MONDOmagazine

A spirited defense of why it is sometimes okay to MURDER a helpless animal and eat it.

By Leo K. Moncel

Meat, meat, meat, you femme fatale. You’re literally killing Canadians as I write this. You’re killing the planet faster than ever. I used to know better than to tango with you. But I’m done with this love/hate relationship. Wicked, corrupting as you are, I’m giving my heart to you. You’re my salty poison and my never-ending possibility. I love you more than I thought was possible in my youth.

I did away with you, once, for five whole years. Today, I consider myself a former vegetarian, though it’s now been almost a decade since I gave up a meatless diet. When I ended my vegetarian period, I swore to myself I’d return to vegetarianism in my 20’s. I will not keep that promise. This is why.

At age nine, I became a vegetarian for moral reasons. I ate well with the help of my vegetarian mother and my gifted-in-the-kitchen father. I defended my decision against other adults who told me things like, I was “too young to have convictions”, or made prophesies about my iron-depleted body shriveling away like a raisin. I was an excellent defender, if not proselytizer, of my beliefs. For all that time, my entire adolescence, I never lost the appetite for meat. When asked if I missed meat, I confessed that occasionally I got a “craving for bacon”, but truthfully, anytime I got quite hungry, I thought about eating meat.

It was for bad reasons that I abandoned vegetarianism — the push of school bullying and the pull of fast food did me in during grade nine. Meat eating, I told myself, would be the phase, vegetarianism, the course, and after this weakness passed I’d get back on the wagon. After my lapse into meat eating, my sister too succumbed. Now we were teenagers trying to figure out how to cook meat at home. Mainly we bought chicken breasts and baked them in the oven, usually with salt and pepper and sometimes with honey and garlic. I ate meat infrequently and cooked it simply.

About a year and a half ago, I was eating some delicious pork and cabbage dumplings at my soon-to-be-girlfriend’s house. I went out on a limb and decided to try some chili sauce with them. I detested chilies. Chili heat was not a taste, but simply an experience like scalding your tongue or biting your cheek. Well, a little bit of the slightly sweet Sriracha chili sauce with these delectable dumplings and I did a total 180 on chilies. My reversal on chilies was the start of a full-on food obsession. Within a week, I made a trip to the library and returned with a backpack full of cookbooks and the beginnings of a huge project.

In the last 18 months since the chili sauce, food has become my central preoccupation. My teen self had no idea that the self he was calling back to vegetarianism would be someone who read cookbooks, talked for hours about cooking, who photographed and wrote about what he ate — someone with a wholly different relationship to food, and more intensely in love with food than he imagined he’d ever become.

I still believe, as I did when I was younger, that eating meat is both wrong and avoidable. So, is it ever okay? Sort of. I’m of the school that says you must pick your poisons. You can’t do nothing but poison yourself and the world around you, because it will catch up to you.* Then again, a little bit of poison now and then is just the ticket. A life of harsh, ascetic deprivation wouldn’t be worth living for most of us. When I decide which wrongs to indulge in, I ask how big the benefit really is to me. In the case of eating meat, the benefit is enormous. When I cook now, I don’t just do it to sustain myself, but as a form of exploration and even self-expression. Driving your car is wrong, but how wrong it is depends, in my view, on why you’re driving and where you’re going. If you drive somewhere nearby because you don’t feel like walking, that is a worse use of your car than, say, exploring a waterfall with a friend. This is how I look at meat eating. If you eat meat everyday because you can’t think of any other way to fill yourself up, you are using meat wrong. If you’re judicious in your meat consumption, if you make the effort to turn each cut of meat into an exciting or enriching meal, you are using meat right.

If you don’t really care about food (a small minority, I admit, probably only 10% of people I meet — and probably not one of you who’s read this far — but still more than double the 4% of Canadians who are now vegetarian), perhaps meat is a poison you can live without. You should consider vegetarianism.

I realize that the argument being made here — basically, “I appreciate meat and therefore should have it, but if you don’t really appreciate it, go without” — may appear to echo old classicist justifications for keeping poor people malnourished. “Oh, the poor wouldn’t know what to do with beef if they got it, so it’s okay we rich hoard it all!” But, in the present-day Canadian context, where everyone but the extremely poor can afford meat, all I’m really saying is that with all these inexpensive poisons at hand, pick yours with care. Mine is meat. Maybe it’s yours, too, maybe not.

Ironically, the average vegetarian cares far more about what he or she eats (including taste and texture) than the average meat eater.** But, after much consideration, it is my opinion that a lifelong strict vegetarian can never be a true lover of food. Breadth of palette is, to me, essential to the exploration and appreciation of food. The biggest difference between my attitude towards meat at 14 and my attitude now, is that back then I wanted meat for its familiarity and now I want it for its undiscovered joys. I can’t preemptively give meat a flat “no” because I’ve never tried kibbi stuffed with pine nuts, or sliced ox tongue, or steamed meatballs coated with sticky rice. In refusing meat altogether, vegetarians close the door to an enormous world of tastes and textures. If a person told me they wouldn’t ever eat any kinds of tomatoes, peppers, onions, mushrooms, or leafy vegetables, I would likewise say that I could not consider that person a true lover of food. They would have closed the door too tightly.

In defence of the vegetarian, they close the door for excellent reasons. I admire vegetarians. I could not have spent five years as a vegetarian if I didn’t, in a large way, believe in vegetarianism. Don’t believe for a minute that it makes no difference to the world if you choose to eat meat or not. Vegetarians are surely making the world a lessbad place. I simply can’t banish from the kitchen my vicious darling, meat, while I have so much left to explore.

* I wrote this passage pre-listeriosis. I meant poison more in the sense of the wrongdoings we indulge in, but if people want to be more literal here, for the record, I don’t think meat is generally a healthy option.

** Road test this one, ask a vegetarian what they ate for dinner last night.