by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
With a broader view of the landscape and our history here, I could look out across the Winooski and North Branch valleys and recognize the obvious. Every acre of agricultural land I had ever seen—every cow or sheep pasture, every wheat or soybean or vegetable field—was once forest, wetland, prairie: another kind of land. Regardless of whether the farming was done well or poorly, its initial establishment in all those places had required conquest, eviction of the creatures that lived there before, and conversion of the land to a new use. And maintaining it required constant defense against nature’s efforts at reclamation.
That helped me understand something else I had seen as a boy. In the Vermont Historical Society museum, near the capitol in downtown Montpelier, is a big glass case. In the case stands a mountain lion. It is said to be the last cougar—or catamount, as we call them here—killed in Vermont, shot near the town of Barnard on Thanksgiving Day, 1881. As a boy, looking up at the big cat, I had grasped the immediate cause of its death: the man in the photograph, Alexander Crowell, sharp nosed and bearded, dressed in dark suit and hat, firearm cradled in the crook of his arm. And I had taken catamount hunting to be what extirpated the species from the state.
In one sense, I had been right. Catamounts, like wolves, were indeed killed by men with guns, men who hated large predators for the danger they posed to livestock. Yet, despite the establishment of bounties in 1779 and the popularity of organized hunts, both species persisted in the state for decades.
What sounded the final death knell was loss of habitat. As expanses of forest were broken up, these predators’ hunting territories shrank. Simultaneously, their primary food source—the white-tailed deer—was being driven to the brink of extinction by the same factors: overhunting and habitat loss. It is no coincidence that Vermont’s remaining populations of wolves, catamounts, and deer all plunged precipitously in the first half of the nineteenth century when agricultural deforestation was at its peak. Only a few large predators survived the height of the merino’s reign. And even those few were eventually hunted down, mainly for preying on the state’s remaining sheep. There were, after all, virtually no deer left for wolf or catamount to eat. The “savage beast” shot by Crowell in 1881 had, according to a local newspaper report, “killed many sheep and lambs in different parts, and the people in this vicinity greatly rejoice at his death.”
No doubt predators feasted on plenty of individual sheep. But the merino population as a whole was instrumental in wiping wolf and catamount off the landscape entirely.
Hiking in the woods late one summer, I turned off a hillside logging road toward a break in an old stone wall. Almost to that breach of tumbled stones, I glanced up for some reason. Four eyes locked with mine. Fifteen feet off the ground, two house-cat-sized felines clung to the bark of a nearby maple, one on each side of the trunk: kittens, all fuzzy from ruffed necks to stub tails.
They were bobcats, the catamount’s much smaller cousin. They stared. I stared back. Though not rare in Vermont, bobcats are seldom seen in broad daylight, and such a close encounter with a pair of kittens was extraordinary. I gave myself an emphatic mental kick for not having a camera in my pocket.
When the spell broke, one kitten, then the other, leapt to the ground and vanished into cover. I caught a glimpse of one as it pranced from stone to stone along the top of the wall, then paused to look around, perhaps for its mother. She must have been close by.
Only later did I reflect on the spot. Though adaptable—and apparently tolerant of the occasional untidy passage of logging equipment through that timberland—bobcats prefer forest habitat. Neither they nor their main prey, snowshoe hares, thrive amidst intensive agriculture. The kittens would not have been there if that old stone fence still divided two pastures.
The mere fact of living, I had begun to realize, linked me to larger webs of life and death. Regardless of what I did, whether I liked it or not, I had an impact. No matter what I ate, habitat had already been sacrificed. No matter what I ate, animals would be killed.
Even while gardening within the confines of our deer- and woodchuck-proof fence, innocence was out of reach. The sandy soil, which I had ruthlessly stripped of grasses, wildflowers, and tree roots, needed all the organic matter it could get, so we imported compost by the truckload, compost made from the manure of chickens, horses, and cows. Now and then—shoveling the dark, rich stuff out of the back of my pickup—I would notice a knobby, light-colored chunk and pause to examine it. A fragment of bone. Perhaps the tip of a dairy cow’s tibia.
