WHEN SOMEONE ASKS ME why I’m a vegetarian, I usually bring up how the pig farms in our part of the state gather their waste in open cesspools the size of football fields, where it turns a weird shade of pink and then leaches into the groundwater. Or I talk about world hunger and how it takes fifteen pounds of grain to produce just a single pound of beef, on a planet that now holds over seven billion hungry people. Or I mention the old pair of pants I now fit into, or how much my cholesterol’s improved, or the odd fact that animals seem to like me more.
But, really, it’s all bullshit: I’m a vegetarian because of my father.
WHEN I GOT THE call that my father was dead, it was evening, and quiet. The children were asleep. It was my sister on the other end of the line, and she said something simple, on the order of, “Well, it’s happened,” and I said something oddly stilted and formal, like, “Yes, of course, I understand,” as if I were talking to someone from the bank about an overdraft. My father was seventy-two and had been sick for a while with Alzheimer’s, but somehow I’d never imagined this moment, never prepared for it.
I went upstairs and packed a bag—many pairs of socks, for some reason, but no shirt or underwear—and then I turned off the lights and climbed into bed, where I imagined that I could once again hear the rusty wheeze of my father’s breathing, as if he were present in the room with me.
It’s hard to describe now the weird sense I had of his lingering thereness. At the funeral in New York, I took one look at the plain pine box standing on sawhorses by the grave and knew with absolute certainty that it was too fragile to contain him. Back in North Carolina, a heron started visiting the pine tree in our backyard, and I took it as a sign. The bird was huge, with a great beak and beady eyes and long spindly legs, and he flew like an old man would, with a slow flapping of wings. Staring at him from the window, in the stillness of dawn, I began to cry, not out of sorrow but relief: my father was still with me.
At the same time, he obviously wasn’t. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, gasping for air, would get out of bed and sit in first my son’s room, and then my daughter’s, watching the gentle rise and fall of their chests as if looking for pointers on how to breathe. It wasn’t sorrow, exactly, but something more angular and ugly—something a lot like fear. My father had died in old age of Alzheimer’s disease, but to me it felt as if he had been murdered. Now that my eyes were open, I could see that, one day, I would be murdered, too—as would my two beautiful children, with their solemn, dreaming faces.
I carried that thought with me to the playground and the kindergarten pickup line, convinced that the beauty of the sunlight in the trees was nothing but a trick. I wanted to lodge a protest, to say, at least, “I disagree with death,” but there was no way to do that without sounding like an insane person. And then one day, I looked at the hamburger I was eating for lunch and realized that it had once been alive, just like me, that it had been killed so I could eat it.
What if I didn’t eat it? Wouldn’t that mean a little less death in the world?
Then I grew timid and afraid, because I knew I didn’t have the self-control to put the burger down. I liked hamburgers, and I was hungry. So I ignored the idea, feeling small and cowardly.
OF ALL THE THINGS we try to communicate, the hardest thing to explain may be why you love somebody. Once, when I was in my twenties and living in Brooklyn, I stopped by my parents’ apartment in Manhattan and came across my father outside the building trying to reattach the driver’s side mirror to his car. He was using duct tape. “Is that going to work?” I asked him.
“Probably not.”
It was warm, and he was in a T-shirt, a chain around his neck with a bunch of medallions dangling from it: a Star of David, a St. Christopher carrying the baby Jesus, and a Buddha with the calmest face in the world. My father’s great virtue was flexibility: he believed in luck and was willing to borrow anyone’s.
That moment became my emblem of him: in his late fifties, trying to put his life back together with the cheapest tools available, through an act of loopy improvisation. He had met some reversals and was now meeting his clients in the McDonald’s across the street, where he would fill his pockets full of blue packets of Equal to take home. I’d heard him on the phone, holding his nose and pretending to be his own secretary so he could claim to be out. “Does that fool anyone?” I’d asked, meaning, really, please don’t do that, it breaks my heart.
“They’re too shocked to say anything.” He looked at me with a sort of wistful and bemused pity that he used to deflect my judgment. “Come on, let’s bust Sean out of Care Bears.”
Sean, my youngest brother, was four at the time. The three of us played hooky a lot in those days, Sean from Care Bears, my father from court, me from the novel that was really about him. We’d go to the park together, my father pushing the stroller as if he were chauffeuring a movie star. It took time to get anywhere because the two of them knew everyone in the neighborhood, had to stop and talk with the doormen and bodega guys and the man with the falafel stand and the woman who sold cigarettes in the little newsstand on the corner. My father gave money to every beggar we came across, dollars while he had them, and then coins, and then he’d be wiped out and I’d have to buy us all lunch. Nevertheless, when I fled my writing desk in Brooklyn, terrified by the blank page, it was to him I went. Somehow, when I sat with him in the sunlight in the park, some primitive voice inside of me, some remnant of childhood, said I would be all right.
