2004-04-04
Ruminations (!) on the state of beef
I�m not sure when I started becoming a vegetarian.It certainly wasn�t when I was a kid, and fried chicken and roast beast and all that was a daily thing.
Or in high school, when it was the thing to do, to cruise Steak n� Shake, ordering burgers only if you were actually there to eat. Pizza was the rage, of course.
Not in college, either, when pizza was even more the rage, and furthermore, leftovers could be stored under the sink in the winter for a yummy breakfast the next day.
I doubt it was the early working years, going from job to job and apartment to apartment, often without electricity and sharing cans of beans on bread with my cats. That kind of vegetarianism was forced on me by the economy. My economy, but still. When money permitted it was meat I bought first.
Throughout most of my adult life, meat has been an important part of my diet and my lifestyle.
What would summer be without barbeques? Ribs, grilled chicken, grilled burgers, steaks � you name it. Shish kebab has always been a favorite of mine.
When we were in college (well, I was out, my brother still in) my brother became a vegetarian. He who loved MickyD�s with a love of all loves. He became a vegetarian on moral principles. He said after years that he couldn�t even think of hamburgers, let alone eat them.
My mother always liked my brother best. So, since he was practically her god, she gradually became a vegetarian too. After all, if he was one, it must be the right thing to do. She would still let us grill at her place, for a while, till the smell of meat made her sick.
Through it all, I just ate what I felt like, letting my body tell me when I needed something or had had too much of something. And it did.
I�m very in tune with my body, in that regard. I don�t always listen to it, mind you, but I can hear it.
Sometimes it takes a lot of ice cream to drown out the muffled screams of a thin person wanting to claw its way out of said body.
My mother was thin. 5�2� and thought she was fat if she hit 100 lbs. I grew up thinking I was fat, even when I wasn�t. I go back and look at pictures of me as a child and think, what was I thinking? No way was I too heavy. But I was 5�0� and 110 lbs. To Mother that was obese. So years of being asked, in a sarcastic voice only a mother can produce, if I really wanted to have thighs like hams, and trying to live up to her starved-model ideas of what was fashionable, when I reached my 30�s I just said to Hell with it and gave up.
So yeah, I�m not thin.
And I eat meat.
At least I did, up until recently.
For quite some time now I�ve just seemed to favor chicken, turkey, fish, and occasionally pork in the form of ham or bacon. I�d occasionally get a craving for a burger but I�d go have one and was fine.
When Partner and I got together, he was big on healthy stuff but not to the ridiculous point. I started eating salads a bit more, and desserts a bit less.
But meat was still part of it all, even if it was mostly fish and fowl, and the occasionally squirrel and venison.
Did I mention Partner was a hunter? Me, the animal freak, with a spousal-type attachment to a hunter!! My friends thought I was nuts. But Partner is the kind of hunter I can tolerate. He doesn�t hunt because he enjoys killing, but because he enjoys the outdoors, respects nature, and eats what he kills. Which is fine with me, as long as whatever it is he brings to the pot, looks like it came from the grocery before it enters my front door. I will not clean, gut, pluck, de-fur and otherwise butcher anything but garden vegetables. Period.
Me, the one who as a young kid loved biology class and dissecting things to see how they worked.
The one who, when my Dad went squirrel hunting (before my Mother made him get rid of his guns) and brought me the tails, thought he�d somehow magically gotten them to give up their tails while they went merrily on their way, tailless, and oh by the way brought home some odd looking chicken from the store.
The me who, later, couldn�t eat frog legs if my ex was across the table saying �ribbet, ribbet� and talking about Kermit.
The me who, never could eat anything that was recognizable as it�s previous form in life. (except chicken, which I grew up on and never really thought about). This to the point of ordering fish once in a classy restaurant, because I liked fish, and then not being able to eat it because how was I to know it would still have the head and tail on? And then, after putting a napkin across its head and tail so I couldn�t see them, thought it was too much like a dissecting table and still couldn�t eat it.
*sigh*
You�d think I�d have been a vegetarian long ago, eh?
But no, just in my 50�s am I slowly getting to that point. I�d already lost my taste for red meat before the mad cow disease scare. (diversion here: why do they call it PMS? Answer: Mad Cow Disease was already taken) After reading about that, in gruesome detail, thanks to interviews with guys from the slaughterhouse, it was no big deal to just give it up all together. I�ve now gotten to the point that I not only don�t want it, I can�t eat it. I can eat stuff that�s touched meat, and I don�t have a cow (pardon the phrase) if a piece of meat kind of slips into the broth, but steak and burgers and even the smell of them cooking just don�t do it for me anymore.
And now I�m having trouble eating chicken. My lifetime favorite! I can�t do it. I get a piece of breading on a piece of home fried chicken and taste it, and it tastes yummy. For about 2 seconds. Then I just walk away. Can�t do it.
I even skipped Partner�s Men�s Club Fish Fry last week.
What�s wrong with me?
If I�m becoming my mother, as they say every woman does, just shoot me now.
On the second thought, my mother died a bitter, lonely woman, obsessed with thinness and cigarettes .... until she ended up in the hospital and died of lung cancer. I quit smoking a few months after that. Now I�m becoming a vegetarian.
But I�ll never be lonely or bitter. *I* have a computer.
So save the bullet. I may be a lot like her, but I�ll never, ever, end up like she did.
And if I do, well, Partner will shoot me.
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