I Never Embraced Veganism

I’ve learned well from doom scrolling on social media that if you want to get someone to look at what you’re doing, you need to either make a total ass of yourself through some sort of ridiculous skit or dance OR make a controversial statement. I’m not limber or adroit enough to convince anyone I’m dancing rather than just having an episode, so I’ll try sounding controversial and see if I get any takers. You’re here, so there’s one.

So, yes…the title. I didn’t so much “embrace veganism” as I “quit eating meat.” In my career as a cook in my twenties, I loved eating, preparing, and serving meat. I deeply enjoyed charcuterie work, butchery, fish cutting, all of it…and I enjoyed a lovely steak as much as the next person. But a series of events led to me never (willingly, see below) putting a piece of meat in my mouth again.

Look! I used to be a kid. Me as a cook back in Pompano Beach, Florida 1998. Cafe Maxx. Right before I headed to NYC to get my ass kicked by life for a while.

Event One: The Rabbits

In the Spring of 2001, I was working at a restaurant in the upper eastside of Manhattan as a saucier who so happened to do all of the charcuterie work. One day the chef took me aside and told me that some rabbits were coming tomorrow and I should get them on cure before anybody else comes in. I shrugged and said ok and went about my day.

I came in the next morning expecting to find delivered the neat little plastic packages with skinned and gutted headless rabbit carcasses awaiting a cure. Instead, there lie a bin of live rabbits , hopping about, contianed to their bin only by a sheet pan with a heavy pot on top of it.

My jaw dropped. These rabbits, mind you, were not lovely cutesy rabbits but the stringy haired wild-eyed meat rabbits you may have met if you’ve fostered a rescued animal (as I did later for penance). I had zero idea how to deal with these little fellas, but went to work with my friend Tom to send them to rabbit heaven. The butcher, Ramone, would have nothing to do with the whole affair, and evacuated the butcher shop to drink espresso while we went about killing these poor little rabbits. I accomplished my mission and after some difficulty with the rest of the knife work, had them prepared on cure to make ballontines. A day later, I completed them, but just couldn’t bring myself to eat them. In the back of my head, a seed of doubt was placed.

Event Two: Questions about Foie Gras

After 9/11 happened, I was feeling rather depressed in the city, and ended up heading to Jacksonville, Florida, where I had an opportunity to open a restaurant. I wanted to open a very French restaurant, and it was called “The VIllage Store,” named after the name of the building on the historic registry. After a few months of removing black mold, repairing schoolhouse windows, making a garden, and a million other tasks, the restaurant was born.

2902 SE Corinthian Drive, Jacksonville, Florida. My first restaurant.

It was JUST what Jacksonville didn’t want or need! My customers asked for bigger portions and “Coconut Shrimp” while I was trying to serve stuffed pig trotters and coal fired rouget. Meanwhile, the conservative southerners who did dine at our place, felt uncomfortable about our French wine list, as Bill O’Reilley was shouting at everyone to pour out French wine for their refusal to participate in the war against Iraq. Regardless, I stubbornly pushed forward with my Frenchie theme. We had all of the usual suspects on the menu: escargot, veal, frog’s legs, and of course foie gras.

Previously, my understanding from all the chefs I worked for was that ducks and geese LOVED being overstuffed until their livers were forty times their normal size. I didn’t question it, and I continue to make torchon and sizzle “a” grade escalopes in sauté pans.

One day I sat at the bar of the Casbah cafe, my friend Jason Bajalia’s fantastic Palestinian restaurant/hookah lounge/bar. I sat next to a cook who worked at another restaurant and were chatting for a bit before I encouraged him to come and eat at the restaurant some time. “It’s a little too foie gras heavy for my taste,” he said. What the heck? What could he have meant? I argued weakly but after some parrying I came to realize that foie gras was not something I was proud to serve. I took it off the menu soon after.

Event Three: The Veal Incident

One day one of my meat purveyors came in and asked if I wanted to check out a new product: baby veal chops. I was confused. Veal are babies, I said. “But these are very small chops, check them out!” He was excited.

He popped open a white bucket with a few tiny, pale pink chops within. For reference, a regular veal chop, with the bone in, would be about the size of my fist in circumference. We’d always tie it with butcher’s twine to make a neat chop with the bone on. THESE veal chops were the size of New Zealand lamb chops…we’re talking about 1.5 inches! Absurd! I stared into the bucket, the chops sitting in a light colored blood/water mix. Terribly off putting. I became visibly upset, but I composed myself enough to flatly ask, “were the chops butchered from aborted cow fetuses?” He giggled. I kept my face blank. He sort of swallowed, said no, and went on to explain this absurd monstrosity. “No thanks,” I interrupted. I was disgusted, but it made me think about this whole mess a wee bit more.

I took all veal off the menu that night.

