zaraska-epub-3-ready_for

Introduction

In the summer of 2009, my mother decided to go vegetarian. She had been living among vegetarians for years—both her husband (my stepfather) and his son (my stepbrother) eschew meat. Being a good Polish wife, she would cook them plant-based dinners every night and a separate one, containing meat, for herself. No one pressured her to change her diet, and she didn’t seem to mind the additional work. But in 2009 she stumbled upon an article on the health risks of eating meat. The data it quoted, which came from a study of over half a million people, was alarming: high intake of red meat increases a woman’s risk of premature death due to heart disease by 50 percent and due to cancer by 20 percent. That, my mother thought, was disturbing. She didn’t want to clog her arteries with LDL cholesterol (the bad one) and damage her cells with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (carcinogenic substances that may form during the cooking of meat). She pledged to take better care of herself. She was done with meat, she told us.

My mother’s resolve lasted about a fortnight. Then the juicy hams and the creamy pâtés crept back into her fridge. Since that summer she has tried giving up meat several times more, but it has never worked out. Her efforts invariably remind me of my husband’s never-ending quest to quit smoking. At some point, when I asked my mother what happened to her vegetarianism, she just shrugged. “I like meat, I eat it, end of story.”

But for me, it was only a beginning. Several questions were starting to form in my head, questions about our relationship with meat: What is it about animal protein that makes us crave it? What makes it so hard to give up? And if consuming meat is truly unhealthy for us, why didn’t evolution turn us all into vegetarians in the first place?

Two years later in early 2011, I was sitting in Eight Treasures restaurant in Singapore, overlooking the hustle and bustle of Chinatown. Through an open window the smells of incense and frangipani flowers drifted in from a nearby Buddhist temple. The world outside simmered with noise, yet the restaurant was peaceful. By then I’d been living in Singapore for over two months and was slowly getting accustomed to the culture. But in Eight Treasures I was in for another eye-opener. This was supposed to be a vegetarian restaurant, yet the menu featured exclusively meat dishes: mutton curry, suckling pig, Peking duck, even the notoriously environmentally unfriendly shark’s fin soup. Confused, I called the waiter. “Do you have any vegetarian dishes at all?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were not exactly sane. “These are all vegetarian dishes,” he said. Me: “You mean these pork ribs are not made of, well, pork?” The waiter: “Everything is fake meat only.”

Ah. Here were the key words: fake meat. Soy- or gluten-based mixtures, sometimes flavored with petroleum derivatives. It didn’t sound very encouraging, but I took the plunge and ordered “pork” ribs. And they were delicious. They looked like meat; they had the texture of meat; they even tasted like meat. I’m still not 100 percent sure they weren’t actually made of meat. Perhaps the cooks at Eight Treasures just serve the vegetarians animal protein and fool them into believing it is soy. But what it really made me wonder was this: Why does such an oddity like fake meat exist at all? We don’t concoct fake nuts for those who are allergic, nor are there fake carrots for the strict Jains, who avoid root vegetables (they believe pulling them out of the ground is gross violence). So why bother with fake meat? Are we so addicted to animal protein that we’d rather eat a meat-substitute curry loaded with chemicals than just enjoy a simple dish of curried vegetables? What’s in the taste of meat or in its social and cultural appeal so that even lifelong vegetarians can’t completely give it up?

Today, my mother still eats meat. She is even known to enjoy such Polish delicacies as kaszanka (a sausage made of pig’s blood and lungs) and wątróbka (seared cubes of chicken liver). I don’t hover over my mother’s plate with a scale and a calculator, but if she’s like an average Pole, she eats about 156 pounds of meat per year. Americans devour even more: 275 pounds a year, give or take. In the meantime, many scientific journals report on the detrimental health effects of eating meat. According to studies, high consumers of cured meats and red meat are at a 20 to 30 percent increased risk of colorectal cancer. High intake of red meat and processed poultry may raise the risk of diabetes in men by 43 percent and in women by 30 percent. In one widely cited study that followed over 120,000 people, researchers associated higher intake of red meat with an elevated risk of cardiovascular and cancer mortality and estimated that “9.3% of deaths in men and 7.6% in women in these cohorts could be prevented at the end of follow-up if all the individuals consumed fewer than 0.5 servings per day (approximately 42 g/d) of red meat.” Meanwhile, studies show that the vegetarian Seventh-day Adventists in California live on average 9.5 (men) and 6.1 (women) years longer than other Californians.

