I’M READING Jonathan Safran Foer and he’s saying that eating a dog is the equivalent of eating a pig. I look at Lola. She narrows her eyes.
“Just try me,” she says, or would say, if I got her one of those talking collars like in the movies. Rest assured, I’m not going to try her, but I get his point. Which is not, it turns out, that we should be eating them all – pigs, cows, dogs, cats, aging aunties, etc. Rather, that the sentiments preventing me from eating Lola should equally prevent me from eating, er, Porkie.
I think of George Clooney. For many reasons, but at this particular juncture, because he has a pet pig. Or had a pig until Max died of old age after 18 years of close companionship: they even shared a bed, rumour has it. Though to dine on one’s sleeping companion would be a serious faux pas in most eyes, it does make you wonder whether, even if he let Max RIP, Clooney still chomped on BLTs with the same relish as the rest of us.
But I digress. The point is whether Safran Foer – author of beloved books such as Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and now of a new polemic, Eating Animals– is right when he tells us not to eat the animals. Lola wags her tail in agreement. But doggy, look away because the big problem with such theorising is that animals are delicious! And I say this as one who has done her time.
I was a fully paid-up vegetarian for 12 worthy years. Nary a hunk of red flesh passed my lips between the ages of 16 and 28, and my belly was a stranger to the joys of full Irish breakfasts and steak sandwiches. Yet every single time I mentioned my vegetarianism, usually sotto voceto a host or waiter, non-vegetarians would leap out of their seats and stride across dinner tables demanding I explain myself.
The reason for my vegetarianism was embarrassingly simple: I liked animals and didn’t see that I needed to eat them for my own survival. But you can’t be telling that to someone when they’re chewing through a T-bone without it falling somewhere between impolite and self-righteous.
That’s the problem with such decisions: the implied judgment that if I’m not eating the poor animals, I’m looking down my nose at you for doing so. And by God those flesh-tearing carnivores did not take lightly to such judgments. Later, I found several more palatable reasons for not eating meat – relating to the environment and world food shortages and health – that I trotted out whenever cornered, but inside it was still all about Daisy the cow.
Then I went to Argentina, home of the carne-only diet. The first time I was invited over to dinner at an Argentine friend’s house, I found he had gallantly forked out a week’s salary – this during a massive economic crisis – on a seriously fatted calf for the delectation of his foreign guest. I wasn’t going to nibble at the salad like a jumped-up European. So I ate the cow. The cow was tasty. I ate another.
And so I proceeded to eat my way through entire herds over the ensuing four years, and came home remade as an ex-vegetarian with a few mumbled excuses about happy cows and not eating battery-farmed chickens. You know, because I still had my principles.
How did I go back to eating meat? By not thinking about what it represented. One doesn’t get far in this life without learning to suppress a moral qualm or two, after all. Plus I hate to miss out on something, particularly a good culinary experience, and never enjoyed being the awkward eater requiring special consideration at every dinner party. And I liked the taste of it. Of all that I’d been missing, of steaks and sausages and lamb roasts and ham sandwiches. A breakfast roll is hardly a breakfast roll without the rashers, now is it?
But Safran Foer has me thinking all over again, and I’m considering giving the whole vegetarian thing another go. I’m just not sure how far I want to go, and where I can draw the moral line without sacrificing so much of what I hold dear (or delicious).
Say I stop eating meat and poultry. Does the fish have to go too? What about cheese and eggs? Et tu butter? Am I really going to contend that while they may not enjoy being butchered, cows are just wild about having tubes tied to their udders and being milked on a daily basis? Then there’s leather, and wool, all those shoes and bags and hats and scarves that beg their own questions. This is the problem with moral decisions: short of relinquishing all, à la Gandhi, I’m bound to fall foul of the hypocrisy police at some stage.
And the bottom line is, I don’t want to be picky. I’m Irish after all, raised in a country where to be picky around food is a sin far greater than eating your dog. My attention, however, has been called to a whole new label for me and my ilk: flexitarian, or those who eat mainly vegetarian food with occasional meat consumption (whenever you don’t want to be awkward . . . or starve.)
Sure, it’s a diluted kind of philosophy, a triumph of pragmatism over purity of purpose: I draw the lines where I do sometimes for my own convenience, and sometimes because it’s just better to do a little something than to do nothing at all. So I’m not eating Lola, but I might eat Max’s relatives if they were served up in such a manner that it’d be rude to refuse. I’m flexi, see? But picky? Never.
fionamccann@irishtimes.com