When I was a child, we ate meat three times a day; the rare times when we didn't reflected a rather dire financial downspin I learned of only much later. One of my father's best friends was the town butcher, and I saw him almost every day. I went with my mother so she could pick up a few chops and some hamburger and a roast for Sunday, all to be wrapped up in neat, white packages by jovial Mr. Bryan. I also went there with my father, through the back door, while he made his regular rounds of back doors around town. I would stand on the sticky, yellow sawdust powdering the wood floor, listening to the meaningless talk of adults. When one of the men in long stained aprons opened the freezer door, puffs of frosty air crossed my face and I could see the long room where the carcasses hung, swinging gently as they were brushed aside. That room, that cold breeze fragrant with blood and the steel slice of knives, defined meat for me at a very young age. I'm grateful for it; even today, I can recall that delicate perfume in a six-year-old's nose, full of wonder and questions never asked. Even today, standing in front of a supermarket case of neatly wrapped packages of chops and steaks, I remember the halves of cattle, the hooked lines of gutted pigs, the racks of whole chickens still slowly dripping. I know what meat is, even when I don't want to know.

I certainly feel hunger for meat at times, and wonder if there are unknown, even unknowable nutrients in flesh. Sometimes I crave it, and most especially when I'm sick, as though we can trade life for life. The act of eating meat is marked, for me, by those hours in the back room of the butcher shop. Like all children, when I suddenly made the final, vital connection between animals and meat, it tore through my life like a quake, a cataclysm, ruin -- as it should. I felt a childish, terrible loss, I didn't eat meat for a long time, and then I did again, wiser.

Well into adulthood, I tried to make myself believe that eating meat was unnatural -- that any appetite I have for meat is conditioned, not innate. The way we Americans go about raising animals and making them into meat is so often inhumane that I wanted to believe our hunger was not entirely human. But all this history I've been reading, my ever-growing awareness that much of what I've wanted to reject in my culture is the deeply desired wish of billions of people -- all this has made me change my mind. I've come to believe that the appetite for flesh is quintessentially human. Eating meat isn't necessary, and it isn't right, anymore than a lot of other human impulses are right -- but I think of it as an impulse of the race nevertheless. My refusal to look clearly at meat, at meat-eaters, at meat hunger, was a refusal to look at something essential about people themselves.

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