Do reports like these deter us from eating meat? Not really. American meat consumption has been growing for decades. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), in 2011 we ate an average of sixty-one pounds more of meat than we did in 1951—that’s about 122 average eight-ounce steaks a year more, despite all the accumulating warnings about cancer, diabetes, and heart disease and despite the fact that the first of these warnings came as early as the 1960s. And it’s not just the United States. Across the world, the appetite for animal protein is on the rise. The Organisation for Ecomomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that by 2020 the demand for meat in North America will increase by 8 percent (as compared to 2011), in Europe by 7 percent, and in Asia by a whopping 56 percent. In China, meat consumption has quadrupled since 1980. Studies on the deteriorating health of the Chinese caused by their growing meat consumption (among other causes) are mushrooming in scientific journals. But the black scenarios painted by scientists don’t seem to scare the Asians away from Kung Pao chicken and Mushu pork.

This international love of animal protein is not only messing up our health, it’s also damaging the planet. The media have reported on this over and over: each burger contributes as much to global warming as driving an average American car for 320 miles. Producing one calorie from animal protein releases eleven times more carbon dioxide than producing one calorie from plants. Meat eating is responsible for up to 22 percent of all greenhouse gases—by comparison aviation contributes a mere 2 percent. That’s a huge deal. According to some new estimates, global warming may eventually cause sea levels to rise as much as sixteen to twenty-nine feet, flooding cities like New York and Shanghai by the end of this century. And so scientists and politicians (at least some of them) are trying to come up with solutions, thinking up new energy sources, deliberating how to encourage people to consume less, drive smaller cars, and so on. But there is one thing that, in theory, is very easy to do—much easier than, say, inventing solar-powered cars—and that would greatly reduce carbon emissions, slow global warming, and improve our chances of survival. That thing is to go vegetarian. And yet, we don’t want to give up meat, New York City be damned.

The meat puzzle has a moral dimension as well. According to a 2003 Gallup poll, 25 percent of Americans claim that animals deserve “the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation.” In one study, 81 percent of Ohioans said that the well-being of farm animals is just as important to them as the well-being of pets. Yet we do not spoil farm animals the way we spoil our pooches and kitties, nor do we guarantee them the same rights as we guarantee humans. Instead, we snip the beaks of caged chickens, without anesthesia, to prevent them from killing each other out of desperation. We cut the tails of pigs short (also without anesthesia) so that they don’t bite them off as they lose their minds. We crowd our egg-laying hens eleven to a cage, packed so tightly that they cannot move. As a result they sometimes get stuck between the bars and die of hunger and thirst. It’s not that we don’t feel empathy toward farm animals or like seeing them suffer. On some level, it does disturb us, and that’s precisely why we engage in elaborate mental exercises to avoid feeling guilty over all the harm these cows, pigs, and chickens are fated to suffer. We convince ourselves these animals are less smart than they really are. We disconnect the living creature from the food on our plates. Scientists call it “cognitive dissonance reducing techniques” and show that even attaching the label “meat” to a species means that we start treating it differently, with less respect.

The harm to our health, our planet, and our conscience notwithstanding, the human race is no closer to letting go of meat. According to Gallup, in 1943 the number of Americans who didn’t eat meat was about 2 percent. By 2012 the number of people who consider themselves vegetarian had risen to 5 percent (again according to Gallup). But another survey showed that 60 percent of the Americans who are self-described “vegetarians” actually consume red meat, poultry, or fish at least occasionally, which roughly brings us back to 2.4 percent of committed vegetarians—about the same as in 1943.

Myself, I’m one of the sloppy vegetarians. First of all, I eat fish. I do it mostly because I’m lazy. I live in France, a country of foie gras and horse steaks. And I’m not talking Paris. I’m talking small village in the middle of a vast forest—very vegetarian unfriendly. I enjoy dining with friends in restaurants, and if I were to stick to meat-free dishes, by now I would have consumed about half a thousand goat cheese salads. There is not much else on local menus that doesn’t contain animal flesh. And so I order poisson blanc au beurre à l’ail (white fish in butter and garlic sauce) or saumon aux herbes (salmon with herbs). But it’s not just the fish eating that I’m guilty of. Sometimes, if no one can see me—and this is really difficult to admit—I nibble on a slice of sausage or a strip of bacon. It doesn’t happen often—maybe once every six months or so. The taste usually disappoints me. I feel guilty over harming the poor cow, pig, or chicken and swear I’ll never do it again. And then, sure enough, I do it again. Just like my mother, I can’t seem to completely let go of meat either. There is something in it—in its cultural, historic, and social appeal, or maybe in its chemical composition—that keeps luring me back.

There are many books on the shelves of American bookstores dealing with the unhealthiness of our addiction to meat and at least as many about the suffering of farm animals. I’ve read most of them, yet none answered the question that kept bothering me: Why do we eat meat at all? I wrote this book because I wanted to find out what meat offers people, such that despite its costs—the guilt, the damaged arteries, the polluted planet—we carry on eating it. It seems as if nature has played a trick on us and given us a craving for something that is basically bad for our well-being.

