Meeting meat

It was like one of those crystal balls you shake that would give you a winter snowfall scene, except that this one was a recycled wine bottle and it had home-grown gin in it with a dead sea-horse visibly "swimming" in it. A Vietnamese scientist served this to us as we sat on the floor of his tiny house. We were supposed to drink it. I could not.

On another day in another place in Vietnam, excited to have found an eatery in a remote island, we sat and just pointed to anything on the menu and casually asked what it was. As a response, the waiter "barked" and suspecting our disbelief, he said "dog" which promptly elicited our objections. We turned to another page and pointed again. The waiter replied, "ngeow" and once again, was lone witness to our expressed morning horror. Frustrated and puzzled, he motioned for us to stand and walk toward the big sign which was written in Vietnamese outside his eatery. We then understood. Translated, the sign said "Cat and Dog Restaurant."

When I was a child, I watched numerous times when my mom would kill a chicken with her own hands to make our own stew at home. This was usually a chicken she would buy alive and take care of for a while. I did watch and I squirmed while doing it but I ate nevertheless afterwards, in fact with gusto. But we never spoke of the chicken when it was alive while we ate it. How could I eat an animal that was killed in measured slaughter while I stood and watched but cannot even imagine having a morsel of what had been killed behind my back?

While converting to vegetarianism may be good for the world’s sustainability and your personal health, our very anatomical evolution as human beings, with sharp teeth and corresponding digestive processes, are proofs that it is not against our nature to eat meat; that we, indeed, have survived eating meat, i.e., other animals. But over the last three decades or so, people have raised the matter well to the level of thoughtful debate. I will not go into the psychological divide between eating wild versus domesticated animals but to the extent human appetites have increased in both numbers and the kinds of animals they pursue in their quest for gastronomic novelty and the mostly male-driven quest for the ultimate aphrodisiac, the consequences for the non-human world have transformed. We have reduced entire species of animals to near extinction. I personally heard a science writer speak about a scientific expedition to find the Golden Moon Bear. When they had found one alive in an Asian market, it was limping because one of its paws was cut and sold. They left him alive till other buyers come and take his other body parts, not one less for their "aphrodisiac powers," this claim albeit lacking basis in science. A limping bear made so because one human being wants to "rage in the dying of the light" and thinks bear paws can make his apparatus do so. Personally knowing this, I can think of very few other direct reasons for "shrinkages" in the character of anyone who after knowing what happens to these animals, are still willing to pop a pill or two containing "bear paws."

I think we have reached a point that it is no longer a question of whether it is natural to eat meat but whether, as Michael Pollan, once wrote in a New York Times article, we should reduce what we consider "moral" or "ethical" to what is "natural." I agree with Pollan on a particular point he raised that it is important that the one intending to eat another animal, as much as he or she can, watch it get killed. I also think that "participating" in the killing of an animal, whether as population check, or part of some ancient hunting tradition, is a transformative act. Richard Nelson, a zoologist and nature writer, in an essay called "The Gifts" (The Nature Reader, 1996) let us in on the humbling experience of hunting deer. After he has shot the deer once and killed it, he prepares the meat with his own hands and blades it. What he writes, I think, could be said of any animal we eat.

"A meal could not be simpler, more satisfying, or more directly a part of the living process… when we eat the deer its flesh is then our flesh. The deer changes form and becomes us, and we in turn become creatures made of deer. Each time we eat deer, we should remember it and feel gratitude for what it has given us. And each time, we should carry a thought like a prayer inside ‘Thanks to the animal and to all that made it – the island and the forest, the air, and the rain…’ We should remember that in the course of things, we are all generations of deer and of the earth-life that feeds us."

What I feel as a disjunction is not the fact that we still eat meat but the smugness and the chosen ignorance we exhibit as we all increasingly live in places where other creatures are already neatly cut up in supermarket freezers or in those quaint boxes in medicinal stores. We not only deceive ourselves that we can separate life and death by masking it with cellophane and glass; we also want to brag about it and put a price premium on species that put up a fight to join the frozen or dehydrated ranks so that tiger testicles and rhinoceros horns demand more cash from their buyers.

Whether or not you personally believe the animal "feels" any "suffering" (not pain which is always, of course, present as long as nerves are active), the experience of eating another animal should never be purely mechanical all the time. You need not engage in an ancient ritual all the time or dramatize every lunch you have with chants of grace. As a human being, we still so far, seem to be the only creature aware of what death and life mean or even bother to think about it. As such, we look for connections and meaning in everything. Eating an animal is one shot at it. At the very least, we can think. Think of the connections you have with the life of the creature whose fate crossed with yours in this glazed plate or glass before you. Meet meat unhurriedly. It does not bring back the creature to life but this act of thoughtfulness and respect would naturally empower your character better than any aphrodisiac by an order of magnitude.