The Will is Weak

I've been faltering quite a bit on my vegetarianism of late.

Outwardly, I've been a vegetarian for about two years. Inwardly, it is as if those two years haven't been but a second, in that my taste for meat has never gone extinct. If anything, after going for weeks without eating meat, I get this keen hunger for flesh and blood. I lust after meat, much as I might lust after a woman. It's ghoulish, I know, but most Americans are getting their fix for flesh on a daily basis. Mine gets temporarily beaten into submission, only to come back stronger than ever.

Some vegetarians develop an aversion to meat, or else they become vegetarians because of that aversion. Why can't I have this aversion? I want it. I really, really do. But no matter how much I tell myself that I don't want to eat meat, the smell of chicken or steak on the grill drives me a little crazy.

It's not like I'm not getting enough protein. I eat almonds and beans and peanut butter and cheese and meat substitutes. A lot of meat substitutes. Too many meat substitutes; they're laden with sodium, and I hear bad things about excessive consumption of soy. But my point is that this isn't a need thing (I don't think), it's a taste thing.

My inhibitions against vegetables break down. I experiment more with the leafy stuff in the produce section that used to scare me. I eat more greens. I accept the necessity of eating avocados, even though they still don't taste like much to me unless they're in guacamole with excessive amounts of salt and garlic, and then it's not really the avocados I'm tasting, is it? I eat exotic mushrooms--mushrooms are great because they *aren't really vegetables*. Fungi aren't plants; they're more like animals that don't move, and you can taste it in their flesh. Thank god for mushrooms. I go to the farmer's market and buy all kinds of Asian vegetables like giant radishes and purple carrots. But this variety of new foods to which I am now amenable is not sufficient replacement for meat.

Being a vegetarian would be a lot easier if it were not for polish sausage. And bratwurst. And pepperoni. And mutton chops. And fried chicken. And chicken strips. And teriyaki chicken. And teriyaki beef. And Korean ribs. And ham. And bacon. And bacon cheeseburgers. And roast duck. And smoked salmon. And beef jerky. And calamari fritti. And carnitas. There are not replacements for these things in a vegetarian diet. It's possible to find vegetarian versions of a few of these foods, but the pretend meat is never convincing. It might be alright in its own right, but it would never fool anybody who had any experience with the genuine article. If I have a jones on for fried chicken, let me tell you, Morningstar Chik'n Tenders are better than nothing, but they certainly don't ever quite satisfy. Sometimes I can find vegetarian specialty restaurants or markets that sell usually overpriced but often quite excellent pretend meat. I don't feel like I'm cheating myself or punishing myself when I eat the teriyaki chicken kabobs from Mother's Market; but I can't have them every day, and I don't know where a good vegetarian market is around here in S.D., anywho.

The real essence of the problem is this: I love the taste of meat. I am quite confident that I always will. This taste was strongly inculcated in me as a child--my parents rarely, if ever, served more than a garnish of non-potato vegetables with any meal, and most of the time left me to scrounge for myself in the kitchen with few, if any, available vegetables. My mother had a thing for canned vegetables--canned peas, canned corn, canned beets, canned potatoes, canned mushrooms--but I found such fare disgusting, and do to this day. Meat or pastries or very unhealthy dairy products were usually the default foods in my home. I'm still struggling to uninculcate the overstrong tendencies towards these foods in myself.

I love the taste of meat, but I don't allow myself to have it. Some small part of this self-denial is a concession to health--lord knows I don't need to be consuming large quantities of cholesterol and saturated fat. Nobody does. Some small part of this self-denial is on account of animal cruelty. This isn't a major issue for me. I don't think animals have any special right to life. I don't think of animals as friends, or as having a human-like intelligence. I acknowledge that animals can feel pain, but insofar as I know that pain and fear involved in industrial-scale slaughtering techniques is relatively brief. Whether the animals suffer in as a result of confinement and overcrowding or the mutilations they incur as part and parcel of contemporary industrial meat-raising techniques, I cannot know. It's hard enough for humans to gauge pain in other humans; I have no idea what goes on in the mind of a chicken, and I don't think that Peta does, either.

No, the real reason I deny myself meat is because I want to protect the planet. I don't give a rat's ass about cows and chickens, but I do care about biodiversity and the wild species that are compromised as a result of industrial agriculture. I like wild animals; I think of them as "real" in a way that domesticated animals are not. I want civilization to last out my lifetime and the lifetimes of my hypothetical grandchildren. And I don't see that happening unless there are major changes to the way we get our protein in this country.

