a stone tower I’d never seen before, or a massive waterfall. Ithaca was a city of constant surprises: a church flying a gay pride flag, a house painted purple.
By the beginning of my second year at Ithaca, I’d embraced how different I’d become from my family, forced the wedge further, and had fully adopted the part of the neophyte radical. Having just recently been dumped by the first boy I fell in love with, I’d chopped my hair off and pierced my lip, and I was skipping class fairly regularly to spend as much time as possible with my two closest friends, Caity and Meghan. They were endlessly fascinating. Caity: a film and photography major who’d grown up in a brownstone in Yonkers, with porcelain skin and a strong Greek nose, her nearly black hair cropped short and straight around her stunning face. Meghan: a sociology major fixated on Mexican culture, quickly developing her now-fluent Spanish, with curly hair and always a soft, blissful smile while dancing. Both introduced me to exciting new music: the punk-pop of Saves the Day, the hard thrashing of Converge, the upbeat salsa of Celia Cruz.
I was a young activist who hadn’t quite figured out yet what that meant, but I knew I had a big heart that seemed to be splitting with all the suffering I was learning existed in the world. I wanted to work with orphans rescued from sex slavery in Cambodia, and I wanted to write plays protesting the unfair labor practices of Walmart. I volunteered at the exhibit when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was on display. I ran for student government and helped draft a resolution opposing the Iraq War, made anti-war mix CDs for the rallies we held, and attended die-ins.
This is the young woman I was when, in the first semester of my second year, Professor Bob screened PETA’s Meet Your Meat film for a class on the rhetoric of persuasive arguments. I sat in a college classroom while images I’d never seen, images I hadn’t had the capacity to imagine, flickered, slightly grainy and over-pixelated, on the wall in front of me.
Giant metal chutes spat a flurry of white into a caged truck, like laundry, like garbage dumped from the window of an upper-level apartment. The sounds were deafening, a thousand birds tweeting, layered on top and on top of each other, the random bangs of a swinging metal door, the flutter of a thousand pairs of wings.
A suspended black rubber belt orbited a silver tank slowly, white masses dangling, swinging gently. At first, the rotating conveyor belt looked like it was at any other factory. An assembly line.
But then, I realized they were bodies. The white hanging masses. They were chickens, stunned into unconsciousness; they were my frozen, prepackaged, breaded chicken nuggets. And the swinging metal arm that gently brushed up against each body as it passed, so slowly, was actually slitting their throats.
A dancing circle of swinging, dead chickens, wings splayed, spun under its own weight, with gravity, like ten feather dusters gathered at the handle. Over a two-ton vat of purple blood, they hung, swaying in a postmortem ballet.
I watched the images, fading in and out, seeing only flashes: A disembodied hand, from the wrist up, gripped a struggling hen and lifted her to a blue metal gate, a miniature guillotine. A little trap door wrapped itself around the hen’s beak, a small movement, like a long slow pinch. It didn’t look painful. It didn’t look like anything. But the hen tensed, beady black eyes pinched shut, wings flapping frantically, useless yellow-clawed feet scratching at the empty air. When the hen emerged, her once-white beak was pink and bent, half the size and curved downward, drooping towards her chin.
A twitching cow, pushed with a forklift.
A piglet’s skull bashed against the concrete floor.
When Professor Bob flipped on the lights at the end of the film, he asked us to comment on the rhetorical strategies at play in the video. I blinked in the harsh light, chewed my lower lip, listened silently.
Professor Bob, my professor and a new mentor, was a vegan, skinny and funny, with a long gaunt face. His typical teaching outfit was khakis and a plaid button-down shirt, and he was perpetually a day behind on shaving, like a slightly polished lumberjack. He’d spent a year digging trenches with the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, before quitting to return home and marry his wife. They were both volunteers at the local animal shelter, and in addition to full-time teaching jobs, they taught creative writing workshops at a nearby penitentiary. He was a nerd and a smart one, making Star Wars reference alongside Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, and I thought he and his wife were exactly the kind of adults I hoped to become in college: worldly and opinionated, rife with stories, and able to hold up their end of a political debate at a cocktail party.
In his classroom, I saw something for the first time, and so did many of my classmates. When I tuned back in to the conversation, they were scrambling to come to terms with the violence of the film, to justify their diets, their family farms, their love of bacon.
It’s not like that everywhere.
and
My family raises dairy cows.
and
Can they even feel pain?
and
Whatever, steak is good.
and
Protein is good for you.
and
So we should just set the animals free?
and
What about hunting?
and
What about medical testing? That’s necessary.
and
What, so we should just all become vegetarian?
Since starting college, I’d been working hard to expand my perspectives: I had recently declared a minor in sociology, and I took classes like Sex and Gender in the Third World, seminars on media and politics. I was a member of the Young Democratic Socialists, the environmental club, the feminist organization, born shiny and new into radical idealism.
But I was starting to come to the uncomfortable realization that I’d never spent any significant amount of time thinking about the fact that food grew somewhere. Food, as far as I was concerned, came from the grocery store. I was used to fluorescent-lit aisles and shrink-wrapped meat, miles of shelves stocked with dozens of brands of chips, and cheese sliced off a massive block by a woman wearing a hairnet.
I thought back to a week in February, when I was seven or eight, that my family spent on a farm in Vermont, the childhood home of my mother’s best friend, which was still in operation and run by her parents, Red and Judy. Every morning there, I rose early, peeling back the handmade quilt on the twin-sized bed in the attic, slipping my tiny cold feet into heavy brown boots, and clomping down the stairs, shivering and grinning, to help with chores.
Although at my own house we had a big backyard, thick with rows of spindly pine trees, I was a suburban girl. Our block had fenced-in pools and power lines and a school bus stop in my front yard and a sign that read Slow Children (no comma). We played outside often, building tree forts and raking pine needles into houses, and I may have worn red flannel button-downs, but I was not a farm girl. My week on the farm was a vacation from suburbia, at a magical place where a little girl could carry metal buckets heavy with sap through the snow into the warm sugaring shack to make maple syrup, where she could throw bread to geese that roamed the front yard, where she
