Meat

The local PBS station is begging for money again, and to get our attention they’re running old episodes of Julia Child‘s The French Chef. Last Saturday she made several dishes using potatoes. It was the first installment, apparently, from 1963— “in glorious black and white,” as they say. She didn’t manage to flip the first potato pancake— “The main thing is, you need the courage of your convictions,” she said before she tried it. Problem was, the mixture was still too runny and the attempt was a flop, but she recovered well: “The nice thing about cooking is, when you make a mistake, you just make something else out of it.” She succeeded the second time, a little later, and I’m sure the viewers in that distant time cheered and fell in love with Julia.

Today was lobster day with the well-preserved 1970s-era Julia (now in “living color,” as they say). Her delivery was smoother, though she still had that touching way of looking at the camera (cameraman?) expectantly every time she shifted to another counter or table. She had broad selection of lobsters—one pound up to “Bertha the Behemoth.” You want the lively ones, she said, as the one she placed on the counter played dead. She continued talking about the different sizes, and soon she had one that actually moved. “This is what you want,” she exclaimed, as she got the thing to curl its tail.

We all know you have to boil lobsters alive. Did you know you should put them in head first? Yes. It’s only humane. That’s the easy part, in a way. It’s eating the things that is so darn disgusting. To me. Julia showed how to do it—the tools you need, the techniques that work best, what to eat and what to throw out. I thought: yech. She kept saying how indescribably tasty the meat is, the meat from the legs and the meat from the chest and so on, each tasty in its own way, and having tasted lobster I could understand her point if not her enthusiasm, but still I thought: yech.

Enough about lobster. On to meat in general. Often as I head out to hunt for a lunch that frequently consists of a blackened-chicken burrito or gyro, I think: would I eat this stuff if I actually had to kill the animal and prepare the meat myself? How many people nowadays would? Could I casually wring a chicken’s neck, like our great-great-grandmothers might have done; or shoot an elk, skin it, gut it, and so on?

I suppose if I were living in an African savanna, my empty stomach gurgling, I might chase down a wild animal and dispatch it. But here I am, in modern America—dozens of other people do all the dirty work for me. I get my meat in a very pretty form, on a plate or between slices of bread. Sometimes it doesn’t really look like meat—like those nifty round things you find on pizzas. It certainly never looks like an animal, unless it’s a fish.

There’s a passage in Berlin Alexanderplatz that comes to mind whenever I think about this. The author describes the activities of a slaughterhouse in language that varies from bureaucratic to elegiac, brutally anatomical to ironically poetic. It’s an assembly line of death, but for the men it’s all in a day’s work.

A man in a linen smock ambles through the corridor, the pen opens, he steps in between the animals with a stick; then, once the door is open, they rush out, squealing, grunting, and screaming. They crowd along the corridors. Across the courtyards, between the halls, he drives them up, those funny bare creatures with their jolly fat hams, their jolly little tails, and the green and red stripes on their backs. Here you have light, dear pigs, and here you have dirt, just give a sniff, go ahead and grub a while, for how many minutes longer will it be? No, you are right, one should not work by the clock, just go on sniffing and grubbing. You are going to be slaughtered, there you are, take a look at the slaughter-house, at the hog slaughter-house. There exist old houses, but you get a new model. It is bright, built of red brick, from the outside you might take it for a locksmith’s workshop, for a machine-shop, an office-room, or a drafting room. I am going to walk the other way, dear little pigs, for I’m a human being, I’ll go through this door, we’ll meet again, inside.*

I do the text an injustice by excerpting it, because the effect builds over fifteen pages (with a brief interlude). It’s horrific on many levels, and in the context of the book it raises the question of the effect of such mechanized killing on the persons who perform it and on society as a whole. At any rate, the passage by all rights should have made me a vegetarian. Clearly I lack the courage of my convictions.

The American Indians, from what I’ve been told, would thank an animal before killing it. Because they do not make a sharp distinction between other animals and themselves, the last line in the quoted passage above would not make sense to them. Their world is not divided into one where bison live and another where human beings live. The spiritual “economy” of humans and animals is fundamentally different from the European model we have inherited. An animal that allows itself to be killed and used for food or clothing is making a gift of itself, and attention is paid to all the proper spiritual aspects of gift-giving and gift-receiving, including the responsibilities of humans toward their fellow creatures.

How much of this is true and how much I dreamed up, I can’t say. But I’d like to remember it more often when I eat a hamburger.
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*Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Tr. Eugene Jolas. New York: Frederick Unger, 1983, p. 175.