I was writing this entry last week and got lazy about finishing it; my renewed interest comes with a special article in this month's NatGeo. It reminds me how it takes five pounds of corn to produce one pound of pork or ten pounds of corn to make one pound of beef, not to mention the exorbitant amounts of water and fossil fuels used to produce meat and then there are the tons of pig or cow shit to deal with afterwards which often end up getting dumped into rivers and causing lethal algae blooms or leaching into groundwater or causing some other nasty pollution problem. And, see, this is why I don't let myself eat meat anymore. Because with populations continuing to increase around the world but resources already being stretched to their limits, there's no way we can continue on with our current lifestyle into perpetuity. Scientists have been busting their asses to increase the efficiency of food production with things like growth hormones and factory-style mass production of animals to be slaughtered, and there may be breakthroughs yet to be found that will solve some of these problems, but in the end there is no possible way that the American diet can be sustained beyond the next generation, any more than can the current American consumption and combustion of gasoline. And if we can't increase efficiency, then the only other alternative is to put new land into production, which causes habitat loss, which is then the greatest threat to biodiversity on our planet. You see how it's all connected? And you see why, much as I really really want that ham and cheese sandwich, I ask for the Veggie Heaven instead. Veggie Heaven. As if.

It's not that the production of plant foods isn't fraught with problems in itself. You've got your dependence of petro-chemical based fertilizers, your use of carcinogenic pesticides that love to leach into groundwater or remain as residue on food, your problems with mono-cultural single crop farms that only necessitate the use of more fertilizers and pesticides, your soil degradation issues that come with exhaustive and super-intensive farming techniques. You know when they slash and burn down the rainforest in Brazil? They plant soybeans in the ashes. Yeah. But, of course, all of these problems are intensified by the consumption of meat. Maybe farming practices are pretty sucky at present, but if you recall that something like...damn, I can't find the actual percentage right now, but it's about 75%...something like 75% of the grain produced in this country goes for animal feed rather than human food, you realize how it is that the consumption of meat exponentially aggravates all those other extant problems with produce farming practices, because a large majority (whatever the exact number) of what we make is not going directly to meet human needs, but is instead being given to animals who are then killed to satisfy human wants. Meat is a luxury that our country, and our planet, cannot afford.

None of these issues apply to fish, of course. Fish are just out there in the ocean; nobody's spending fossil fuels and grain to make them grow. Instead, we are just overharvesting our seas such that world fish stocks have fallen about 80% in the past fifty years, turning the once-abundant ocean into a vast wet desert. And that's no good, either. A large amount of the fish that get caught turn into chicken feed, besides, and so that introduces layers of inefficiency again.

I know I'm not doing an extensive analysis here. That's not the point. The point is that others have done the research and the analysis, and I can find no reason to dispute these facts. I really believe it's important to take this information into account; I believe it's important to live a responsible lifestyle that doesn't threaten the continued survival of the last remaining wild places on earth, and potentially human civilization as we know it. The way we are living now will not abide. The disasters of climate change, hovering over our current fragile and over-extended food production system like vultures. Either we will change before we encounter the imminent catastrophes that come with overconsumption, or those catastrophes will come and force us to change, or those catastrophes will wipe us out. I'm just trying to get a head start on the future.

But it all seems so abstract sometimes. Knowing that these problems are global in scale and endemic in our culture seems so damn impersonal. If my resolve does crumble and I order a cheeseburger, does some polar bear drift past on a shrinking ice floe, howling its pain and starvation as a result of my own poor choices? No. No such polar bear appears. I can't see the results of my own successes in reducing my carbon footprint, or my own failures. The impact of my actions on the environment remain terribly far away, and terribly small. It's only when millions of people convince themselves that their actions are insignificant and choose not to pay attention to the repercussions of their lifestyle choices that there is a serious problem. And, at best, I can just say that I am one person who is opting to be conscious and conscientious when there are many millions more who do not care. Those catastrophes aren't depending on my own personal collusion or resistance to occur.

But just because everybody else is doing something doesn't make it right. And just because everybody else is doing something wrong doesn't mean that I am excused from doing right as I see it. And right for me means minimizing the damage I do to the planet. And so that means salivating at the smell of my neighbors grilling sausage on the grill and then going to eat my sauteed greens. And probably accepting that I am fallible, and not feeling guilty when my resolve does fail, and so get discouraged from doing anything at all.

I just wish the wanting would go away. But it never does, does it? Perhaps this whole life thing isn't actually about getting what you want, but learning how to accept that your wants will always outstrip your capacity to satisfy them, justifiably or otherwise, and to keep those wants in submission. A rather unhappy thing to contemplate, but I wonder if it isn't true.