Men Eat Meat
by Kirtan Nautiyal
Though they didn’t like to talk about it, my parents ate meat growing up. Not often, but they did. For my father, that changed sometime after he moved to America and began attending the Hare Krishna temple. Something powerful drew him there, and it wasn’t long before he began to live by the words of the Bhagavad Gita as translated and interpreted by Swami Prabhupada – “foods dear to those in the mode of goodness increase the duration of life, purify one’s existence and give strength, health, happiness, and satisfaction” while “food that is tasteless, decomposed, and putrid, and food consisting of remnants and untouchable things is dear to those in the mode of darkness.” For my father and the other members of the temple, that meant a categorical vegetarianism, one which my mother joined when she moved here some years later. Once they chose that life, they never wavered. Not that they let me see, at least.
When I opened my blue insulated lunch bag every day in elementary school, I didn’t know anything about how diet had divided Indian culture for thousands of years, separating peoples based on caste and religion, serving as a pretext for oppression and violence. All I knew was that I never got a baloney sandwich, let alone a coveted box of Lunchables, and since my mother never packed sugary snacks like Fruit by the Foot or Dunkaroos either, my lunch never had much trading value in the cafeteria at Wayside Elementary in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
My classmates were more bemused than malicious. We’d all watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that gonzo scene where the heroes were served chilled monkey brains and snakes by Indian cultists, and perhaps wondering how that wild omnivorism squared with my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, one of my best friends frequently joked about sneaking a few bacon bits between the slices of bread, while others asked why I couldn’t just peel off the pepperoni on top of the square slices the lunch ladies served. It was true I never bought my lunch at school, which only offered pepperoni on their pizzas and filled out the rest of the week with Salisbury steak and sloppy joes. Still, I remember poring over the monthly menus the teachers sent home with us anyway, wondering what turkey tetrazzini tasted like as I made the short walk home after class.
I never indulged my curiosity with a surreptitious visit to the lunch line. I had a few dollars stashed in my Velcro wallet, and none of the teachers or students would have stopped me. Yet the thought never crossed my mind. The way in which I lived my life, in which my family lived theirs, seemed immutable, the product of thousands of years of history. I didn’t know then it had been a choice made only a few years before, that the line between tradition and modernity is ever fluid, necessarily interpreted afresh in each new place and time. Indeed, just as Gandhi himself grew steadfast in his vegetarianism only after moving to meat-eating England, so too did my parents pursue their strict interpretation of Hinduism only after coming to America.
I can still recall one field trip to nearby Tulsa with the rest of my second-grade class. As our bus pulled into McDonald’s for lunch on the way back, I realized I had left the brown bag my mother had packed me back in the classroom. I tried to navigate the menu of burgers and fish filets and chicken nuggets with the help of my kind teacher, who helped me pick out and pay for one large garden salad. While the rest of the kids threw french fries at each other and played with their Happy Meal toys, I picked at the lettuce, confused about how to eat the hard-boiled egg sitting at the edge of the plastic container.
Restaurants represented both the temptation of the larger culture and the simultaneous difficulty of finding a place within its complexity. Between every half hour of afternoon cartoons, I saw advertisements for burgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, popcorn shrimp, and supreme pizza, but the ones for McDonald’s were always some of the best. If the toys with each order weren’t alluring enough, there was the fact that everyone in the ads seemed so happy. That’s what the meals were called, after all.
Perhaps sensing the strain between what they had chosen for us and the easily influenced turns of our own nascent desires, my parents began to allow my sister and I room for compromise. We ate out occasionally, even though the dishes were cooked on grills that weren’t cleaned in between every order. They also eased their rules on eggs, telling my sister and I that while we still shouldn’t eat them on their own, it was OK if they were cooked into something else. Relieved, we licked the frosting off vanilla sheet cakes at our friends’ birthday parties and ate chocolate chip cookies two at a time whenever we could get our hands on them.
Yet there remained limits to their laxity. A few months later, after some of my classmates began coming to school in their crisp blue Cub Scout uniforms, I asked my parents if I could join too. After dinner, I overheard them talking in the dining room. They agreed the scouts would not be a good idea, because what would I eat when camping with the group overnight? “All they have out there is hot dogs.” That accommodations could be made for me apparently never crossed their mind.
Rules governed more than just diet. There were rules also on how to dress, how to talk, what and how to study. That they weren’t written down anywhere didn’t make them any less real. Many of these came from my parents, but some were beyond even their ability to lay down or enforce – those governing popularity and social status, those that defined the accepted ways to be a man. Then there were those that transcended our humble reality, unchangeable, those that determined meaning, those that determined the connections between all beings and things. We were boxed in by these intersecting lines, seemingly both arbitrary and absolute, determined in a way that I didn’t fully understand.
I was a boy, and I wanted to be a man. Outdoors, in the wild, a boy could learn a little bit about what that meant, but now, with scouting closed to me, there didn’t seem to be any other way to get out there, even for a weekend. When Scott and Ryan showed me pictures of themselves dressed up in camouflage out hunting with their dad, I found myself wondering when exactly “deer season” even was. The lake beckoned, but we did not join the others in spending lazy hours fishing in the summer heat. My father and I both liked to watch football on weekends, but we never emerged into the cool autumn sunlight to spend our afternoons grilling meat, faces enveloped in smoke.
