Food Recognition
During our germy, exhausted fast-food weekend, I found myself eating a McNugget. I had several thoughts all at once: 1) This tastes boring. 2) This neither looks nor feels like an actual chicken. 3) I feel a little sick. 4) Are there any more left for me?
We have been at this everything-from-scratch lifestyle for several months now, and though I had already realized during our previous illness-induced backsliding that fast food does not actually taste good, this time I found myself repelled by the way an animal had been rendered unrecognizable.
I eat meat. I do not find anything disturbing about eating meat, though there are ethical implications both in the frequency with which we eat it, and in the way we care for and slaughter the animals we eat. But the idea of meat does not creep me out. If we all decided to stop using the Norman-French words for meat and began calling our beef “cow” and our pork “pig,” it would provide no shocks in this household. We are aware – deliberately and even reverently – that our meat costs a life, that the bacon we eat was once a living creature.
But our McDonald’s meal disturbed me because, after all these months of preparing our own chicken, the dismembering and grinding and reshaping of a chicken carcass so that it no longer looks like a chicken carcass struck me as obscene.
Since we started our slow food experiment, I have stood in line at the butcher’s shop looking at the diagram of the different cuts of a cow, or I have unshelled shrimp, removing the tiny creatures’ legs and tails, or I have cut apart the skeleton of a chicken. All these small practices remind us not only intellectually but tangibly that this body was a life, with legs like ours, or bones like ours. I have learned to reckon the life of the animal as part of the cost of eating meat. This is not always something that sits comfortably on me. I have not yet killed our own meat, but I think I should be willing to, if I’m willing to eat it.
I was disturbed by the McNugget not because I think there’s anything wrong with eating a reshaped chicken carcass. I was disturbed because its popularity shows how excluded most of our culture is from the realities of meat. It is a spiritual impoverishment for us to eat an animal without recognizing that we have taken its life. Meat costs a life. That should matter to us.
As I said, I am not a vegetarian. I do not believe that it is wrong to take the life of an animal. I do believe that there is something wrong with us if we take the life of an animal and pretend we didn’t.
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I think this is really interesting. We are not 100% vegetarian, but over the years have morphed into very nearly so. We eat meat at other people’s houses, we eat meat sometimes when we go out to a restaurant, I cook meat at home about 3-4 times a year. (This has had the sad side effect that I am losing my knack for successfully cooking meat; I feel like it turns out worse every time I try it.) We have reduced the amount of meat we eat for financial and environmental reasons, and then we don’t really like it that much. A big reason, though, is that I am SO SQUEAMISH about meat. The fact that the chicken was alive, that the cow had bones like me, etc weirds me out tremendously, and I can only really eat or cook meat when I mentally block that out. I think this means that I should eat even less meat than I already do because I obviously am not psychologically or ethically comfortable with it.
Your tale of the chicken nugget reminded me of a book I read (author & title eluding me right now but contemporary, sort of speculative dystopian literary fiction, written by a woman) where one scene involved this thing that was basically a tree that grew boneless skinless chicken breasts. AAAAAAAAAAH! I read this YEARS ago but it was so horrifying that obviously it has stuck with me.
You would probably like this blog. Charlotte lives in Montana, buys whole pigs from her neighbors, gets elk from her hunter friends. She used to be a city girl, though.
I hadn’t thought of a McNugget that way but now you say it, I agree with you. Lunch meat — a deli cut — while less processed is like that, too.
This was one of my main reasons for being 98% vegetarian for 5 years or so. I couldn’t afford to buy meat that had been treated like an animal (rather than a product) so I just didn’t eat meat. Now that we do eat meat more often, my girls know that beef=cow, though as city kids I worry that the reality of a cow has been cartoonized away from being an actual animal. I never know how far to push it without causing trauma, but it is something I want them to understand.
Well put. I feel the same way about meat. It doesn’t bother me to eat it but I like to acknowledge where it came from.
Yes! It’s really important to me to have a verifiable connection between the food source and the dinner on the table. Cutting up chickens is one way to get there. Peeling & dicing potatoes is another.
You are being way more hardcore about your “experiment”, in the only buying single product things, but you cook much like we cook. From scratch, almost all the time.
So I take it you’re not really a fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken changing its name to “KFC.” Or maybe you ARE a fan, since they’re not even pretending anymore …
Making that visceral connection between farm and grocery store was one of my favorite side benefits of living in the country. When we drove by the cows and the corn fields, I could talk to my preschoolers about where our hamburgers come from.
Excellent post! I was raised with a very close connection to my meat/food source– my parents are organic farmers. I know exactly what you’re talking about here, but what a challenge to raise my own children in the city with the same consciousness!
It has been driving me insane ALL DAY that I could not remember the name of that book with the freaky chicken tree, and I finally remembered one word of the title. It was Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Very good, if dark and scary.
Amen, sister.
I like your approach. I read, awhile back, an article on plants in the NY Times; the complexities of their lives, their reactions to threats and non-threats, etc. The author pointed out that eating vegetables requires killing something just as eating meat does. I think having a reverence towards all of the wonderful things available to us is a good place to be.
Having been raised on a beef farm, I knew the NAMES of the animal I was having for supper. And I was a vegetarian for a while as a teenager, too – but I’ve never felt the urge to be one again. I KNOW what you are saying.
Beck, my in-laws always kept a few animals, but had the rule that “you don’t name your food.” They only gave names to the pets.