We weren’t eating animals, but our vegetables were.
4
An Animal Who Eats
Try to remember that we are going after food—that we are, in a way, exploring our place in the systems of life in the universe. I grant you that our place, when we think we’ve found it, isn’t always comfortable.
—John Hersey, Blues
Our doctor, a soft-spoken Buddhist naturopath, was the last person you’d expect to say, “Go eat an animal.” And she didn’t. It was gentler than that. She simply reviewed an analysis of my blood chemistry and suggested I could use more protein.
She did not mean more tofu.
The suggestion was corroborated by Cath’s study of holistic health and nutrition. A few of her instructors—themselves former vegetarians—offered words of caution about long-term veganism. They had seen the effects repeatedly: people showing up in their offices after twenty years without any animal foods, bodies drained and depleted. They pointed out that certain kinds of protein, particular types of omega-3 fatty acids, and key nutrients such as vitamin B12 were difficult or impossible to get by eating unfortified plant foods.
Cath and I eased into it slowly. Local organic yogurt. Then eggs from cage-free hens. They tasted strange and rich. But I ate hungrily, and I started noticing changes. I had more energy, felt more alive. My allergic sensitivities to cats and dust mites diminished. Within a few months, wild-caught fish and locally raised chicken were also on the menu, their flavors and textures even more alien.
We could have held the line at dairy and eggs, refusing all flesh. By then, though, I knew more about dairy products: Bovines do not lactate spontaneously. Milk comes from pregnant cows, pregnant cows give birth to calves, and virtually all male calves end up as veal. Though I had no interest in eating any kind of mammalian meat, let alone veal, I recognized that yogurt production involved the killing of calves as surely as soybean production involved the killing of deer. Ethically, which was more palatable: flesh from a wild fish, or milk from a domestic cow with a calf about to be taken away to slaughter? Legs from a chicken that lived a couple of months, or eggs from a chicken that lived somewhat longer? My faith in simplistic claims to moral superiority had shattered.
Doubts about our dietary shift did linger. If I had tried harder, could I have achieved this newfound energetic health in other ways? I had read and heard so many contradictory nutritional arguments, supported by opposing references to the longevity and health of peoples around the world, their diets ranging from rice and vegetables to fish, meat, and fat. Even more confusing were the conflicting appeals to human morphology: some noting that we lack a predator’s fangs, others that we lack the masticating jaws of a ruminant; some arguing that we resemble herbivores in our digestive chemistry and structure, others that we resemble carnivores; some comparing our eyes to those of tree-climbing, fruit-eating primate ancestors, others suggesting a link to broader ocular tendencies in the mammalian world—“eyes in front, you hunt, eyes on the side, you hide.”
By then, though, figuring it all out by rational means felt futile. I was listening to my body.
My physical craving for animal foods made me think of a winter camping trip to the Adirondacks. A few years earlier, when Cath and I were at Bird Cottage, a friend and I had driven up toward Blue Mountain Lake for a long weekend in February. The day we hiked in, it was oddly warm, near sixty, and the crust on the deep snowpack had begun to soften. Our boots punched through in p
laces, our legs disappearing to above the knee, until we stopped and put on snowshoes. By the next day, the weather had shifted. Even as the stream outlet near our pond-side lean-to continued to swell with snowmelt, the mercury was plummeting. As we prepared dinner over our camp stove that evening—eager for both the immediate warmth of the food and the caloric fuel—my companion added butter to the pan. I watched ravenously. Except for cream in the occasional cup of coffee or cocoa shared with Cath, it was the first animal product I’d consumed in years. Had I been alone, I might have grabbed the frozen quarter-pound stick, peeled back the wax paper, and started gnawing.
