It was a routine day, the day of my conversion. I was at an artists’ retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the MacDowell Colony. I was lucky to be there, and in an ambitious moment in my career, working on finishing my novel Purple America, falling in love with someone on the premises, taking in spring in New Hampshire, hiking Mount Monadnock, meeting and greeting, full of dreams. It was seven years since my last drink. I would call my approach to what I put in my body—excepting the injunction against drugs and alcohol— unenlightened. I ate what I wanted to eat, and while I took seriously the suggestion (among my community of sober friends) that I have a spiritual life, I wasn’t yet preoccupied with the resolution of that question. I took the spiritual stuff in stride. I’d read a book on Zen and then toss it aside and read a book on the Quakers. It was the semiexamined life. As regards the evening in question: I always hated the moments before dinners at the artists’ colonies, those awkward quarter hours where you had to talk about what you had done that day. And so: There was no reason to suspect that this particular quarter hour would usher in a complete change in my life. And the chef who cooked dinner that night had no reason to suspect she would change my life. But she did. She changed my life when she decided that that night’s dinner was going to consist of meat loaf.
I have always kind of hated meat loaf. The presence of the word loaf in the phrase meat loaf seems to be part of the problem. That phrase meat loaf has always been repellent to me, even when I was a child, and even though I ate meat (flesh, as vegetarians sometimes call it), I always thought there was something highly suspect about meat loaf. I have the same feeling about pot roast. Somehow these words weren’t meant to go together: pot and roast, meat and loaf, and the idea of meat being packaged like a bread product is inappropriate to me. Then as now. In my thirties, I made my peace with the phrase, and had been known to eat meat loaf on occasion, especially in my penniless twenties, because I didn’t have the money to make sure the next meal would be as good as the one in front of me. Nevertheless, when the cart of meat loaf was wheeled out of the kitchen at MacDowell, I felt some dark stirrings. This was not entirely unusual. Though I was not a finicky eater (I would eat, for example, almost any kind of hamburger, no matter how dingy the precinct in which it was assembled), I had, as well, a tendency to find mac and cheese totally nauseating, and had heaved it up once as a child, never to eat it willingly again. It was not, at first, disturbing to me to find the meat loaf at MacDowell was nauseating. What was novel was why it was nauseating. I remember the platter of meat loaf having a crimson hue, almost like it was a red velvet cake. My further recollection is of a kind of gray/tan base material over which some ketchup had been drizzled, nouvelle cuisine style, to create a lively and animated plate of gore. I had a thought about the meat loaf I will never forget. I thought: car crash.
That is, the meat loaf did not look like food, but rather like somebody’s femur and quadriceps at a car crash or at a crime scene or in one of those preposterously violent war scenes that you might see in a film, when the film is attempting to be realistic. The meat loaf was disgusting to me, utterly abject, and just as abject was the proposition that I was meant to eat this gore that had been shoveled up from a soft shoulder. That I should eat it and engage in conversation with the other colonists, that I should pretend nothing was wrong: These obstacles were, suddenly, insurmountable. I can remember no more of the night, except that I didn’t eat the meat loaf, and probably ate five extra pieces of bread and an extra helping of salad, and I didn’t give the experience of abjection a second thought, really, because I had in no way prepared for abjection that night; it had overcome me, which I suppose is how conversions take place. Not because of persuasion (I have known a great number of vegetarians in my life), but because of an alignment of circumstances. I did not consider the possibility of renouncing meat that night. I imagined, simply, that I would never again eat meat loaf.