So often, my parents’ rules contradicted those of our society, ran perpendicular to them. They didn’t know, or they didn’t care. At home, they said we could not date until we graduated and left the house, while my school held formal dances and crowned a homecoming king. The cool guys dated the beautiful girls, took three long steps towards being real men. My parents said that we shouldn’t waste time on football, but there was no one more revered in the high school hallways than the quarterback of the team, varsity letter jackets the marker of those with the strength and speed to earn them. Though a higher law than my parents’ dictums seemed to be coming into focus, to challenge them remained, to me, as inconceivable as soaring into the sky.
If the halls of the high school were the scene for one type of manhood, my father and all that he taught were the tacit counterpoints. But I was coming around to the idea that size was the measure of a man, not strict faith or academic discipline or moral integrity. That’s what the girls wanted, I told myself – muscles, pure physical strength. The racks of glossy magazines near the grocery store cash registers glorified ripped abs and broad shoulders, yet even a cursory glance through their pages made it clear that protein, specifically from meat, was the only way to achieve that kind of a body. Lean chicken breasts, frozen cod. Thousands of calories would be required, all of which were forbidden to me.
Underlying the glorification of size was the implication of violence, which fascinated me equally. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa crushing baseballs into the outfield, offensive linemen holding three hundred pound nose tackles at bay. In the movies I watched, the bigger guys stuffed the smaller ones into trash cans, and the masculinity of physical power and the importance of meat in achieving it were among the assumptions underlying most of the war epics, Westerns, and action movies I loved. On a more visceral level, though most of the hamburgers and chicken breasts my friends ate came from the supermarket, the act of eating that meat was the deepest endorsement of the act of killing that preceded it. Meat was manly; meat fueled virility; meat gave strength; but most of all, meat demonstrated sincere allegiance to the American ideal of establishing dominion over all that surrounded us.
My mother tells me I was a “preoccupied kid” in those days before I left home, and I suppose I was. Football and girls off limits, I became lost in novels and schoolwork, both assuming an overbearing importance I now know was largely imagined. My father ruled our home sternly, and in those days, I only very rarely entertained the idea of challenging any aspect of the lifestyle that had been set down for me. I parted my hair the same way I always had, wore the same off-brand clothes my mother had always bought me. I felt in my bones that tradition was an inheritance, not a choice. To even consider cutting into a steak for the first time would have been as ridiculous as challenging the color of my eyes or curve of my nose.
Still, I felt a vague embarrassment when I went out to dinner with a group and I’d have to, say, ask the server at Chili’s if they could thaw me out a black bean burger, or on other nights, when I’d be relegated to eating a basket of fries for dinner at Bennigan’s while the others had whatever they wanted. I couldn’t quite put it into words, but something about always having to ask for the “veggie option” struck me as effeminate, and it bothered me. It was prim, almost a turning up of the nose. Being a man meant being down for anything. To avoid that, to ask for accommodation, indicated a fragility, I thought. I wanted to move through the world thoughtlessly. I didn’t want to consider the lines that bounded me. Real men didn’t need special treatment.
When I joined many of my high school friends in moving on to college at the nearby University of Oklahoma, I stayed in my comfort zone. While others drank and puked and yelled in the dorm hallways, my first year passed more innocently in a haze of missed morning alarms, ultimate frisbee games, and nights playing Mario Tennis. Despite the Chick-fil-A in the freshman cafeteria and all-night hamburgers at the student union, I remained true to my vegetarian roots.
Yet even as I assumed more of the outward trappings of adulthood, moving off-campus into an apartment and working a few jobs to make extra cash, I hesitated to forge in a wholly new direction. It was only as time began to weaken the gravity of home that I was able to achieve, if not full escape velocity, then at least a slow drift to a more distant orbit. I remember certain events as being especially important in this transition – getting a scratched CD-R copy of Mogwai’s EP+6 from my friend Matt; logging into Urban Outfitters’ website for the first time after a guy told me that’s where he’d gotten his checkered socks; traveling to England for a summer as part of a study abroad program and spending evening after evening drinking cheap beer with the other students.
I thought I was finally going my own way, but even during those years of muted questioning, my father remained the silent axis around which it all turned. After all, in his worldview, it was important to be “street smart” – his words, not mine. In this, he shared something with most Indians of his generation, who’d grown up with petty theft, black money, and an incompetent government bureaucracy, and had then moved someplace new with little in their savings accounts and many bills to pay. A man couldn’t be a dewy-eyed innocent; he needed a slight world weariness, constant suspicion, and a modicum of savvy in order to survive.
It wasn’t until later that I realized my mildly discontented desire to be experienced was only a different way of following in his footsteps. At the time, flipping through travel guides in Barnes & Noble, I only knew that solo travel seemed to be the best way to do it. Anthony Bourdain’s new show was just out on the Travel Channel, and I was taken with the figure he cut, going where the magazine spreads ignored, listening to others with an open mind, and eating only what the locals ate. A man couldn’t travel in that way unless he knew a little bit about the way the world worked, I thought. A man couldn’t travel in that way unless he was self-sufficient, brave, confident, likable – everything I dreamed of one day being.
