A Mite Unappetizing

Abstract

January 2007 marked my 30th anniversary of becoming a vegetarian. It’s not exactly a moment that Hallmark commemorates with a card, but all the same, it gave me pause. Things have changed a lot since my last voluntary meat-containing meal (a pastrami sandwich from a deli in Ithaca, New York). Back in 1977, Ithaca was probably the best place in the United States to be a vegetarian, what with three vegetarian restaurants in town (including the now-famous Moosewood Restaurant downtown). By contrast, my first night in Urbana, Illinois in August 1980, when I moved to start as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, was spent telephoning restaurants in the hope of finding at least one entree anywhere without meat. When I telephoned Katsinas, a Greek-themed steak place in Champaign, to ask whether there were any items on the menu without meat, I was reassured that “yes, we have chicken and fish.” I knew even back then that there are all kinds of vegetarians—vegans, who eat no animal products, ovolactovegetarians, who eat eggs and dairy products, pescatarians, who eat fish and other seafood (who are also sometimes called vegaquarians), and, like my friend and fellow graduate student Matt McElroy, ovo-lacto-restauranto-vegetarians (Matt ate eggs, dairy products and meat in restaurants). But I hadn’t realized that, in the Midwest in 1980, being a vegetarian meant eating any animal other than a cow. Actually, defining “meat” is a challenge. There is no biological definition per se. There are, however, legal definitions. In Pennsylvania, meat is “The flesh of animals used as food including the dressed flesh of cattle, swine, sheep or goats and other edible animals. The term does not include fish, poultry and wild game animals as specified under § 46.221(b) and (c) (relating to game animals)” (www. pacode.com/secure/data/007/chapter46/ s46.3.html). And in Maine (http://janus. state.me.us/legis/statutes/22/title22sec2511. html27), “Meat” means “the part of the muscle of cattle, domesticated deer, sheep, swine, goats, horses, mules, other equines or other designated animals that is skeletal or that is found in the tongue, diaphragm, heart or esophagus, with or without the accompanying and overlying fat, and the portions of bone, skin, sinew, nerve and blood vessels that normally accompany the muscle tissue but does not include the muscle found in the lips, snout or ears.”[1999, c. 771, §1 (new).] So the folks at Katsinas’ were clearly on solid legal ground in differentiating “meat” from chicken and fish. Notwithstanding, I wouldn’t recommend putting that legal definition on menus any time soon—it’s not exactly a lip-smacking description. So, it’s not surprising that vegetarians are sometimes inconsistent in what they consider permissible. Many meat-eaters, who seem to regard vegetarianism as some sort of personal affront, delight in picking apart the various and sundry working definitions used by vegetarians. Some vegetarians won’t eat “anything with a face” but that begs the question as to how many anatomical components constitute a face. Scallops have mouths (or at least two “lips” surrounding a u-shaped slit equipped with ciliated epithelial cells), as well as five or six dozen eyes around the outer perimeter of their shells, but can there be a face in the absence of a clearly discernible head? For me, the criterion I’ve always used is that I won’t eat anything that moves on its own volition. I would have defined it as myosin-based movement (muscle contraction brought about by actin-myosin interactions) but a carnivorous colleague (a sophisticated version of the kind of guy who wears a t-shirt that says “if God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?”) pointed out to me that certain plant parts, such as pea tendrils, rely on myosin motors to drive actin-based movements (interestingly, myosin proteins have a “head,” even if the plants possessing them don’t). I suppose, then, that I should specify This is mite-e-delicious cheese! Try some! No thank you! You just convinced me to go Vegan.