Smoke; part two, the lean years…

SCENE: A household in Texas in the early 90’s, a son confronts his parents with a startling revelation:



SON: “Mom, Dad I’ve got something to tell you.”



FATHER: “You’re gay?”



SON: “No, worse…”



MOTHER: “Oh my god, Sam, he’s a vegetarian!”



There are a lot of things that can go through the mind of a cook or a butcher whose profession involves the handling of meats daily and often. I’m sure I don’t speak only for myself when I consider the speculation involved in the quartering of a chicken or a rabbit, when the mind wanders to a pet cat or dog, or the way a knife passes through a meaty joint of pork or lamb and considering one’s own cut-ability. Perhaps even more disturbing are the thoughts that creep in when handling the less blatantly obviously animal of the meats, for instance opening a case of four layers of six ounce boneless, skinless chicken breasts, twenty-four to a layer, each identical piece separated into its own little plastic tray. What kind of world produces such cases upon cases of these disturbing ‘protein delivery systems’, and what is to be said about the consumers who demand it? These can be weird and terrible thoughts, and they inevitably lead to a black sense of humour among cooks. I used to love the way the fat trimmed from the chicken breasts looked like giant loogies; the waitresses, however, were not nearly as impressed. No doubt, some Sigmund would describe this as some sort of coping mechanism, which is fine, and I would hope we could all laugh in the face of our own darkness, but not too much, and not to excuse it. All things considered, we are meat and our rationalizations for consuming it will always be tempered by that honest truth. In the early nineties, my response to this philosophical hypocrisy was simple: I quit eating it.



My first wife’s father was a rancher; it was his first and third career. In between, he was a civil engineer. His first career, because he was raised with it, and his third, because even after years of schooling and years of well-paid high level work in engineering firms in Dallas, he couldn’t get it out of his blood and returned. In the city, he heard (herded?) the cows in his sleep, mooing for him to come home. Or something like that. He was a good intentioned man, which is not to say he was a good man. Cattle were something he thought he understood, unlike the employees at the big firm or even his own family. He worked with the cattle like he would have approached an engineering question: with a desire to produce the most beef per acre at the lowest cost. Dogs and cats on the farm were treated with the same callous disregard for health or hardship and were only allowed their share of the food when their usefulness (as mousers or herders) warranted it; they certainly weren’t allowed inside and affection (or a trip to the vet) was out of the question.



Maybe my ex-wife’s inheritance of this attitude of disrespect for animals was what lead to our demise-- our last big fight was about the fact that I shelled out a pile of cash to save our dog’s life without consulting her (how many marriages have cell phones saved?), but probably not, as we were headed apart anyway. But it is no coincidence that my exit from that animal-hating family put me off the meat industry for a while. When people ask me about why I became a vegetarian, I usually crack wise about getting thin to pick up chicks after my first divorce or crack sincere about how I was always a lover of the environment and animals and life in general and couldn’t reconcile that with my experience of the meat production industry from within. Well there’s actually a partial explanation within both of those reasons and in the story of the rancher above, and in the meat cutting story in the previous paragraph. None of us do anything for just one reason, we do things for one just reason. To me it all goes back to one little lie. One day in the field with my father-in-law I pushed the punch into the calf’s ear for a tag and felt the large animal shudder with pain, and my father-in-law said the following:



“Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt them.”



They say that one of those stages of addiction (or is it grief?) is denial. And we are addicted to the consumption of meat, without question. There are millions of us who satisfy our itches with booze or drugs, but there are billions and billions of us who satisfy our itches with a Big Mac. The only way we can collectively justify that industry created by our addiction to cheap meat is to hide it on the fringes of our vision. We don’t see the killing floors on our televisions or in our grocery stores; our feedlots do not offer guided tours. Our meat comes to us on sale, pre-cut and pre-cleaned on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in cellophane, and we buy it with out ever looking at the guts, brains or the eyeballs of the animal from which it came. We collectively deny the animal’s pain. When I lost my ability to deny it, I had to confront it, and I had to quit.



But wait, isn’t this supposed to be about barbecue? Now you’ve got us addicted to eating food? That’s like saying we are addicted to air! We have to breathe don’t we? Well, to that point I must ask, how quickly would our lives change if we had to pay for air? Bet the cheap stuff would go quick and somebody would figure out a way to market second hand smoke to children (“Keeps you alive for a few years for under 99 cents and it comes with a free toy!”) In other words, there are right ways and wrong ways to do everything. There is always more to the story than meets (meats? Sorry, that was completely uncalled for…) the eye…



Stay tuned for part three…