The host of the pig roast presided over the pig in question, which was very crispy and very dead, its insides arrayed like a wreath around its outsides. “Have some!” the host said. “Thanks, but I don’t eat meat,” I replied, deploying the apologetic smile I haul out in these situations. He looked at me with some consternation. “Isn’t that hard for you, being a food writer?” he asked.
I work in a field heavily populated with people who thrill to pig intestines, revel in the delicate crunch of fertilized duck embryos, and have never met a thymus gland they didn’t eat. The only things more open than their minds are their mouths. Yet telling many of these people I don’t share their predilections tends to elicit a look of incomprehension that usually evolves into something between mild disdain and undisguised horror. It’s like telling someone you don’t believe in evolution or pre-marital sex. The fact that I eat fish is a moot point.
And so over the course of my career, outing myself as a non-meat eater has been something I’ve had to approach delicately. Most of the time, it’s just easier to smile and agree that yes, a life without cracklings would not be a life worth living. But I wonder why people assume there’s a conflict between what I choose to eat and what I do.
Just because I don’t eat the meat being sold by a butcher doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate and write about why the butcher does what he does. I take plenty of pleasure in eating food and have plenty of interest in writing about the people who put it on our tables; I never thought that my diet invalidated my career choice. I love food and I think about it for most of my waking hours; should I also have to eat it wantonly?
Most of the time, it’s just easier to smile and agree that yes, a life without cracklings would not be a life worth living
A couple of years ago I attended a three-day Southern food symposium. I knew that it would be all but greased with pork fat, but I was excited to attend lectures by people I admire, and I figured I could eat my weight in boiled peanuts. Still, I didn’t love explaining to my dining companions, again and again, why I wasn’t feasting upon the magnificent variety of animal parts that greeted us at each meal. I lost track of the number of times I got the fart-in-a-parked-car look.
I felt like a steady drizzle on the pig parade. Shared meals are the foundation for camaraderie, and you sacrifice a certain connection when you opt out of the all-you-can-eat meat buffet that everyone else is happily diving into. Though I was in friendly company, I started to feel lonely, and about halfway through the conference began entertaining the idea of swallowing down a rib or two for the sake of team spirit. (I discovered instead that I could more or less attain the same goal with bourbon, and so I passed on the ribs and spent the remainder of my time in Mississippi in an agreeably addled haze.)
Later, I recognized that what I was feeling at the dinner table wasn’t just loneliness, but something even more unsettling. I’d thought we’d all come here, members of this food-loving community, to obsess about food together, but, as I was learning, all obsessions are not created equal. It’s as though professional food lovers turn eating into some kind of contest, with its participants out to prove themselves by way of naked, aggressive consumption. But opting out of the madness, even a little bit, has had a way of turning food from a source of pleasure to one of anxiety.
Meat came at me like I was a drunk in a batting cage, and I had no choice but to keep swinging.
I once applied for a job with a website known for its documentation of restaurant meals. The job description gave me pause—if I were to get this position, I’d probably have to eat a substantial amount of meat. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d do so for the sake of professionalism. When I was in cooking school, for example, I tasted everything to educate myself and pass my exams. It’s just that I’d prefer not to have my job get in the way of my principles. Then again, I also prefer to have a job in the first place.
I went to a trial dinner with the website’s editor-in-chief, an imperious woman who regaled me with tales of her marathon dining experiences. “Boulud was furious with me,” she said, recounting the time at a three-star restaurant when she insisted on photographing a plate of langoustines in the ladies’ room because the light in the dining room wasn’t ideal.
The chef responsible for our meal, it turned out, was a nose-to-tail man through and through, and four of the five courses he served us could have been used to illustrate a course in livestock anatomy.
I knew I was in trouble when we started with a charcuterie plate the size of a chess board. Next came a deep bowl of pappardelle woven through with shredded rabbit, followed by a pork chop the size of a housecat. And then there was the halibut, poached in duck fat and garnished with a spray of lardons.
There’s so much more to loving food than being a stone-cold, camera-wielding, rhapsodic-waxing foodie.
Meat came at me like I was a drunk in a batting cage, and I had no choice but to keep swinging. I found it terrifying, fascinating, and very, very strange, a bit like French kissing for the first time. (Maybe you kissed different people.)
We were required to photograph every course, a task the editor embraced with breathtaking gusto in between inappropriate questions about my marital status. To get the shot she wanted of the charcuterie board, she parked it on the floor, unzipped her boots, and stood on a chair in the middle of the dining room, snapping pictures as our fellow diners regarded us with bewilderment and hatred and our waiter contemplated seppuku. When I wasn’t choking down paté, I was holding a light box, shining it on whatever dish the editor had in her crosshairs. The chef got the same treatment as the food: the editor positioned him just so, forcibly straightened his chef’s jacket and smoothed her hands languorously across his chest, and took her best shot, over and over.
By the time we reached dessert, which I remember only as the one dish that wasn’t animal in origin, I realized that the prospect of eating meat for a living was far less daunting than the prospect of being the professional dining companion of one of the worst restaurant customers on the planet.
It was an important experience, though, as anything that forces us to confront our worst fears and the specter of public humiliation usually is. As I recall the relentless click of the camera shutter and the sickly glow of the lightbox, I think about the discrepancy between the obvious care and respect the chef showed for his ingredients and the cursory, almost atavistic treatment his work received at our table (and beneath it). The chef’s mission was to nourish people and make them happy. Ours was ostensibly to exalt it, but really we were just cataloging and criticizing. I’ve always feared telling chefs I don’t eat meat, but the experience made me wonder what, in their eyes, is worse: the diner who politely abstains or the diner who reacts to their food with the thoughtfulness and subtlety of a hand grenade?
I became a food writer to celebrate food, not agonize over it. There’s so much more to loving food than being a stone-cold, camera-wielding, rhapsodic-waxing foodie. At its best, food writing does what any good writing does—to tell stories that deserve to be told, to make us question what we thought we knew, to provide answers to questions we didn’t even know we had.
And there is so much for me to celebrate, whether it’s a jar of pickled herring, the chef who’s trying to overhaul a city’s school lunch program, or some dude selling pimento cheese out of his mom’s basement. Do it with a level head; do it with a sense of perspective. The only anxiety my love of food should inspire is that of telling a story well, on deadline.
And oddly, learning to accept that my preferences may hinder me professionally has just made me more determined to embrace them. You want to shout your love of goat eyeball tacos from the rooftops? Fine. I’ll be singing the praises of roasted Brussels sprouts. Besides, it could be worse: it’s not like I’m a vegan.
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