«
»

Speaking of Meat…

by · August 24th, 2007
Dinner Parties, Food Conference, Jewish Culture, Kosher, Meat, Vegetarian

bukhariantandoor.jpg

Over the last couple of days, I’ve watched with interest the growing debate around whether or not Hazon should schect a goat (or two) at the Hazon Food Conference. Last night, however, I was faced with my own “meaty” challenge: whether or not to eat it.

I have been a vegetarian for the last eight years and was vegan for two. Over that time, I have never particularly craved meat aside from an occasional urge for a corned beef sandwich from this amazing deli near my parents’ house in Chicago. (Even then, I’m not sure if it was the meat itself I craved, or the comforting memory of my mom coming home with a warm corned beef bundle wrapped in hefty white paper.)

Last night, however, was a different story. I found myself tagging along to dinner at a kosher Bukharian restaurant on 108th street, also known as “Bukharian Broadway, in Rego Park, Queens. (To read more about Bukharian Jews and their culinary delights, read Julia Moskin’s great article in the NY Times Dining & Wine section.)

Up until last night, I had certainly never had Bukharian food and to be honest – I barely knew that this sub-group of Central Asian Jews even existed. So I didn’t realize right away what my friend meant when he said to me, “you might want to have a snack on the way.” Turns out, he was referring to the menu which was filled with chicken and lamb kebabs, lamb samsi (like an Indian samosa), sweet breads, and special pulled noodles…with spicy lamb.

Once there, I quickly fell in with the swirl of loud ordering, bottles of red wine being poured into tall glasses, and the noise of plate after ceramic plate hitting our table. I devoured what I could, enjoying the pickled cabbage, peppery carrot slaw, scarlet borscht, garlic french fries and large, puffed rounds of sesame crusted bread. Drunk on fiery Rioja and the thrill of an unexpected Thursday feast, I didn’t even think of the meat at first. But watching my friends exclaim over the savory rice “cooked all day” with tender chunks of lamb, or pull a hunk of glistening meat off a flat skewer, something in me shifted. I wanted to try that lamb!

This unpredicted craving frightened me a little. I’d been around friends’ barbeques and meat-filled dinners before without even a twinge of interest. Lately, my body had been craving more protein (summer? exercise?) but it’s nothing that a hardboiled (free range) egg or a handful of almonds couldn’t soothe. I wondered if maybe all this “schecting a goat” talk had gone to my head – or maybe it was just the unusual reverence with which my tablemates were treating their meat dishes. But for some reason – or combination of reasons – my internal conversation about whether or not I will ever consume meat again, which was once firmly shut in my mind, was reopened.

No need to build the suspense – I didn’t eat any lamb last night. But at the end of the meal, my boyfriend asked, “Do you think you’d eat the goat if you end up slaughtering one at the Food Conference? For now it’s food for thought – I’ll keep you posted.

Print This Post Print This Post

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Speaking of Meat…”

  1. Gloria Feldscher Says:
    August 24th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    I cannot batten on the slaughtered bodies of the beautiful, gentle animals condemned for food.Being aware of the suffering they endure to feed us evokes a dark deja-vu to the Holocaust. I stand with Isaac Bashevis Singer who wisely and humanely declared: “I’m not eating meat for the animals’ sake.”

  2. Gersh Says:
    August 25th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

    Gloria,
    Thanks for teaching me a new word today — that’s not happened in years. However, no thanks for comparing the suffering of innocent Jews to the suffering of innocent animals. If you’re trying to make a point, the only one I can see in your (blessedly brief) screed is that you’re a poor debater.

  3. Gloria Feldscher Says:
    August 26th, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    Gersh,

    Your response to my post is flavored with speciesism. Be that as it may, stand is supported by thinkers far greater than I.

    ECC.3:19 – “…they all have one breath…so that man hath no preeminence above a beast.”

    The modern Tzaddik, Isaac Bashevis Singer: “As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in behavior their toward creatures, all men were Nazis.”

