Red Meat

I cooked a steak for my 7-year-old daughter Chloe last night. This is strange because I have been a vegetarian for 20 years. I had to call my ex-husband to walk me through it, as usual. While me and Chloe cooked the steak, we had two interesting conversations.

Chloe's thumbs-up steak

First, she asked me if it was bad to be weird. Upon further query, she told me she feels kind of cool because she wears awesome clothes, but that she feels kind of weird sometimes. I would give you the examples, but when I asked her later to remind me what those reasons are, she said: "What are you writing?"

This is intriguing because I think I have always felt fairly cool but weird. To hear my own clone put voice to something like that was surreal. So I told her that I think it's always good to be dressed well but with a little twist—and to not think something just because everybody else does. I hope she remembers that.

Chloe eventually gave in and told me that her weird example is that she sometimes does things like puts her arm up and pumps her bicep while saying choo-choo and throwing herself head first into the fluffiest pillow part of the bounce house. And I told her I will take weird if not being weird would mean I couldn't go choo-choo into the softest, pillowiest part of the bounce house. I stand by that. Forever.

Our next topic came from when I took a picture of the cooked steak and sent it to her father so he could tell me if it was too rare or not rare enough. I have no idea. While we waited for his response she continued to smack her lips and tell me that it was “all good” and that she knew what he was going to say. I have never seen "Twilight" or "True Blood," but I can only imagine this is how the little vampire kids are portrayed.

He gave the thumbs up. Actually, he said OK. It was Chloe who gave a thumbs-up over the steak in the picture we sent her father.

As she asked me—for the 687th time—why I don't eat meat, I started to try to explain it to her. I do not eat meat partly because my father was a butcher when I was growing up. I would walk into the grocery stores and head to the back of the store, straight into the meat department to the refrigerator section where the meat cutters cut meat.

I, for really one of the first times, described to her what that looked like. There were always full cold, carcasses hanging, and my dad's job was to cut them up. He often cut them up right in front of me while talking like that was a total normal thing to do while talking to a small child. It’s nothing abnormal for a butcher's daughter, but after the years it wore on me.

My dad worked in a slaughterhouse for one year when we moved to Missouri in 1981 during a recession. I vividly remember going to see him at the slaughterhouse, seeing a cow go in, hearing a loud bang and seeing blood all over the walls.

I ate meat regularly growing up. We were not wealthy, but we never lacked iron. And as I got older, meat just became less and less appetizing. So it wasn't that hard when I First gave up red meat while taking an environmental science class in college.

I decided to stop eating meat for ecological reasons. If I cut it out completely, I thought, that would make up for someone else eating a ton of meat (like most of the people in my family).

Everyone should eat less red meat for his or her health and for the ozone layer. The amount of methane gas produced by the cattle in Central California alone has forever altered global warming. Methane is responsible for as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases combined.

One day not long after making the decision to not eat red meat, I was driving down the freeway with my sisters and we were eating chicken soft tacos. We were driving on the 60 Freeway near the 15, right by the dairies. A latch-sided truck carrying a bunch of live chickens was on the freeway in front of us in the front lane as we were merging right onto the 15.

The chickens started flopping onto the asphalt and cars were hitting them, blood splattering everywhere. It was agricultural helter skelter. Tacos mid-chew were practically vomited on the spot. And I never purposely ate meat, poultry or fish again.

I have never missed it. Not even when I was pregnant. I promised myself that if my body told me that I needed it, I would eat it. But my body never said a word.

Vegetarian nachos. See, it's not so bad, I swear.

Anyways. As I started telling Chloe about my experiences in the meat locker, she got a glazed look over her eyes. I asked her, "Are you listening?"

"That sounds great," she said, still stuck on the part about the carcasses hanging in the meat locker, a carnivore's delight, apparently. Weird.