Stuffed Animals

Although they neglected to nominate me for sainthood in the last go-around, I do try to follow a few modest practices. I don’t eat animals that were raised or slaughtered chemically or inhumanely, preferring animals that grew up in pastures and fields, were cared for individually and by hand, and were not given growth hormones or unnecessary antibiotics. I don’t eat veal from anemic calves confined in the darkness of a crate that keeps their meat desirably pale. I haven’t eaten supermarket pork for the past ten years, except at important Southern BBQ events. Or eggs laid by battery hens. Or chickens on growth hormones raised by the thousands on the floors of barns covered with several weeks of their own waste—except when they have been fried by an incontestable master. I don’t eat meat that doesn’t matter—crumbled onto a pizza or scattered over a slimy salad or cooked to cardboard grayness and wedged between two buns. Meat and fowl of the highest quality are extremely expensive, and so I can’t afford a great quantity of them. This cuts down on the volume of slaughter for which I’m responsible, as does my attempt not to waste animal flesh. That is how I’ve made my peace with slaughter.