Ambivalent vegetarian faces meat of the matter

By Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

updated 7:28 a.m. ET July 10, 2007

Every time I sit down to eat at a restaurant, it’s the same dilemma: Should I choose what I want or order vegetarian? Sometimes I’m lucky and what I want is meatless. But if what I really want is the boeuf bourguignon or the veal pepperonata, I squirm, caught between moral horror, my taste buds and a desire not to be the “weird” vegetarian. I’m 38, and I have been engaged in this internal war, off and on, for nearly 20 years. I have been a vegetarian, semivegetarian and old-fashioned carnivore. Right now, I eat everything — but with a pervasive sense of unease. I thought my dilemma would get clearer over time — that my sense of what’s right, at least right for me, would have naturally evolved toward some conclusion. But it hasn’t. I’m more torn than ever.

In the beginning, I must confess that I was motivated more by a concern for calories than animals. When I went to college, everyone assured me that I would inevitably gain 15 pounds. I was so freaked out, I started cutting calories (and thus avoiding meat) the minute I hit campus. But it sounded better to say I was a vegetarian than that I was obsessed enough with my weight that I’d give up an entire food group. I lost 10 pounds and became addicted to the attention (“You’re so skinny. I hate you!”), along with the moral superiority our fat-hating culture affords the thin. If my diet saved animals, all the better.

Not that I didn’t take a certain amount of flak. Non-vegetarians don’t like to have vegetarians to dinner. The first Thanksgiving home from college, my family worried — irritably — over what I was going to eat while everyone else ate turkey. (They settled on lobster stuffed with crabmeat. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that wasn’t strictly vegetarian, either.) Friends didn’t appreciate forgoing pepperoni on their pizza because one person in the group — me — couldn’t eat it. And there was a certain wacko label that went with the whole thing. Once, at a party, when I took issue with a guy who had made a hideous racist comment, I overheard a friend whisper to him, “She’s a vegetarian,” by way of explaining my liberal tendencies.

Learning to love meat
But it was a boyfriend who prompted my first flip-flop. He was from Italy and had a fine palate and a certain civilized insistence on eating well that felt healthy and appealing, especially to someone like me who was perennially flirting with an eating disorder. When we moved in together, I began eating everything, particularly the stuff I’d really missed: the sausage and pepperoni that had been staples of my Italian-American diet growing up. He also introduced me to new delicacies such as ribs, roasted Italian-style, with a mere sprinkle of salt, olive oil and fresh rosemary. They were tender and aromatic, like something that had been cooked over an open fire for days rather than for a few hours in our broiler. They were so good, I couldn’t stop eating them. I’d put down my fork with deliberation, only to pick it up again and decimate what little remained on the platter.

I learned to love meat again. I felt slightly guilty, but my boyfriend’s approval was ample compensation. It didn’t help that we lived in Chicago, chock-full of ethnic neighborhoods and the restaurants that go with them. We ate sausages and meat dumplings in the Polish neighborhood, schnitzel at a German place and pork vindaloo from local Indian spots. The way I ate didn’t make people uncomfortable anymore. Plus, I just plain liked the taste of meat. I accommodated the extra calories by stepping up my running regimen.

The boyfriend lasted less than a year, but he changed my relationship with food. I could see that there was a lot to be said for the Italian way of eating: consciously, inclusively and with loving attention to the nuances of flavor. So you’d think I’d simply decide I was an omnivore and be done with it. I tried, for a while. But untethering my calorie obsession from meat ended up making room for the bigger, knottier issue I’d only dimly considered before — namely, the animals. Although I’d always been a dog lover, I never felt any special affinity for cows and sheep. But somewhere along the way (probably from the Italian boyfriend), I’d picked up a smattering of information about cuts of meat and where they came from. Increasingly, when I looked at a piece of beef on my plate, I no longer saw the calories I’d have to jog off the next day. I saw something that looked unnervingly like flesh — flesh not all that different from my own. This tugged my mind to uncomfortable comparisons. Skinned and butchered, how different would I look on a plate? How different was this piece of meat from me?

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