The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [62]
Familiarity Breeds …
An automatic demerit goes to the waiter or waitress who unfurls your napkin and flattens it onto your lap. This is a pretentious and unsanitary practice. He or she has been handling dirty plates, linens, and money for the past hour; now she touches the snowy cloth that will later brush my lips. I keep a very short list of people who are allowed to touch my lap, and an even shorter list of people who are allowed to touch my wife’s. A waiter or even a waitress to whom I have never been introduced is extremely unlikely to have made it onto either.
The environmental arguments against meat are strong, but they apply mainly to factory farming—vast numbers of animals kept in close confinement, fed with grain and water hauled from long distances and producing more waste than we can possibly use as fertilizer or fuel. I have read that more than half of America’s water consumption goes to raising beef and that twenty pure vegetarians like me can be fed on the same amount of land needed to feed one meat eater. Meat has been called a petroleum by-product: you can grow forty pounds of soybeans with the amount of oil consumed in producing a pound of beef.
But unless you insist that we must all eat in the most economical manner possible—though few of us dress in the cheapest way or live in the smallest possible space—these are arguments not for avoiding all meat but for eating less meat and raising it in a sustainable way. Universal vegetarianism would not be an unmixed blessing for the environment. Ecological nutritionist Joan Gussow explained to me that for millennia livestock has been indispensable for its magical ability to convert agricultural waste, failed crops, and the vegetation on unfarmable land into high-quality protein. And without grazing animals, it would be difficult to practice environmentally sound crop rotation. Cutting your meat consumption by 50 or 75 percent makes more environmental sense than becoming a vegan like me.
As you can see, I was furiously preparing myself for the switch back to meat. Everything depended on the cholesterol test. And then my doctor called with the results. I don’t know whether to be happy or sad, but my serum cholesterol is, if anything, slightly higher than when I started. Even with a near-zero intake of saturated fat, my cholesterol has not budged. For better or worse, my ultimate fate does not seem to depend on my diet. Tonight I will eat a lobster.
June 1993
High Satiety
Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
—FIELD MARSHAL HERMANN GÖRING, 1936
The twentieth-century ideal of the dominant, successful, and emaciated man or woman is nearly irresistible. Even I succumbed to emaciation fifteen years ago. For one entire day in 1976, I weighed 116 pounds. This was the culmination of a yearlong diet composed mainly of low-fat cottage cheese and single-malt Scotch whiskey, plus nine hundred packs of cigarettes and a daily vitamin pill. I hit upon this happy combination all on my own, and it is the only diet that has ever worked for me. Having followed a potentially destructive course of conduct that left me thirty pounds underweight, I was inundated with accolades and marriage proposals.
Since then, the fat man inside me has had no trouble getting out. I’ve gradually passed from svelte through statistically normal, then on to adorably chubby, and finally well past that point, arriving at thirty pounds on the far side of average. Another ten pounds and I will be legally obese. All it took was a steady gain of four pounds a year, which works out to no more than forty excess calories a day—an extra pat of butter or an Oreo. Yet somehow I doubt that I would still be skinny if I had turned down just one mouthful of food every day for fifteen years. How could I have known when I had eaten precisely enough? Which mouthfuls should I have avoided?
Most animals don’t even have to think about it. If they stuff themselves on Monday,