The truth is that I’m a congenital vegetarian. I didn’t know that until I had my first child, but I knew, from the first time somebody tried to put dead animal puree on my lips, that I didn’t want dead animals in my mouth.
It was never a moral issue for me. Two year olds aren’t keen on moral issues. Or, rather, they are keen on moral issues, but their morality is based on old-fashioned ideals of, “I like it, give it to me,” or “I hate it, take it away from me.” You know, the in-born morality of tiny (and large) humans since time began. The morality that mom, dad, church, school, legislative bodies and peer pressure try to steer us away from.
My childhood was an unending nightmare of: “Eat your meat.” “You won’t leave this table until you eat your meat.” “Just take a bite.” “Look, three more bites and you’re done!” “There’s nothing wrong with that.” “It does not taste nasty.” “Yes, you have to eat the fat too.” “That’s not gristle, that’s meat.” Well, you see what I mean. Although, we hit a shocking low with the famous, “Here’s what you didn’t eat last night. You can have it for breakfast.”
By the time we reached the, “stick the plate in the fridge and serve it for breakfast,” point, I had become a daily vomiter. Apparently, my parents had the crazy idea that certain people, faced with a tasty dish of arsenic, dog poop, cow boogers and live worms could simply *will* themselves to vomit rather than doing the decent, civilized thing of shoveling it in with a smile. It was not only a living nightmare, I had nightmares about it.
I think things came to a head one evening when I was about eight or nine. I walked into the kitchen, saw the round steak steaming on its plate, saw the fat, knew that it boded gristle, and began to cry. I said I wasn’t hungry, but they were too smart to buy that. I was ordered to sit down and eat. I began baby-stepping toward the table as I cried and, before I even sat down, I was staring fixedly at the platter of meat and gagging.
My father started screaming about how long we had to put up with my bullshit, I started wailing and dry heaving, and my mother told me to go to my room. Release! No, of course not. My mother came in to inform me that I didn’t get out of eating dinner. Back to the table, crying and pleading. I really, really hated round steak – fat and gristle, you know. I don’t know how many dinner plates I stared at with hunks of half-chewed gristley meat in a tidy pile next to the remnants of green beans and mashed potato. It was just dinner.
I was marched back to the kitchen where my father informed me that we would never again have vomiting at the table. I have no idea what the implied threat was. I was sobbing hysterically as I popped a yummy bit of steak in my mouth. Yeah, you guessed it, it wasn’t going to my stomach without a fight. It would have had to get past my tongue. My tongue was the sentinel to prevent meat fat from getting to my stomach. My tongue felt meat fat, the gag reflex kicked in, my father screamed, “Don’t you vomit on this table!”, and as I rushed to push my chair back, I vomited on the floor.
Ah, dinner with the family in the fifties. Good times, good times.
Fortunately, my father told me to get out. Release! Only this time I wasn’t force marched back to the dinner table. I really truly didn’t have to eat dinner.
I have no idea what went on in my absence. But there was screaming and yelling. I was just grateful that I wasn’t one of the ones doing the screaming. Eventually my bedroom door opened and that was enough to set me crying. I figured I was in for the you-will-sit-in-the-dark-kitchen-by-yourself-until-you-finish-your-dinner treatment. But, no. Apparently there were to be changes in the dinner routine.
I would no longer be expected to eat fat. All fat would be trimmed from my portion of meat. All my meat would be cut into tiny pieces, and in the cutting process all gristle would be removed. All I had to do was eat the meat without gagging, heaving and vomiting. Would I promise to do that? Of course I promised. What was I supposed to do – disagree?
Shortly after that a friend told me she avoided nasty food by sneaking it into her pocket and secretly giving it to the family dog later. Worked a treat, except for when I got caught. It was just something else to get beaten for. It certainly didn’t stop me.
I was getting older and wiser. I learned to sneak some of my meat to my brother. I learned to hold it under my tongue – they can see it when you hold it in your cheek. Mealtimes grew calmer. Except when I couldn’t get to the dog and forgot to flush the meat down the toilet. Then my mom would find it in my pockets when she did laundry. No, life wasn’t smooth meat-wise, far from it. But, I realize now, that my mother was determined not to let my father in on my continued dislike of meat. Like all mothers, before and since, she was trying to be the buffer zone. She was trying to promote peace.
In later years, much later, like when I was in my forties, my mother told me some of the things that were behind the meat drama. It started with my grandmother and grandfather insisting that I was not taking enough formula, I was too skinny. Then it moved on to I wasn’t eating enough meat, I was too pale and I’d become anemic.
