Are You What You Eat?

Jonathan Safran Foer on why he doesn't eat anything with parents

The nine-year-old life of me

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine years old, and the rationale was entirely straightforward: I didn't want to eat anything that had to be killed for me to eat it. I couldn't, for the nine-year-old life of me, understand how anyone could possibly disagree.

Then again...

I did eat plants. Albeit reluctantly. And I ate meatballs, my favorite food, which technically didn't have to be killed for me to eat them, as a meatball is not, technically, an animal. I wore leather, but I didn't eat it. But I did chew on it.

Although that's not the whole story...

Because there was a babysitter who was a vegetarian. She didn't want to hurt anything. She put it just like that: "I don't want to hurt anything." Which is different from not wanting to kill anything. It was a beautiful idea, and I loved her. She let me run my fingers through her hair while we watched the television in my parents' bedroom at hours past my bedtime.

Remembering those late nights...

I wonder what she was thinking when she let me run my fingers through her hair. Even at the time I recognized the inappropriateness. Whenever my Dad would take me along to pick her up he'd remind me not to say anything about how messy her house was. I told him of course not. Her backpack was covered in patches, her jeans were more rips than denim, she was "radical" in just about every sense of the world.

But that's not the whole story...

Because as it turns out, she'd been filling that patch-covered backpack of hers with my mother's jewellery. (Although, as I repeatedly pointed out to my mother, everything she took was returned, and always in its original condition.) My mother continued to hire her, so I continued to love my mother.

And several years after that...

I learned of her suicide. Someone who didn't want to hurt anything hurt herself until there was no more self to hurt. It didn't make sense to me. Or it made a kind of sense I didn't want it to make. I took the news of her death far out of proportion to how well I knew her. I took it like a child. Her death felt like the death of something more than a radical babysitter who let me play with her hair.

But the death of what?

The kind of romance and idealism that children believe they can construct their lives around? Childhood itself? Something that shouldn't have had to die. I starting eating meat again.

Hard things

My diet has always been tied to changes in my life. When I went to college I starting eating meat. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't feel like standing out just then. When I chose my major (philosophy) and started doing my first serious thinking about serious thinking I became a vegetarian again. When I graduated I ate meat for about two years, until I fell in love – with a once-vegetarian – and we decided to stop eating meat together, as a symbol of moving our lifestyle toward something more sensitive, appreciative and ethical. Then we started eating meat, because we wanted to eat meat.

Then we got a dog that I was afraid of

I was afraid of all dogs. Even the tiny ones that aren't really dogs. George came very much out of the blue. It was a Saturday morning. We were walking in our local neighborhood, and a tiny black puppy was asleep on the curb, curled into its "adopt me" vest. I don't believe in love at first sight, but I loved that damned dog. Even if I wouldn't touch it. We took it home. I hugged it from across the room.

Eventually I pet it

I graduated to feeding it from my hand. And then I let it lick my hand. And then I let it lick my face. And then I licked its face. And now I love all dogs. I love them more than I love people. And it's impossible ever to imagine eating meat again.

Because if a fish, chicken or cow...

Had an experience of life that in any way resembled that of George's to so much as harm it, much less kill it for the ultimate vanity – culinary preference – would be unthinkably barbaric. Being able to eat meat with a clear conscience depends on the idea that animals don't have a valuable experience of life. George does.

These days...

When someone asks me why I'm a vegetarian, I tend to answer – or evade the question – with a little joke: I don't want to eat anything with parents. Like most jokes, it's revealing, and I think it sheds some light on the difference between the scared son I was at nine, and the scared father I am at twenty-nine. The world is relationships, and eating has always revealed me.

Hamish Hamilton published Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in 2005.  

This piece originally appeared in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine.