I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, author and Nobel Prize winner
We’re ready for some warm nights, up on the hill. The cold and wet start to May has set our tomato harvest back a few weeks. Along with some other garden favorites, tomatoes relish the heat, and May’s late-season frost warnings meant waiting to get our little plot growing. True, if we were a bit more industrious, we could have had several harvests of cool-weather greens by now, but somehow, it is the globular beauty of tomatoes and eggplants and peppers that spur us on to double dig and weed and water. All that work for some leaf lettuce? Not so much.
Last year, we joined a CSA—community-supported agriculture. From Memorial Day to
Thanksgiving, I stop on my way home from work and pick up a box filled to the brim with fresh produce grown just to the north of us. Our first season kicked off with beautiful tiny spinach leaves and crazy-curled garlic scapes, a Seussical-looking cross between garlic and scallion. New potatoes, raspberries, rhubarb followed. Mesclun, pencil-thin asparagus, golf-ball sized beets in a treasure-chest array of colors. Corn, acorn squash, heirloom tomatoes, even some peaches. Tasty treats for weeks on end. The real fun is that the contents of the box remain a mystery until they’re getting unpacked; standing in the kitchen, up to our elbows in produce, we puzzle over the coming week’s menus, trying to figure out ways to incorporate all the bounty we’ve just cleaned and sorted.
Now, it won’t surprise many that I’m a vegetarian. Given my penchant for trees over asphalt, and my willingness to carry bugs outside instead of relegating them to the heel of D’s shoe, it isn’t a shock that I gave up eating animals some time ago. It was right around the time we got the dog, actually. She bounded, full-tilt, into our lives, overflowing with joie de vivre. Call it anthropomorphism, I don’t care: she wears her emotions on her sleeve every bit as clearly as I do mine. It doesn’t take a clinical psychologist to tell when she’s happy or sad, scared or feisty. When I get mail from my mother, the dog goes crazy sniffing the envelope. Just that one—no others. Whatever vestige of Mom that remains on the mail sets the dog’s tail wagging and her feet dancing, just as if my mother were in the room.
So, witnessing the dog’s small life up close, filled with the same sorts of emotions that I feel, it wasn’t much of a leap to stop one day and consider who else might share a life of the mind. Accounts by people who keep pigs almost always contain at least one story bearing witness to their intelligence (the pigs, I mean). If dogs and pigs, how not chickens and cows? And fish? Yes. All, in my opinion, possess too much of what Singer calls “the spark of the divine” for me to justify killing them for food. While the food web depends on animals eating other animals, my survival does not—I can choose, and do, to find other sources of nutrition. That’s not to say I don’t miss bacon. But when I remember that bacon = pig, it becomes easier to bear the loss.
In the beginning of my vegetarianism, it was “no food with a face.” Eventually, inevitably, it expanded to encompass all animals—even mussels, a pretty integral part of moules frites, my favorite meal ever. My choice isn’t for everyone, and I understand that. D still enjoys fish with a vengeance. And even he used to chafe a bit when I’d explain “I don’t eat animals” to servers in restaurants. “Why not just say, ‘I don’t eat meat?’ ” he’d ask, with some exasperation. Partly because that led to the inevitable string of questions: How about chicken? No? Okay, what about fish? Better just to cut to the chase: I don’t eat any animals.
But part of me, I admit, wants that slightly-shocked reaction from people. We’ve made it easy to forget that the primary ingredients of Big Macs and gyros and hot dogs are really cows and lambs and, well, whatever animal parts hot dogs are made out of. “I don’t eat animals” is a reminder. So, like Isaac Bashevis Singer and his chickens, I’ll stick with the box of produce and leave the animals off my menu. I just wish someone could come up with a tofu mussel. Or at least a bacon-scented air freshener. Now that would get my tail wagging.
(For those interested in more information about Community Supported Agriculture and how to join a produce pick-up program, click here.)