Guess what came next! That’s right, my doctor put me on a foul liquid iron tonic because I was anemic from all my nosebleeds. Luckily the doctor told my mom that my not eating lots of meat had nothing to do with the anemia, it was plain old loss of blood. Not that that bit of medical wisdom convinced anyone but my mom! I don’t know what the iron tonic was made of but sometimes I puked it up. I was just grateful I didn’t have to hold it in my mouth long enough to chew it, which made it slightly less nausea-inducing than meat.
We moved when I was ten and I got a different doctor. Hooray! No more iron tonic! Shortly before my 11th birthday I started having periods. *sigh* My mother had a serious and private talk with me about needing to eat more meat to make up for the blood loss. Naturally, I pointed out that I no longer had nosebleeds, and Dr Underwood didn’t think I needed iron tonic. We uneasily agreed that, as long as I didn’t become anemic, I didn’t have to immediately begin increased meat consumption.
I pointed out that if they tried to make me eat more meat, it would mean that Poco (the family watch-Chihuahua) would eat more meat, not me. Yeah, I caught hell for saying that. It was an ugly scene, but it passed. Either my mother gave up on me, or she recognized that I was vomiting less as I grew up and developing other coping skills, or maybe she figured I was going to be a bitch for a week every month.
Let me digress a moment. Women’s hormones make them bitches a week in every month, right? Not me. As I explained to my first husband many years after the famous-in-the-family comment about the dog getting more meat if they tried to shove it onto me:
“All the nasty things I say during my period are simply what I’m thinking the other three weeks of the month. It isn’t hormones talking. It’s me talking. Stop blowing it off as me in a bad mood. Of course I’m in a bad mood. I’m silent and compliant three weeks out of every four, no matter what happens. That would put you in a bad mood too. I can cope with cramps or I can cope with you, but I can’t do both at once. Start taking notes during my period. Come back to me a week or so later and ask me if I was serious about what I said.”
Naturally, he didn’t take notes and he didn’t ask me diddley when I was “non hormonal.” Obviously other women may have different mileage. *Your* wife probably doesn’t mean it at all when she says you’re a lazy, self-indulgent, balding, red necked, pencil-dicked, sandwich eating, slug with the sensitivity of a concrete driveway. She probably won’t still be saying that to you after she stops having periods, huh?
Back to the meat–
So, I figured there was something “wrong” with me because I didn’t like meat, and I couldn’t get past the childish habit of gagging when meat fat touched my tongue. Then my first child was born. She refused to eat meat. The closest I could get her to it was Gerber “Cereal, egg yolk and bacon.”
Now, by the time my daughter was born I had learned to eat lean tender cuts of meat in public. I was socially acceptable. I ate meat to fit in, and I ate other sources of protein to get the necessary amount of it into my body.
When the pediatrician said it was time to introduce meat into Darshana’s diet, I was shocked to discover that she had come into the world with a strong aversion to meat. I didn’t know why, but I was sure it had nothing to do with her ethics or morality. That’s when the polite tussle with, and the lying to, the pediatrician began.
I had idiotically assumed that he was the guy who would tell me what to feed her instead of meat so that she’d be healthy. For well over a year, I’d say, “She still refuses meat. What should I give her instead?” And every time he answered, “Keep giving her meat” I tried approaching the subject a million ways, but all he ever said was, “Keep giving her meat.”
I stopped asking for his help in guiding her nutrition when he said, “She’ll learn to like meat.” My blood ran cold. What if she didn’t? What if there were human beings, otherwise regular humans, who were born without the I-want-to-chew-on-a-dead-mastodon gene? If such a thing were possible, it looked like I had birthed just such a human. So I turned my “pre internet research” skills to getting the correct amount of protein into her body without the convenience of Gerber pureed dead animal.
Then, not long before she turned two, she surprised me again. We went to Whopper Burger. Her dad and I got hamburgers and fries, and she had whatever I had brought for her from home. She usually ate some of our fries. But, on that forever remembered night, she insisted on a burger of her own. So we got her a baby burger, assuming that she’d eat some of the bun.
She took the meat off the bun – and she ate it! She ignored the bun and fries. She ate just the meat! Well, I figured she’d never has a weight issue since there seemed to be a Dr-Atkin’s-Diet gene that kicked in around the age of two.
I was wrong about that too. Apparently she had the I’m-not-eating-pureed-animals gene, in addition to the I-can’t-wait-until-I’m-old-enough-for-fast-food gene. McDonalds was her best friend until she was ten, when she said:
“Why do we have to have McDonalds again?”
