Alan Liere: All about meat
A number of years ago when I was still flirting with early burnout and bladder failure as a high school English teacher, I ran into one of my students at the grocery store.
“Oh, Mr. Liere,” he said sarcastically, noting the rib-eye steaks in my grocery cart, “Haven’t you killed anything for your dinner tonight?”
This student had only recently heard me tell my class that I mostly ate fish and game I had killed myself, and he was appalled by the notion.
“No, Darren,” I replied, “I let someone else kill tonight’s dinner.”
I’d like to say my answer changed his views about hunting – or of food consumption in general – but I don’t think it did much more than make him stop popping his gum for a few seconds. I don’t think he’d ever see any similarity between my venison burger and his Big Mac.
I’m pretty sure he and an ever-growing majority of the population think steaks and chops and hamburger and roasts just grow in Styrofoam trays covered with cellophane and are shipped to grocery store display racks once they have attained the desired shape and size. I’m pretty sure a lot of folks think hot dogs grow like that somewhere and the pepperoni on their pizzas was invented by Papa Murphy.
The fact that I happen to prefer to procure my own wild meat – meat without additives – is a concept difficult to grasp for many. They think I am uncivilized because I prefer to know where my meat came from and how it was handled, and I prefer to know my animal died quickly in its natural habitat, unaware that its life was ending.
If someone wants to be a vegetarian, that’s fine with me. I’m sorry for their choice, however, as I think the fat from a good steak or hamburger dribbling down the chin is one of life’s more pleasurable experiences, as is the smell of pork ribs on a charcoal fire on a summer evening.
I think some people don’t eat meat because they feel it is a healthier alternative; maybe it is. Their decision. If eating meat is shortening my life, then so be it. White flour, sugar and beer are probably also shortening my life, but what good is life without pleasure?
Others feel that by abstaining from meat, their hands and souls are not dirtied by the blood of an animal; they would be appalled to learn that no matter what, there is a gut pile somewhere. These are the people I take exception to.
To raise those soy beans and grapes and carrots and corn so coveted by the dedicated vegan, animals died from loss of habitat, loss of food and the stress of trying to cope with noisy human neighbors with cats and dogs.
No one wants deer and rabbits eating their gardens, but every time we make a vineyard or build a house in the country, we disrupt the food source of the original inhabitants of the land. If they leave, they become concentrated on diminishing habitat and are susceptible to disease, predation and steel-belted radials which are perhaps the most efficient predator of all. Many will die, but evidently, that doesn’t count because we can’t always see it happen.
If they don’t leave, on the other hand – if they stay and feed on the petunias – we complain. For heaven’s sake, we can’t have wild animals eating our petunias! We complain to our Departments of Fish and Wildlife to “DO SOMETHING!” And while hunting seasons were not created to save the world’s petunias, an unmanaged deer population would certainly create all sorts of problems for homeowners.
In South Africa, there are thousands of acres of vineyards where impala and springbok and giraffes and zebra once roamed, but the fact they were killed or run off to make room for grape vines evidently doesn’t reduce a vegan’s appreciation of a robust South African merlot.
There are those who lament the decimation of the enormous bison herds, but no one wants a couple of hundred thousand bison in the neighborhood. Wolves are beautiful – noble, almost mystical animals, and so are cougars … until they grab Fifi off the back porch … then there is another uproar to “DO SOMETHING!”
Unfortunately, you can’t have it both ways.