If you know me well, you know that I haven’t eaten poultry in five or six years. I was standing in Whole Foods one day looking at chicken breasts, and when I saw a “whole chicken, cut up,” and saw the wings and legs, it reminded me of my fids. I cried right there in the grocery, and I haven’t had poultry since. Eating a bird is for me like eating a dog or cat would be for you. Just can’t do it.
Am I a vegetarian? No. Not yet. I tried it once before and lasted about three months before I caved and had a cheesesteak. I’ve never been much of a carnivore, though: When I was a kid, I would say I was “allergic” to meat. My mother didn’t eat much meat, either.
As I get older, however, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the consumption of meat. First, factory farming is absolutely cruel. The animals are confined in revolting conditions, fed everything from barnyard scraps to chicken feces, and then shot up with hormones and antibiotics to ward off the illness that would surely befall them in such horrific squalor. Then, they are slaughtered in a barbaric fashion. Beef cattle are subjected to electric shock, supposedly to stun them, but they still feel the agony of the kill. Chickens and other poultry foul are hung upside down by the ankles, and although they, too, are supposed to be stunned, many of them are still very much conscious and able to feel pain when their feathers are yanked out. Veal? Well-publicized abuse and torture. Lamb, no better. Pigs, complete terror.
Second, meat is not necessary for human survival. The American Dietetic Association has endorsed vegetarian diets as part of a healthy lifestyle. Contrary to popular belief, it is entirely possible to get all the protein and iron you need without eating meat.
Now I could fill up this page with links to the horror. I could post many YouTube videos of suffering animals, and subject you to scenes that will not only turn your stomach, but will stay in your head for the rest of your life and give you nightmares. I don’t feel that’s necessary, though. I don’t know that it’s even all that persuasive, because by and large, animal-rights groups are often preaching to the choir when they release videos like that. It’s useful to have proof of the horror, true, but let’s face it: If you’ve eaten for 20, 30, 40, or 50 years, it’s ingrained. It’s part of your lifestyle, background, and traditions, and it can be a real challenge to forgo meat when dining out or having a meal with friends or family.
This is especially true on a day like today, Thanksgiving, when turkey is the centerpiece of millions of American celebrations. 43 million turkeys were slaughtered for this holiday. So were millions of pigs. If you decline turkey on Thanksgiving, you’re bound to raise a few eyebrows and take a bit of ribbing.
But I have a new tradition, thanks to a news story I stumbled upon late last week about a petition to President Obama. Each Thanksgiving, the president pardons a turkey. Pardoned turkeys go to live in Disneyland, but that has become a bit controversial as Disneyland is notorious for not taking care of its animals properly. The article mentioned a place called Farm Sanctuary and explained that the sanctuary and other groups had a petition going to ask the president to give the turkey he pardoned to a sanctuary instead of Disneyland.
Well, that didn’t work out so well: Courage, this year’s lucky turkey, is en route to Disneyland as I write this, on a 2:15 flight out of Dulles.
However, the article did lead me to the Farm Sanctuary site, where I then found the Adopt-a-Turkey Project. Vegans (vegetarians who don’t eat eggs or dairy, either) with lots of yard space can actually adopt a turkey and have that turkey come live with them as a companion! Of course, that excludes most people, but there’s something that most people can do, and that is sponsor a turkey living at one of the sanctuary’s two farms. I sponsored Olive and Gideon. Something about the look in Olive’s eye broke my heart. Plus, well, those two are not conventionally cute. They are beautiful in their own way.
That’s going to be my new tradition: Every Thanksgiving I am going to sponsor turkeys.
As for going veggie, it will take time. As with all lifestyle changes, the best route to success is slow growth from within. I stopped eating poultry, then game meats. The only flesh I still consume is pork, beef, and fish, and even then, if I have it once a week, it’s a lot. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to completely abstain from fish and shellfish, so that will be the last thing on my list. As it is, I carry the Montery Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch card in my wallet and stick to fish that are on the okay list.
The rest will be a day-by-day process.
From the fids and me to you, Happy Thanksgiving.
While surfing around the Internet doing background research the other night, I came across a delightful little piece in the March 2003 issue of The Atlantic. In Caring for Your Introvert, Jonathan Rauch hits the nail dead on with his description of how introverts think and how misunderstood they are.
From the article:
Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours.
This was something my rather extroverted ex-boss just could not seem to grasp. If I closed my door to concentrate, I was “inaccessible.” If I answered “how are you?” with “fine, thanks, and you?” without expounding on all the things I was doing and what kind of morning I was having, I was not engaging. If I answered a yes-or-no question with a “yes” or a “no,” I was being aloof and abrupt.
My ex-boss couldn’t understand that I was not interested in, or even capable of, sitting around bullshitting about nothing in particular, especially with people I don’t know very well. She didn’t understand that my interest in the job extended only as far as what had to be done to complete my projects. If that meant working via e-mail most of the time, then I worked via e-mail most of the time. If it meant telling a coworker, “I’ve got a ton of stuff on my plate — perhaps we can catch up later,” that’s what I’d say. If it meant letting a call go to voicemail while I was writing, I let the call go to voicemail. I learned early on that asking her how her weekend was would take 30 minutes out of my day, so I stopped asking.
However, she felt there was something “wrong” with the way I work — indeed, with the way I am — and on several occasions had the social cluelessness to ask me, “Is something going on with you?” or “Are you sick?” This, after I had told her repeatedly that I am an introvert, that I don’t respond well to a string of interruptions and questions while I’m writing, and that when I am asked a question about a project, I prefer to give an accurate answer, which may take a few seconds of quiet while I think it through. There were times when, as I was thinking of a response, she would continue to pelt me with questions, and I could only surmise that she either thought I had no answer or that she simply could not bear the silence in her impatience for verbal feedback. More than once, I had to say, “Wait a sec, I’m thinking.”
In the article, Rauch says that introverts are people who find other people tiring. I found my ex-boss to be draining for a number of reasons, but her constant barking and yipping (to borrow from Rauch) was positively exhausting. That is why she is now short one employee. I got tired of being tired.
I daresay this will become a more common scenario as more and more introverts seek opportunities to telecommute or decide to go into business for themselves and freelance from home. It’s not that we don’t like people, it’s that we like people in small doses. It’s not that we don’t like to talk to people, it’s that we don’t believe in content-free speech, even if we were good at it. Not everyone is a Chatty Cathy or a Gabby Gus.
And that’s okay.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that most women skip mammograms until they are 50.
From the article:
Most women don’t need a mammogram in their 40s and should get one every two years starting at 50, a government task force said Monday. It’s a major reversal that conflicts with the American Cancer Society’s long-standing position.
Also, the task force said breast self-exams do no good and women shouldn’t be taught to do them.
For most of the past two decades, the cancer society has been recommending annual mammograms beginning at 40.
But the government panel of doctors and scientists concluded that getting screened for breast cancer so early and so often leads to too many false alarms and unneeded biopsies without substantially improving women’s odds of survival.
That is pretty much what I’ve been saying all along, but it’s nice to have the government back me up. I think women have been sold a bill of goods, not by the American Cancer Society, which I believe acts in good faith, but by all the commercial think-pinkers who make a buck selling everything from jeans to yogurt in the name of breast cancer awareness.
I’m glad I didn’t let any doctors bully me into a mammogram prematurely. In fact, I have half a nerve to print out a stack of journal and news articles and send them to one or two, with a sticky note on top saying, “YOU’RE FIRED.”
I may do it yet.