So, what drives us to do it? My mother’s answer—“because I like it”—isn’t enough. It makes me think of a teenage girl who is dating an inappropriate boyfriend and tells her anxious parents she refuses to leave him because she “loves him.” At first glance, it seems like a good response. But she doesn’t love the boy “just because.” She loves this particular human male because his body gives off pheromones that attract her, because culturally she is predisposed to be drawn toward tall and muscular types, because she was raised by, say, a controlling mother and an insecure father, so she likes her boyfriends to be free-spirited. Likewise, we don’t eat meat “just because we like it.” There is much more to our meat hunger than that.

This book is an investigation into why humans love eating meat. The story it tells begins 1.5 billion years ago in the temperate waters of Earth’s only ocean, when ancient bacteria got hooked on the “flesh” of others. Spanning millennia, it uncovers our planet’s first carnivores and their victims, the first-ever meat animals. It follows our hominin ancestors as they learned to eat meat and tracks down the benefits that they derived from becoming part-time carnivores: among them were a larger brain and advanced social structures. Some scientists would go so far as to say that meat eating has actually made us human. Not only did it help us migrate out of Africa but it was even behind our thinned hair and profuse sweating (relative to our cousins, the chimps).

As we approach the modern era, this book turns to biochemistry. Is there something in meat’s chemical composition that keeps us hooked? Is it the 2-methyl-3-furanthiol or one of the other one thousand volatile compounds that together make up the specific, mouthwatering scent of cooked meat? Is it the umami taste (Japanese for “delicious”) that is found mostly in meat, mushrooms, and milk? Or is meat actually necessary for staying healthy? Despite the risks of cancer and heart disease, what if the human race would be even worse off without meat, a planet full of small, immune-deficient weaklings? Are some people, those with a gene mutation that makes them dislike the scent of androstenone (a mammalian pheromone), destined to be vegetarians, while others, those who are particularly sensitive to bitter compounds in fruits and vegetables, more likely to love meat? Is it the skillful marketing and lobbying of the powerful meat industry, with its $186 billion worth of annual sales in the US alone, that keep us hooked on animal protein against our best interests? Or maybe, just maybe, do we eat meat simply out of habit, because it got so engrained in our culture and history that we just cannot let go of it? After all, what would Thanksgiving look like without a turkey or a summer grill without a burger? Do we eat meat because over the centuries it has come to symbolize masculinity, power over the poor, power over nature, and power over other nations? Is our love of meat a kind of addiction—psychological, chemical, or maybe a little of both? And if it is, will we ever be able to break it? Is telling people to “cut down on meat” no different from telling a chain-smoker to go cold turkey?

As this book reveals, there are many reasons why meat is so attractive to us. I call these reasons “hooks.” The hooks are linked to our genes, culture, history, the power of the meat industry, and the policies of our governments. I examine these hooks in detail, one by one, to discover the individual reasons for meat’s appeal—such as the importance of a particular polymorphism of serotonin receptor genes 5-HT that can affect how much beef you eat, or the role $2.7 billion in corn subsidies plays in boosting American appetites for meat. In each chapter of the book, I analyze the hooks, big and small. I conclude by showing the likely future of humanity’s relationship with meat: Are we ever going to cut down our meat consumption? What happens if we don’t? Are we going to soon be eating lab-grown steak chips, insect burgers, or plant-based chicken that we 3-D print in our own kitchens?

Meathooked is not a book about the detrimental health effects of meat consumption, nor is it an essay on the suffering of farm animals. There are enough of those already. I may be a vegetarian, but I won’t tell you how much meat you should or shouldn’t eat. I’ll just give you the facts: what’s in the taste of meat that keeps us hooked, how our culture encourages meat eating, how deeply the need to consume animals is engraved in our genes. The rest is for you to decide.

If you are an avid meat lover, this book will help you understand what drives your appetite and will make you aware of the ways meat eating influences who you are and how you behave. If you are one of the 39 percent of Americans who is trying to cut down on meat, this book can help you change your diet and show you the reasons why reducing meat consumption may be difficult and what you can do about it. Just as it may be hard to stop smoking if you don’t know why you got addicted in the first place, it may be hard to give up meat if you don’t know why you crave it. And for committed vegetarians and vegans, this book offers an insight into why the majority of humans don’t follow in your steps and so often react with anger if encouraged to do so. I’ve written this book hoping it will help you make conscious, informed decisions about your diet, instead of simply adhering to the eating scripts written for us by culture, habits, imperfect government dietary guidelines, or what your mother ate during pregnancy.

But above all, this book will be a story—a story that I’m hoping will entertain you as it takes you through history and through space, from the depths of the Precambrian to the mid-twenty-first century, from steak houses in India and voodoo temples in Benin to the meat labs of Pennsylvania. It will be a story about humanity’s love affair with meat: how it started, why it continues going on so strong, and how it may end—if it ever will.