The Mindful Carnivore Read Online Free

girlfriend’s family, I enjoyed their vegetarian stir-fries and salads. When I visited my best friends—a pair of brothers—I savored their mother’s meaty German-style cooking just as much. If I was out with friends and we stopped at McDonald’s, I would order a Quarter Pounder with cheese, never pausing for a moment to consider where the beef patty came from.
    By the time I was twenty—holding that trout to the cutting board and considering Thich Nhat Hanh’s words on kindness—my days of carefree carnivory were over.
    I started cutting back on meat in my late teens. I had learned that excess beef and pork weren’t good for my health. I had learned, too, that supermarket meat was far from pure. Looking at ground chuck in the local IGA cooler, I wondered what chemical mysteries lay accumulated inside those plastic and foam packages. How much pesticide had been on the corn those cattle had eaten? What antibiotics had been pumped into the animals, keeping them alive for slaughter day?
    A year or two later, I learned that more than ten pounds of corn were used to produce every pound of U.S. grain-fed beef and that broad swaths of South American rainforest were being denuded to raise cattle for North American markets. Why should my diet harm the earth? Why should it make such wasteful use of the fruits of the land, perpetuating this pattern of First World gluttony when people around the globe were starving?
    My appetite for supermarket flesh had been further dulled by what I knew about factory farming: pigs crammed into crates barely larger than their bodies, chickens stuck in tiny cages for the entirety of their brief lives. What right did humans have to treat animals so cruelly? And must not that cruelty harm humans in turn? Must not the common practice of “thumping” runt piglets—grabbing them by the hind legs and smashing their heads against concrete floors—harden people’s hearts and distort their notions of morality?
    The change had been gradual: these questions growing, my meals including less and less meat. Now, at twenty, the final recognition hit hard. I had killed this fish out of nothing more than habit.
    Picking up my little spinning rod, I had tied a lure to the stiff, tightly spiraled line and cast out into the quarry. Soon enough the trout had struck and had come in flashing, struggling against the hook. A minute later, I had it on the cutting board, its head severed, my heart filled with sudden disquiet.
    Because I had killed the fish, I ate it. But I cooked and swallowed its tender flesh with regret. Unlike a factory chicken, it had lived well, yet its death had been gratuitous. There were so many other things I could have eaten, things like rice and vegetables, things that would not have felt the hook or even the briefest slice of steel. It was, I vowed, the last time I would ever consume a fellow creature.
    During my last two years of college, I lived in Brooklyn and attended classes in lower Manhattan. Practically all of my friends were vegetarians. We could see no conscionable reason to eat the flesh of other animals. No rationale could justify it. No apology could set it right. Before long, I became a purist: a vegan. I forswore eggs, milk, yogurt, and cheese. I objected to specific practices like the partial clipping off of laying hens’ sensitive beaks to prevent them from pecking at each other in overcrowded conditions. And I objected more generally to the confinement of fellow animals, the bending of other creatures’ lives to serve human ends.
    I could walk into any New York City grocery store and find shelves and display cases brimming with bread and beans, fruit and greens. Or I could walk over to the farmers’ market in Union Square, at the intersection of Broadway and Fourteenth Street, to buy produce directly from the folks who had grown it.
    I still knew plenty of meat eaters, of course, including my family. Fortunately, they accepted my diet. When we sat down to Thanksgiving