But as we began passing full serving platters around the table, or serving each other heaps of mashed potatoes or dripping roast beef, tossing rolls to our neighbors, licking drops of gravy from our fingertips, differences emerged. Dad preferred the ends of the roast, blackened to a crisp on the outside; gray, tough meat on the inside. Caitlin made a little divot in her mashed potatoes and then filled it, a small gravy volcano spilling over the edges. Nana took just two mouthfuls of everything, nothing more, and wouldn’t finish even that. Gampi loved the fat and gristle of the roast, keeping it in the corner of his mouth and gnawing long after the meal was done. And my plate that year held two crescent rolls, several forkfuls of green beans, and an extra-large serving of mashed potatoes. No meat, no gravy, not this time.
This was my first Christmas as a vegetarian, the first ceremonial family meal since I’d stopped eating meat, and I was not at all prepared for the alienation I felt sitting at that table, looking around at the others’ plates, passing meat along, smiling awkwardly at my own sisters as if apologetic. I finished eating before everyone else for the first time in my life and saw then how unlike the rest of my family I had become.
My whole life, my family had believed that the dinner table was a place you came together, that eating was a crucial, collective activity. But when I sat, pierced and protesting, at my family’s Christmas dinner table that year, I remembered the little girl building a fort of books to shield herself from the kitchen noise, the nights with pizza and my father. When I imagined myself through their eyes, a newborn radical fresh home from her hippie college, bearing strange new habits and restrictions, I didn’t think they understood anything I did anymore. And I took that as a challenge. Tension in my shoulders, I settled into the role of outsider. Perhaps, I thought, this was inevitable, that the redheaded eldest daughter would one day splinter apart from her Italian family heritage.
Food had been the bedrock of my family, the solid foundation onto which all of our connection was built, the means of expression, the reason. When I discovered the bloody, complex truth behind our family meals, the battery cages and the electric stunners. I saw cracks in what I thought had been a solid foundation. I decided to build my own.
Chapter Four
Cheez Whiz Is Vegetarian
I WAS SITTING AT the kitchen table with my new roommate, Erin, in Washington, D.C. She had a map of the city and a red Sharpie she was using to circle neighborhoods I should avoid. I was new to the city, a recent and hopeful college graduate, staying with some friends of a friend from high school for the duration of my summer internship with an environmental nonprofit. Erin had spent the last four years studying at George Washington University and wanted to make sure I could navigate the dense, complex city comfortably on my own. Here, she circled, was a great coffee shop on my way back from work. She marked Ben’s Chili Bowl and Kramerbooks and an independent record store where she knew I’d be able to find the kinds of obscure bands we both liked. Meridian Hill Park, just blocks from our apartment, was fine and beautiful during the day, but there had been a recent string of sexual assaults there after dark. Columbia Heights, the next neighborhood to the west, was a known drug hub. Needles in the street.
This was my introduction to the city, a place full of art and politics, of potential and promise—for the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
SHORTLY BEFORE MY college graduation, determined not to move back in with my parents, I’d gotten an internship with the Communications Department at the Wilderness Society, practically a dream job for a young activist writer. I arrived at the office on my first day—one week and two days after my college graduation ceremony—with feet blistered from the heels I’d walked in for three blocks from the bus stop. The building, the whole block, stretched before me like an urban dream, my Mary Tyler Moore fantasy come to life. Smooth taupe bricks, an enormous window etched with the Wilderness Society’s logo in gold, a courtyard dotted with blossoming cherry trees, and a stone archway marking the entrance. Directly across the street, I could see the fountain and sunken amphitheater courtyard of the National Geographic Society. I took a deep breath, ignoring the faint sweet rot of a mid-Atlantic city in the summer, and thought, This is it. I was living confidently in the direction of my dreams. My real life could begin.
My nervousness at meeting the people I’d only spoken to over the phone was unfounded. Within the first few weeks, I’d become comfortable and familiar with my coworkers: Pete, one of the three vice-presidents for communications, a kind father to a toddler daughter, with a beard and glasses, a man who looked like he spent his weekends in wool socks and hiking boots; Drew, a funny and sensible law school grad, just a few years older than me, who would leave in the fall to join his fiancée on a yearlong Fulbright to Lima; and later, Sharon, a young Korean American in the year between American University and Georgetown Law, with whom I gossiped regularly in the office.
My first task, after getting settled in, was to write a series of press releases, based on a template, about some of the monuments in the National Landscape Conservation System, a lesser-known, less-protected series of parks run by the Bureau of Land Management. The language of advocacy was already in the press releases, the result of months of focus groups and messaging meetings. My job was to write a brief paragraph about the beauty and conservation value of each monument so that we could personalize the press release by state: the Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado, Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana. I spent my first few weeks as a college graduate studying photographs and fact sheets about some of the most beautiful wild places in the country and describing what I saw. This was perfect.
ONE NIGHT THAT summer, I returned home to my apartment around ten at night and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Dizzy and grouchy and tired, I yanked open the door to my freezer and cupboards, tossing a series of cardboard boxes onto the counter. I ripped open the tab on a package of Near East Parmesan-flavored couscous and poured the grain into a plastic bowl. I sliced open the seasoning packet and dumped the white powder flecked with dried green herbs into the water, stirring quickly with a fork before setting the whole thing in the microwave to rotate on its glass plate. A fake chicken patty slipped from its cellophane sleeve straight into the toaster for a minute on each side. Ten minutes later, I sat cross-legged on our hand-me-down orange couch, a plastic dinner plate balanced on my lap, watching Martin Sheen play the president on TV and swirling fake meat through a small pond of ranch dressing.
This is what passed for a meal most of my first few years as a vegetarian. I was still young, capable of eating anything short of Tupperware and remaining healthy. I had no clue about budgeting for groceries. And I had spent most of my childhood hiding beneath a table, avoiding the feminine domestic, which is to say: I never really learned how to cook. Cracks began to form in my perfect activist adulthood.
The problem with being a vegetarian, I discovered, was that you couldn’t eat meat. Steak was my favorite food when I was seventeen—I couldn’t get enough of that tough, chewy meat, of the red-gray flesh peeling apart into moist strands under the pressure and slide of a knife. I’d let each bite drip bloody juice onto my mashed potatoes before I ate it, sucking the meat dry in the corner of my mouth. But being a vegetarian meant you had to eat a lot of vegetables, and I’d never really been a fan.
I gagged over the grimy paste of lentils mashed between the flat plates of my teeth, the slimy flesh of an eggplant slipping towards the back of my throat, the grainy pulp of a soft pear. Broccoli tasted like plastic to me, hummus like dirt. I couldn’t so much as graze the fuzzed skin of a peach against my lower lip without convulsing in a shiver of disgust. Once, in a nice restaurant in California, I accidentally put a slice of mushroom into my mouth—masked under the thick
