To Meat or Not to Meat

These biological urges are the real deal. First, we decided it was time to start going to church exactly a year before I got pregnant with my oldest son. Now we've hit our mid-thirties and the clock says, "time to take a serious look at what we're putting in our bodies."

MMA and I are curiously in tandem, again. We've both been feeling ambivalent towards meat. (We've also broached our high fructose corn syrup and MSG problems, but that's for another day.) I don't think this is an accident. I think there is a greater force at work, a beacon of light that's even brighter than the fast food neon.

If you'd asked me a few weeks ago where I was in my vegetarian walk (because none of us are getting any younger) I would have said, "I haven't laced up my shoes." I love me some Texas BBQ, bacon nineteen different ways, elaborate burgers that fall apart and drip down your hands...I could go on Liz Lemon-like about our meat fetish. Didn't I list bacon bits IN THIS VERY BLOG as one of my favorite things?

Well. All of the sudden, meat is starting to gross me out even while I'm enjoying it for dinner. MMA, too!?!

What has gotten into us?

My 4 year old just realized that the "chicken" that we eat almost daily was once an animal just like the chickens at the zoo. And thanks to Chick fil A's brilliant marketing, he has worked it out in his little head that a hamburger was once a cow. And he's got a healthy pensiveness about it.

I, myself, made a conscious decision years ago to put that inconvenient truth out of my head and just enjoy steak night with a little garlic butter and beer. I do my best not to waste meat, you see, and so I feel better about eating the flesh of another animal.

Thanks to MMA, we stopped eating most bone-in meats because he found it unseemly. I never understood that until now because everyone knows that meat cooked on the bone tastes so much better. But, its a little harder to deny what you're eating when a bone makes your dinner an identifiable body part.

And by that token, it is so easy to reconcile the standard frozen chicken tender in your head. It's just a preformed meat-like substance supped up with hormones, saline solution and encrusted in God-only-knows-what to make it pleasantly palatable. I mean, did an actual chicken have to die?

It's virtual chicken. My marketing guy is already working on the T-shirts.

I'm no tree hugger. I'm not even an animal hugger. There, I said it. I don't even like live animals that much. I will not be carrying a PETA card or trading in my leather shoes anytime soon. But it cannot be coincidence that I have been bombarded with such disgusting meat imagery lately. To the point that I must reconsider my diet of probably thirty percent meat. (Don't judge.)

Exhibit A) There is a ziplock bag of turkey left over from Christmas in my fridge. I meant to spin it into some kind of casserole and never did and now I feel too guilty to throw it away. I wish an elf would magically take this problem off my hands. (MMA will not make it easy and throw it away because he told me not to make a whole turkey in the first place.)

Exhibit B) I got the pink slime email...did you? Regardless of what I should have known and/or chose to believe before reading the NY Times article, I now know too much. I heard somewhere that a typical fast food hamburger was literally made from the meat of hundreds if not thousands of cows. I can now fathom how this is possible.

Exhibit C) I also saw the show discussed here about a guy eating roadkill. BY CHOICE. My eyes were tearing up as a precursor to dry heaving before he even loaded the carrion into his car. By the time he served up his badger head and seagull stew, I was asking myself what starvation scenario would it take?

Urp coming on.

Since I'm not really motivated by environmental or moral considerations this must be the weakest embargo ever:

Meat is gross (right now.)