morning that week, Judy asked me to help her gather eggs for breakfast. We crunched outside over shorn, frosted grass into a hay-stuffed laying barn, the early-morning geese caws outside muffled by the padded plywood walls. The barn felt warm, insulated, as if I could fall down anywhere and not get hurt, just bounce softly, and giggle. The hens slept hunkered down in laying boxes, feathers puffed, invisible beaks tucked beneath one wing. I watched them inhale and exhale, quivering with slight snores. Judy called them her “little mamas.”
“Mama,” I whispered into the morning air, the gray smoke of the word drifting slowly away from me in the cold.
Judy handed me a woven wooden basket with a metal handle. “Go ahead,” she said.
When I imagine myself in that moment, I laugh a little at the pathetic look on my suburban face, small blonde eyebrows gathered in confusion, static-charged bangs floating over my thick glasses. I had no idea how to gather eggs. Judy showed me, smiling, using the back of her left hand to lift the sleeping hen and her right to reach beneath the body, pulling out a warm, brown-flecked egg. I trembled when I reached beneath my first hen, terrified of the horror I was sure would befall me if I woke the mama hen. But then I held a perfect, smooth egg in my hand and felt the impossible heat emanating from within. We went row by row, filling two buckets with the eggs from just one wall of the laying barn. When I crossed to the other side, Judy shook her head and whispered a gentle no.
“No,” she said, “those mamas are hatching.”
I only spent a handful of days at the farm as a kid. I barely knew Judy before that day, and I haven’t seen her in decades. But when I conjure this memory, I feel an immense gratitude towards her, a childlike sense of protected warmth. Because she let me in on a secret. In that private moment we shared in the laying barn, she pulled back the curtain and took my hand and showed me how something sacred happened.
Red and Judy’s farm, it took me fifteen more years to learn, was not what a farm really looks like anymore. Our food was as suburban as my neighborhood, and the result was that I was twenty years old and in college before I saw the kind of farm that raised the meat I ate five nights a week.
IN PROFESSOR BOB’S classroom, one of my classmates raised his hand to speak. He, a skinny vegetarian, was the editor for Buzzsaw Haircut, the independent campus magazine for which I occasionally wrote angry op-eds about electoral politics and the media’s culture of violence, so when he spoke, I listened. And he said that he really respected people who had the courage to hunt and kill their own meat. That the real problem was how the rest of us got our meat, and how we were reacting to the video.
“I think,” he said, “if you turn away from the thought of the death in order to eat meat, you’re just letting someone else do the dirty work for you.”
And I started to remember things.
I remembered how I hated working at a seafood restaurant in high school, hated the screaming sounds the lobsters made when thrown alive into the pots of boiling water, which all the bearded cooks in the dirty kitchen told me was not, in fact, a scream of pain, but still, I remembered how it scratched its way down my spine and under my skin like fingernails bent backwards.
And I remembered that on my first and only fishing trip, I refused to use bait because I didn’t want to kill the worm by stabbing it onto the metal hook, so I caught only a floating piece of cardboard. I remembered the bloody gash through the gill of the fish my friend caught, from where he yanked the hook from its mouth.
But mostly what I thought of, when I sat in Professor Bob’s classroom, mulling over the reality of factory farming I had just witnessed, was something my father said once, on a family vacation to London. The five of us sat around a white-clothed table, under silver, dim candlelight flickering in the dark wood-paneled steakhouse in Battersea Park. I pointed, shaking my head, up at the mounted head of a steer on a wooden plaque like a hunting trophy near the room’s crown molding.
“Why,” I asked my father, “would anyone want to think about the cow while they’re trying to enjoy a nice filet mignon?”
“Well,” my father replied, “that’s what it is.”
THAT’S WHAT IT IS, I thought, when I choked on the gruesome images from the PETA movie. When I tried to reconcile my celebratory birthday chicken potpies with the heavy grinding sound of a wood chipper slowed by fifteen thousand squirming bodies tossed in for disposal as mulch, the bodies of chickens too sick for slaughter, too sick to ever be eaten.
The tough rubber of those words in my mind, like ripping the meat off a chicken wing with my teeth, like chewing through it.
It would be another seven years before I ate meat again.
When I was twenty, I watched a video and decided to become a vegetarian. I couldn’t stomach what I’d seen. I couldn’t be a part of it. Looking back, I see it as an impulse born of youth and indignation, a snap judgment, but I was starting to understand the word “privilege.” I was discovering an enormous amount of suffering that happened behind closed doors, in the name of my convenience—cheap clothes and massive landfills and supermarket steaks. This, I realized, was what’s been missing from my family’s communal approach to food—an acknowledgment of how our choices had an impact beyond our home. And I didn’t know what else to do but say no.
I called my mother and told her Thanksgiving had better be good, because it would be my last meal eating meat.
She said, “I am going to have to learn to cook all over again.”
JUST A FEW months later, I was drinking cheap beer from cans with Meghan and Caity outside a house beaten by age and heavy partying. We’d met the four men who lived there just a month or so before, at a bar where their band was playing, when we went back to their place and stayed up all night, smoking cigarettes and playing Trivial Pursuit. Now, it was late March, in the middle of a warm streak. The night smelled like the air would burst into bloom. We were punchy in the way people who live through long dark winters get at the first hints of warmth. Aran, the smallest of the boys, short and absolutely covered in tattoos, had just stolen a motorized shopping cart from the grocery store down the street and ridden it the entire two miles back to his house, at about half a mile an hour. He had a lit time bomb inked onto his forearm, the red-orange flame looking as if it burned his skin. He sat in the open windowsill, feet dangling into the night, and watched us.
Meghan was supposed to be giving me a trim with the clippers we’d borrowed from the boys. Like many twenty-year-olds who are angry at the world and don’t know where to put it, I had developed an intense love of punk, hardcore, and metal music, and their fuck-you stylings. I’d always kept my hair long, but by the end of my freshman year, my roommate had chopped it off for me—with the scissors from her desk—into a short pixie. Now, this DIY do was getting too long in the back. Some eighties basement-club punk rock was blaring through the open window, and I was sitting on a concrete step with a towel draped around my shoulders when Meghan said, “Hey, do you mind if I try something?”
I bit my lip and looked back over my shoulder at her. “Go for it.”
Aran jumped up and scrambled into the house through the window. “Hang on,” he shouted over the music and into the night, into our looming summer. “Let me get a before picture!”
The hum of the clippers against my scalp felt good, and I leaned into it, and a few minutes later, all that remained was a thin layer of peach fuzz and bangs. Alone in the dirty bathroom, I leaned towards the skim of the mirror and examined myself: mostly-shaved head, two lip piercings, vegetarian—me. I didn’t know yet how I would become the agent of change I so desperately
