Although I ate chicken, steak and hamburgers often during my childhood, and particularly loved fried chicken, flank steak, deliciously marinated, and burgers char-grilled over coals, I have been a vegetarian now for seven or eight years.  As they say, just because you’re a vegetarian doesn’t mean bacon stops smelling delicious.  The smell of burgers on a charcoal grill still gets to me, though I haven’t eaten one in years.  Same for pastrami (a childhood delicacy) and barbecued brisket (which I discovered very late in my meat eating life), damn that stuff smells delicious.  As for my vegetarianism, a friend corrects me, I am a pescatarian, since I eat fish a couple of times a week.  

I zestfully ate the lean muscle of many animals over the years, what we call meat, but was always squeamish about eating internal organs, feet and necks.  My mother loved to gnaw on a neck, or chicken feet, working her way around the tiny bones and sucking out the marrow with a smile of pleasure; I’d watch in horror.  Squeamish is defined as a “prudish readiness to be nauseated” and no Victorian lady was ever more ready to recoil prudishly than I was from the smell of a calf’s liver frying with onions.   The odor would literally sicken me and drive me from the house.

Why did I stop eating meat?  I heard Michael Pollan on the radio, a long interview on WNYC, I think he was speaking to the gourmand Leonard Lopate, a man who will seemingly try any food.  Pollan described something I’d witnessed as a teenager and was able to ignore at the time: animals we eat are raised in death camps not much different in spirit than places like Auschwitz.  

Yes, this was an uncomfortable fact, and I’d seen the brutal treatment of tiny chickens and turkeys on kibbutz in Israel, but then Pollan described the intelligence and suffering of these meat animals and I looked over at my cat, a handsome carnivore, and he seemed to nod.  Pigs become very depressed, they are much smarter than dogs, smarter than cats.   They have to be restrained and drugged to stop them from freaking out in the weeks and months before their painful slaughter.  

Delicious, yes, but also way smarter than this cat I like very much. The cat has a personality, preferences, moods, a certain brutal sense of humor.  I will cry when he dies, hopefully many years from now.  Sekhnet will be inconsolable, she cries at the thought of how inconsolable she’ll be.  I suddenly could not eat pork, delicious as it is.  Or cows for that matter, large gentle animals who, raised by the millions for meat, are big players in global warming with their ruminant farting.  Human love of burgers has incented (as the capitalists now say) the destruction of the Amazon jungle, the earth’s lungs, for grazing land for cows.  They say a vegetarian who drives a Humvee has a smaller carbon footprint than a bicyclist who regularly eats cow.  That is another matter, also important, but it was the idea of the terrible lives these sentient animals raised in industrial death camps lead that instantly made me unable to eat meat.  

I recalled the way we chased down baby turkeys, sometimes they were kicked, take four or five in each hand, upside down by the feet, pass them to someone with a pair of clippers who’d snip off their beaks.  A spurt of blood and they’d be passed to someone with a syringe who’d shoot them full of antibiotics, hormones and who knows what else.  Then they were thrown into another section of the enclosure with their squawking, blood spattered colleagues.  I have a vivid memory of these birds, all with blue eyes, suddenly turning into a friend of mine, a beautiful girl with blues eyes.  I excused myself and went into the bathroom to write this up in my journal.  I was eventually rudely called back to work in the turkey coop.   There were thousands more turkeys to get ready for meat and I was a needed volunteer.  Eventually, decades later, after hearing Pollan’s description, I had to stop eating birds too.

This does not make me highly moral, of course.  Hitler was a vegetarian for the last fourteen years of his hideous life.  He gave up meat in penance for his part in the death of the young niece he was obsessed with.  The only woman he ever truly loved, he said later in his life.  At twenty-three Geli Raubal finally shot herself in the lung in 1931, with Hitler’s gun, during the last leg of Hitler’s marathon to power.  Who could blame her?  Hitler was obsessed with her, jealously kept her virtual prisoner in his apartment, and though we may like to think of him looking at her through a bathroom keyhole and jerking off, her nauseated face as he rubbed against her sometimes, it is probably just because Uncle Hitler was fucking Hitler that she chose death over life in the end.   In any case, when he snapped out of his depression and got back to his life’s work, he gave up meat.

So, although I can’t eat meat these days (fish, a hypocritical compromise) I’m not on a moral high horse about it.  I’m on a moral high horse about many other things, of course.  I also wish people would stop eating so much increasingly poisonous and earth-damaging meat, but enough on that.  

Toward the end of my mother’s long death from endometrial cancer she lost a lot of weight.  She had always been very heavy, but after my father’s death, nibbled at by cancer, she lost most of her excess weight.  “The widow’s diet,” she called it, a lost interest in cooking and eating, for the most part.  She was almost gaunt by the end.  

A few years before she died we were driving in her Cadillac in sunny south Florida and she suddenly said “I feel like Golden Corral all of a sudden.  Do you want to go?”   I was hungry, and she expressed so little interest in food, that I immediately I swung the car toward Golden Corral and we got our trays and giant plastic cups.  

Golden Corral is a large scale buffet with many stations.  It’s possible to eat semi-healthily there, if one sticks to three or four foods, but that’s not why people go there.  My mother was thinking of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, a bunch of other things I wouldn’t necessarily put on my plate.  I had not yet heard Michael Pollan’s description of the suffering of animals raised and slaughtered in Auschwitz and I took some fried chicken along with some side dishes.

I’d had a tasty steak there a few weeks earlier, and I took a thin well-done steak as well.  I did not notice the tell-tale onions.   My mother ate the chicken happily for a moment, and then pretty much lost her appetite, the cancer was all over her and probably had something to do with it.  She watched me eat and asked me how I liked this, wasn’t the macaroni and cheese good, and so forth.

I sliced into the thin steak, took a morsel on my fork, put it in my mouth and chewed it.  It tasted funny, it tasted bad.  This was not the tasty steak they’d served for dinner a few weeks earlier, this was some kind of horrible lunch time meat.  

“It’s liver,” I said right after swallowing it, with a nauseated face that made my mother laugh.

“It’s not liver,” she said dismissively.  For some reason I’d swallowed the foul tasting dark meat and I was feeling sicker by the moment.   A waitress passed by.  I asked her if it was liver.  

“Yes,” she said with a big smile, “isn’t it delicious?”   I gave her the expression of Woody Allen about to go into the MRI.   My mother laughed again and told me to grow up, that it wouldn’t kill me.   I wasn’t so sure.  

Not long afterwards I heard Pollan describe the torment of literally tens of millions of animals raised in factories to be killed so we might cook and eat them and I could finally stop worrying about eating liver.