cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Penitent Eating When I made the decision to stop eating farmed pork some years ago, it was for exclusively ethical reasons. I should say straight away that I really, really miss eating it. I'm not one of these people who stops eating meat or a type of meat and develops a disgust for the whole concept of it. Even after years of abstinence, I crave bacon. The sight of really good Virginia pulled pig barbeque practically makes me cry. That's definitely the hardest part. Dear God how I miss barbeque. 'Barbeque' in the south has a very different meaning than it does up north. I had strong reservations about moving to the south when I was 12 years old. All I knew were the popular stereotypes. Then right before we actually moved here we went on a car trip to Opryland, Tennessee by way of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This involved driving from Maryland down through Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee and the food along the way totally changed my mind. We stopped at barbeque joints in every region en route and I discovered the joys of various regional styles of barbeque. While I love them all, my favorite has to be North Carolina style, doused heavily with vinegar and eaten with alternating bites of cole slaw. Jesus fuck, there is no better food on this earth. Ok, maybe boiled Maine lobster with a bottle of Saison DuPont. If someone asked me to name the number one best thing about living in the American south, pork barbeque would probably be it. Yet here I am, drooling over something that I have voluntarily given up. People often make a bit of a fuss about my abstinence from pork, trying to make sure that meals do not include any pig meat and apologizing for something that does contain it. But here's the weird thing: I don't mind it. I don't expect or even want the world to go out of it's way to accomodate me essentially being picky. Because somewhere along the way my abstinence has been transformed into the arguably despicable aspect of the penitent. I am on some level enjoying the sacrifice as a sacrifice. Pork is such an omnipresent substance in American food. Really, you have no idea until you are trying to avoid it. Nearly every day I am confronted at least once with food that I would like to eat except that it has pig in it. So my refusal to eat the meat becomes a daily exercise in self control, which cannot help but influence my sense of identity. Tying pork abstinence to my sense of self naturally enhances my own self-righteousness about the whole thing, which gives me even more incentive not to give in one day. It's a feedback loop of the type that led monks to flagellate themselves. Strength through denial. The great irony of the situation is that while I stopped eating pork because I think that conditions in pig factories are deplorable, the positive aspects of abstinence will only be present so long as everyone else continues to eat factory-raised pigs. If my ethical position won the day and everyone agreed with me, then in a sense I lose. This is the trouble with ego getting wrapped up with ethics, which I suppose is inevitable when one determines to swim against the popular stream. I think that what perhaps sets me apart from most other categories of picky eaters is that I am not particularly evangelical. My own approach to food is not something that most people could manage to emulate. I personally hunt, kill and butcher as much of my meat as I possibly can. I believe in taking personal responsibility for the brutality necessary to procure meat, rather than burying the ethical facts through a buffer of sin-eaters or sabbat goyims or whatever you want to call the invisible industries between cow and cheeseburger. But I don't expect anyone else to do this. It's just not practical. I feel that it is a good thing to do what I do but it's not mandatory in some metaphysical way. At the end of the day it adds up to my being sort of half Catholic. I was raised Catholic, though not devoutly. We weren't saying rosaries around the dinner table or anything. I'm no longer a part of any church but it would be kidding myself to say that my whole penitent feedback loop has no connection to years of sitting through CCD classes. Yet if I'd really absorbed the whole Catholic ethic fully, then I would truly give a shit what other people put in their mouths and I'd be out there trying to win souls from bacon. 11:07 - 2008-02-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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