What my body wanted was to eat other vertebrates—not for their flavor, but for their substance. Emotionally, I found it unsettling. The habitat destruction and animal casualties incidental to agriculture were collateral losses, regrettable and unintended. The deaths of the creatures I was eating now weren’t incidental to anything. Each fish or bird had died specifically so that I could ingest part of its body, extracting elements of its tissues and adding them to mine. While fruit and grain could—in theory, at least—be plucked from tree, bush, or stalk by relatively gentle means, and while vegetables politely declined to bleed, these individual organisms had met some intentional, violent, twitching end.
Perhaps I would have felt less conflicted if I’d had a role model. The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, for example, became a vegetarian in the mid-1960s, after witnessing the slaughter of a chicken, but ill health later forced him to return to eating flesh. I might have taken comfort in knowing that such a teacher of compassion had been down this path before me. At the time, though, I didn’t know his story, or any other like it. Without another’s footsteps to follow, I was feeling my way along, trying to integrate my shifting diet with my essentially unchanged values.
Like other ex-vegans and ex-vegetarians I have since met and spoken with, I found that eating fellow creatures made me palpably aware of my own physical presence, waking me to the obvious: I am not simply a moral, emotional, and intellectual being. I am also an animal who eats. I have a footprint here. That simple recognition grounded me. Grasping a chicken leg and tearing off the last bits of tender flesh with my teeth, I began inhabiting the world.
Meal by meal, I began to sense how indebted my life was to other lives, how inextricably intertwined. The blood of deer did run through my veins, and the blood of woodchuck and hare, chicken and trout—the blood of the land itself.
Several months after we started eating chicken and fish, I took a bus to Boston in early spring to see Willie. He greeted me with a bear hug, then showed me around his furniture shop, meticulously maintained woodworking equipment arranged across the open warehouse floor, the scent of sawdust permeating the air. When I asked, he showed me his portfolio, too, a three-ring binder full of photographs. Each hardwood piece was more stunning than the last: polished cherry tables and kitchen cabinets, baptismal fonts of walnut and oak, altar screens for a Greek Orthodox church.
That evening Willie took me to one of his favorite Vietnamese restaurants. His taste for Southeast Asian cuisine dated back to his tours of navy duty during the Vietnam War. Across the table from me, he eased back into the seat with something between a sigh and a grunt. He was ready for a satisfying meal and visit. We hadn’t seen each other much since I was a kid. More than having things to catch up on, we had a new friendship to build. Together, we broke bread—or fish, rather. And we talked. About life. About work. About food.
“You know,” I said, “for a long time, eating flesh didn’t feel right to me. But I’m seeing things differently now.”
“Yes,” Willie nodded. “We’re omnivores.” He had obviously worked this out a long time ago.
I asked him if he still fished. He said he did. He hadn’t had much time to get out recently—not like his younger years when he would have had his morning catch cleaned and in the cooler before he got to work at eight o’clock—but he still loved being on the water.
Later, back at his apartment, our conversation continued at the kitchen table.
“I’m thinking about fishing again,” I said.
Willie beamed. Eyes flashing with a playful glint, he leaned forward slightly. “You remember that fillet knife you sent me?”
I nodded.
“You want it back?”
“Sure!” I laughed in surprise.
Willie was on his feet, quick for a man so large. He disappeared into his bedroom and was back in under a minute, knife in hand. When he laid it on the table in front of me, I picked it up and turned it over and over: the smooth leather sheath stitched up the back, the blond wood handle with its crackling varnish, the fine, bright blade whispering against leather and built-in sharpening stone as I drew it out. I looked from the knife to Willie’s face. He was nodding, his mouth spreading in a wide grin, that curiously high-pitched laugh rising up from his barrel chest.
He’d had the knife six years, and he had never tossed it into a tackle box. He had been keeping it somewhere special, I realized, knowing I would return to the water someday. Knowing something that I, in my certainty as a vegan, had never suspected.
