On being a worse person (by eating meat)

One Friday evening last year during lockdown in New York Jess suggested that we order schnitzel for dinner. Both of us were at the time vegetarians. But not the type of vegetarians who despise meat. We both like it, particularly schnitzel. And we were holed up inside and seeking comfort. So we ordered schnitzel. And the following week we ordered Cantonese roast duck. And the following week we ordered lamb shawarma. By the beginning of summer I had stopped confining my meat eating to Friday nights or dinners. I was regularly ordering bacon, egg and cheese roles from the Bodega for breakfast.

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It was the first time in my life that I'd embraced a completely unrestricted approach to eating meat. I grew up in a home that was mostly vegetarian. My dad, who grew up for a time on a farm with cows, said that he could never stomach meat. His mother had to hide it in mouthfuls surrounded by vegetables. My mum didn't grow up vegetarian but was happy to accommodate my dad's distaste for meat, partly I think because vegetarian food was associated with health. In any case, there was a vague but persistent message that meat was bad, or at least not really that good. The problem was that I really liked eating it. I liked eating it at my grandmother's at shabbat dinner. And once I was old enough to eat out with friends by myself I liked eating it at Nando's and McDonalds. Yet there was always lingering guilt. A sense that I was doing the wrong thing.

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At university people started not eating meat for moral reasons. In other words people became vegetarians, a marker of identity that felt pretty significant. It indicated a sympathy with a certain type of politics. I remember a guy complaining to me that he wanted to be vegetarian really badly but that he kept failing. He was brought up in a strongly meat oriented household. He had been socialized to believe that a meal wasn't a meal without meat. He wanted to improve his politics but his taste for meat kept holding him back. For me, it was the opposite. I could very easily give up meat because I wasn't accustomed to it. If anything I felt more comfortable not eating it. And then I got to lay claim to a type of virtue that I had inherited purely by chance. So I stopped eating meat and became a vegetarian. Predictably, I was more intense and moralistic about it than my parents. They ate fish. I didn't. They'd occasionally stray and eat some meat. I promised myself I would never. I wasn't evangelical and I tried not to be sanctimonious. There were those people who claimed that once they became vegetarian their desire for meat left them. That their identity overtook their tastebuds. That wasn’t me. But I definitely felt good about my diet: I was on a journey of political and moral self-improvement.

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A little while ago Lauren Oyler wrote an essay about the abundance of good people in contemporary fiction. They are everywhere, trying not to buy stuff on Amazon or ride in planes too often. They are aware of their place in society’s power structures. They check their privilege. They have a personal politics that they are always monitoring and working on. Occasionally they make mistakes like drinking too much or cheating on a boyfriend. But they learn from these mistakes. In the end, all the things that make them bad help them become better. The good people in novels, Oyler says, become "tools for moral instruction". And by extension, the writer becomes a type of moral teacher. The contemporary writer not only needs to be a good writer with a keen understanding of the human condition but maybe a good person, too. (This is why we constantly debate whether we're allowed to read good books by bad people, or question whether that’s even metaphysically possible: like the vegetarian who claims to have stopped liking the taste of meat, a bad person could not possibly have written a good book because their badness – their bad politics – infests the books aesthetics??) But Oyler is suspect on this. She thinks that writers are, maybe even ought to be, "notoriously bad people." That’s what makes the writing good.

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Her novel, Fake Accounts, seems to be an experiment in writerly badness. It is about a young woman living in Brooklyn who is planning on breaking up with her boyfriend after she discovers that he runs a popular conspiracy theory account on Instagram. But before she can break up with him he tragically dies. Then she moves to Berlin where she starts dating people via dating apps and compulsively lies about herself. Then after a bit of doing that she finds out her boyfriend faked his death and was alive all along. Morally speaking, the book is incoherent. The characters do a mix of good, bad and neutral things in a chronology. They don't seem to understand their own or each other's motivations. We don't know why the boyfriend ran the Instagram account or faked his death. We don't really know why she compulsively lies. There is no moral arc to the story, and if there was, it would not bend towards justice.

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Oyler implicates herself in this amorality by occasionally and very subtly breaking the fourth wall as the author and pointing out the similarities between the narrator and herself. Like the narrator, Oyler also lived in Berlin and spends a lot of time on Twitter, for example. The way she describes her Twitter profile pic is very similar to what Oyler’s actual Twitter profile pic looks like. For Oyler, there is very little to be gained, politically speaking, by drawing this equivalence between writer and character because the character remains more or less unimproved throughout the novel. If there is any lesson maybe it is that the thing we can connect about most, that makes us most curious about each other, and maybe most sympathetic is that most of us are morally confused people, just getting through life with brief moments where we are delusional enough to believe in our self-improvement. Is Oyler suggesting that writers should try to portray that instead of offering moral lessons?

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I have often felt that what I write about is curtailed by how I wish to be perceived through my writing. I want to be seen as good by the right type of people. I want my causes to be seen as adequate. I want to be seen as making a contribution. There are things I want to write about, that come from a place of desire or curiosity or anger or confusion, but I fear this writing will be reprehensible, particularly to those I admire. I am, unfortunately, not one of those people whose politics has cleansed their souls—like the vegetarians at university who claimed that they could no longer even look at a hamburger without gagging. The wish to be good, the fear of being bad, are definitely key drivers of my writerly self-doubt. And stupid as it sounds, this is part of the reason why I've been eating meat. It is a very mild exercise in doing something I consider bad but satisfying, and persisting anyway. I have no justification other than "because I want to." Or "because it tastes good". And then to see the reaction that engenders in people who knew me once to be a good vegetarian is good practice in dealing with moral judgment. Through meat eating I am investing in the whatever the opposite of self-improvement is, but only in a minor way.

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I was trying to explain all of these thoughts to a friend the other week as we walked along a desolate beach in the rain. Strewn along the sand were carcasses of black birds. There were dozens of them along the beach in various stages of disembowelment. It seemed that some had their torsos ripped out. Others had crushed skulls and their brains picked clean. In the distance we saw two birds — they looked like albatross—standing over one of these black birds that was still alive pecking at its chest and neck, and then flying away, leaving it stunned, still faintly breathing as we approached. To us, it looked they were torturing it just for the sake of it. Just because they felt like it.

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In other news: For The Monthly, I wrote a review of Patricia Lockwood’s novel, No One is Talking About This. I am reading Torrey Peters Detransition, Baby. I’m always like UFO content and enjoyed Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ long feature in the New Yorker about what the authorities may have been hiding all along. A friend sent me this album, Enter the Zenmenn. It’s very nice. In general I feel like I’m losing my mind on the platforms so I deleted the apps from my phone.