Meat

If you travel east from San Francisco toward Southern California, you’ll pick up Interstate 5 near Tracy. It is a dull, dull drive with just one way to counter the boredom—go 95 mph in the 70 mph zone. Driving like this does make the most of a dreary stretch; pacing and ducking, cutting in and out. It’s almost like an interactive video game with the flat countryside rolling past. Nothing else much happens, except that halfway to the Grapevine, the smell of an immense feedlot blooms and smacks you sentient.

Hundreds of cows, heads lowered, are jammed together along feeders near the highway fence. The lot is huge, a filthy stretch of acidy shit and dirt that flows to the eastern horizon and beyond. The beasts are caked to the knees with their own insides and though they have plenty of space, they do not lie down or nose the ground. Their hooves must be wet all the time, burning and festering. They feed at the long troughs, munching listlessly, but with a terrible doggedness on food their mouths, teeth, guts, do not understand. And they reek of disease.

Inhaling, my nostrils constrict like pinched soda straws and this condenses the stench. Everything in me recognizes and resists this smell. It is rank and full of sickness, with a dash of sweetness, like rotting flowers. Pretty soon, the cows will be packed into trucks and if you see them on the highway, it will be a speed-by glimpse of soft muffiny noses searching the air, eyes wild and bulging. When the trucks stop, the animals will be unloaded and funneled into a narrow, inescapable ramp. They’ll be mostly terrified in air laced with the smell of their own decay.

Here’s the dilemma—I like meat. At its most toothsome, it tastes spicy, bloody and dense, with a little bit of jungle, a whiff of groin. So, after driving a few miles beyond the buzzing smell of the feedlot, I’ll sever any connection with my appetite and what I’ve seen. I’ll begin to wonder how a chunk of cow might next arrange itself on my dinner plate, forgetting that almost all of it now tastes as dull and lifeless as a wedge of tofu.

But if I could be braver, more truthful about what I do and what I want, I’d meet my Ferdinand in his own sweet, green pasture, lure him with soft words, press my head against his dry, bristly throat and feel his heart thumping through hot flesh and hide. Could I be like a lover and slit its throat? No. But, could I be halfway like a Masai—nick the flesh just deep enough and drink, just enough. Each of us would be standing, still and taut—both of us throbbing with suspense and utter forbearance.

(Illustration by Sue Coe)