The Meaning of Meat
I like meat.
I like the smell, I like the texture, I like the taste. I like the sound it makes when sizzling in a frying pan or on a barbecue grill. I like the scent of the fat when it mixes with spices, garlic or mustard.
It’s not that I want to like it. But since I was little, I was taught that meat was good. I was made to finish it when it was on my plate. I was sat in front of whole chickens, told these were moments of joy, of sharing. Of happiness. I was brought chunky beef ribs and they were welcome at the table as if they were a guest sure to brighten the night. I ended up believing it. Believing that eating by the seaside involves eating sea animals, that eating in the countryside was meaningless without a piece of dead animal in front of me. That the crab and the shrimp and the cow and the pig and chook and the duck were only there, in front of me, to serve and be served and satisfy a vital need, bringing me these nutrients without which I would wither, fade, become grey and weak.
I ended up forgetting these animals, erasing them entirely from my conscience, seeing through them as if they were made of air, at the very moment when I cut them, pulling out their legs or their fat, putting them in my mouth, chewing them. They were never alive, they were, at best, food in the shape of animals.
I like animals. I grew up with a cat. I had a puppy when I was 16. One morning, I looked at him and I saw NOTHING but another person like myself, with a different shape, hairy, lying on the carpet. I hugged pigs in Brittany, let calves suck on my fingers. I saved snails, tadpoles, mice chased by cats. I held homeless dogs tight in my arms. I walked through fields where peaceful herbivores grazed, and found that the fresh country air was the best smell in the world. I placed my ear against the side of a cow, closed my eyes and for a long time listened to her warm and deep breathing. I felt fishes brush against my legs in rivers and it felt like the essence of life.
So, I like meat. I haven’t eaten any for some time now. I don’t see meat any more, I don’t see meat anywhere. I stopped seeing meat because meat doesn’t exist. Everywhere, it is nothing but carved, crushed, boiled, skinned, knifed, eviscerated, dead, animals.
I liked meat, and then one day, I discovered that I wasn’t alone on Earth.
Olive Gramain