A COUPLE OF YEARS passed after my father’s death, and then something happened inside of me. Maybe I was simply old enough to feel how each winter, a little bit of the cold stays inside you, your gathering mortality. I realized that if I didn’t give up meat soon, I never would, and I would die without having acknowledged how much I missed my father. I’ll skip meat just this one day, I thought. I won’t think beyond this one day. And so I left the meat on the plate and ate only the vegetables—and then did that the next day, too, and the next, and the next, single days like stepping-stones leading somewhere I couldn’t see.
In the split of domestic chores, my wife, Karen, does most of the cooking. “I notice you’re not eating any meat,” she said to me one night, sounding a little aggrieved. Neither of us likes trouble when getting through our domestic chores. “Is there something wrong?”
I tried to phrase it gingerly. “I have an evolving sense of myself in relation to food.”
“So, this is what, a diet?”
“I’m not giving it a label.”
She looked at me as if I were causing a problem along the lines of our daughter’s refusal to eat anything but chicken nuggets. “Let’s make it simple, then—what won’t you eat?”
I remembered how my father, in the middle stages of his illness, insisted on going to the newsstand on the corner for a copy of the Times each morning, even though he was losing the ability to walk. He would get there by staggering from lamppost to mailbox to parking meter, hanging on till he had the strength to move again. It looked like he was running from a murderer—and, of course, he was.
I said, “I don’t eat anything that wants to run away.”
It’s been fourteen years since then, and I’ve never missed meat, never had cravings, never jumped in the car at two a.m. in a sweaty panic, looking for a Burger King. There are times when the ease of this change startles me anew, and I realize how much I used to worry that I would end up like my father, three hundred pounds and sucking taco mix out of the foil packet. Eating together was, after all, one of the things we did best: the steak for two at Peter Luger, followed by cheesecake at Junior’s, or suckling pig in Chinatown, a movie, and then—why not?—pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s. “You’re an eater,” he would say, grinning, “just like me.”
But it turns out that I can love him without becoming him.
“SO YOU’RE A HUMANIAC now?” my brother David asked, when I told him I needed to order something vegetarian. We were in a Chinese restaurant on one of my visits to New York, soon after I’d stopped eating meat. Before I had a chance to pick a dish, he called over the waiter and began running up and down the menu: beef, pork, chicken, and squid. “Now that’s a meal,” he said.
The odd thing is that he’s the animal lover, not me. I’m wary of dogs, and can’t help but feel offended when they jump on me with their dirty paws. I’m shocked by the money people spend on their pets, and bored when they talk about them as if they were substitute children. I don’t belong to PETA and haven’t yet struggled with the ethical nuances of using animals in medical research. All I truly know at this point is that Porky Pig’s right to scratch himself, dream, and generally be a confused idiot on the face of the earth is no different from my own: we’re both alive, both made of flesh—things of the moment, full of yearning, doomed to end.
And yet, driving down the main drag where we live now, I sometimes look at the rows of fast-food restaurants, stretching for block after block, and I can see how the American hunger for meat interlaces with other problems: obesity, the automobile, suburban sprawl, billboards, and big-box stores, a constructed environment that features the parking lot as its primary aesthetic expression, a culture focused on truly insane levels of consumption and distraction. There is definitely something wrong with us, some kind of sickness of the mind, and I start to wonder if our blithe cruelty isn’t a contributing factor.
Almost thirty-one million head of cattle were slaughtered in the U.S. in 2016 along with 118 million pigs, and more than eight billion chickens. Somewhere I’ve read the great Yiddish writer and vegetarian Isaac Bashevis Singer calling the eating of meat a Treblinka that never stops happening. I recoil from that statement even now, the way it connects the Holocaust to what most of us simply know as dinner. But then again, maybe I recoil because I secretly believe it’s true: wasn’t Treblinka just a slaughterhouse for people?
IN THE GLAMOROUS NEW Whole Foods market that recently opened near us, there’s a huge flat-screen TV on the wall. It’s in the meat section, and it plays a strangely beguiling video loop of pigs frolicking on an organic farm: rolling in the mud, scampering around a big open pen, what can only be called smiling into the camera. I remember the first time I stopped to watch, caught at first by the postmodern weirdness of the situation: a video of happy hogs mounted above a refrigerated case full of pork chops. Can nobody else see the problem here? I wondered. But a minute later I was wholly absorbed in the film itself, in the sheer spectacle of living things being alive in their peculiar way, snorting, rooting, chasing each other, so deeply immersed in the moment that there can be no thought of the future. It felt like somebody’s home movies, and I stood there like an idiot as the loop repeated.