After graduating college, I spent a summer capital-hopping on my own in Central and Eastern Europe. New friends and experiences flowed easily, as they do in that part of the world to those with the time and money to enjoy them. Riding the rails, I felt, for the first time, the product of my own choices, and, for a few months, it seemed possible that I could make myself into the man I’d always wanted to be. When I came back to America and went to my medical school orientation, I thought there would be something different about my face that everyone who saw me would be able to recognize. But no one there knew who I was.
While the magic of that trip stayed with me for some time, by the second year of medical school, buried in pre-clinical work, the sense of agency I’d briefly discovered across the Atlantic Ocean had disappeared in the regimented schedule, dissolving into what seemed like never-ending periods of mandated studying and testing. Desperate to regain what was mine, I impulsively bought another round-trip plane ticket, this time to the Middle East, a region of the world my favorite bare-bones travel website described in glowing terms.
Buying the ticket to Jordan felt like an act of defiance, a way to gain a slippery grip on the course of my life. And as I planned what I’d pack and where I’d go, the question of meat loomed in a way it never had before. In the years since my trip to Europe, I’d been increasingly bothered by how I’d eaten during those months. I had skipped Wiener schnitzel in Vienna and goulash in Budapest, schweinhaxen in Bavaria and kielbasa in Krakow – choices I knew no self-respecting, hard-nosed, open-minded cultural explorer could have made. Now, I wondered if this trip could be different. I wondered if my diet remained beyond choice.
Yet I was paralyzed by the thought that eating a piece of fish would represent something irrevocable. To that point, I’d never critically engaged with the religion with which I’d been raised, but I wondered if a hamburger meant I couldn’t pray alongside my parents any longer. I wondered what it would mean for my psyche, attuned since birth to contrarianism, for me to suddenly, in an important way, not be so different anymore.
I considered my relatives in India, many of whom ate meat, as indeed my parents had while growing up there. I considered the Indian kids I’d grown up with in Oklahoma, some of whom were vegetarian and others who had been allowed to eat whatever they’d wanted because their parents weren’t religious or followed a different religion or simply felt the energy required to buck the popular culture was too much. Floating upwards came faint recollections – the stern visage of my grandfather in the sole black and white photo of him that existed; visions of the many-faced, many-armed vishvarupa, or Universal Form, that Lord Krishna had displayed to Arjuna while reciting the Bhagavad Gita; barbeque ribs, a campfire, and all of my friends.
I postponed my decision until the growing pressure of my rapidly upcoming departure made further delay impossible, and, driven by an obscure internal logic, I went from endlessly pondering all the variables surrounding the decision to planning the concrete logistics of how I would finally take that fateful step. Shadowed by predestination, I finally drove one late afternoon to the nearby Quizno’s I’d selected for the momentous occasion, and when I took the first bite of the turkey sandwich I’d hurriedly ordered, I was surprised to find it anti-climactic. I’d chosen the place because I’d read of others getting sick after an inaugural giant steak or greasy patty melt, and I’d chosen the time because I knew there wouldn’t be anyone else there. The sandwich wasn’t a revelation, to say the least, but it wasn’t terrible, either. As I sat there alone, looking out the glass window at the half-empty strip mall parking lot, I didn’t feel like anything had changed.
Days later, I left for parts unknown. In Syria, I clumsily ate a bone-in haunch of meat at a white tablecloth restaurant President Assad had reportedly visited some weeks prior. In Jordan, I dug into a rice pilaf mixed with chunks of goat, traditional to the Bedouin who lived there. In Lebanon, I ate many falafel sandwiches, but also tried shawarma for the first time. I did not know anyone else who had done these things where I had done them, and that knowledge exhilarated me. The choices that these outwardly minor transgressions signified filled me with a swirling, technicolor energy, and when I eventually returned to America, I continued my exploration – a medium-rare steak at a dinner hosted by a local pharmaceutical rep, messy barbeque at a neighborhood joint, nice sushi at a long marble bar. It all went down so easily, and it was not long before I could not remember how I had eaten during all the years that had come before I thought I had made myself anew.
I never told my parents about these changes, but one day while I was home on vacation, my father found an open web browser on my computer with a discussion about the best barbacoa in town, and the suspicions they’d long held were finally confirmed. As I had drifted away from the lessons of the Gita that my parents had taught, they’d held on to my vegetarianism as a last strong link with those values, and though they did not let on, I knew how disappointed they were in my choice.
I wanted to tell them that I hadn’t started eating what everyone else did because I thought that a piece of salmon every now and then could erase my skin color or family history. I wanted to tell them that it was merely a question of freedom, that a man was entitled to be free in the land of the free, or at least to live by the rules that he has decided on for himself, not simply those that he inherited. Most of all, I wanted to tell them about the deep paradox that this declaration of freedom felt totally determined, that there never seemed to have been a choice at all. But I didn’t know how to tell them that in a way that made sense, in a way that didn’t sound ungrateful, so the crucial moments passed, and I never explained myself. There was no dramatic confrontation, no sudden schism. Life just moved on.
