I could never be a vegetarian.
First of all, my heart just wouldn’t be in it. I’m okay with the fact that what I’m cramming into my mouth was once a living thing, because with the exception of chewing gum (which is some sort of plastic, untouched by nature), everything you eat was once living. It’s the way the whole digestive thing is set up. You can’t live on chewing gum and multivitamins. I tried it my senior year of college, when I running low on rent money. It just doesn’t work.
I feel bad for animals that they haven’t managed to do what plants do, which is to create portions that can be plucked away, leaving the rest of the living entity intact. If God had created pigs that shed a fully-cured ham every three months, or cows that dropped sirloins from fleshy stalks, no one would find anything wrong with eating meat. But He didn’t. And as bad as I feel, I don’t feel bad enough, since I keep eating meat, and have no intention of stopping. I do draw the line at veal, though if I think about it logically, it’s a questionable line to draw. Every calf I save from being penned is likely to go on to grow up to be several hundred quarter pounders. “Sooner or later” is the life story of a veal calf.
Another reason to avoid the meatless lifestyle is that if I became a vegetarian, I wouldn’t be able to blithely note to the veggies that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian (well, I could, but what would that say about me). Vegetarians hate having that brought up; it is, as you may imagine, a serious taint on the whole movement. You can often go for the double whammy by pointing out the Hitler also thought up Volkswagen, which will cause them to gnash their teeth as they grind their way back home in their 1970 VW bus. It never occurs to vegetarians to retort that Stalin ate piles of red meat; I wonder why that is.
But my lack of moral objections is not the real issue here. The real issue is that every once in a while, I get a hand-shaking, knee-buckling, mind-swishing urge for the flesh of an animal. My body, fed too long on cheap, cellophane-covered crackers and individually packaged Rollo candies, screams for the protein found nestled in the muscle and fatty tissues we generically call “meat.” When I get to that point, it doesn’t really matter what sort of meat product I devour. Porterhouse, chicken leg, hot dog—even a Slim Jim will work (though with the last one, you pay for it later, a point that ironically the Slim Jim folks are playing up in their most recent batch of commercials).
I was hit with one of those moments yesterday, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon—I had fed myself fat free, sugar free yogurt in the morning, and six or seven chocolate mint cups (think of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but with mint in the role normally played by the peanut butter), and my body had just had enough of that. You’ve had your fun, it said to me. Now FEED me. I barely made it down the stairs to the refrigerator.
Where I encountered a dilemma: There were no suitable meat products to be found in the fridge. I had expected to find a Cheddarwust—a summer sausage that, as you might have guessed from the name, was riddled inside with little pockmarks of cheddar cheese. As if you weren’t already getting enough fat out of the sausage. But the Cheddarwurst was gone. We had used them all up. The only other meat product in the fridge was a package of turkey ham that had been sitting in the meat bin for longer than I could remember.
Which of course is a very bad sign. It was lying in wait to ambush me. It was the turkey’s revenge—first it was killed, and then it was made to perform a carnivorous transvestite act, masquerading as the meat of a pig. Its only method of revenge was to lie in the meat bin past its due date and trick me into eating it then. Well, not this time, Tom. I passed it up (but I didn’t remove it from the fridge and throw it in the trash, its threat then forever neutralized. No, I don’t know why not. I suspect the decision will come back to haunt me).
The freezer held loads of meat, though, naturally, all of it was frozen and thus of little use to me in this moment of crisis. I looked into the door compartments, and found we had some frozen pizzas—cheese pizzas. I had eaten all the meat-flecked ones in earlier crisis situations.
But next to the pizzas: Corn dogs. Reduced fat corn dogs, yes, but it would do in a pinch. I grabbed one, nuked it, and tromped back up the stairs, happily munching on my dead animal fix.
I mentioned the Carnivore Moment to my wife when she came home. She looked at me blankly. I asked her why.
“Those were vegetarian corn dogs,” she said. “There’s not a speck of meat in them.”
Vegetarians, start your abuse…now.