published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend on May 27, 2011
As I’m thinking about finishing this column, I pinch off a piece of my husband’s tilapia. It is baked (of course) with “tandoori masala,” garlic, and lemon. (Tilapia is fish, I would like to remind you. If you didn’t know that, I don’t want to know what sort of image your mind just conjured up.)
The fish, if I don’t say so myself, is delicious. Darn. That’s inconvenient because this column is all about my thinking about becoming a vegetarian. For me, thinking and food have rarely gone together. In the presence of food, I become a lovesick teen. Thinking? Who needs to think?
This vegetarian thing may just be a transient running through my head. Perhaps I won’t be quitting meat completely, going cold turkey, or going tofurkey, if you will, but I want to start thinking about my food a little more.
Perhaps I will be like that woman in California who told me she was a vegetarian while helping herself to fish and chicken. Acknowledging my puzzled look, she explained her family’s dietary decisions: “We don’t eat mammal.” Something about that statement, although accurate and succinct, made me feel like a cannibal for partaking in the eating other mammals.
Maybe I could just stick to being a non-mammal-eater or eater-of-non-mammals. Don’t accuse me of trying to be trendy. Forty-four is a little late to fake fashionability. What will come next? Henna-hands? A nose-ring? Wait a minute; I was born in India, brought up in a Hindi-speaking, Hindu household. Being a vegetarian with a nose ring and hennaed hands should be neither foreign nor particularly fashionable to me. If anything, it should come naturally. (Isn’t it great how I can say that without getting into trouble for ethnic stereotyping?)
So if I’m not trying to be fashionable, why am I thinking about becoming a vegetarian? It stems from watching two movies lately: “Food, Inc.” and “Supersize Me.” I should probably have stuck to the sort of leisurely movie you save for the afternoon when you have the excuse of a small mountain of laundry to fold. Instead, we watched “Food, Inc.” last weekend. The month before that, we had just watched “Supersize Me.”
“Supersize Me” is the documentary by Morgan Spurlock http://super-size-me.morganspurlock.com/ in which he embarks on a one-month, medically supervised diet of McDonald’s meals, three times a day in 2003. The filmmaker has certain rules in his personal scientific experiment: He must try everything off the menu at least once, and if the server asks whether he wants to “supersize” his meal, he must answer in the affirmative. Also, because he wants to simulate the impact on the typical American, this New Yorker (at 6’2” and 185 lbs.) drastically cuts back his physical activity and replaces his former mode of transportation of walking and biking with cab rides. By the end of the month, he has gained almost 25 pounds.
The movie we watched last weekend was “Food, Inc.” Released in 2009, it exposes the negative aspects of mass food production. Here, an investigative reporter tries to follow the chain of our food supply, and finds that all the spokes of this wheel return to cornfields in the Midwest.
There are sobering images of meat processing plants and chicken “factories” in which the birds are crowded together and never exposed to sunlight. Barely able to support their weight, these chickens have been engineered to grow bigger in a shorter time. The film also shows how smaller farmers are being crowded out of their livelihood by multinational corporations who protect their patents and assets with investigators and legions of lawyers. It also shows the impact of the processing plants on the immigrant community, and the impact of poverty on health.
On the other hand, there are a few rays of sunshine, and fortunately for me, they are featured toward the end of the movie. One of these is a farmer/philosopher by the name of Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in the Shenandoah Valley. Located 8 miles southwest of Staunton, Virginia, this farm does not ship its food, since its philosophy is sustainable, local agriculture. People do travel 150 miles or more to get there and to get to the free-range chickens, their eggs, or to the pasture-fed beef. If you want to get more information, the movie’s website is http://www.foodincmovie.com/, and the farm’s website is http://www.polyfacefarms.com/. The farm is open and camera accessible. They do offer tours and apprenticeships. There is also a twelve-hour tour called the Polyface Farms Field Day that starts and ends at 6. This one is offered once every three years, according to their website, and it will be available on July 9th this year.
I’m going to see if I can rope any of my family into going there. I hope I won’t have to resort to drastic measures to help convince them that it would be a wonderful daylong “staycation.” Perhaps I will just have to withhold meat from people’s diet.
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