What I could eat was what I chose to eat. What I could be was what I chose to be. Happiness now felt like something that could be achieved, like the grade on a test, the result of choices, all of which were now up to me. I felt better than I had in years, more fulfilled in medical school now that we had finished classroom lessons and spent most of our time with patients, and more contented with the dedicated group of close friends I had made in the process. While I remained close to my parents, they were increasingly consumed with their own spiritual journey and no longer had the energy to demand I live a certain way. That was for the best, I felt, and, newly buoyant, I turned back to the road, choosing to spend several months in India wandering throughout the north of the country, staying in shabby rooms, eating simply, and speaking only Hindi, my first language.
In India, I was a foreigner, the shopkeepers and rickshaw-wallahs picking me out by my clothes, my skin color, the way I walked. Yet, while there, I still felt a surprising need to perform the tradition my parents had created for us in small-town Oklahoma. The freedom I thought I’d carved out for myself came up against something stronger – the allure of submergence, the beckoning of the current. It was as if the ideas I thought I’d left behind had been supercharged in the country of their origin, the India of my parents’ imagination becoming real only here, in the India I saw right before my eyes. I didn’t eat any butter chicken or mutton kebab, no matter how many of those around me were carnivores, surreptitious or otherwise, no matter how many of my current relatives and long-ago ancestors had eaten meat during their own lives. The strange thing was, I didn’t mind.
When I returned to America, however, that brief spell was broken, and my diet soon reverted to what it had been. I didn’t have the time to question the nature of these changes, swept up as I was in the hectic toil of my residency in internal medicine, eating whatever free food we were given at our lunchtime conferences – cold-cut sandwiches, frozen burritos, take-out pizza. What spare time I did have was spent playing the tiring game of modern love.
When I met Chaya on that Halloween-eve blind date in 2013, it took both hands and both feet to count the many ways in which we were similar, every important way but one. When, a few weeks later, we brought Chinese take-out back to her place, she asked me not to use her silverware to eat my orange chicken. A few weeks later, we went to a tasting menu restaurant to celebrate her acceptance of a competitive position in Philadelphia, and she ordered the version without any meat. I can still remember one dinner we had while on vacation in Maine, and the look of revulsion on her face when the bone marrow I had ordered as an appetizer for myself came out in a metal dish, sizzling and delicious.
We’d come to most important decisions about our life together through implicit agreement; we hadn’t had to argue or agonize about me moving to Philadelphia, and when it felt like the right time to propose marriage that is what I did. Yet diet remained a solitary point of contention. She wanted me to return to the ways in which we had both been raised. She told me how she felt eating meat from factory farms was morally wrong, and I said I knew in my heart she was right. She told me that she needed to know that we would bring our own children up as vegetarian, and I said of course, there could be no other way.
I felt inexorably drawn to the ancestral masculinity open to me through marriage, yet to take that step, to make that choice, meant trading away everything I had spent the last years building. Though our engagement had not been arranged by our parents, and was therefore comprehensible to our peers, I still worried whether a manhood born in a brown space could have any currency outside that space. I wondered – could I be enough?
Almost thirty years after I first walked through the elementary school doors with the lunch my mother had packed, nearly ten years since I’d begun to live my life in the opposite way, I wondered what remained unchanging, whether choices had ever really been made, and if so, who it was that had done the choosing. Somewhere between what I’d inherited and all that had come about as a result was what it meant to be a man, hidden artfully in a constant process of becoming – something beyond the determined, something beyond history. Yet perhaps there was some part of my being even more important than the nature of my masculinity. Something essential. Something I hoped it was still within my power to grasp.
I wasn’t convinced I had nurtured a deeper strength beneath the performance of masculinity I’d created through time abroad and dietary choice. Next to the possibility of marriage and family and all that might follow, what I chose to eat seemed like an insubstantial foundation upon which to build an identity. I feared that a return to vegetarianism would bring the entire flimsy edifice tumbling down. But maybe those were just different kinds of insubstantiality. Maybe both needed to fall. Or at least my conviction that either was the key to my future happiness. My insistence on agency, my determination to make my own way, my desire to be different from my parents – maybe mere ego. My anguish about where I fit in – maybe a new way of missing the point.
I’d spent my life drifting through stories, becoming each, if only for a time. A boy who wanted to be a man but couldn’t. A man who thought himself one because of what he ate and where he went. A boyfriend on the cusp of a manhood sanctioned by the tradition of his birth. This too would fall away, soon enough, leaving me with what remained, what did not change.
But even this was, as yet, another story, taught to me by my parents from what they had learned themselves. A distant holy tradition, divorced from my life, as of now still separate, filed away next to other facts about my body, about the bodies of others. I hadn’t put in the work to make the story as true in my heart as it was in my head. This was another story I hadn’t yet made real.
In recent years, the diet that had been a basis for ridicule and incomprehension has been rebranded as a means for helping the environment and one’s own health. The people around me can’t get enough of plant-based burgers and hot dogs that were carrots and thanksgiving roasts made of seitan and wild rice. Many of those people are men. That’s alright. The stories a nation tells itself change as regularly as those people tell themselves, after all. I started a new job a while back, days before my birthday. The office ordered in lunch and bought a cake. When the nurse who was calling the restaurant asked me what I wanted to get, I looked over the menu and told her I’d just take a salad. “Are you a vegetarian?” she asked, and I wanted to tell her everything that had happened from beginning to end, all that I had learned about who I really was, but there wasn’t time for all that, and that wasn’t a story she had asked for, so instead I just turned back to my work and told her that I was.
