But it brings up an important question: How polite does one have to be? After bearing witness to its torment, I couldn’t eat the fish. Fortunately, in the Asian culture there are usually several courses, so you can bow out of the ones that scare you and say, “Thank you, but I think I will save myself for the next atrocity.”
For the record, I know people eat insects in certain cultures, and I am much more okay with that than with the writhing live animals. I’ll go with a bug over a mammal any day. At least they don’t look you in the eye.
Also, for the record, I’m not against eating animals. I wear leather and I eat meat, but I draw the line at inhumane fur. I’ve worked with PETA to help educate the public about it. I say, know where your food comes from, and take responsibility for it. I’m no zealot; I just think we should be as humane as possible, and when it comes to fur, there are alternatives.
I got involved with PETA because Parsons was inviting the International Fur Trade Federation to speak, and I thought the students needed to hear the other side. I don’t think fur is always bad. I visited a Saga Furs of Scandinavia fur farm in Denmark, where they raise fox and mink in an ethical way. I always say, if you absolutely must have a fur, make sure Saga is the fur source. They have bred the animals’ natural instincts out of them over time so their foxes and minks are basically domesticated and have a very happy life before they become stoles.
I really do understand vegetarianism, even though I’m a failure at it.
In college I was so traumatized by the slaughterhouse scene in James Agee’s short story “A Mother’s Tale” that I became an instant vegetarian. I swore off meat. It repulsed me.
Then, several months later, I was feeling weak, and a voice from within said, “I need meat! I need it immediately!”
I went to the local grocery store, ran to the packaged meat section, grabbed a package of bologna, and ate the whole thing standing there in the aisle. Then I paid for the empty container. I proudly help PETA with their antifur campaign, but they know they’re not going to make a vegan out of me. And yet they still named me their 2009 Man of the Year (Ellen DeGeneres was their Woman of the Year) because of my crusade against abuse in the fur trade.
Vegetarianism can make for social awkwardness at times, especially if you’re at an event where only hunks of meat are served. You may think this is rare, but vegetarian friends tell me that it does happen. In those situations it really is a question of just eating enough not to insult the host.
One person I know was at a fancy luncheon at which they were serving venison and nothing else. There was no way to get around it, so he ate it. I am very impressed that his manners trumped his feelings. I don’t even know if I could have gone there, because I have a psychological aversion to the meat of animals I find especially adorable, like deer—the same goes for rabbit, lamb, and veal. My gag reflex kicks in. But I am very much a believer in not insulting a host, so perhaps I would have been able to choke down Bambi had it come to that.
Parsons used to have a lovely graduation at Riverside Church with a lunch afterward, to which we invited our honorary degree recipients. One year two of our guests were Sister Parish and Albert Hadley of Parish-Hadley, the legendary interior design firm. I was sitting at Mrs. Parish’s table, and she was an incredible character. I said, “You must receive lots of awards and accolades,” and she said, “No, this is the first since I was given a perfect-attendance medal as a young girl. It came with a pig.”
Well, this award did not come with a pig. It came with a very odd lunch of sea scallops that I was pretty sure were raw. Sister Parish corroborated this when someone asked her, “How’s lunch?”
“Terribly chic,” she replied, “but inedible.”
As much as I believe it’s good manners to eat what’s put in front of you as long as it won’t send you into anaphylactic shock, I also believe that, when a host, you really need to think about what will suit your guests. I think it’s bizarre when you assume no one is a vegetarian or has an allergy. It doesn’t hurt to have a salad on the side so your vegan guests can fill up on that rather than having to struggle through the coq au vin.
This does seem to be a modern dilemma. I don’t want to challenge the allergies, but they do seem to be proliferating at a frightening rate.
You see parents sometimes hovering over perfectly healthy and allergy-free children, saying, “Oh no, she can’t! He can’t!”
I think in those extreme situations children get to the point where they are afraid to disappoint their paranoid parents, and so they profess an aversion to pretty much everything but chicken nuggets, hold the sauce.
When I grew up, I don’t remember anyone having allergies to food. I went all though elementary school and never knew anyone with any allergies at all. Certainly some allergies are deadly and all too serious, but if there’s a way to make yourself a more flexible eater, I think you should.
I think it is good, though, that nonsmokers are protected these days from the clouds of smoke that used to hover in every public space just a couple of decades ago. Can you believe there used to be a smoking section on airplanes? You could smoke in theaters. It hasn’t been that long. I remember watching TV award shows and when they did a wide shot you’d see the lasers cutting through dense smoke that filled the auditorium.
I never took up smoking. When I was nine or ten, my father was diagnosed with pleurisy. It scared the daylights out of him, and he quit cold turkey. For years my mother would have one cigarette a day, in the evening. My grandmother smoked until the last day of her life. I still remember going to the doctor with her when she was in her eighties. Her doctor said she had to stop smoking.
“But it’s one of the few things she still enjoys,” I said. “Let her smoke!”
That’s not to say I’m pro smoking. When I was at Parsons, I was sad that with each successive year, more students would smoke. Maybe it’s declining now, but in that place at that time, it was definitely on the rise.
Not only did I not smoke, I didn’t have a drink until I was thirty and moved to New York. Any association with alcohol was a turnoff because there was so much of it around my family.
Now, my mother denies this up and down, in spite of hard evidence. My grandmother had a huge box of correspondence. After her death, my mother and sister and I read these letters out loud, and I said, “Isn’t it funny how often she talks about people drinking? Everyone was always drunk and falling off horses and wandering off into the woods.” My mother insists they weren’t drunks; they just knew how to have a good time.
Yes,I thought, by getting loaded.
Anyway, because of that association with booze, I would go out to people’s houses and just have tonic water. Now, since moving to New York, I love having a drink now and then.
So maybe I’ll grow to love sea slugs, too? I kind of doubt it.
When You Need Help, Get It
I’M CRAZY ABOUT MARTHA Stewart. We’ve done a lot of things together, and I’ve always loved watching her show. But sometimes her domesticity gets a little out of control.
One day I was watching her cooking show. While roasting a pan of nuts, she said something I have never forgotten: “Life has few disappointments greater than a room-temperature nut.”