NEXT FEW years were a blur of dingy apartments and dingy dorm rooms, gray carpet and any number of obscurely acquired sagging and spotted couches, listening to boys strum acoustic guitars, watching tattooed crowds thrash to loud bands I’d never heard of but moved me to an anger I’d somehow always felt, beginning to think the word “revolution” on a regular basis, new piercings and sociology class discussions, and binges on Smirnoff Ice.
It was in a dorm room the fall after I shaved my head, on a night with warm cheap beer and indie folk music coming from the speakers, showing off my first tattoo—an ampersand between my breasts, to keep it a secret from my parents—that I met the guy who would one day leave me for the West.
He was tall and thin, with glasses with thick brown rims and shaggy ski-bum hair. I’d seen him for months around campus: pilled elbow-patch sweaters from the Salvation Army and a vintage Minolta always around his neck. He seemed to be the perfect blend of sexy and artsy and nerdy when I first laid eyes on him, sitting alone in the dining hall, wearing the hoodie of one of my favorite obscure indie bands, long fingers wrapped around a book. I had a distant lusty crush on him for months before I discovered he—Kevin—shared a dorm room with my friend Matt. The first night we met, as we talked shyly into our cans of Milwaukee’s Best, my hopes of starting something up with him flared and then faded, as he told me he planned to leave Ithaca soon, to transfer by the end of the semester to a college in Montana.
Montana might as well have been Mongolia to me. I had never been to Montana, had practically never heard of Montana, so distant and strange its frontier name seemed compared with the quietly padded forests of my northeastern home.
“What’s in Montana?” I asked him, thinking his explanation would be practical—he had friends or family there, they offered a major in a program he really wanted to study.
Instead, his face lit up with a smile wide enough to shrug his glasses up on his cheeks, eyes grown distant with fantasy. “Really big mountains,” he replied.
I was in love.
And soon, Kevin and I decided we were young enough for a three-month, no-strings-attached, leaving-on-a-jet-plane fling. He had stopped eating red meat years earlier, and within the first month of our dating, he too was a vegetarian. We were all becoming vegetarians then, in our early twenties, in Ithaca and beyond. My high school friends off on their own campuses in New Hampshire and Connecticut and Maine were stumbling across PETA brochures and discovering Thai food and abandoning Tater Tot casserole. We did it just to see if we could, just to see what else would change in our worlds when we discarded our parents’ paradigms about what food is, why we ate it, and how it made us feel.
On one winter break at home, Caity told her mother she was considering becoming vegetarian too. Her mother, a short-haired doctor specializing in HIV/AIDS research, who had raised her three daughters in a house where nudity was common, surrounded by an alliance of gay and lesbian artists and poets, sent Caity back to school with her copy of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. We flipped hungrily through the book, its dog-eared pages unfolding a story we were shocked and appalled to learn. No one had ever told us how wasteful the industrial meat system was, how much land was eaten up by corn and soy to feed cattle whose digestive systems were never meant to eat anything but grass, or how much more tofu could be produced on the same amount of land. In a world we were just beginning to see was so increasingly fueled by greed, in a world of oil and revenge and excess, we couldn’t imagine being part of a system that allowed so much hunger. I remember us so clearly, cross-legged on her dorm room bed, reading passages back and forth to each other, while the last season of Friends played on the television behind us. I’m not sure we realized the book was written in 1971.
I BEGAN MY foray into vegetarianism in the Ithaca College dining halls, a shining palace where dietary preferences were welcomed and celebrated. Silver chafing dishes warmed kosher entrées, and little laminated cards labeled vegetarian options; the salad bar always had marinated tofu along with tuna and chicken salads. What I didn’t know at the time was that the dining halls on my campus were operated by Sodexo, the food services industry giant notorious for its low minimum wage and private prison contracts with the U.S. military.1 All I saw was the vegan cooking station—its own booth with a separate cooking surface and a chef whose hands were not contaminated with the meat of other dishes.
The vegan station served veggie burgers made with brown rice and black beans. I imagined them soft in someone’s hands, rolled around and flattened, the way Nona’s raw meatballs felt in my palm before they were baked. A twentysomething Ithaca native with flowers tattooed on the backs of his plastic-gloved hands tossed burgers onto a slatted grill, then wrapped them in red-and-white checked paper and placed them in a cardboard container, next to a side of the coveted sweet potato fries. We loved the Sodexo sweet potato fries, the perfect layer of corn-syrup crispy on the outside, a delicate crust that broke open into the soft, tanning-salon orange flesh of the fry, always just this side of too hot, crumbling and sweet.
Looking back, I suppose I felt I had already done the difficult part: I had made the decision. By giving up meat, I had declared my membership in this new group of budding revolutionaries. We sat around the generic beige tables in our private-school dining hall, us white, upper-middle-class kids with our shaved heads, and discussed serious things, discussed free trade and facial piercings, our naïve fingers shoving handfuls of greasy sweet potato fries into our mouths. We were safe in our convictions. We were happy to let someone else do the cooking.
I HAVE A photograph of myself from around this time, unwashed hair in pigtails glinting red under a late-October sun. I am squinting into the camera, the Washington Monument in the background. Two fingers of my left hand form a V, and in my right hand I hold a poster mounted on a wooden stick, the grayed image of a young girl’s body, half-buried in stony rubble, stark white block letters reading, No Blood for Oil. And I am smiling.
This was the fall of 2002, my sophomore year, about a month after I stopped eating meat, and my friends and I had driven eight hours through the night from Ithaca to attend a protest in Washington, D.C. When I see the shiny-faced radical optimist in the photograph, I can’t help but smile along with her. I feel a surge of pride for the unabashed hope in her expression; I remember the churning in her stomach, the sense of purpose. But I can’t look at the beaming smile on her face without also remembering that six months later, despite our protests, President Bush authorized the invasion of Iraq, a war we are still fighting. I became a vegetarian in the swirl of this same controversy, born of the same belief in the power of protest. In the time before the war, decidedly, vocally, against.
But my face in the photograph is not angry, not defiant—it is joyful. I celebrated my boycotts, treasured them as a part of this new, radical identity I was crafting for myself, an identity that I hoped would take me away from the suburban convenience, the enclave of desensitization. The girl in the photograph, who smiled out for peace even as she held the image of a dead body in her hand, looked in only one direction. Outward, forward, away.
IN PREPARATION FOR Christmas dinner later that year, my father and I performed our usual non-cooking-related kitchen duties: inserting the double leaf into the cherrywood table, carefully draping the red-and-green plaid tablecloth over it, laying the real silver flatware alongside the goose-patterned china. We folded the napkins and lined a basket with paper towels for the rolls. Everyone clattered into the kitchen as the last of the food made its way from counter to table. My grandfather, right elbow hiked up over his shoulder, finished carving the roast beef and laid the slices delicately on a large crystal platter. Nana’s small knotted fingers gingerly plucked warm Pillsbury crescent rolls from baking sheet to basket. My mother surveyed the scene: she grabbed a spoon for the gravy boat, ladled green beans into the flowered vegetable dish, pointed at my sisters to pour water, wine. Then we sat, the seven of us, around the table in our traditional Christmas seating arrangement, held hands, and bowed our heads to give thanks.
