The Confessions of a Lapsing Vegetarian by Susan Piperato

My car wears a bumper sticker in support of vegetarianism, but I didn't put it there. My oldest son, who’s now eight, stuck it on about three years ago, before he could read. I won’t report exactly what my sticker says because anonymity is hard to come by in a small town like New Paltz, and I’d like to preserve what little of it I have. The sticker got stuck about three years ago after my son learned to recognize the logo for PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals from endless discussions with me about all the stuff the mailman brings and why. When yet another letter came asking for a donation, he ripped the envelope open, pulled out the bumper sticker, shouted "Cool!" and ran outside with it. I got there just in time to make sure he didn't put it on crooked. I don’t know if my bumper sticker has converted anyone on the road to stop eating meat, but it does help me locate my car in large, crowded parking lots.

But lately that bumper sticker has come back to haunt me in unexpected ways. Recently, up at Split Rock on a Saturday with about a dozen kids with three other women, the mom who’d brought the veggie pâté announced that she’d read the back of my car, and lauded me for spreading the word on the benefits of going meatless. While I nodded politely my oldest son glared at me so hard that I almost went into the ice cold water after all. You see, I’m a long-standing vegetarian who occasionally eats meat, and if my son knew the word, he'd gladly call me a hypocrite. But lest my frank admission or sudden leap into oxymoronicism make you stop reading the rest of this article, let me qualify that statement.

My two kids were born about halfway through my roughly 15-year career as an herbivore. My few recent backslides into meat-eating in the past few years have occurred only when I’ve felt utterly deprived of something, protein, for instance, or adult interaction, or a sense of balance when I've been swinging wildly between school and work and home. In other words, the only cooked animal flesh that has passed my lips has been solely to satisfy my emotional needs, in the form of comfort food.

When my oldest son was a toddler in Australia (incidentally, a country known not only for its beef, but for its lamb, kangaroo and emu) I explained to him that the things we were offered when we ate out—like cocktail franks or meat pies or sausage rolls, were not what we ate at home. These foods were made of animals’ bodies, I said, and I didn't believe in eating animals. But I also said that most people I know do eat meat, and that although I wouldn’t serve it at home, everyone has to make his or her own choice on vegetarianism. In other words, I left it up to him what he noshes on at parties.

At the time I wondered alternately whether I was being too liberal, or giving too much responsibility to a little kid. Either way, I could have blown it, and ended up raising a rebellious carnivore. But I was wrong. My son immediately became a vegetarian zealot, proclaiming frequently that when he grew up he was going to make people stop eating meat. "Is that DEAD ANIMAL you're eating"; he would demand of relatives at barbecues, other bewildered children at parties, or strangers seated near the McDonald's franchise at the mall. Each person he accused of partaking of animal flesh would initially stare at me as if I had been shoving propaganda instead of meat down his little throat. I always made sure to explain to whomever he'd confronted that, yes, I'm vegetarian, but that I'm letting my son choose whether or not to eat meat. But this never got me anywhere either. If I didn’t look like a control freak, then I appeared wildly permissive.

What constitutes comfort food—which, to me, is any food that takes you back to the most blissful and secure moments of your childhood, varies widely from one person to another. For Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, it was the madeleine, a tiny, rich, shell-shaped cake I still yearn to try someday. My personal comfort food isn't so high-falutin’. If it isn’t bagels or cinnamon bread or any form whatsoever of dark chocolate that I crave an addiction begun in childhood with my family’s frequent indulgence in boxed, homemade creams from the Commodore on Broadway in Newburgh then it’s meat. It’s meals like my father’s meatballs, tuna-noodle casserole, or turkey with all the trimmings. Comfort food is about emotional rather than physical sustenance. It's not that I need or even want to eat that turkey deluxe dinner at the diner for its nutritional value, it’s that eating it takes me back through the parade of Thanksgivings and Christmases and summer nights on the Jersey shore, where it was always followed by chocolate parfait, that made up my childhood. Although comfort food always leaves me feeling at least somewhat happier than before I ate it, it does have its problems. I'm so hyperaware of its passage through my digestive system for the next 24 hours, and all of the carcinogenic and unethical ramifications of what I’ve done, that I end up feeling as guilty for my backsliding into meat-eating as if I owned an entire closetful of mink coats. But sometimes I can’t help it. Sometimes I need a kind of solace I can’t get from meditation or a glass of wine or a walk or a good heart-to-heart conversation. Sometimes I need to ingest the foods of my past, whatever their ingredients.

My moment of reckoning regarding my carnivorous lapses and what they mean to me as a vegetarian and animal rights supporter has come about after a good solid year of having my eating habits scrutinized by my kids. My second son, who's almost five, is as adamantly opposed to meat-eating as his big brother. I am not, in their eyes, what I proclaim to be. They've told me so in no uncertain terms. "My Mom is a Vejitareein, but she will cook turkey," my older son began his school report last fall on how his family celebrates Thanksgiving. "I will not eat it," he concluded. It was no use explaining to him or his little brother that I just couldn’t do the fake turkey thing with seitan ever again. I never could shape the legs right, and anyway, let’s face it, eating seitan is like eating Flubber. I tried a compromise: There comes a time in everyone's life, I told my kids, when she has to reconsider her commitments. The turkey was going to be an experiment for me. I might eat it, or I might not. But I was compelled to cook it.

