3.5.03 – lent, guilt and gendered deities
for reasons i don’t entirely understand myself, giving things up for lent is the only part of catholicism that i still practice. most of the world limits itself to fat tuesday; i’m stuck with lent. tack on a hefty dose of catholic guilt and the unconscious habit of referring to god with a male pronoun, and you’ve got a pretty complete picture of the catholic i’ve grown up to be. when i was a kid my brothers and i used to think we were really clever, coming up with promises like “i’m giving up homework for lent!” or “i’m giving up giving up things for lent!” which would cause our CCD teachers to give us withering, do you think you’re the first snarky kid to invent that? looks. these days, lenten sacrifices are usually centered around self-improvement. i don’t have much willpower of my own, but given that breaking lenten promises ranks way up there on the
fear-of-being-struck-by-lightening scale, its can be a handy way of reforming bad habits.
this year the plan is eating-habits reform with a focus on eliminating toxins and ‘unnatural’ elements – less processed food, more organic vegetables, only grain-fed, hormone-free meats and eggs, etc. i have big plans for a vegetable garden in the backyard this spring. when i was a kid we had a couple of fruit trees, and in the summer my dad would come inside with an armload of apples. i recall avoiding eating those, because they seemed too…i don’t know, dirty. they weren’t shiny and clean and perfectly formed like the ones from the grocery store. more importantly, they hadn’t come from the grocery store. and that’s where all the food comes from, right? that made sense as a kid, and i still sometimes find myself unconsciously leaning in that direction. i think this betrays a greater problem – the total disassociation between source and finished meal. in a world of processed food, its hard not to lose track of where the food comes from – hamburger comes in a plastic-wrapped tube from the meat locker, not that from lumbering holstein in the mucky stall or the dewy fields. that’s why i’ve largely given up meat in the past few years – i don’t want to eat something if i can’t reconcile the meat with the animal it came from. fish is easy – i’ve gone fishing, i’ve killed and cleaned and cooked and eaten a fish all on the same day. chicken proves more ideologically problematic, as i’ve never actually cut the head off of a chicken or plucked out the feathers. mammals are totally beyond my comfort level. i’ve been asked why it’s so important for us to reconcile the death of an animal to the meat on our plate, and i’m not sure i have a good answer to that. it just feels wrong. it’s one of those gut things.
reading Fast Food Nation recently only helped to solidify the notion that not knowing where your meat comes from can hurt you. (e.g., mad cow disease: a monster that humans created by fucking around with nature – feeding animal proteins to herbivores). not only did the tales of modern-day slaughterhouse horrors convince me that i never wanted to eat tainted, hormone- and antibiotic-laden meat from an animal whose feet had never touched the ground and had been force fed a cannibalistic diet nature had never intended, but it was the stories of the unspeakable The Jungle-like conditions that most slaughterhouse workers endure that turned my stomach. eating commercial meat isn’t just bad for your body, bad for the animals and the environment – it’s bad for largely migrant workforce, too. and the sweat of an exploited worker really can’t make that burger taste better.