When I opened my blue insulated lunch bag every day in elementary school, I didn’t know anything about how diet had divided Indian culture for thousands of years, separating peoples based on caste and religion, serving as a pretext for oppression and violence. All I knew was that I never got a baloney sandwich, let alone a coveted box of Lunchables, and since my mother never packed sugary snacks like Fruit by the Foot or Dunkaroos either, my lunch never had much trading value in the cafeteria at Wayside Elementary in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
My classmates were more bemused than malicious. We’d all watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that gonzo scene where the heroes were served chilled monkey brains and snakes by Indian cultists, and perhaps wondering how that wild omnivorism squared with my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, one of my best friends frequently joked about sneaking a few bacon bits between the slices of bread, while others asked why I couldn’t just peel off the pepperoni on top of the square slices the lunch ladies served. It was true I never bought my lunch at school, which only offered pepperoni on their pizzas and filled out the rest of the week with Salisbury steak and sloppy joes. Still, I remember poring over the monthly menus the teachers sent home with us anyway, wondering what turkey tetrazzini tasted like as I made the short walk home after class.
I never indulged my curiosity with a surreptitious visit to the lunch line. I had a few dollars stashed in my Velcro wallet, and none of the teachers or students would have stopped me. Yet the thought never crossed my mind. The way in which I lived my life, in which my family lived theirs, seemed immutable, the product of thousands of years of history. I didn’t know then it had been a choice made only a few years before, that the line between tradition and modernity is ever fluid, necessarily interpreted afresh in each new place and time. Indeed, just as Gandhi himself grew steadfast in his vegetarianism only after moving to meat-eating England, so too did my parents pursue their strict interpretation of Hinduism only after coming to America.
I can still recall one field trip to nearby Tulsa with the rest of my second-grade class. As our bus pulled into McDonald’s for lunch on the way back, I realized I had left the brown bag my mother had packed me back in the classroom. I tried to navigate the menu of burgers and fish filets and chicken nuggets with the help of my kind teacher, who helped me pick out and pay for one large garden salad. While the rest of the kids threw french fries at each other and played with their Happy Meal toys, I picked at the lettuce, confused about how to eat the hard-boiled egg sitting at the edge of the plastic container.
Restaurants represented both the temptation of the larger culture and the simultaneous difficulty of finding a place within its complexity. Between every half hour of afternoon cartoons, I saw advertisements for burgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, popcorn shrimp, and supreme pizza, but the ones for McDonald’s were always some of the best. If the toys with each order weren’t alluring enough, there was the fact that everyone in the ads seemed so happy. That’s what the meals were called, after all.
Perhaps sensing the strain between what they had chosen for us and the easily influenced turns of our own nascent desires, my parents began to allow my sister and I room for compromise. We ate out occasionally, even though the dishes were cooked on grills that weren’t cleaned in between every order. They also eased their rules on eggs, telling my sister and I that while we still shouldn’t eat them on their own, it was OK if they were cooked into something else. Relieved, we licked the frosting off vanilla sheet cakes at our friends’ birthday parties and ate chocolate chip cookies two at a time whenever we could get our hands on them.
Yet there remained limits to their laxity. A few months later, after some of my classmates began coming to school in their crisp blue Cub Scout uniforms, I asked my parents if I could join too. After dinner, I overheard them talking in the dining room. They agreed the scouts would not be a good idea, because what would I eat when camping with the group overnight? “All they have out there is hot dogs.” That accommodations could be made for me apparently never crossed their mind.
Rules governed more than just diet. There were rules also on how to dress, how to talk, what and how to study. That they weren’t written down anywhere didn’t make them any less real. Many of these came from my parents, but some were beyond even their ability to lay down or enforce – those governing popularity and social status, those that defined the accepted ways to be a man. Then there were those that transcended our humble reality, unchangeable, those that determined meaning, those that determined the connections between all beings and things. We were boxed in by these intersecting lines, seemingly both arbitrary and absolute, determined in a way that I didn’t fully understand.
I was a boy, and I wanted to be a man. Outdoors, in the wild, a boy could learn a little bit about what that meant, but now, with scouting closed to me, there didn’t seem to be any other way to get out there, even for a weekend. When Scott and Ryan showed me pictures of themselves dressed up in camouflage out hunting with their dad, I found myself wondering when exactly “deer season” even was. The lake beckoned, but we did not join the others in spending lazy hours fishing in the summer heat. My father and I both liked to watch football on weekends, but we never emerged into the cool autumn sunlight to spend our afternoons grilling meat, faces enveloped in smoke.