But my so-longed-for trip down memory lane in the form of turkey dinner was a disaster. My experiment failed. All Thanksgiving morning I sat happily perched on the kitchen counter with a book and a glass of wine, breathing deeply the wafting aroma of roasting turkey. I felt nostalgic and calm, free of the pressures of work and school for a few days. Every so often I'd jump down, join the kids in front of the TV to pan particularly ridiculous aspects of the Macy’s parade, or baste the turkey. In the latter case the kids always came crashing into the room no sooner than I'd reached for the oven door. "That's disGUSTing," the two of them would scream at me as I painted the turkey with butter the way my grandmother had always done. "You're going to eat THAT??" My younger son danced around, yelling in a sing-song voice, "My-mom-is-a-carnivore, my-mom-is-a-carnivore." To him, I'm as bad as the Tyrannosaurus-Rex in the dinosaur book he’s always asking me to read.

Stubbornly, I ate turkey while the kids sullenly picked at their candied yams. They perked up for the pumpkin pie, and so did I. They stopped berating me, and I stopped feeling guilty. I let my perfect, lumpless gravy congeal in its boat and my beautifully carved, feather-like slices of white meat dry out on the serving plate.

I’d hoped for a few days of unwinding from all the stress of working and mothering while eating reheated leftovers, followed by a few days worth of turkey and cranberry sauce sandwiches, with a finale of turkey gumbo, just like my mother used to make. This wasn’t to be. Instead, we did the kids’ eating routine: pizza, burritos, soup, pasta. Whenever one of us opened the fridge, they’d scream about the disGUSTing turkey. I quickly lost interest in so much as carving meat for a sandwich. Finally I wrapped up the turkey and took it to my grandmother so she could make soup with it, a move my kids heartily approved. They accept that their great-grandma eats meat because she's from another generation, this, to them, being the equivalent of coming from another planet. But it’s not okay for me, their mom, to so much as THINK about eating meat. They take my lapses personally. "Is that a fish’s BODY?" my younger son has asked the few times he's seen me open a can of tuna. "Well, yes," I've admitted. I've tried to explain about it being dolphin-safe and the fact that sometimes Mommy is so busy she needs more protein than she can get from tofu and cheese and lentils and refried beans. "If it's a fish's body then it's MEAT," he always tells me, looking like Orson Welles, "and that means YOU are a MEAT-EATER, Mommy."

And he’s right. What am I up to with these lapses? I gave up meat and standard-issue dairy products because I can’t support cruelty toward any living thing (and ever since I read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, the Bible of the animal rights movement, I can’t even so much as look at a commercially-produced egg without feeling some degree of distress). And I know all about the carcinogenic effects of the hormones and pesticides used in raising cattle and poultry. So why do I even think of backsliding? Because comfort food reminds me who I was, and where I come from, and gives me a boost forward.

Last winter when I volunteered to eat one of my father's meatballs after refusing them for a decade and a half I was in the midst of making some pretty difficult personal decisions. It was a cold, bleak Sunday afternoon, my kids weren’t there, and my dad had cooked a little bit of vegetarian sauce just for me. Suddenly, with my heart in my throat, I found myself reaching for one of those nuggets of beef and herbs and breadcrumbs that he’d rolled in his own olive-oiled hands and set simmering on Friday night. I still remember the precise taste and texture of the meat in my mouth. I can't say it was good, because it brought me back so quickly to a world I'd forgotten that the taste itself seemed inconsequential. As I bit into the meatball I noticed that familiar twinkle of surprise in my father's eye. I told him not to get his hopes up, that this was a once-only event. He nodded."Is it the same?" he asked. Yes, I told him, exactly the same. "That's good," he said. "Now eat."

I don’t expect my admission of carnivorous lapses to go over any better publicly than it has in my own home. After all, despite the local proliferation of fast food joints, we live in a vegetarian heartland, with organic farms dotting the landscape and meatless culinary delights available in virtually every restaurant. But there comes a time in everyone's life when it’s time to ’fess up and either change your habits or learn to love them. I'm choosing the latter. If I need to ingest animal flesh once a year, so be it. I'll thank the animal and hope for the best and stop feeling guilty, even in front of my kids. And although many vegetarians out there might claim to be so pure that not one morsel of flesh has ever touched their lips, I know I’m not the only vegetarian who’s ever been tempted to nibble at meat. An entire industry of foods has been developed for people like me, who eat tofu hot dogs and fakin' bacon and veggie burgers, not so much because they’re gustatory delights (some of them taste like spiced cardboard), but because we sometimes need the comfort of eating the way we did as kids. My own kids won't have this problem. Their comfort foods—and their kids' comfort foods will be the vegetarian dishes I serve them now.

As my bumper sticker claims, one of the keys to a healthy global future is vegetarianism. But I can’t deny that I come from a long line of carnivores. Even though I’ve been known to very infrequently lapse, I do believe I’ve made a difference globally. At the very least, I never buy meat, so I’m not guilty of supporting the industry. But most importantly, I've provided the link in the food-habit chain that runs from my carnivorous ancestors to my kids' children's children.