T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

"Meat?" April Wind is offended. "But you're a vegetarian, aren't you? You of all people — I mean, I've read all the bios and the magazines too, everything…" She's gaping up at him from a plate of chapatis, lime pickle and eggs-over-easy prepared by Mac's invisible cook and served up silently by a masked Pakistani woman who disappeared the minute the plate hit the table. "You're a vegetarian. I know you are."

Andrea's left in the middle of the enormous room, looking as if she's been deserted on the dance floor between tunes. "He probably just keeps it for his guests, for the parties-Barbecue You? Right? Isn't that it, Mac?"

Mac. She met him two days ago-through me, because of me — and already it's Mac this and Mac that and could I get you another soda, Mac, or peel you some grapes, and what do you think, Mac?

He's smiling — I can tell because the corners of the gauze mask lift just under the plastic rims of the sunglasses, where the muscles of his fleshless cheeks would be. He's looking at me — or at least his head is turned my way. "Come on, Ty, don't be such a crank-come on, I'll show you," and there's movement now, Maclovio Pulchris, the ex — pop star who hasn't had a hit in sixteen years sliding across the room on spring-loaded joints to take hold of my aching and angry arm, the two Als stirring and exchanging nervous glances over the dangerous proximity of their employer to another human being, Andrea closing fast and even April starting up from her congealed eggs. "Down in the basement, Ty — the east basement, locked off from those sweet tawny lions, and you know I love them, man, so don't give me that look. Shit, I've got a whole meat locker full of staff-steaks, rump roasts, strings of pork sausage, lamb chops, corn dogs, filet mignon, you name it. We could feed fifty lions!"

I've never believed in vegetarianism myself, except as an ecological principle-obviously, you can feed a whole lot more people on rice or grain than you can on a feed-intensive animal like a steer, and, further, as everyone alive today knows, it was McDonald's and Burger King and their ilk that denuded the rain forests to provide range for yet more cows, but, still, I don't make a religion of it. Meat isn't the problem, people are. In prison, they gave us spaghetti with meat sauce, chili con came, sloppy joes, that sort of thing, and I forked it up gladly and didn't think twice about it. It's a Darwinian world-kill or be killed, eat or be eaten — and I see no problem with certain highly evolved apes cramming a little singed flesh between their jaws every now and again (if only there weren't so many of us, but that's another story). Besides, I didn't really come to the environmental movement till Andrea got hold of me, and I'd gone through thirty-eight years as a carnivore to that point. Top of the food chain, oh, yes, indeed.

My daughter saw things differently.

It started when she was eleven. She came back from an outing in New York with Jane's sister, Phyll, which I'd assumed would be a Radio City Music Hall/Museum of Natural History sort of thing, and announced to me that meat was murder. They hadn't gone to the Hall of Mammals after all. No, Phyll had taken her to the Earth Day rally in Washington Square, where she'd been converted by a dreadlocked ascetic and a slide show depicting doe-eyed veal calves succumbing to the hammer and headless chickens having their guts mechanically extracted on a disassembly line. Pa had a catastrophic day at the office, my biggest tenant — a national drugstore chain, the anchor for the whole shopping center — threatening to relocate in the mall down the street, and I was sipping scotch to anaesthetize my nerves and defrosting a fat, dripping pair of porterhouse steaks for dinner. Sierra stood there in the kitchen, five feet nothing and eighty-eight pounds, lecturing me about the evils of meat, the potatoes dutifully baking, the frozen string beans in the pot and the steaks oozing blood on the drainboard. "That's disgusting, Dad-it is. Look at that meat, all slimy and bloody. Some innocent cow had to die just so we could eat like pigs, don't you realize that?"

I wasn't humorless — or not entirely. But I'd had a rough day, I was a single parent and a cook of very limited resources. Meat was what we had, and meat was what we were going to eat. "What about last week?" I said. "What about the Chicken McNuggets I get you every Saturday for lunch? What about Happy Meals?"

The kitchen we were standing in was a fifties kitchen, designed and built by my father after he'd finished the first seventy-five houses in the development. Things were breaking for him, and he spared no expense on the place, situating it on three acres at the very end of the road, with a big sloping lawn out front and an in-ground pool in back, then buffering the property with another hundred acres or so of swamps and briars and second-growth forest — the haunt of deer and opossum, toads, frogs, blacksnakes and the amateur biologist and budding woodsman who was his son. The kitchen, with its built-in oven and electric range, Formica counters and knotty-pine cabinets my mother insisted on painting white, had been the scene of any number of food rebellions in the past (macaroni and cheese particularly got to me, and wax beans — I couldn't even chew, let alone digest them), but this was unique. This wasn't simply a matter of taste-it was a philosophical challenge, and it struck at the heart of the regimen I'd been raised on.

Her gaze was unwavering. She was wearing shorts, high-tops and an oversized T-shirt Phyll had bought her (Lamb to the Slaughter? I t asked, over the forlorn mug of a sheep). "I'll never go to McDonald's again," she said. "And I'm not eating school lunch either."

I took a pull at my drink, the scotch swirling like smoke in a liquid sky. "What am I supposed to give you, then-lettuce sandwiches? Mustard greens? Celery sticks? Bamboo shoots? You don't even like vegetables. How can you be a vegetarian if you don't like vegetables?"

She had nothing to say to this.

"What about candy? You can eat candy, can't you? I mean, candy's a vegetable, isn't it? Maybe we could base your whole diet around candy, you know, like eggs with fried Butterfingers for breakfast, peanut brickle and baked Mars Bars on rye for lunch with melted chocolate syrup and whipped cream on top? Or ice cream-what about ice cream?"

"You're making fun of me. I don't like it when you make fun of me. I'm serious, Dad, you know, really serious. I'll never eat one bite of meat again." She pointed a condemnatory finger at the steaks. "And I'm not eating that either."

I could have handled it differently, could have humored her, could have applied the wisdom I'd gained from all the little alimentary confrontations I'd had with my mother when I was Sierra's age, not to mention my father and his special brand of militant obtuseness. But I was in no mood. "You'll eat it," I said, looming over her with my scotch and the beginnings of a headache, "or you'll sit at that table over there till you die. Because I don't care."

The steaks were in the pan, inch-thick slabs of flesh, and I looked at them there and for the first time in my life thought about where they'd come from and what the process was that had made them available to me and my daughter and anybody else who had the $6. 99 A pound to lay down at the A&P Meat Depai. Talent. Cattle suffered, cattle died. And I ate burgers and steaks and roasts and never had to contemplate the face of the creature who gave it all up for me. That was the way of the world, that was progress. I shrugged, and shoved the pan under the broiler.

Sierra had retreated to her room at the end of the hall, the room that had been mine when I was a boy, and she wasn't listening to her tapes or doodling in her notebook or whispering dire secrets into the phone-she was just lying there facedown on the bed, and her shoulders were quivering because she was crying softly into the pillow. I'd seen those quivering shoulders before, and I was powerless before them. But not this night. I had my own problems, and I didn't take her in my arms and tell her it was all right, she could eat anything she wanted, Fruit Loops in the morning, cupcakes for lunch and Boston cream pie for dinner-no, I took her by the arm and marched her into the kitchen, where a baked potato sat slit open on the plate beside a snarl of green beans in melted butter and a slab of medium-rare steak the size of Connecticut.