FIVE REASONS TO EAT MEAT: 1> It tastes good 2> It makes you feel good 3> It’s a great American tradition 4> It supports the nation’s farmers 5> Your parents did it Oh, sorry…those are five reasons to smoke cigarettes. Meat is more complicated. It’s a food most Americans eat virtually every day: at the dinner table; in the cafeteria; on the barbecue patio; with mustard at a ballpark; or, a billion times a year, with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun. Beef is, the TV commercials say, “America’s food”–the Stars and Stripes served up medium rare–and as entwined with the nation’s notion of its robust frontier heritage as, well, the Marlboro Man. But these days America’s cowboys seem a bit small in the saddle. Those cattle they round up have become politically incorrect: for many, meat is an obscene cuisine. It’s not just the additives and ailments connected with the consumption of beef, though a dish of hormones, E. coli bacteria or the scary specter of mad-cow disease might be effective enough as an appetite suppressant. It’s that more and more Americans, particularly young Americans, have started engaging in a practice that would once have shocked their parents. They are eating their vegetables. Also their grains and sprouts. Some 10 million Americans today consider themselves to be practicing vegetarians, according to a TIME poll of 10,000 adults; an additional 20 million have flirted with vegetarianism sometime in their past. To get a taste of the cowboy’s ancient pride, and current defensiveness, just click on South Dakota cattleman Jody Brown’s website, www.ranchers.net and read the new meat mantras: “Vegetarians don’t live longer, they just look older”; and “If animals weren’t meant to be eaten, then why are they made out of meat?” For Brown and his generation of unquestioning meat eaters, dinner is something the parents put on the table and the kids put in their bodies. Of his own kids, he says, “We expect them to eat a little of everything.” So beef is served nearly every night at the Brown homestead, with nary a squawk from Jeff, 17, Luke, 13, and Hannah, 11. But Jody admits to at least one liberal sympathy. “If a vegetarian got a flat tire in my community,” he says, “I’d come out and help him.” For the rancher who makes his living with meat or the vegetarian whose diet could someday drive all those breeder-slaughterers to bankruptcy, nothing is simple any more. Gone is the age of American innocence, or naivete, when such items as haircuts and handshakes, family names and school uniforms, farms and zoos, cowboys and ranchers, had no particular political meaning. Now everything is up for rancorous debate. And no aspect of our daily lives–our lives as food consumers–gets more heat than meat. For millions of vegetarians, beef is a four-letter word; veal summons charnel visions of infanticide. Many children, raised on hit films like Babe and Chicken Run, recoil from eating their movie heroes and switch to what the meat defeaters like to call a “nonviolent diet.” Vegetarianism resolves a conscientious person’s inner turf war by providing an edible complex of good-deed-doing: to go veggie is to be more humane. Give up meat, and save lives!
