On being, and eating, the juices of other animals

I fried mushrooms and zucchinis in the juice left over from having fried a steak for my daughter. Then I ate them. They were delicious.

There’s nothing remarkable in that, except that I’m a vegetarian who is, since my ‘conversion’, repelled by the idea of eating meat. I could not have eaten the steak, but was happy to eat the mushrooms and zucchini fried in its juices.

This struck me as odd when I first thought of it. But I was able to explain it to myself well enough, at least at first. The explanation was that I was brought up to abhor waste and, since the juices would otherwise have been wasted, and the cow had already been killed, it would be a shame to waste the nutrition of those juices. All very sensible, except that the same argument wouldn’t have worked had my daughter decided she did not want her steak. I could not have eaten the steak to save waste, however strong my intentions. I would have requested my daughter to bury it in the garden. That is the fate of all unwanted meat scraps in our house, as experience has taught us that putting them in the compost bin attracts too many rats and breeds maggots.

As an aside, our garden is full of decently interred parts of animals. Buried carefully and solemnly, but without ritual (unless I do it, in which case there may be a surreptitious incantation of respect for the departed spirit). Perhaps that is why the garden is so lush.

But that leaves me without an explanation for why I will eat the thus-fried mushrooms but not a leftover steak or sausage. Don’t get me wrong. A left-over portion of meat is a rare event in our house, as we only have two meat-eaters out of five (the third meat-eater having flown the coop), and I try very hard to err on the side of too little rather than too much, to avoid the animal having died any more in vain than necessary.

Anyway, an alternative, or perhaps supplementary, explanation occurred to me today. It may be a bit new-agey and holistic, or is it just brutally biological, I don’t know. But whichever it is, I stand by it. It seems to explain why I’ll consume the juice but not the steak.

Carl Sagan told us that we are all made of star dust, and how deep and inspirational that is. But other perspectives are possible too. One comes from an African philosopher – Simba the Lion King. He reminded us that we are all part of the circle of life. Put bluntly, while from one perspective we are made of the remains of dead stars, from another we are made of the remains of dead animals and plants. And however vegetarian or even vegan we may be, we are still made of both. Because there is no food chain with a top and a bottom, there is only a food cycle. Even Lions and Tyrannosaurs become food for worms and bacteria, fungi and plants. Plants are part animal juice and animals are part plant juice.

So when I eat a pear or a nut I am also feasting on the bodies of long-dead kangaroos, rabbits, mice, dingos and wild cats and dogs. And also on the bodies of long-dead people.

Not only do we all eat the remains of people and animals. We also breathe them. The air is full of small particles of organic matter, each molecule of which has probably been part of the body of a long chain of living organisms – plant, animal, fungi, bacteria, whatever, over the billion or so years since organic chemistry really took off on this planet.

And of course we are breathing in loads of dust with every breath, which they tell us is mostly discarded human skin.

Now this doesn’t mean that I regard all consumption as identical, either in an ethical or an aesthetic sense. I have no immediate plans to become a direct cannibal, or any other sort of direct carnivore. I have aesthetic objections to both and ethical objections to most carnivorous opportunities that are presented to me. I won’t start eating steaks simply because I have come to dislike the thought of chewing on flesh, because every bite would remind me that this animal had been imprisoned for life and finally killed for my benefit.

That would not be the case if the animal had been shot in the wild, or raised on a happy farm (I picture the farm in Charlotte’s Web) and humanely slaughtered there rather than undergoing gruelling transport to an abattoir. But since almost all meat in our society does not meet that standard, I have come inevitably to associate the texture of meat with that spectre of life imprisonment and execution. So unfortunately, I could not even eat a humanely culled wild kangaroo or Wilbur the pig from the idyllic-sounding farmyard in Charlotte’s web. I doubt I could even eat road-kill, which would be the most defensible of all choices. Just because of the texture and what it reminded me of.

But there is none of that involved in consuming the juice of a steak, especially when combined with zucchini and mushrooms. One does not have to chew it or slice it. There is no tearing and ripping involved. One’s only obstacle to consuming those steak-cooked mushrooms is the potential to think ‘Oh no, this was cooked in the remains of a cow!‘ But since my epiphany of this morning, all I need do is remind myself that everything I eat is made of the remains of animals, including people. So why be squeamish?

Andrew Kirk

Bondi Junction, November 2014