown alive into the pots of boiling water, which all the bearded cooks in the dirty kitchen told me was not, in fact, a scream of pain, but still, I remembered how it scratched its way down my spine and under my skin like fingernails bent backwards.
And I remembered that on my first and only fishing trip, I refused to use bait because I didn’t want to kill the worm by stabbing it onto the metal hook, so I caught only a floating piece of cardboard. I remembered the bloody gash through the gill of the fish my friend caught, from where he yanked the hook from its mouth.
But mostly what I thought of, when I sat in Professor Bob’s classroom, mulling over the reality of factory farming I had just witnessed, was something my father said once, on a family vacation to London. The five of us sat around a white-clothed table, under silver, dim candlelight flickering in the dark wood-paneled steakhouse in Battersea Park. I pointed, shaking my head, up at the mounted head of a steer on a wooden plaque like a hunting trophy near the room’s crown molding.
“Why,” I asked my father, “would anyone want to think about the cow while they’re trying to enjoy a nice filet mignon?”
“Well,” my father replied, “that’s what it is.”
THAT’S WHAT IT IS, I thought, when I choked on the gruesome images from the PETA movie. When I tried to reconcile my celebratory birthday chicken potpies with the heavy grinding sound of a wood chipper slowed by fifteen thousand squirming bodies tossed in for disposal as mulch, the bodies of chickens too sick for slaughter, too sick to ever be eaten.
The tough rubber of those words in my mind, like ripping the meat off a chicken wing with my teeth, like chewing through it.
It would be another seven years before I ate meat again.
When I was twenty, I watched a video and decided to become a vegetarian. I couldn’t stomach what I’d seen. I couldn’t be a part of it. Looking back, I see it as an impulse born of youth and indignation, a snap judgment, but I was starting to understand the word “privilege.” I was discovering an enormous amount of suffering that happened behind closed doors, in the name of my convenience—cheap clothes and massive landfills and supermarket steaks. This, I realized, was what’s been missing from my family’s communal approach to food—an acknowledgment of how our choices had an impact beyond our home. And I didn’t know what else to do but say no.
I called my mother and told her Thanksgiving had better be good, because it would be my last meal eating meat.
She said, “I am going to have to learn to cook all over again.”
JUST A FEW months later, I was drinking cheap beer from cans with Meghan and Caity outside a house beaten by age and heavy partying. We’d met the four men who lived there just a month or so before, at a bar where their band was playing, when we went back to their place and stayed up all night, smoking cigarettes and playing Trivial Pursuit. Now, it was late March, in the middle of a warm streak. The night smelled like the air would burst into bloom. We were punchy in the way people who live through long dark winters get at the first hints of warmth. Aran, the smallest of the boys, short and absolutely covered in tattoos, had just stolen a motorized shopping cart from the grocery store down the street and ridden it the entire two miles back to his house, at about half a mile an hour. He had a lit time bomb inked onto his forearm, the red-orange flame looking as if it burned his skin. He sat in the open windowsill, feet dangling into the night, and watched us.
Meghan was supposed to be giving me a trim with the clippers we’d borrowed from the boys. Like many twenty-year-olds who are angry at the world and don’t know where to put it, I had developed an intense love of punk, hardcore, and metal music, and their fuck-you stylings. I’d always kept my hair long, but by the end of my freshman year, my roommate had chopped it off for me—with the scissors from her desk—into a short pixie. Now, this DIY do was getting too long in the back. Some eighties basement-club punk rock was blaring through the open window, and I was sitting on a concrete step with a towel draped around my shoulders when Meghan said, “Hey, do you mind if I try something?”
I bit my lip and looked back over my shoulder at her. “Go for it.”
Aran jumped up and scrambled into the house through the window. “Hang on,” he shouted over the music and into the night, into our looming summer. “Let me get a before picture!”
The hum of the clippers against my scalp felt good, and I leaned into it, and a few minutes later, all that remained was a thin layer of peach fuzz and bangs. Alone in the dirty bathroom, I leaned towards the skim of the mirror and examined myself: mostly-shaved head, two lip piercings, vegetarian—me. I didn’t know yet how I would become the agent of change I so desperately wanted to be, but now I looked the part.
THE NEXT FEW years were a blur of dingy apartments and dingy dorm rooms, gray carpet and any number of obscurely acquired sagging and spotted couches, listening to boys strum acoustic guitars, watching tattooed crowds thrash to loud bands I’d never heard of but moved me to an anger I’d somehow always felt, beginning to think the word “revolution” on a regular basis, new piercings and sociology class discussions, and binges on Smirnoff Ice.
It was in a dorm room the fall after I shaved my head, on a night with warm cheap beer and indie folk music coming from the speakers, showing off my first tattoo—an ampersand between my breasts, to keep it a secret from my parents—that I met the guy who would one day leave me for the West.
He was tall and thin, with glasses with thick brown rims and shaggy ski-bum hair. I’d seen him for months around campus: pilled elbow-patch sweaters from the Salvation Army and a vintage Minolta always around his neck. He seemed to be the perfect blend of sexy and artsy and nerdy when I first laid eyes on him, sitting alone in the dining hall, wearing the hoodie of one of my favorite obscure indie bands, long fingers wrapped around a book. I had a distant lusty crush on him for months before I discovered he—Kevin—shared a dorm room with my friend Matt. The first night we met, as we talked shyly into our cans of Milwaukee’s Best, my hopes of starting something up with him flared and then faded, as he told me he planned to leave Ithaca soon, to transfer by the end of the semester to a college in Montana.
Montana might as well have been Mongolia to me. I had never been to Montana, had practically never heard of Montana, so distant and strange its frontier name seemed compared with the quietly padded forests of my northeastern home.
“What’s in Montana?” I asked him, thinking his explanation would be practical—he had friends or family there, they offered a major in a program he really wanted to study.
Instead, his face lit up with a smile wide enough to shrug his glasses up on his cheeks, eyes grown distant with fantasy. “Really big mountains,” he replied.
I was in love.
And soon, Kevin and I decided we were young enough for a three-month, no-strings-attached, leaving-on-a-jet-plane fling. He had stopped eating red meat years earlier, and within the first month of our dating, he too was a vegetarian. We were all becoming vegetarians then, in our early twenties, in Ithaca and beyond. My high school friends off on their own campuses in New Hampshire and Connecticut and Maine were stumbling across PETA brochures and discovering Thai food and abandoning Tater Tot casserole. We did it just to see if we could, just to see what else would change in our worlds when we discarded our parents’ paradigms about what food is, why we ate it, and how it made us feel.
On one winter break at home, Caity told her mother she was considering becoming vegetarian too. Her mother, a short-haired doctor specializing in HIV/AIDS research, who had raised her three daughters in