Shut Up and Eat Your Meat

I was brought up that way, experimented with other methods, and saw the error of my ways. When I sit down to eat a plate of rice I wouldn't mind a little flesh to go with it, preferably something I've killed myself..

Don't get me wrong. I think it's clear that McDonald's and the meat industry as it exists today are at least abominations if not crimes against nature. But that doesn't mean we should just sit back and let the people in Birkenstocks and drawstring pants tell us what to eat.

I actually don't have a problem with those who abstain, for whatever reason. It's more than a fad, I know.

But I don't want to be snidely chided by those who think they have found the true path just because they are in a comfortable enough position to make it from day to day without soiling their hands with blood. Because blood flows just as rich and red from a plate of macrobiotic vegetation as it does from a rare t-bone. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. And wishful thinking will never make it so. Nor will telling me how cool you are. Chances are I've already figured it out. Let's face it: a herd of cattle produces no more methane per capita than a herd of vegetarians. I know, I've been in small, hot rooms with both. And the experience is not substantially different.

By your gaseous emanations you are known. There's no reason to inform the world of it with your manifestos and your leafier-than-thou declarations.

Vegetarianism and its more regressive partner veganism are nothing more than affectations of the rich, just another way for the affluent to lord it over those resigned to the struggle for survival at a more basic level.

In terms of pure economics, in fact, it's quite difficult to live on bread alone-that hamhock will extned your pot of beans better than more beans will.

If your life is more strenuous than strolling about in a Pollyanic dream from cubicle to cubicle, if, in fact, you work for a living rather than sit dreaming of a better world behind your keyboard, you can't get by on fluff. You need solid matter. You need flesh and blood. It's the way you are made, the way your ancestors lived for countless generations, the way your benevolent creator intended things to be.

I would humbly submit, in fact, that whatever pre-hominid finally decided to forego the life of the furbearing brachiate for standing on its hind legs and wearing dinner jackets did so because of the availability of fresh, cooked meat.

It just makes life better. It gives one the strength to dig foundations and hammer together frameworks. In fact, without the vitamin B-12 available in a nice pork chop, one has to make a full-time pursuit of blending grass seeds and legumes just to make sure that brain function remains at the level which has made all this professionalism possible.

So as far as I'm concerned you can eat what you like. You can graze lawns and top it off with nasturtiums. You can substitute falafel for hassenpfeffer and feel good about it. But just shut up about it. I don't need to hear about it, I don't need to read it in the news,

If you have ever killed and prepared your own meat, if you even have a foggy notion of what that means, you are at least one step ahead of the benighted folks who don't-because when it comes right down to it you don't eat anything without somebody being sacrificed for it. I for one think it's better if you know that rather than pretend it isn't so.

It is difficult if not impossible to hunt and kill something without sacrificing something of yourself in the exchange. You leave a little blood on the soil whenever you extend yourself out of the closed loop of supermarket, workplace, freeway, and respond instead to weather, season, geography. Society recognizes the economic nature of this equation and enforces it on the hunter and fisherman by requiring that he pay the state for the privilege of supplying himself with the diet of his forefathers, with the funds going toward enforcement of fish and game regulations and habitat preservation.

This is more than can be said of the smug vegicurians who eschew their pound of flesh and retreat into their make-believe world where nothing is ever killed, nothing with a face is ever set on the table, nothing with any nutritional value is ever laid in the pan.

Yes. I eat meat. I hunt it down and kill it. I pull it out of the river with a net and set it on a bed of hot coals, and relish every breath of scorching fat. And no amount of your atirficial, self-righteous piety is going to make me feel bad about it.

So complain about whatever you want to, eat what you like, but shut up. You'll need that energy in order to think clearly on your diet of raw seeds.

Entire cultures have disowned their birthright and their place in the food chain for humanitarian reasons, religious reasons, or reasons having to do with delicacy.

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But I am tired of, sometimes quite disgusted by, those who think a diet of leaves makes them better than me and feel the need to tell me about it every time they open their mouths (between bites of eggplant) long enough to get a word out.

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It's fundamentally an ethical problem. When I was a sprout myself, we used to get out of bed in the chilly pre-dawn, put on our sacred hunting gear, load our weapons, and hunt dinosaurs. It wasn't easy. It wasn't the stereotypical picture you probably have of a bunch of rednecks riding around in pickups, drinking beer and tying brontosaurs to the tailgate. In fact it was much more than that. We had to, first of all, understand the land we were living on. We had to know our way around. We had to understand the animal we pursued. We had to know where it lived, what it ate, where it shat and how it regarded us. If we didn't, we were reduced to dining on a plate of zucchini with red sauce. It filled the belly but left us feeling somehow empty and out of sorts.

We worked for the scorched flesh. We worked hard for it. We had to plan and scheme and then execute our designs with precision and diligence or we didn't get fed. You could look it up.

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I don't need to sit for hours listening to you wax eloquent about your diet of succotash, and I especially don't need to be condemned on the grounds that I eat meat and you don't.

As mentioned earlier, I've done it. I've gone off meat, for reasons I'm prepared to admit had more to do with fashion than necessity, for years at a time. And the benefits of that decision were not particularly obvious, either in economic or nutritional terms.

The empirical evidence is unavoidable.

Even with the artificially low prices we pay for produce (not a bite of spinach is produced commercially without someone taking unfair advantage of someone else, after all, which is one of the central conflicts of our increasingly schizophrenic society), a bowl of beans with bacon is a better deal than the same beans without.

Let me tell you. I like it. I like the firm resistance of a Porterhouse under the knife, the way gravy can be fabricated from a little bacon grease and a handful of flour, the way carnitas transform a burrito from airy nothingness to solid food. I like the way it makes me feel, I like the things i can do when I'm fully nourished, I like the energy I get from sucking down blistered blood and a mouthful of marrow, and it's no accident.

The ethical position of the hunter-gatherer is beyond reproach. The prime directive is to survive, and at the same time to progress, learn and synthesize this learning-not to spend your time chewing through a mountain of broccoli, but to think the great thoughts and experience the sublime emotions of the fully-developed being, the one who seeks and achieves, rather than sitting in a corner farting.

So I don't need you telling me how much better a person you are whenever two or more people gather and start thinking about what to eat. Usually, you don't wait for that. You prosletyze with the fervor of an evangelist but without the scriptural backing. You show up at poetry readings, write articles for the small press, publish books, and stand around chirping like so many underfed sparrows, explaining that you get by on leafy matter and feel very good about it, and demand to know of me why I don't.

You are no more evolved than I. In fact, by renouncing flesh, you voluntarily retreat from the point of humanity's farthest advancement along the evolutionary trail.

You don't have to. Nobody's holding a barbecue fork to your head, telling you that a pound of meat is inherently nicer for the planet than an acre of wheat, demanding that you act accordingly. They are two sides of the same coin, except one side is concentrated nutrition while the other is diffuse and requires the cooperation of an army of underpaid illegal aliens just to put it on your table.

I would even go so far as to say meat is sacred. There is plenty of evidence to back me up on that, whatever religion or frame of mind is closest to your heart.