So often, my parents’ rules contradicted those of our society, ran perpendicular to them. They didn’t know, or they didn’t care. At home, they said we could not date until we graduated and left the house, while my school held formal dances and crowned a homecoming king. The cool guys dated the beautiful girls, took three long steps towards being real men. My parents said that we shouldn’t waste time on football, but there was no one more revered in the high school hallways than the quarterback of the team, varsity letter jackets the marker of those with the strength and speed to earn them. Though a higher law than my parents’ dictums seemed to be coming into focus, to challenge them remained, to me, as inconceivable as soaring into the sky.
If the halls of the high school were the scene for one type of manhood, my father and all that he taught were the tacit counterpoints. But I was coming around to the idea that size was the measure of a man, not strict faith or academic discipline or moral integrity. That’s what the girls wanted, I told myself – muscles, pure physical strength. The racks of glossy magazines near the grocery store cash registers glorified ripped abs and broad shoulders, yet even a cursory glance through their pages made it clear that protein, specifically from meat, was the only way to achieve that kind of a body. Lean chicken breasts, frozen cod. Thousands of calories would be required, all of which were forbidden to me.
Underlying the glorification of size was the implication of violence, which fascinated me equally. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa crushing baseballs into the outfield, offensive linemen holding three hundred pound nose tackles at bay. In the movies I watched, the bigger guys stuffed the smaller ones into trash cans, and the masculinity of physical power and the importance of meat in achieving it were among the assumptions underlying most of the war epics, Westerns, and action movies I loved. On a more visceral level, though most of the hamburgers and chicken breasts my friends ate came from the supermarket, the act of eating that meat was the deepest endorsement of the act of killing that preceded it. Meat was manly; meat fueled virility; meat gave strength; but most of all, meat demonstrated sincere allegiance to the American ideal of establishing dominion over all that surrounded us.
My mother tells me I was a “preoccupied kid” in those days before I left home, and I suppose I was. Football and girls off limits, I became lost in novels and schoolwork, both assuming an overbearing importance I now know was largely imagined. My father ruled our home sternly, and in those days, I only very rarely entertained the idea of challenging any aspect of the lifestyle that had been set down for me. I parted my hair the same way I always had, wore the same off-brand clothes my mother had always bought me. I felt in my bones that tradition was an inheritance, not a choice. To even consider cutting into a steak for the first time would have been as ridiculous as challenging the color of my eyes or curve of my nose.
Still, I felt a vague embarrassment when I went out to dinner with a group and I’d have to, say, ask the server at Chili’s if they could thaw me out a black bean burger, or on other nights, when I’d be relegated to eating a basket of fries for dinner at Bennigan’s while the others had whatever they wanted. I couldn’t quite put it into words, but something about always having to ask for the “veggie option” struck me as effeminate, and it bothered me. It was prim, almost a turning up of the nose. Being a man meant being down for anything. To avoid that, to ask for accommodation, indicated a fragility, I thought. I wanted to move through the world thoughtlessly. I didn’t want to consider the lines that bounded me. Real men didn’t need special treatment.
When I joined many of my high school friends in moving on to college at the nearby University of Oklahoma, I stayed in my comfort zone. While others drank and puked and yelled in the dorm hallways, my first year passed more innocently in a haze of missed morning alarms, ultimate frisbee games, and nights playing Mario Tennis. Despite the Chick-fil-A in the freshman cafeteria and all-night hamburgers at the student union, I remained true to my vegetarian roots.
Yet even as I assumed more of the outward trappings of adulthood, moving off-campus into an apartment and working a few jobs to make extra cash, I hesitated to forge in a wholly new direction. It was only as time began to weaken the gravity of home that I was able to achieve, if not full escape velocity, then at least a slow drift to a more distant orbit. I remember certain events as being especially important in this transition – getting a scratched CD-R copy of Mogwai’s EP+6 from my friend Matt; logging into Urban Outfitters’ website for the first time after a guy told me that’s where he’d gotten his checkered socks; traveling to England for a summer as part of a study abroad program and spending evening after evening drinking cheap beer with the other students.
I thought I was finally going my own way, but even during those years of muted questioning, my father remained the silent axis around which it all turned. After all, in his worldview, it was important to be “street smart” – his words, not mine. In this, he shared something with most Indians of his generation, who’d grown up with petty theft, black money, and an incompetent government bureaucracy, and had then moved someplace new with little in their savings accounts and many bills to pay. A man couldn’t be a dewy-eyed innocent; he needed a slight world weariness, constant suspicion, and a modicum of savvy in order to survive.
It wasn’t until later that I realized my mildly discontented desire to be experienced was only a different way of following in his footsteps. At the time, flipping through travel guides in Barnes & Noble, I only knew that solo travel seemed to be the best way to do it. Anthony Bourdain’s new show was just out on the Travel Channel, and I was taken with the figure he cut, going where the magazine spreads ignored, listening to others with an open mind, and eating only what the locals ate. A man couldn’t travel in that way unless he knew a little bit about the way the world worked, I thought. A man couldn’t travel in that way unless he was self-sufficient, brave, confident, likable – everything I dreamed of one day being.
After graduating college, I spent a summer capital-hopping on my own in Central and Eastern Europe. New friends and experiences flowed easily, as they do in that part of the world to those with the time and money to enjoy them. Riding the rails, I felt, for the first time, the product of my own choices, and, for a few months, it seemed possible that I could make myself into the man I’d always wanted to be. When I came back to America and went to my medical school orientation, I thought there would be something different about my face that everyone who saw me would be able to recognize. But no one there knew who I was.
