The New York Times promotes vegetarianism at long last

I found it highly amusing to open The New York Times this weekend—okay, to browse the ‘Week In Review’ online—and discover an article enumerating the reasons not to eat meat.

I don’t have any disagreement with the content, neither on grounds of data nor ethics. My amusement stems from the simple fact that these reasons are the same ones that led me, and many of my friends, to stop eating meat 17 years ago as teenagers. The negatives of meat consumption haven’t changed; if anything they’ve become more widespread in the United States since 1990. Ill animals crowded together on mounds of their own waste; land and water resources used to grow grain for animals rather than people; huge amounts of fertilizer and—let’s just call it what it is—poop running off and leaching into water systems. Back then, the factoids—’about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption,’ for example—were distributed in photocopied zine-like publications hand to hand; they were what we brandished to explain and justify our choices to those around us who didn’t understand the lure of going vegetarian.

Oops, did I say vegetarian? Silly me! The New York Times managed to run an entire article about the general benefits of vegetarianism—that is what not eating meat is, right?—without ever printing the dirty word, and there I go busting it out in the second paragraph. Well, not quite never: the article’s author takes pains to clarify that he is not one, despite having published a vegetarian cookbook. Which I’d think would make some readers question his authority on the subject of vegetarian cooking, but that’s neither here nor there. My point: it seems odd that an entire article lauding the virtues of meat-free eating would shun the term used to describe such a dietary choice.

It could be that Bittman is simply being exacting in his terminology: if one doesn’t give up meat entirely, then one is not technically a vegetarian. The inverse of this truism—if one is a vegetarian, one also doesn’t eat the less attractive animals like clams—is something all of us have had to explain at one point or another to a well-meaning (and frequently elderly) relative, so it’s possible. It’s possible, but its seems—to my jaundiced sociological eye—that something more is going on here. It may be becoming more hip and classy to eat less meat, but it is just as un-hip as ever to identify as a vegetarian outside of certain established subcultures. We seem to be moving away from a definition rooted in the core ethical foundation for vegetarian choices, and toward one focused on a minute tally of each eating decision. In this framework, nothing less than perfection is ‘allowed’ to label itself vegetarianism, and every imperfect manifestation is open to being lambasted as hypocritical (‘how can you refuse to buy CAFO beef when I just saw you eat that salmon?’). In this way, vegetarian becomes a dirty word, code for a judgmental snob at best and a snarking hypocrite at worst, a label that no normal person in their right mind would willingly take on.

The truth is, though, that vegetarian—like organic—is a word that reflects a multi-faceted philosophy of interaction with the natural world. It encompasses systematic beliefs about resource management, human labor, compassion in life and death, moderated consumption, and respect for the balance inherent in natural processes. Any particular conviction will be of differing priority for each person, but the collective manifestations of holding them are similar and recognizable. They are, generally speaking, visible to an outside observer as the choices recommended by Bittman in The New York Times. Eat less meat, as little as you’re willing to. Buy meat and other animal products from people who have raised and killed the animals humanely, cleanly, healthily, and with minimal impact on the surrounding environment. Don’t waste a lot of other natural resources getting that food to your table. Eat things that improve your own general health, such as fresh vegetables, legumes, and whole fruit.

It would be accurate to say that I am a vegetarian and I eat meat. Fifteen years ago I wouldn’t have been comfortable enough with my dietary choices to be able to say that, nor would it have been accurate; my consumption of animal flesh back then would have been completely accidental. Over the past decade my choices have changed, though, and I’ve slowly incorporated more meat into my eating. Some of the times I’ve eaten meat in the past decade have stemmed from my inability to resist a slice of mouth-watering pepperoni pizza. Most of them, however, have been the result of more purposeful and systematic choices. My ethics and beliefs have never wavered, and the actions they recommend remain the same. However, in the intervening years since I first swore off animal flesh, I’ve gained additional information about my own physiology that has led me to reconsider certain choices.

I still don’t eat beef or pork (pepperoni lapses aside), because I believe the consumption of resources necessary to raise the animals and their generally poor quality of life to be too great a cost for me to be willing to pay. I make a different evaluation about various types of wild fish and chickens raised by my local organic farmer. I choose not to eat soy in order not to exacerbate the symptoms of my thyroid disease, a choice which dramatically limits the prepared vegetarian foods available to me in the United States. I make similar choices regarding where I get our eggs (our farmer) and milk (the Organic Valley cooperative). All of these are within the context of a web of interrelated considerations related to global economics, environmental impact, labor, and animal welfare.

The end result is that every day—ethically, philosophically, and politically—I am still a vegetarian. And, a couple of days a week as an eater, I am not.

The New York Times promotes vegetarianism at long last

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

This is another book I’ve had for years and just now got around to reading. Prodigal Summer is a lovely novel, one of my favorites by Barbara Kingsolver. Before this book, the only novel of hers I really loved was The Poisonwood Bible; for me, that novel was in a different league than her earlier works, in terms of characters, plot and resonance with a time and place. Others may disagree, and it’s possible I was simply at a different point in my life when I read it. Nonetheless, I’d put Prodigal Summer in the same category, as a cut above her earlier writing.