However, the feeling of abjection quickly extended itself to all beef products. As I say: I had no thought initially about the cow, the animal, who provided the meat in the meat loaf. As with most philosophical regeneration in my life, I could not make the journey until the old way of thinking was completely emptied of relevance. And so it seemed to me in this transitional period that beef was a constituent element in meat loaf, and probably, therefore, I should avoid beef. This was not, as I recall it, a difficult thing to give up, and there was no real cost to doing so. Every right-thinking person recognizes that there are reasonable health-related criteria for avoiding beef. Hamburgers are petri dishes for listeria and salmonella, all manner of bacteria, and high cholesterol is a likely outcome after a lifetime of red meat, and I have heart disease in my family. Even worse, there is bovine growth hormone to contend with, excessive use of antibiotics in the food chain, etc. People approaching middle age, these days, often come to rethink red meat, unless they are ranchers or reactionaries who feel that there is some kind of pride inherent in red meat. I gave it up easily, and I don’t remember regretting it.
I have always kind of hated meat loaf. The presence of the word loaf in the phrase meat loaf seems to be part of the problem. That phrase meat loaf has always been repellent to me, even when I was a child, and even though I ate meat (flesh, as vegetarians sometimes call it), I always thought there was something highly suspect about meat loaf. I have the same feeling about pot roast. Somehow these words weren’t meant to go together: pot and roast, meat and loaf, and the idea of meat being packaged like a bread product is inappropriate to me. Then as now. In my thirties, I made my peace with the phrase, and had been known to eat meat loaf on occasion, especially in my penniless twenties, because I didn’t have the money to make sure the next meal would be as good as the one in front of me. Nevertheless, when the cart of meat loaf was wheeled out of the kitchen at MacDowell, I felt some dark stirrings. This was not entirely unusual. Though I was not a finicky eater (I would eat, for example, almost any kind of hamburger, no matter how dingy the precinct in which it was assembled), I had, as well, a tendency to find mac and cheese totally nauseating, and had heaved it up once as a child, never to eat it willingly again. It was not, at first, disturbing to me to find the meat loaf at MacDowell was nauseating. What was novel was why it was nauseating. I remember the platter of meat loaf having a crimson hue, almost like it was a red velvet cake. My further recollection is of a kind of gray/tan base material over which some ketchup had been drizzled, nouvelle cuisine style, to create a lively and animated plate of gore. I had a thought about the meat loaf I will never forget. I thought: car crash.
That is, the meat loaf did not look like food, but rather like somebody’s femur and quadriceps at a car crash or at a crime scene or in one of those preposterously violent war scenes that you might see in a film, when the film is attempting to be realistic. The meat loaf was disgusting to me, utterly abject, and just as abject was the proposition that I was meant to eat this gore that had been shoveled up from a soft shoulder. That I should eat it and engage in conversation with the other colonists, that I should pretend nothing was wrong: These obstacles were, suddenly, insurmountable. I can remember no more of the night, except that I didn’t eat the meat loaf, and probably ate five extra pieces of bread and an extra helping of salad, and I didn’t give the experience of abjection a second thought, really, because I had in no way prepared for abjection that night; it had overcome me, which I suppose is how conversions take place. Not because of persuasion (I have known a great number of vegetarians in my life), but because of an alignment of circumstances. I did not consider the possibility of renouncing meat that night. I imagined, simply, that I would never again eat meat loaf.
However, the feeling of abjection quickly extended itself to all beef products. As I say: I had no thought initially about the cow, the animal, who provided the meat in the meat loaf. As with most philosophical regeneration in my life, I could not make the journey until the old way of thinking was completely emptied of relevance. And so it seemed to me in this transitional period that beef was a constituent element in meat loaf, and probably, therefore, I should avoid beef. This was not, as I recall it, a difficult thing to give up, and there was no real cost to doing so. Every right-thinking person recognizes that there are reasonable health-related criteria for avoiding beef. Hamburgers are petri dishes for listeria and salmonella, all manner of bacteria, and high cholesterol is a likely outcome after a lifetime of red meat, and I have heart disease in my family. Even worse, there is bovine growth hormone to contend with, excessive use of antibiotics in the food chain, etc. People approaching middle age, these days, often come to rethink red meat, unless they are ranchers or reactionaries who feel that there is some kind of pride inherent in red meat. I gave it up easily, and I don’t remember regretting it.
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