/under their feet.
table stopped sitting with me because they
me for making them feelit’s aCarnivory
by camilleThe summer I was eleven, our family took a detour through the Midwest
on our annual drive back from our farm in Virginia to Tucson. We passed
by one feedlot after another. The odor was horrifying to me, and the sight
of the animals was haunting: cows standing on mountains of their own ex-
crement, packed so tightly together they had no room to walk. All they
could do was wearily moo and munch on grain mixed with the cow pies
Looking out the window at these creatures made my heart sink and my
stomach lose all interest. The outdoor part of the operation seemed crueler
than anything that might go on inside a slaughterhouse. Whether or not
it was scheduled to die, no living thing, I felt, should have to spend its life
the way those cows were. When we got home I told my parents I would
never eat beef from a feedlot again. Surprisingly, they agreed and took the
same vow.
I had another eye- opening experience that fall, in my junior high cafete-
ria: most people, I learned, really don’t want to know what their hamburger
lived through before it got to the bun. Some of the girls at my usual lunch
didn’t like the reasons I gave
them for not eating the ground- beef spaghetti sauce or taco salad the lunch
ladies were serving. I couldn’t imagine my friends would care so little about
something that seemed so important. To my shock, they expressed no in-
tention of changing their ways, and got mad at
badly about their choice. A very important lesson for me.
Nobody (including me) wants to be told what church to attend or how
to dress, and people don’t like being told what to eat either. Food is one of
our most intensely personal systems of preference, so obviously
touchy subject for public debate. Eight years after my cafeteria drama, I can
see plainly now I was wrong to try to impose my food ethics on others, even