Free-Range Guilt

I know several vegetarians, and they all have different reasons for shunning meat. There are the people who won't eat certain kinds of meat but will eat others. There are those who think fish isn't meat. There are the vegans – whom TV chef Anthony Bourdain calls the “Hezbollah faction” of vegetarianism – but even they differ on what constitutes animal product. Deep vegan asceticism forbids not just dairy products but even honey, ‘cuz of them poor ol' bees.

If you're a liberal, like I am, most of your friends are liberal. And if you have a lot of friends, like I do, they have various food issues. If they eat meat, it has to be organic, farm-raised, no hormones. Preferably, the animal was slaughtered in some old-style way in the outdoors, rather than inside a modern warehouse. Depending on how anachronistic the organic slaughter is, there could be a shaman present to obtain the animal's spiritual permission to be hacked to pieces and used as food.

Public aversion to meat is gaining on the profit-driven meat industry. By now most people have heard of the industry's hideous manufacturing process, which packs chickens like so many widgets on an assembly line, pumps them full of hormones and slices their beaks off their faces before transporting them for slaughter, so they won't peck each other on the way. That's pretty cold-blooded, for sure.

But ask the skinny farm-raised rooster racing across the barnyard, away from the hatchet-wielding hippie who just got a shaman's permission to behead old Leghorn, and I think he'll tell you it still sucks to be a chicken.

Other carnivores are less concerned with how the animal died. They care, but only the blood of a beast will slake their Type O blood. So their primary concern is what kind of beast they're eating. Lots of people will eat poultry but not beef or pork. Strict Jews and Muslims won't eat pork; Hindus won't eat beef. The rules are varied and confusing, and often just personal.

“I won't eat anything with a face,” I've heard a few people say. Well, fish have faces. Oysters? Clams? I dunno. Do they have faces? What doesn't have a face? Even bugs and worms have faces.

“I won't eat any mammal.” This one perplexes me. What the hell does that mean? Mammal got its name from mammary: Mammals (for the most part) suckle their mothers' breasts as babes. That's what unites us in our evolutionary journey, so I guess for some folks who think sentimentally of that common ancestor 100-or-so million years back, eating other mother suckers is wrong.

But what if the calf was one of those pitiful orphans on Wild Kingdom and had to be bottle-fed? Mmmm… veal. Though some people refuse to eat the baby cow because it's just a baby. Better to wait 'til he grows up. Then hack him to pieces and eat in good conscience.

Apart from health reasons, economic reasons, political or spiritual reasons (and weird, inane reasons, like the face thing or the mammal thing), there is the moral one. And it's hard to argue with it: Torturing sentient beings and killing them for food is unnecessary for human survival.

OK. Call me evil, but man, I do love it so. I love the taste and texture of animal flesh that's been cooked well and seasoned to perfection. I like my beef still tainted with the slightest tang of raw blood, my organ meat creamy as butter, and I think raw fish RULZ when filleted by an experienced sushi chef. I'm a human being, and that makes me a seriously spiritually flawed, amoral and natural carnivore.

This past New Year's Eve, I sat at a supper table surrounded by Frenchmen. Among the adults, there were four Americans in a group of about 10. Two of the Americans were strict vegetarians, and they were cool about the meat thing; it just wasn't for them. There was only one time they showed any repugnance to the meat the rest of us were eating: when the pâté came out.

Goose liver. Foie gras. Depending on whom you ask, the goose is either force-fed or over-fed until it gets fat enough to kill for its succulent liver. The result is the World Heavyweight Champion of good-goddamn-tasting meat. The morality of its production is questionable at best, inexcusable at worst. Ask a Frenchman how he feels about this, and he will look at you like you are an eediot.

“Intellectually, it's difficult, the ethics of this process. It is cruel, depending on how you define cruel. Aesthetically, it is sublime, which is a state beyond rational comprehension. I would love to talk about this paradox for hours, but I'm hungry, and life is short. Mangeons.”

The contemplation of human cruelty and culinary imperative is followed, fittingly, by the cheese course. I respect vegetarians for their understandable repudiation of meat, but their dairy-damning subset – vegans – strikes me as essentially fundamentalist. I can't help but suspect most vegans never had good cheese, and I'm not talking about the shredded or individually wrapped slices of rubber you find in most supermarkets. I'm talking about the real thing, aged or fresh from the creamery, that you can smell from the next room. Talk about your paradoxes: How could anything that tastes so good smell so, well, flatulent?

So, to appreciate good cheese, your sense of irony has to be as well developed as your palate, which is why many vegans reading this article might not think it's funny. I beg their forgiveness, not only for my cheeky, cheesy stab at humor at their expense, but also for my seeming indifference to the plight of duck, duck and goose. And I offer this penance: I gave up meat for Lent.

If my fast doesn't convert me to a lifetime of vegetarianism, I'll have rabbit for Easter. But just the organic, free-range rabbit, and with the head rabbit's permission.