    German Jewish philosopher, Theodor Adorno: “Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”

    Author Charles Patterson of Columbia University wrote the
    quintessential book on the connection between our treatment of animals and the Holocaust, “Eternal Treblinka– Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocast. A must read for both Jews and Christians. He dedicated the book to Isaac Singer.

    Shalom!

  4. Gloria Feldscher Says:
    August 26th, 2007 at 4:53 pm

    Gersh,

    Your response to my post is flavored with speciesism. Be that as it may, my stand is supported by thinkers far greater than I.

    ECC.3:19 – “…they all have one breath…so that man hath no preeminence above a beast.”

    The modern Tzaddik, Isaac Bashevis Singer: “As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in behavior their toward creatures, all men were Nazis.”

    German Jewish philosopher, Theodor Adorno: “Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”

    Author Charles Patterson of Columbia University wrote the
    quintessential book on the connection between our treatment of animals and the Holocaust, “Eternal Treblinka– Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. A must read for both Jews and Christians. He dedicated the book to Isaac Singer.

    Shalom!

  5. Alix Says:
    August 26th, 2007 at 7:19 pm

    Leah,
    It’s nice to read others’ struggles with the same issue. This week I had dinner with an old college friend, the very same one I lived with my sophomore year when I became a vegetarian. I think I did it in some part, because in living with one, I realized how easy it was to be vegetarian. We met at a great vegan restaurant in Berkeley, we hadn’t seen each other in over a year, and one of the first things she told me was that she had started eating meat again. After so many years (almost 20) as a vegetarian (and no fish), her body developed a negative reaction to soy. While I have not had that happen, I do wonder about the consumption of too much soy, both because I’ve heard it’s not good for women who are considered at high risk for breast cancer like myself, and because so many soy products are so overly-processed. While mentally I am much closer to eating meat than I have been in years, I still cannot bring myself to take that step. Yet. But hearing that this friend of mine had gone back to eating meat did seem like an end of an era kind of thing…

  6. Gersh Says:
    August 27th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    Gloria,
    Valuing a human life over the life of an animal may be “speciesist”, but if we’re going for the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy, more authorities eat meat than don’t.

    As much as I love Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories, I wouldn’t ask him how to to live my life, just as I wouldn’t ask my rabbi how to write a computer program.

    Have a great day.

  7. Leah Koenig Says:
    August 27th, 2007 at 2:55 pm

    Alix – life just seems to get less and less black and white as I get older. It’s kind of upsetting actually – though, being a militant vegan like I used to be wasn’t necessarily any easier.

  8. Michael Croland Says:
    August 27th, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    Re Gloria and Gersh’s conversation:

    I think the Holocaust/animals analogy offends easily and should only be used delicately and in the proper context, which is why I generally avoid using it these days.

    That being said, I don’t think it should be dismissed out of hand simply because people might be offended by it. Charles Patterson’s book Eternal Treblinka (mentioned by Gloria) is a very thoughtful, respectful masterpiece that examines various tenets of the comparison in an academic style and an appropriate context. It’s highly recommended.

  9. Stephen Mendelsohn Says:
    August 27th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

    BS”D

    I have been a guest in the homes of Orthodox PETA-bashing omnivores on Shabbat or Yom Tov where my refusal to eat the egg-laden challah provoked a discussion of factory farming. I would mention the horrors of factory egg farming, where the baby chicks are selected by sex, with the females going to debeaking and confinement in battery cages (work camps?) and often forced molted (put on a starvation diet, just like …) while the males are suffocated in garbage bags or macerated in woodchippers. Others at the table would respond “chicken holocaust,” to which I would respond, “You said it, not me.”

    PETA’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign a few years back may have been highly offensive, but we need to understand the evils of factory farming that would lead many to make this sort of analogy. While there are many obvious similarities between concentration camps and factory farms; there can be no equating of the six million kedoshim with farmed animals. Only humans are created in G-d’s image; if this fundamental Jewish idea is “speciesist,” so be it. We simply need to describe the very real horrors of factory farms and let others make the analogy for themselves, without putting pictures of Jews next to pictures of pigs or battery hens.

Leave a Reply