No More Sacred Cows - Newsweek

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Some longtime vegetarians are returning to meat, but only with

sustainably raised, grass-fed livestock like these cows at Ghent, N.Y.'s

Hawthorne Valley Farm

 

No More Sacred CowsBy

 

Jennie Yabroff | NEWSWEEK

Published Dec 31, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Jan 11, 2010

 

The latest cookbook by Mollie Katzen, author of vegetarian bibles

 

The Moosewood Cookbookand The Enchanted Broccoli

Forest, includes recipes for spinach lasagna and vegetable tofu stir

fry with orange ginger glaze. It also includes a recipe for beef stew.

No, not " beef " stew, in which some soy-based protein substitute

is dressed and spiced to look (and sort of taste) like meat. Beef stew.

With real beef. From a cow.

 

Considered one of the chefs most responsible for the mainstreaming of

vegetarianism in the 1970s and '80s, and a vegetarian herself for 30

years, Katzen began eating meat again a few years ago. " Somehow it

got ascribed to me that I don't want people to eat meat, " Katzen

said. " I've just wanted to supply possibilities that were low on the

food chain. "

For as long as people have been foreswearing meat, they've also been

sneaking the occasional corn dog. The difference is, vegetarians used to

feel guilty about their sins of the flesh-consumption. Now, thanks to the

cachet attached to high-end meat, they are having their burgers without

sacrificing the moral high ground.

The word " flexitarian, " meaning someone who mostly eats

vegetarian with the occasional cheesesteak thrown in, has been around for

a while. But only recently have former vegetarians been so smug about

their forays to the dark side. " There is something almost primal

about it, " writes lapsed vegetarian Tara Austen Weaver, describing

her first meat-buying expedition in The Butcher and the

Vegetarian. " I haven't actually hunted dinner myself, but I set

my sights and claimed the prize I sought. " The

" primalness " of the meat-eating (or meat-purchasing) experience

comes up a lot in these conversion narratives, which inevitably take

place at a quaint, family-run butcher shop. Some of these shops are even

run by former vegetarians and vegans, such as Fleisher's, the upstate New

York store where Julie Powell (of

 

Julie and Juliafame) learned to carve up a steer for her

forthcoming

 

Cleaving.

Buying only grass-fed, sustainably raised (and incredibly expensive) meat

allows former vegetarians to maintain the same sanctimony they expressed

with their old " I don't eat anything with a face " T shirts. In

response to an article by Jonathan Safran Foer about his decision to give

up meat, a Brooklyn meat moralist wrote, " lovingly raised meat is

not as hard to find as [safran Foer] seems to think­at least not if you

have the good fortune to live near a farmers' market. Almost all the

sheep and cattle and most of the pigs and chickens raised by the farmers

who sell at those markets have spent their lives in the fields, free to

run, graze and root as their natures dictate. " This is the argument

used by born-again carnivores like Katzen: eating meat is not ethically

wrong. Eating ethically wrong meat (i.e., the cheap, mass-processed,

hormone-stuffed burgers and steaks that constitute 80 percent of the meat

sold in the U.S.) is wrong.

While it's true that sustainably raised, grass-fed beef may be better for

the consumer, it's hard to argue that it's ultimately better for the cow.

What these steak apologists seem to be missing is that no matter how

" lovingly " the cow was raised, no matter how much grazing or

rooting he did in his life, he gave up that life to become their dinner.

Carnivores who only ate the flesh of animals that had died of natural

causes at the end of long, satisfying lives might have a claim to moral

superiority, but what to call them? Corpsevores? And if these organic

farm animals have such great lives, isn't the more humane thing to eat a

cage-raised, industrially processed chicken? At least we'd be putting it

out of its misery.

© 2010

 

 

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