While the magic of that trip stayed with me for some time, by the second year of medical school, buried in pre-clinical work, the sense of agency I’d briefly discovered across the Atlantic Ocean had disappeared in the regimented schedule, dissolving into what seemed like never-ending periods of mandated studying and testing. Desperate to regain what was mine, I impulsively bought another round-trip plane ticket, this time to the Middle East, a region of the world my favorite bare-bones travel website described in glowing terms.
Buying the ticket to Jordan felt like an act of defiance, a way to gain a slippery grip on the course of my life. And as I planned what I’d pack and where I’d go, the question of meat loomed in a way it never had before. In the years since my trip to Europe, I’d been increasingly bothered by how I’d eaten during those months. I had skipped Wiener schnitzel in Vienna and goulash in Budapest, schweinhaxen in Bavaria and kielbasa in Krakow – choices I knew no self-respecting, hard-nosed, open-minded cultural explorer could have made. Now, I wondered if this trip could be different. I wondered if my diet remained beyond choice.
Yet I was paralyzed by the thought that eating a piece of fish would represent something irrevocable. To that point, I’d never critically engaged with the religion with which I’d been raised, but I wondered if a hamburger meant I couldn’t pray alongside my parents any longer. I wondered what it would mean for my psyche, attuned since birth to contrarianism, for me to suddenly, in an important way, not be so different anymore.
I considered my relatives in India, many of whom ate meat, as indeed my parents had while growing up there. I considered the Indian kids I’d grown up with in Oklahoma, some of whom were vegetarian and others who had been allowed to eat whatever they’d wanted because their parents weren’t religious or followed a different religion or simply felt the energy required to buck the popular culture was too much. Floating upwards came faint recollections – the stern visage of my grandfather in the sole black and white photo of him that existed; visions of the many-faced, many-armed vishvarupa, or Universal Form, that Lord Krishna had displayed to Arjuna while reciting the Bhagavad Gita; barbeque ribs, a campfire, and all of my friends.
I postponed my decision until the growing pressure of my rapidly upcoming departure made further delay impossible, and, driven by an obscure internal logic, I went from endlessly pondering all the variables surrounding the decision to planning the concrete logistics of how I would finally take that fateful step. Shadowed by predestination, I finally drove one late afternoon to the nearby Quizno’s I’d selected for the momentous occasion, and when I took the first bite of the turkey sandwich I’d hurriedly ordered, I was surprised to find it anti-climactic. I’d chosen the place because I’d read of others getting sick after an inaugural giant steak or greasy patty melt, and I’d chosen the time because I knew there wouldn’t be anyone else there. The sandwich wasn’t a revelation, to say the least, but it wasn’t terrible, either. As I sat there alone, looking out the glass window at the half-empty strip mall parking lot, I didn’t feel like anything had changed.
Days later, I left for parts unknown. In Syria, I clumsily ate a bone-in haunch of meat at a white tablecloth restaurant President Assad had reportedly visited some weeks prior. In Jordan, I dug into a rice pilaf mixed with chunks of goat, traditional to the Bedouin who lived there. In Lebanon, I ate many falafel sandwiches, but also tried shawarma for the first time. I did not know anyone else who had done these things where I had done them, and that knowledge exhilarated me. The choices that these outwardly minor transgressions signified filled me with a swirling, technicolor energy, and when I eventually returned to America, I continued my exploration – a medium-rare steak at a dinner hosted by a local pharmaceutical rep, messy barbeque at a neighborhood joint, nice sushi at a long marble bar. It all went down so easily, and it was not long before I could not remember how I had eaten during all the years that had come before I thought I had made myself anew.
I never told my parents about these changes, but one day while I was home on vacation, my father found an open web browser on my computer with a discussion about the best barbacoa in town, and the suspicions they’d long held were finally confirmed. As I had drifted away from the lessons of the Gita that my parents had taught, they’d held on to my vegetarianism as a last strong link with those values, and though they did not let on, I knew how disappointed they were in my choice.
I wanted to tell them that I hadn’t started eating what everyone else did because I thought that a piece of salmon every now and then could erase my skin color or family history. I wanted to tell them that it was merely a question of freedom, that a man was entitled to be free in the land of the free, or at least to live by the rules that he has decided on for himself, not simply those that he inherited. Most of all, I wanted to tell them about the deep paradox that this declaration of freedom felt totally determined, that there never seemed to have been a choice at all. But I didn’t know how to tell them that in a way that made sense, in a way that didn’t sound ungrateful, so the crucial moments passed, and I never explained myself. There was no dramatic confrontation, no sudden schism. Life just moved on.
What I could eat was what I chose to eat. What I could be was what I chose to be. Happiness now felt like something that could be achieved, like the grade on a test, the result of choices, all of which were now up to me. I felt better than I had in years, more fulfilled in medical school now that we had finished classroom lessons and spent most of our time with patients, and more contented with the dedicated group of close friends I had made in the process. While I remained close to my parents, they were increasingly consumed with their own spiritual journey and no longer had the energy to demand I live a certain way. That was for the best, I felt, and, newly buoyant, I turned back to the road, choosing to spend several months in India wandering throughout the north of the country, staying in shabby rooms, eating simply, and speaking only Hindi, my first language.