That night I unrolled my sleeping bag on the cushions of Willie’s couch. On the coffee table beside me were recent issues of American Rifleman, New York State’s Conservationist, and some fishing magazines. The hardwood frames of both couch and table were simple: no unnecessary flourishes, just crisp, elegant lines executed by a masterful hand, the kind of lines I remembered from the bunk bed I used to lie in as a boy, listening to the bullfrogs sing their echoing evening chorus.
When Willie dropped me at South Station, where I would catch a bus back north, he gave me another vast bear hug. And a promise: We’d see each other again soon, and fish together.
Willie and I kept in frequent touch by phone after that. I learned not to call on Monday evenings. He would be home early, but he’d be catching a nap, resting up for the game. Monday was Poker Night.
Wasn’t there something similar, I mused, in his two favorite pastimes—fishing and cards? In both lay the challenge of honing his formidable skills, paired with the inescapable knowledge that he was up against chance, fate, forces totally beyond his control. “What magic fixes their eyes upon the point of a fishing-rod, as if it were the finger of destiny?” asked Henry van Dyke in Fisherman’s Luck. “It is the enchantment of uncertainty.”
Willie liked to win at cards. He liked to catch and eat fish. He loved not knowing how the game would play out.
We saw each other again in August, at the weekend place he and his longtime lady friend had at the southern tip of Maine.
I had been looking forward to meeting Beth. She, too, lived just outside Boston, and though I had been in the city a few times in recent years, we had never crossed paths. Willie had talked about her, of course, yet I had no clear sense of what she would be like. When we met that Saturday, their relationship made instant sense. Like Willie’s, her face was friendly, her eyes frank and curious, attentive to mine. Though quieter than Willie, with a less arresting presence, she walked with a similar rootedness. Over time I would come to see that her kindness and generosity, like Willie’s, were grounded deep.
Willie showed me around the house. When they’d bought it a few years earlier it had been in rough shape, in need of a craftsman’s attention. Now, it gleamed: the paint fresh, the oak floors refinished, and the deck rebuilt, the corners of the newel posts precisely beveled. The dining table and chairs, fashioned of black cherry, glowed with the soft sheen of top-quality finish, coat after coat patiently applied by hand.
In early afternoon Willie and I ran errands. As we drove, I told him about my latest woodchuck escapade. A few weeks earlier, our vegetable garden in Vermont had finally been discovered and its defenses breached. There was no warning. One day our green beans were simply half gone and, beside them, a hole had erupted from the sandy soil. The tunnel was impressive, a rodent superhighway to Food Central, originating in parts unknown, coming in under our theoretic
ally impervious fence and popping up neatly in the middle of the garden. I filled in the mouth of the burrow several times, but it was futile. No way would this infrastructure be abandoned. The animal wasn’t merely snacking. It was gorging, wiping out pounds of produce at a time. I had to either stop the critter’s depredations, or buy more vegetables at the store and admit what I hadn’t been ready to face at Bird Cottage five years earlier: I was farming out the dirty work to growers like Joey. They were doing the killing, keeping the blood off my hands.
Recalling my showdown with the woodchuck on the lawn back then, I didn’t fancy repeating my antics. Intimidation wouldn’t work this time either.
Ever so briefly, I considered digging all the way around the garden and installing deeper underground fencing. But there was no telling how deep the burrow ran, and friends had recently told us how they had watched a woodchuck climb up and over their ten-foot garden fence.
No, I was out of realistic alternatives. Chuckie’s number was up.
Smoke bombs didn’t appeal. Why deposit noxious chemicals in our garden soil? Just to avoid the actual moment of the kill? So I borrowed a .22 rifle from Paul, and one weekend, while Cath was away, I put a bullet through the bean-raider’s skull. Ashamed that I had no idea how to make use of the meat, I buried the body. When Cath came home and asked about the garden troubles, I told her, “I took care of it.” Her look said, You? Killed?
Willie nodded as he listened to my story.
“You remember your father’s chickens?” he asked.