I replied, “Because your brother is only two and he’ll eat it. Besides, when did you stop liking McDonalds?”
Ah, my congenital meat hater was back. Mind you, she never had eaten meat unless it was on a hamburger bun, still she did eat it for almost eight years. My husband and I think it was because of the kiddie meals at fast food places. Once she had no more interest in kiddie meal toys, she reverted to type.
Over the next eight years she ate meat sometimes, but she always ordered veggie plates in restaurants. I don’t know what she’d have done as a woman. I suspect she’d have cut out meat entirely. She died when she was 18, so I can only speculate.
My boys never disliked meat. They ate Gerber pureed dead animal with the same enthusiasm they had for spinach and carrots. Or, maybe they didn’t have full-functioning taste buds. I mean, is it normal for your favorite Gerber food to be spinach? It didn’t matter to them – cow, pig, chicken, fish, whatever. Although I suspect it’s a taste bud issue because my pureed-spinach-lover graduated to mustard smeared zwieback.
I let them and their bodies decide what they wanted to eat, and the only drama we ever had was with my husband thinking they needed to clear their plates. I made allowances for him growing up during the depression, but I was adamant that nobody had to eat anything they didn’t want to eat in my house.
My children died 19 years ago this December so I don’t know how they’d have related to food as adults. Considering my daughter’s congenital vegetarianism, and my boys’ extreme sympathy for baby seaIs, I think they might not have been adult meat eaters. Children who have their bedrooms covered with pictures of baby animals (before they get slaughtered) probably don’t grow into steak tartare and sushi eaters. And I’m pretty sure they don’t become enamored of blood red juices oozing out of rare steaks.
They might have grown up into adults with “moral and ethical issues.”
I did my best to help them see that their bodies belonged to them, and their food choices were theirs to make. My job was to cook it and dish it out onto their plates, not to turn it into anything except what they needed to survive.
I’ve always enjoyed the food channels’ shows in the week before Thanksgiving. But, this year, I keep seeing all those turkey drumsticks walking around. I see the tails spread proudly, I see their large breasts and think about how they weren’t walking around, they were caged, otherwise they wouldn’t have half so much white meat. I wish I wouldn’t do that. I had a Jason’s Deli Turkey Wrap last night and couldn’t eat it all.
The animals I eat used to be alive, just like me. They had legs, just like me. I really don’t want to think like this. I’m diabetic now so I need not to eat lots of carbohydrates. I already don’t like the taste of dead animals, but at least they don’t have carbohydrates. And I’ve insisted that we switch to only “ethically raised” animals for eating.
But is it ethical to kill animals so that I (or anybody) can eat their dead flesh? I’m not the person to answer that question. I was born not wanting to eat dead animals. How much of *my* answer would be dead animal flesh aversion masquerading as ethics and morality?
I’ve read several things lately that say humans were healthy until we started farming. All that meat was so darn good for us, and all that grain is killing us. I think there’s a lot of BS in that. Or maybe it’s just plain old disinformation to prepare us for lab created meat, which is supposed to be so much better for us than the old fashioned kind, you know, the kind that reproduces on its own.
I suspect that mankind was healthy until “money” was invented. Look at the corporate control of food in America. They’re in it for the money, nothing else. And are we a healthy nation?
I still think there are congenital vegetarians in the world. Maybe they’re the ones driving the “ethical treatment of food animals” movement – and they don’t even realize their true motives! I can’t judge anybody else, I only know what motivates me.
BTW, I also read something recently about how chickens are so lucky that we eat them. It seems that without humans eating lots of them they’d have died out long ago. I understood the guy’s reasoning perfectly. He made a good argument. But, inside me is a three-year-old screaming, “No! I’m not hungry!”
Do some research on what you put into your body. Hunger is coming to America, has already arrived for too many of us, was always here for some of us. If you still have the luxury of turning down seconds or thirds this Thanksgiving, please be thankful for that. It you still have family members to join you for Thanksgiving Dinner, even if you don’t know how you’ll be able to buy the food to feed them, be thankful for their presence.
In the end, no matter who’s at your table, no matter what you do or don’t have to eat, be thankful you’re alive. And, please, donate at least a nickel to any place that’s trying to feed and shelter the homeless and hungry this Thanksgiving.
Choose wisely what you put in your stomach and mind and heart, America. You’re making moral and ethical choices today.
November 24, 2009
