Read The Mindful Carnivore for Free Online

continued development of ideas about animal rights brought the living sources of meat into sharper focus. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring heralded an emergent ecological awareness and set the stage for the publication, nine years later, of Frances Moore Lappé’s landmark Diet for a Small Planet , in which Lappé encouraged Americans to reduce their meat consumption, argued for a different nutritional paradigm, and challenged the economic policies underpinning the protein inefficiencies of U.S. agriculture. Vegetarianism was further influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, with its ecological concerns, its rejection of convention, and its interest in Eastern philosophies and religions, including Buddhism.
    Though unfamiliar with this history at the age of twenty-five, I had woven my convictions from many of the same threads. Abstaining from meat was part of a natural, healthy lifestyle. It would make me whole, both physically and morally, cultivating compassion in my heart and alleviating the suffering of animals. It would put grain into the bellies of the hungry and rescue the rainforests from destruction.
    Vegetarianism—and, soon thereafter, veganism—became more than a mere diet. Though secular, it became a way of life, a statement of values and identity, a coat of arms for the struggle to right all that was wrong with the world. It started out being about food, but soon the beliefs themselves began to sustain me. I felt sure that everyone should be vegetarian.
    My zealous certainty should have set off warning bells, but it didn’t. I hadn’t yet figured out that religious fundamentalism isn’t the only dangerous kind.
    The best food in the world would, logically, be organic vegetables, as fresh and local as possible. As it happened, I was in luck. Cath had been gardening since she was a girl.
    She told me about growing up in the farm country south of Syracuse, New York, about an hour’s drive from the place we had rented near Ithaca. Her father’s father, who’d lived just across the yard in a second farmhouse, had been the family’s head gardener. She spoke of him with such affection: his passion for flowers—the rose bushes by his front door and the mock orange nearby; the bridal veil spireas that hugged the house with their clusters of white, five-petaled blossoms; the big, round bed of phlox, lavender and pink with white eyes, salmon with a dark-pink center—and his strong, steady, limping gait, wooden cane compensating for the old leg injury; as a younger man, he had been dragged by a team of horses.
    From the stories she told me, it was easy to picture her as a little girl, sitting on her beloved grandfather’s knee, taking the occasionally proffered cigar. It was easy to picture him, chuckling kindly and patting her head as she coughed and sputtered at the sweet, thick smoke. It was easy to picture them together in the garden, the girl tagging along, her big, brown, earnest eyes taking in all the beauty this man had cultivated, seeing the tenderness with which he handled all the living things in his care.
    At the corner of his house, beyond the rose bushes, Grandpa set aside a patch of soil a few feet square as Cath’s first flower garden, all her own. And beyond that, alongside the woodshed attached to Grandpa’s kitchen, towered the six-foot golden glows, topped with the double-daisy bursts she liked to pick and bring home by the fistful to put in vases.
    “Why do you pick those weeds?” her mother would ask, disdaining unruliness. Roses were nice to have in the house, but weeds were weeds. Except for her once-an-evening inspection of the beds around the house, picking off a dead leaf or bloom here and there, she steered clear of gardening.
    At planting time each spring, Cath and her brothers had been at Grandpa’s beck and call. In the big vegetable plot out back, they would unfurl the bundles that had been stored away over the winter—two sticks in each, with a