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, author and Nobel Prize winner
We’re ready for some warm nights, up on the hill. The cold and wet start to May has set our tomato harvest back a few weeks. Along with some other garden favorites, tomatoes relish the heat, and May’s late-season frost warnings meant waiting to get our little plot growing. True, if we were a bit more industrious, we could have had several harvests of cool-weather greens by now, but somehow, it is the globular beauty of tomatoes and eggplants and peppers that spur us on to double dig and weed and water. All that work for some leaf lettuce? Not so much.
Last year, we joined a CSA—community-supported agriculture. From Memorial Day to
Thanksgiving, I stop on my way home from work and pick up a box filled to the brim with fresh produce grown just to the north of us. Our first season kicked off with beautiful tiny spinach leaves and crazy-curled garlic scapes, a Seussical-looking cross between garlic and scallion. New potatoes, raspberries, rhubarb followed. Mesclun, pencil-thin asparagus, golf-ball sized beets in a treasure-chest array of colors. Corn, acorn squash, heirloom tomatoes, even some peaches. Tasty treats for weeks on end. The real fun is that the contents of the box remain a mystery until they’re getting unpacked; standing in the kitchen, up to our elbows in produce, we puzzle over the coming week’s menus, trying to figure out ways to incorporate all the bounty we’ve just cleaned and sorted.Now, it won’t surprise many that I’m a vegetarian. Given my penchant for trees over asphalt, and my willingness to carry bugs outside instead of relegating them to the heel of D’s shoe, it isn’t a shock that I gave up eating animals some time ago. It was right around the time we got the dog, actually. She bounded, full-tilt, into our lives, overflowing with joie de vivre. Call it anthropomorphism, I don’t care: she wears her emotions on her sleeve every bit as clearly as I do mine. It doesn’t take a clinical psychologist to tell when she’s happy or sad, scared or feisty. When I get mail from my mother, the dog goes crazy sniffing the envelope. Just that one—no others. Whatever vestige of Mom that remains on the mail sets the dog’s tail wagging and her feet dancing, just as if my mother were in the room.
So, witnessing the dog’s small life up close, filled with the same sorts of emotions that I feel, it wasn’t much of a leap to stop one day and consider who else might share a life of the mind. Accounts by people who keep pigs almost always contain at least one story bearing witness to their intelligence (the pigs, I mean). If dogs and pigs, how not chickens and cows? And fish? Yes. All, in my opinion, possess too much of what Singer calls “the spark of the divine” for me to justify killing them for food. While the food web depends on animals eating other animals, my survival does not—I can choose, and do, to find other sources of nutrition. That’s not to say I don’t miss bacon. But when I remember that bacon = pig, it becomes easier to bear the loss.
In the beginning of my vegetarianism, it was “no food with a face.” Eventually, inevitably, it expanded to encompass all animals—even mussels, a pretty integral part of moules frites, my favorite meal ever. My choice isn’t for everyone, and I understand that. D still enjoys fish with a vengeance. And even he used to chafe a bit when I’d explain “I don’t eat animals” to servers in restaurants. “Why not just say, ‘I don’t eat meat?’ ” he’d ask, with some exasperation. Partly because that led to the inevitable string of questions: How about chicken? No? Okay, what about fish? Better just to cut to the chase: I don’t eat any animals.
But part of me, I admit, wants that slightly-shocked reaction from people. We’ve made it easy to forget that the primary ingredients of Big Macs and gyros and hot dogs are really cows and lambs and, well, whatever animal parts hot dogs are made out of. “I don’t eat animals” is a reminder. So, like Isaac Bashevis Singer and his chickens, I’ll stick with the box of produce and leave the animals off my menu. I just wish someone could come up with a tofu mussel. Or at least a bacon-scented air freshener. Now that would get my tail wagging.
(For those interested in more information about Community Supported Agriculture and how to join a produce pick-up program, click here.)
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