There are many things that spoke to me in this novel. The challenge of re-creating a different way of being on a contemporary farm. The way in which the place of your youth calls you back to it, whether you particularly liked it there or not. The beauty of being awake to the natural world, and the way something—human, plant or animal—will cling to life even as it scrabbles on the brink of extinction. My own commitment to supporting both organic farming and the conservation of wild places made those aspects of the book most enjoyable. The myth of the coyote—scrappy, wily, and allegedly the only native species to profit from European invasion—is one that is becoming central to how we think of ourselves socially and culturally in this country, and the varied ways in which characters respond to the appearance of these animals provides depth that prevents them from becoming caricatures of themselves. Similarly, the opposite approaches that two elderly farmers take to the same challenge—preserving some part of the natural world that is precious to them—helps illuminate the truth that there is commonality between everyone who cares for their local terrain, despite what appears at first glance to be incompatible difference.

Kingsolver’s close connection with the natural world is evident in the care and tenor of her writing in Prodigal Summer, and the book serves as a sort of fictional prequel to the non-fiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that followed some years later. That book deserves a review all its own, but the things that I loved in Prodigal Summer clearly arise from the way in which she looks closely at the natural world around her and holds dear her place in it.

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

living in the future with XM radio

The phones are small and in your pockets. The music is beamed to your car from outer space. Sure, not all the music, but the music on XM radio is, which is kind of weird and fun at the same time. Not that we normally have XM radio, because we normally don’t have a car. This year’s holiday rental car was kitted out, though, and we had a surprisingly positive experience with XM radio, for all that it’s an expense I would never in a million years incur in my own vehicle. In addition to the cost, satellite-based systems are something I wouldn’t sign up for because I happen to agree that the man can track you like a dog with GPS. If you know me, you know that would definitely be a bug, not a feature.

Since I discovered the radio setup before we left town, we drove completely CD-free this year. This turned out to be a little bit painful at times, as I had been planning to bring my favourite holiday CDs to pep things up a bit during the lows. The main low being, of course, the snail trail that was the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I know, I know: people in a hurry make an end run around the Bronx through New Jersey. Having lived in New Jersey for two summers in a row, I am always in a supreme hurry to leave the state, even if that means sitting in the Bronx for a while. I like the Bronx. I like the Cross-Bronx. I like the rivers and the locals and the emergency-use-only steps up to the streets. Also, this year we were driving a car with NY plates, so everybody let us into their lanes on the Cross-Bronx. We joked that NY plates worked for us in all locations: in NYC, drivers cut off the people with out-of-state plates and let us in; outside of NYC everybody gave us lots of room, perhaps out of fear that we’d haul off and bust a cap in their…rear. And, once we got to Westchester the traffic cleared up and it became clear that no one was actually going to grandma’s: everyone was instead going to the mall just outside of the city. Huh.

Getting back to XM radio: it turns out that some stations actually play the music we used to listen to. I say ‘used to listen to,’ because XM radio was (for us) a ginormous 1990ish nostalgia ride. Since my traveling partner is organized in some ways that I am not, he looked up XM stations online before we left, thereby being able to point us directly and smoothly to the single station that broadcasts the overlap in our musical tastes: Fungus. Unfortunately, it also broadcasts the sole category of music that lies outside of both our musical tastes: anything in those genres post 1995ish. Which meant we needed a backup plan. My backup plan included Lucy, which was a total sausage-fest but played all the things I used to listen to with the boys back home in 1990 yet never owned, and Sunny, which played all the hits of my childhood spent putting myself to sleep with the radio. My copilot’s backup plan included Fred and Ethel, which played all the more electronic and (I would say) whiny contemporaries of my beloved alt-rockers on Lucy.

For the most part, these stations came through and we were able to select music much more agreeably than on previous trips. I took a free pass on The Smiths and Smashing Pumpkins, he got a free pass on Creed and 80s duets, and both of us eventually agreed that there was such a thing as too much U2. As an aside, the love for U2 of the boys who program these stations was a bit beyond my ken. I don’t think of U2 as alternative at all, and yet they were the single most played band on every station (except Fungus, bless their hearts). We heard the hits on the more mainstream stations and the ‘obscure’ junk on the more alternative ones. Personally, I think this latter effect was an attempt to justify the jockeys’ love for such a mainstream band, but there’s a reason why the obscure stuff has remained obscure (I’m just sayin). In the beginning this worked out semi-well: I like the sing-along tunes, my partner likes the less well-known stuff. By the end of our trip, though, we were both totally full up on U2 and were changing the station before Bono’s first melodic groan could kick in.

Besides the U2 issue, the only other problem with the radio was that it cut out in the tunnels. Radio does that, you might say. Yes, that’s true, I would agree, except that this radio is coming to us from OUTER SPACE. Surely radio from OUTER SPACE can bust through a few puny feet of concrete and several tons of water, right? Apparently not. Even this had a bright side, though: we discovered that while I can’t always carry a tune or remember the real words to a song, I can keep a beat and hum a guitar like nobody’s business. Being able to do this to ‘Jane Says‘ on the Cross-Bronx was fun but not all that impressive; anyone in their 30s can do that, and since the Cross-Bronx isn’t actually underwater, the radio kicked in periodically to help us keep on track. No, I really impressed us both by being able to sustain ‘Glycerine‘ — a song whose name I wouldn’t have even been able to come up with absent the XM info feature — through the entirety of the Fort McHenry Tunnel without error. Granted, the riff is a pretty familiar one, but still: clearly I spent way more time sitting around doing nothing in the 90s than previously believed.

And, when we got home we threw on a CD and rocked out to my favourite Christmas song, and all was well in the world.

living in the future with XM radio