I am no longer a vegetarian.
Yes, I know. You are all probably shocked and appalled. Or perhaps some of you are delighted that I have fallen off my high horse and can't look down on you anymore. Some of you probably couldn't care less. But for me this is a relatively big deal, okay?
Estonians love meat. They Luuuuuuuuuhhhhhvvvvvvvv it. They put it into everything. Doesn't even matter what kind of meat. Pigs. Cows. Fishes. They will eat it, and they will eat all of it, all the blood and guts and cartilage they can find. Trust me. I've made Estonian sausage with my family as part of our preparation for Christmas since I was knee-high to a grasshopper and I can tell you that Estonians use the whole animal.
I ordered a "cabbage roll" today and was excited about getting a healthy dose of vitamin C and amino acids with lunch. Imagine my dismay when it was brought to me and I discovered that I had ordered a cabbage leaf filled with a mixture of spiced meat and rice! Oh the horror! Oh the tragedy! ... Oh the poor college student who needs to eat lunch and already paid for this food. Therefore it belonged to her. Therefore it was her responsibility to dispose of it properly. And throwing it away would have been both rude and wasteful.
I never really was a hardcore vegetarian. I ate fish, and at Christmastime all my high-and-mighty morals about the meat industry went straight out the window because I decided that it was more important for me to participate fully in Estonian Christmas traditions with my family than it was to worry about the fact that I was eating antibiotics and hormones. ... And also because spiral-sliced ham is probably the most beautiful thing on the face of the earth.
So with trembling knife and fork I gingerly cut through the leathery green leaf and prepared myself for inevitable doom. I told myself I was doing this to prevent waste. I tried to imagine that the meat I was about to eat was locally produced and contained no traces of evil chemicals. I put it in my mouth. I chewed. ...And a wave of guilt washed over me because it was absolutely delicious.
Then I ate hot dogs later on, for dinner. And I knew that I was ruined forever. I'm still going to keep my meat consumption to a minimum, but in a country where even the potato salad has meat in it and vegetarians are treated as disabled citizens, I figured I either had to relax and be okay with chewing animal flesh, or go crazy trying to pick it out of everything.
I tried the pick-it-out-of-everything routine for about a day. ... And it's not as fun as eating meat. So there you go.
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Estonian Recipe: Sült
Buy several pounds of chicken, pork, pigs feet, beef, cow tongue and anything else you can find, the fattier the better. Boil all of it with onions and peppercorns and bay leaves until it's thoroughly dead. Keep the juices. Cut the meat into half-inch cubes. Put it back in the juices. Heat it all up again and add a few packets of Knox clear gelatin. When it's simmered for a while, ladle/pour the mixture into shallow containers (e.g. tupperware works great). Let it cool and then refrigerate overnight. If you've done everything *right* you will be *thrilled* to discover that your meat jello has set *beautifully* into squarish gray blobs that quiver violently if you so much as look at them. Cut yourself a generous piece and douse it in white vinegar. A delicious snack anytime.
2 comments:
I have a healthy respect for vegetarians, but from my own experiences, I've found the best thing about being a vegetarian is how absolutely amazing meat tastes when capitulate. I've done a lot of mammal-free diets and loved it, but now that I'm in a land where beef is taboo I miss it more than.... most things.
I can't share the enthusiasm for hot-dogs though. Since putting down 2 cold ones a night in a play I just can't do them (I'm sure Estonian hot-dogs are far superior though). Eat and enjoy. You can always revert to vegetarianism when you return to a land of evil(er?) meat. I'm shocked you thought cabbage rolls were vegetarian though. They're too much fun to make.
....
Despite my beef cravings, your meat jell-o recipe scares me. A lot. And that's amplified by the mefloquine I'm taking.
The farmer would point out that even vegans have a "serious clash of interests" with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops. Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat.
When I talked to Joel Salatin about the vegetarian utopia, he pointed out that it would also condemn him and his neighbors to importing their food from distant places, since the Shenandoah Valley receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the same would hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the hilliness of the land has dictated an agriculture based on animals since the time of the Pilgrims. The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it--especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.
The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel farther and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature--rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls--then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.
http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=55
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