As I passed by restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and boutiques, I started to notice a trend: almost every single one of these businesses boasted locally and/or sustainably sourced product. One restaurant was featuring fresh New England oysters, another farm-fresh vegetables delivered daily, and yet another locally grown beef. Several proudly displayed the farms they sourced from on their menus, and many boutiques featured clothing and crafts from local artists. Also, these were nearly all local, independently owned businesses.
This is good news. The understanding that local and fresh is better and tastier, that fast food isn't good food, is taking hold. Farmer's markets are springing up all over town, even at this late point in the season. For instance, there will be a farmer's market actually on Tufts' campus once a week for an undisclosed period of time once school starts in two days. This is proof that advocacy for farmers is working. Consumers are becoming choosier and more savvy, suddenly realizing that there are hundreds of different types of heirloom tomatoes (see my last post) or that fresh herbs, meats, and cheeses, can be affordable alternatives to the dreck usually available at the local Shaws or Foodmaster. Why buy from these places at markup when I can get the real deal right from the farmer (whose name and business I know personally), and it tastes so much better?
And what's even more wonderful is that, whereas I knew a lot of these businesses existed before, there were at least a half dozen new ones that are pursuing the same strategy: farm fresh ingredients made into good, wholesome food. For instance, this place Posto is doing it, and a new restaurant called The Foundry is set to offer a significant number of local brews (no website or menu yet!). When I try these places, you'll be the first to know. Now, we just need to get people cooking all this great produce in their own kitchens. Seriously folks, the great thing about fresh produce is that you can achieve delicious meals faster because you can let the flavors shine through in simple preparations. If I've said it once here, I've said it a thousand times...start cooking!
Now there is another significant matter to discuss. No one who knows me from this blog knows that I used to be a vegetarian. And I don't mean one of those idiots who identify themselves as a vegetarian "but, I like, sometimes eat chicken and fish." No. That's not a fucking vegetarian, people. Because, contrary to popular belief, chickens and fishes are both living and breathing organisms with nervous systems and brains and etc. They are, in short, meat. No, from 2003-2008, not a bit of meat passed my lips knowingly. I had been a vegetarian before that as well, but I'm not going to claim those years because I can't remember when I started.
One of the big things people used to ask was, why? And now they ask, why did you stop? So I'm going to briefly answer both of these questions now because I have an ethical quandary I'm busy sorting out, and I want to put it out there and make it official. I want to mark the day, so to speak.
I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons. For one thing, the meat industry in this country is morally and ethically bankrupt- treating animals to horrifying conditions before being slaughtered, forcing them to eat each other in their feed, forcing them to eat grains, drugs, and hormones their bodies are not equipped to withstand. I'm also a pacifist, and was one long before I identified as Quaker. To take this literally means that killing other living things, especially when it isn't necessary, is abhorrent. I also had a belief in Gandhi's principle that "violence begets violence," and that that's a good enough reason to stop participating in the mass wholesale slaughter of animals. I had other reasons too, but those were the biggies.
Then I came to Boston, and I was poor. Very, very, poor. My roommate Amy, whose own eating habits and knowledge about food and cooking I absolutely and fully respect (she just got her MA in nutrition at the Tufts Friedman School), saved me from certain starvation by pooling her resources (read:food) with me. We had several long discussions about vegetarianism, about best-practice meat production, and about the economics and ethics of sustainable food. In the end, I started eating meat again.
In some sense, this will seem hypocritical in the most profound way. The ethical stance I had was, after all, very clear. Please bear with me. First and foremost, my thought was that supporting a structure of meat production that was antithetical to industrial practice was very important, and second, I had never understood or really been exposed to the "meat culture" in America. I grew up in the Virgin Islands, a son of two health-conscious European ex-pats, with soy milk, tofu, and vegetables as dietary staples. Even after I came to America, my exposure to meat was limited to the occasional (organic, free-range) hamburger. This was fine with me, and I had no compunction to rebel against it because I felt that what I was eating was much better than what the kids down the street were eating (and I knew for sure after I had stayed over for dinner a few times). I got interested in how the other half lived. I wondered, what was I missing? I decided, partly for these two reasons, to forgo being veg for a while to find out what it was like to eat meat in this country, and how available sustainable and affordable meat products really were.
I feel as if that experiment is drawing to a close. As it turns out, and as other people have concluded before me, we eat too much meat. We've sanitized the process of killing to the point that we have no connection with the animals on our plate, nor do we care. Meat is just another "product"- a nearly artificial-seeming thing produced by a mystical process that we don't want to hear or know about. As if there was a "meat-tree" from which prepackaged cuts of ham and steak materialized and were put in the grocery store freezer. And this is wrong on nearly every level I can imagine. Life deserves respect which, at the very least, has to begin with an acknowledgment of taking it for sustenance. We have to understand where these animals come from, how they were treated, who treated them, how they died. Animals have stories and feelings and histories, and denying them that is the goal of our meat-centric culture. And, while this may seem like hippie-tripe to some people, our lack of respect is quite literally killing us. From heart-disease to mad-cow to rampant obesity, our obsession with death (and the requisite cover-up of it for an ignorant public) is deadly. We're killing biodiversity, and animals, and ourselves, in a nearly perfect industrial machine that even professionals have to take years trying to understand.
So, starting today, I'm ramping down the experiment. Eventually, this means that I will probably be totally vegetarian again. I'm starting by never eating ANY animal that I can't verify had a good, healthy lifestyle before it showed up on my plate. I want to know where these animals live and how they die, because that's the very least that I owe them. I want to know the farmer who took care of the animal, to look them in the eye and understand something about my place as a consumer. We can call this phase two of a multi-phase process. And as an acquaintance of mine argued well to me not too long ago, dropping out of the process of meat-production, industrial or sustainable, is actually one of the best things we can do to help. Lowering the bar for meat-production of all types is itself the best discouragement of industrial agribusiness. Because if demand lowers, agribusiness must follow, and that means that the small farmer has a better shot anyway. So that's it. No cheating, no going out to get a random burger from a random restaurant, nothing unless I know what I need to know about that animal.
This has been a long and strange journey for me, but I am glad that at this stage of the process I have somewhere I can document it. I am confident that this is the right thing to do.
I bid you peace.
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