In India, I was a foreigner, the shopkeepers and rickshaw-wallahs picking me out by my clothes, my skin color, the way I walked. Yet, while there, I still felt a surprising need to perform the tradition my parents had created for us in small-town Oklahoma. The freedom I thought I’d carved out for myself came up against something stronger – the allure of submergence, the beckoning of the current. It was as if the ideas I thought I’d left behind had been supercharged in the country of their origin, the India of my parents’ imagination becoming real only here, in the India I saw right before my eyes. I didn’t eat any butter chicken or mutton kebab, no matter how many of those around me were carnivores, surreptitious or otherwise, no matter how many of my current relatives and long-ago ancestors had eaten meat during their own lives. The strange thing was, I didn’t mind.
When I returned to America, however, that brief spell was broken, and my diet soon reverted to what it had been. I didn’t have the time to question the nature of these changes, swept up as I was in the hectic toil of my residency in internal medicine, eating whatever free food we were given at our lunchtime conferences – cold-cut sandwiches, frozen burritos, take-out pizza. What spare time I did have was spent playing the tiring game of modern love.
When I met Chaya on that Halloween-eve blind date in 2013, it took both hands and both feet to count the many ways in which we were similar, every important way but one. When, a few weeks later, we brought Chinese take-out back to her place, she asked me not to use her silverware to eat my orange chicken. A few weeks later, we went to a tasting menu restaurant to celebrate her acceptance of a competitive position in Philadelphia, and she ordered the version without any meat. I can still remember one dinner we had while on vacation in Maine, and the look of revulsion on her face when the bone marrow I had ordered as an appetizer for myself came out in a metal dish, sizzling and delicious.
We’d come to most important decisions about our life together through implicit agreement; we hadn’t had to argue or agonize about me moving to Philadelphia, and when it felt like the right time to propose marriage that is what I did. Yet diet remained a solitary point of contention. She wanted me to return to the ways in which we had both been raised. She told me how she felt eating meat from factory farms was morally wrong, and I said I knew in my heart she was right. She told me that she needed to know that we would bring our own children up as vegetarian, and I said of course, there could be no other way.
I felt inexorably drawn to the ancestral masculinity open to me through marriage, yet to take that step, to make that choice, meant trading away everything I had spent the last years building. Though our engagement had not been arranged by our parents, and was therefore comprehensible to our peers, I still worried whether a manhood born in a brown space could have any currency outside that space. I wondered – could I be enough?
Almost thirty years after I first walked through the elementary school doors with the lunch my mother had packed, nearly ten years since I’d begun to live my life in the opposite way, I wondered what remained unchanging, whether choices had ever really been made, and if so, who it was that had done the choosing. Somewhere between what I’d inherited and all that had come about as a result was what it meant to be a man, hidden artfully in a constant process of becoming – something beyond the determined, something beyond history. Yet perhaps there was some part of my being even more important than the nature of my masculinity. Something essential. Something I hoped it was still within my power to grasp.
I wasn’t convinced I had nurtured a deeper strength beneath the performance of masculinity I’d created through time abroad and dietary choice. Next to the possibility of marriage and family and all that might follow, what I chose to eat seemed like an insubstantial foundation upon which to build an identity. I feared that a return to vegetarianism would bring the entire flimsy edifice tumbling down. But maybe those were just different kinds of insubstantiality. Maybe both needed to fall. Or at least my conviction that either was the key to my future happiness. My insistence on agency, my determination to make my own way, my desire to be different from my parents – maybe mere ego. My anguish about where I fit in – maybe a new way of missing the point.
I’d spent my life drifting through stories, becoming each, if only for a time. A boy who wanted to be a man but couldn’t. A man who thought himself one because of what he ate and where he went. A boyfriend on the cusp of a manhood sanctioned by the tradition of his birth. This too would fall away, soon enough, leaving me with what remained, what did not change.
But even this was, as yet, another story, taught to me by my parents from what they had learned themselves. A distant holy tradition, divorced from my life, as of now still separate, filed away next to other facts about my body, about the bodies of others. I hadn’t put in the work to make the story as true in my heart as it was in my head. This was another story I hadn’t yet made real.
In recent years, the diet that had been a basis for ridicule and incomprehension has been rebranded as a means for helping the environment and one’s own health. The people around me can’t get enough of plant-based burgers and hot dogs that were carrots and thanksgiving roasts made of seitan and wild rice. Many of those people are men. That’s alright. The stories a nation tells itself change as regularly as those people tell themselves, after all. I started a new job a while back, days before my birthday. The office ordered in lunch and bought a cake. When the nurse who was calling the restaurant asked me what I wanted to get, I looked over the menu and told her I’d just take a salad. “Are you a vegetarian?” she asked, and I wanted to tell her everything that had happened from beginning to end, all that I had learned about who I really was, but there wasn’t time for all that, and that wasn’t a story she had asked for, so instead I just turned back to my work and told her that I was.