Family Interview About Meat

I’ve been trying to cut non-seafood meat out of my diet for the past year. I’ve managed for months at a time sometimes, but I haven’t been consistent. I’ve been trying to cut down on seafood lately too. I thought it was interesting that two members of my immediate family, my brother Ben and our Mom, have been moving in a similar direction, despite us living in different places. I’m Dan Copulsky, and I’ve been piecing this piece together for too many months.

Dan: You’ve mentioned off-hand a couple of times trying to eat less meat, but I honestly can’t remember what exactly you said. How long have you been eating less meat and what exactly have you been eating?

Mom: I’ve been eating less meat in a non-deliberate way for a long time for a few reasons: I don’t cook, Dad doesn’t cook that much, when he does cook he doesn’t often make meat, and when I go out to eat I usually prefer seafood over meat. However, it has always bothered me that I eat meat, and over the past four or five months I’ve been much more deliberately avoiding it—although I haven’t made the step of completely renouncing it.

Dan: A couple of months ago you stopped eating meat, but then after a month you started again because it seemed to be affecting your health. What’s your diet been like since?

Ben: I’m not sure how much it was really affecting my health. I generally felt more tired when I wasn’t eating meat, and as soon as I started again I felt better, but it could have been coincidence or psychosomatic. Now I’m eating meat, but less than I used to, and I’m trying to mostly eat free-range.

It seemed like my Dad’s diet and perspective on eating meat was an important piece of all this too. I’d been kind of surprised how totally unsurprised he was when I told him about the change in my diet, and I really didn’t know what his feelings were.

Dan: What are your diet and cooking habits like these days?

Dad: I haven’t been cooking much at all but hope to get back to preparing two to three dinners a week. Now, typically one meal a day will be a lettuce/greens salad which once in a while will have a slice or two of salami. The second meal either a sandwich (which may or may not be meat) or else restaurant or take out which usually ends up including meat.

Two of the three people I live with are pescetarian. My partner Kat doesn’t eat meat because of moral objections to factory farming and our roommate doesn’t eat meat as a health decision. They’ve certainly influenced my choice, at the very least in that it makes sense to cook pescetarian when we eat together, but I find it interesting that my own motivation comes much more from a moral issue with killing animals at all. I was curious if my family might be more on the same wavelength about why we want to eat less meat.

Dan: Why do you think it’s better not to eat meat?

Ben: I think it’s better to be a vegetarian for moral reasons. I think meat-based diets and vegetarian diets can both be healthy. I don’t have major moral objections to eating animals, just to the way the animals are raised and treated. Even meat that’s marked as free-range can come from some pretty inhumane conditions. Animal farming also tends to be bad for the environment.

Mom: Although I do care about the health aspect, that plays a much smaller role than the moral issues, with factory farming being the single biggest reason to not want to eat meat. I am not completely morally opposed to killing animals, although I don’t think it’s something I could feel comfortable doing myself. I am morally opposed to animals suffering for my sake. I struggle with the knowledge that of course some animals kill other animals in the wild, so it’s “natural,” but it still feels like we humans could hold ourselves to a higher standard of not causing suffering so easily. I feel repulsed by the idea of any creature being tortured for sport, but where animal populations are too great to sustain themselves and they would otherwise starve, I see hunting them as the more humane option. When I think back to the local farmers where I grew up in rural New Jersey, and remember the chickens running free all the time, I don’t have a moral problem with it. It’s sad to me that it’s hard to assure that quality of life for animals today. Another factor is the “cost to the planet” as far as the use of resources to raise meat, so even if it’s humanely raised it seems more earth-friendly to still not eat meat.

Dan: And what do you think about eating meat?

Dad: When I first started to regularly cook, I was living in a house with several vegetarians and we all took turns making dinner, so I got in the habit of cooking and eating non-meat dishes. I’ve never felt that a meal needs meat to be complete. I’m not too troubled morally/ethically by eating meat, although I prefer to eat animals that are theoretically less self-aware than those that are more so. I tend to not eat a lot of beef for a combination of reasons—taste, health, and environment.

My Mom’s sister, my Aunt Peggy, was one of the first people I knew who didn’t eat meat. She used to be a vegan, but now she’s a vegetarian. Their sister, my Aunt Colleen, has also been vegetarian for a while. My brother’s high school girlfriend Magda was the first vegetarian I considered a close friend. Being around these people never consciously affected how I felt about eating meat, but I’m sure knowing them helped make it a choice I considered changing.

Dan: How have other people influenced your decision? Did Aunt Peggy and Aunt Colleen play a role?

Mom: Other people have certainly influenced my decision just by being in my mental landscape. Aunt Peggy has played the greatest role for that since she has been either vegan or vegetarian for going on twenty years. Then having Aunt Colleen make that choice has made it even more on my radar, as well as many other folks who cross my path, such as Kat and my friend Fran. I’ve also been influenced just by the green movement in general, and have just become ever more conscious of the fact that every choice I make does matter.

Dan: How did Magda influence your feelings about eating meat?

Ben: I don’t really know how to answer this question because I just can’t even remember high school that well. I know I tried going vegetarian for a little while in high school, which presumably was somehow influenced by Magda, but beats me how.

Particularly since our motivations for eating less meat aren’t the same, and even our goals for our diets are different, I found it interesting that we’re all moving in this direction now. I’m curious if we played a role in each others’ decisions or if it’s just chance.

Dan: Do you think it’s a coincidence that three of us are moving towards eating less meat now, or do you think we’ve influenced each other?

Ben: I think it’s mostly chance, but I might have been subconsciously inspired by you. I’m really not sure why I’ve decided to cut down on meat now when I’ve been eating plenty of it most of my life.

Mom: Well, at the very least, it is a coincidence, but I don’t know whether or not it’s just a coincidence. Possibly not since we were all exposed to some of the same things both in our smaller circles as well as in society at large over the same time frame. Another factor in the timing for me was visiting my step-cousin’s organic farm in New Jersey. My step-cousin Jack and his wife Cheryl have other full time jobs and raise organic chicken and steer part time.

I’m eager to start keeping a pescetarian diet more consistently and to move towards eating less seafood and keeping a stricter vegetarian diet. I’d also like to eat more that’s locally produced and maybe even have my own garden. But with how much my feelings on food have changed in the last five years, it’s odd thinking long-term about what my diet might look like.

Dan: Do you have any predictions on what our family’s diets will look like in a decade?

Mom: I don’t know if I have predictions so much as hopes. My hope is that it will get easier and easier to get vegetables and fruits and nuts and grains and everything else that is good for us, in a form that makes it easy to buy and eat. I know that this is not difficult for other people, but it is for me since I can’t cook. I think by ten years from now it should be easier to order organic foods in restaurants. And I think that our family’s diets will be affected a lot by what is available for us “without a lot of trouble.” My other big hope for myself, and for the rest of us, is that we get rid of most of the sugar in our diets, because that is the biggest challenge for me right now. I know I would feel and be so much healthier if I could stop eating all the things with sugar.

Ben: I have no idea what our diets will look like in a year, let alone a decade.

Dad: Ten years from now Mom and I will be eating a similar diet, ideally more frequently meals cooked at home. You’ll be preparing vegetarian meals using home grown produce to feed you, Kat, your seven kids, and the rest of the commune members. Ben, I don’t know.