felt as it was sitting on my plate being sliced apart. To me, a tomato is a desireless, soulless, nonconscious entity, and I have no qualms about doing with its “body” as I like. Indeed, a tomato is nothing but its body. There is no “mind–body problem” for tomatoes. (I hope, dear reader, that we agree on this much!)
I also swat mosquitoes without a qualm, though I try to avoid stepping on ants, and when there is an insect other than a mosquito in the house, I usually try to capture it and carry it outside, where I let it go unharmed. I eat chicken and fish sometimes [Note: This is no longer the case — see the Post Scriptum to this chapter], but many years ago I stopped eating the flesh of mammals. No beef, no ham, no bacon, no spam, no pork, no lamb — no thank you, ma’am! Mind you, I would still enjoy the
Guinea Pig
When I was fifteen, I had a summer job punching buttons on a Friden mechanical calculator in a physiology lab at Stanford University. (This was back in those days when there was but one computer on the whole Stanford campus and few scientists even knew of its existence, let alone thought about using it for their calculations.) It was pretty grueling work to do such “number-punching” for hours on end, and one day, Nancy, the graduate student for whose research project I was doing all this, asked me if, for relief, I’d like to try my hand at other kinds of tasks around the lab. I said “Sure!”, and so that afternoon she escorted me up to the fourth floor of the physiology building and showed me the cages where they kept the animals — literally guinea pigs — that they used in their experiments. I still remember the pungent smell and the scurrying-about of all those little orange-furred rodents.
The next afternoon, Nancy asked me if I would please go up to the top floor and bring down two animals for her next round of experiments. I didn’t have a chance to reply, however, for no sooner had I started to imagine myself reaching into one of those cages and selecting two small soft furry beings to be snuffed than my head began spinning, and in a flash I fainted right away, banging my head on the concrete floor. The next thing I knew, I was looking up into the face of the lab’s director, George Feigen, a dear old family friend, who was deeply concerned that I might have injured myself in the fall. Luckily I was fine, and I slowly stood up and then rode my bike home for the rest of the day. Nobody ever asked me again to pick animals to be sacrificed for the sake of science.
Pig
Oddly enough, despite that extremely troubling head-on encounter with the concept of taking the life of a living creature, I kept on eating hamburgers and other kinds of meat for several years. I don’t think I thought about it very much, since none of my friends did, and certainly no one talked about it. Meat-eating was just a background fact in the life of everyone I knew. Moreover, I admit with shame that in my mind, back in those days, the word “vegetarian” conjured up an image of weird, sternly moralistic nutcases (the movie
“Pig” starts off lightly and amusingly — a naive young man named Lexington, raised as a strict vegetarian by his Aunt Glosspan (“Pangloss” reversed), discovers after her death that he loves the taste of meat (though he doesn’t know what it is that he’s eating). Soon, as in all Dahl stories, things take weird twists.
Driven by curiosity about this tasty substance called “pork”, Lexington, on the recommendation of a new friend, decides to take a tour of a slaughterhouse. We join him as he sits in the waiting room with other tourists. He idly watches as various waiting parties are called, one by one, to take their tours. Eventually, Lexington’s turn comes, and he is escorted from the waiting room into the shackling area where he watches pigs being hoisted by their back legs onto hooks on a moving chain, getting their throats slit, and, with blood gushing out, proceeding head downwards down the “disassembly line” to fall into a cauldron of boiling water where their body hair is removed, after which their heads and limbs are chopped off and they are prepared for being gutted and sent off, in neat little cellophane-wrapped packages, to supermarkets all over the country, where they will sit in glass cases, along with other rose-colored rivals, waiting for purchasers to admire them and hopefully to select them to take home.
As he is observing all this with detached fascination, Lexington himself is suddenly yanked by the leg and flipped upside down, and he realizes that he too is now dangling from the moving chain, just like the pigs he’s been watching. His placidity all gone, he yells out, “There has been a frightful mistake!”, but the workers ignore his cries. Soon the chain pulls him alongside a friendly-looking chap who Lexington hopes will grasp the situation’s absurdity, but instead, the gentle “sticker” grasps Lexington’s ear, pulls the dangling lad a bit closer, and then, smiling at him with lovingkindness, deftly slits the boy’s jugular vein wide open with a razor-sharp knifeblade. As young Lexington continues his unanticipated inverted journey, his powerful heart pumps his blood out of his throat and onto the concrete floor, and even though he is upside down and losing awareness rapidly, he dimly perceives the pigs ahead of him dropping, one by one, into the steaming cauldron. One of them, oddly enough, seems to have white gloves on its two front trotters, and he is reminded of the glove-clad young woman who had just preceded him from the waiting room into the tour area. And with that curious final thought, Lexington woozily slips out of this, “the best of all possible worlds”, into the next.
The closing scene of “Pig” reverberated in my head for a long time. In my mind, I kept on flipping back and forth between being an upside-down oinking pig on a hook and being Lexington, spilling into the cauldron…
Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution
A month or two after reading this haunting story, I accompanied my parents and my sister Laura to the city of Cagliari, at the southern end of the rugged island of Sardinia, where my father was participating in a physics conference. To wind up the meeting in grand local style, the organizers had planned a sumptuous banquet in a park on the outskirts of Cagliari, in which a suckling piglet was to be roasted and then sliced apart in front of all the diners. As honored guests of the conference, we were all expected to take part in this venerated Sardinian tradition. I, however, was deeply under the influence of the Dahl story I had recently read, and I simply could not envision participating in such a ritual. In my new frame of mind, I couldn’t even imagine how anybody could wish to be there, let alone partake of the piglet’s body. It turned out that my sister Laura was also horrified by the prospect, and so the two of us stayed behind in our hotel and were very happy to eat some pasta and vegetables.
The one–two punch of the Norwegian “Pig” and the Sardinian piglet resulted in my following my sister’s lead in completely giving up meat-eating. I also refused to buy leather shoes or belts. Soon I became a fervent proselytizer for my new credo, and I remember how gratified I was that I managed to sway a couple of my friends for a few months, although to my disappointment, they gradually gave up on it.
In those days, I often wondered how some of my personal idols — Albert Einstein, for instance — could have been meat-eaters. I found no explanation, although recently, to my great pleasure, a Web search yielded hints that Einstein’s sympathies were, in fact, toward vegetarianism, and not for health reasons but out of compassion towards living beings. But I didn’t know that fact back then, and in any case many other heroes of mine were certainly carnivores who knew exactly what they were doing. Such facts saddened and confused me.
Reversion, Re-evolution
The very strange thing is that only a few years later, I, too, found the pressures of daily life in American society so strong that I gave up on my once-passionate vegetarianism, and for a while all my intense ruminations went totally underground. I think that the me of the mid-sixties would have found this reversal totally unfathomable, and yet the two versions of me had both lived in the very same skull. Was I really the same person?
Several years passed this way, almost as if I had never had any epiphany, but then one day, when I was a beginning assistant professor at Indiana University, I met a highly thoughtful woman who had adopted the same vegetarian philosophy as I once had, and had done so for similar reasons, but she had stuck to it for a longer time than I had. Sue and I became good friends, and I admired the purity of her stance. Our friendship caused me to