Event Four: Teddy Gentry

One day I found myself speaking on the phone to Teddy Gentry, the bassist from the band Alabama. He had started a company called “Burt’s Beef” and was the first grass fed beef operation I had ever heard of. After describing to me the horrors of the feed lots, including how cows were fed whey soaked expired phone books and plastic scrubbies, he let me know he refused to send his cows to a feed lot ever again. His animals spent their whole life eating grass outside. Sounded good. I was convinced and started serving his beef right away.

It was a strange product for us early adopters: the cuts were smaller, hardly any fat, and the flavor stronger, more gamey. My customers didn’t like it, but I stubbornly stuck to my guns.

This led for me to look at other places I was serving up cruelty. I contacted a mother and daughter who were lobbying for a “Humanely Raised” certification in D.C. I talked at length to Bill Niman about his method of raising pigs. I worked out a deal with a local lady to get her eggs to avoid the factory farm, and in as many ways as I could I eliminated or made a switch to make my kitchen more ethical.

Event Five: Was it a Heart Attack?

I kept on living the lifestyle I had adopted working in New York in Jacksonville: work long hours and party hard. If I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was smoking a cigarette. And if I wasn’t on duty, I had a whiskey.

One night, after a brutal all-day shift, I headed out back and lit up a Camel Wide. A few puffs in, and I felt this incredible pain emanating from my left arm, into my armpit, and then my chest. It knocked the breath right out of me, and I slumped onto the ground next to dumpster, gritting my teeth as this terrible pain took over. After a while, it sort of stopped in its intensity and I could catch my breath again. I finished my cigarette, and went back inside, feeling totally wiped out. I skipped the bar that night and went home to pass out. I was pretty happy to wake up the next morning, and thought for just a moment that maybe, JUST MAYBE, I should make some changes in my life. Of course I never went to a doctor.

Event Six: The Slaughterhouse & THE FARM

This day will live with me forever. In an effort to teach my cooks to better respect the meat they were serving so they didn’t waste it, I took them all on a field trip to a small local slaughterhouse. These aren’t the big operations like IBP, but the type of small slaughterhouse that process folks’ personal cows for their own consumption.

From the start, the facility gave me the heebie jeebies.. We should have left right then, as no lessons about respect were going to be learned here. Instead, we stayed and watched in slow-mo the absolute horror show that is an abattoir unfold before us.

While a pig spun in a pig dehairing maching, screaming, a man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth took a cow from alive to two quivering halves on hooks in about fifteen agonizing minutes, standing in a puddle of blood and surrounded by blue plastic garbage cans full of heads and innards. It was unreal, unsettling, and completely heartbreaking.

I needed a break from the restaurant, and took one. I went to visit my brother who was studying Agro-ecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. There he slept in a tent on a side of a field and enjoyed exclusively vegan meals with healthy, happy, seemingly well adjusted hippies. This world was very unlike the one I was in. No whiskey in sight, but plenty of jars of kombucha brewing. Nobody smoked cigarettes, but I was cheerily introduced to the wonder of the Squatty Potty.

Real, live hippies living it up in Santa Cruz. They were strange to me, but inspired me.

I remember looking at all these healthy, happy people and just wondering if I could possibly be anything like them. I was only 28 at the time…I could still turn my life around.

I went back to the restaurant and left the business. I had enough and I needed to make some changes. My brother was moving to Portland and I decided to follow. Without much of a plan, I loaded up my 1985 Ford Ranger and headed to Oregon.

Event Seven: The Cowboy Steak

Even after all of that, I was still eating meat. I got a job at a wild food and mushroom distributor in Portland and finally had a little cash to treat myself to a good steak. I headed to the Pasta Works butcher shop on Hawthorne and got a fine Cowboy Steak…a bone-in ribeye. My favorite.

I took it home and set it out to come to room temperature after seasoning it with salt and pepper thoroughly. I seared it well in a moderate cast iron pan to make a nice crust, flipping over and over to bring it to rare. Then I dropped in big lob of butter, some shallots, rosemary and thyme, and started basting it with my spoon. I removed it from the pan and set it on a plate, covering it with a piece of foil, and went about finishing my sides. A potato and a wedge salad. Perfect steak house simulation for the evening. I poured myself a glass of Pinot, set the table, and sat down to enjoy this beautiful piece of meat.

I took one bite and it all flashed into my mind’s eye. The slaughterhouse, the bucket of veal chops, the pig spinning, the rabbits. And then further back. All of it. Thousands and thousands of animals. I spat it out and pushed it away. I couldn’t eat it. It was over for me.That was in 2003, and I haven’t intentionally eaten meat since.

I’m not a pure temple guy. I’m not freaking out if the fryer or griddle is shared. I’m not finger wagging at some folks for hunting in the Alaskan tundra or at a cook for accidentally giving me a meat burger (I’m looking at you, Burgerville). But I don’t want to contribute economically to the slaughter of animals ever again. I’m not going to get into a sermon about veganism, but I’ll say this: I love eating meat but I haven’t done it for 22 years because I don’t love it enough to be a part of that big, crazy system. And until that system is gone, I’m not eating or serving the “humane” stuff, either.

I didn’t want to stop eating meat, but I had to.