Even vegetarians are complicated; after all, the mark of an absence is itself a presence, and vegetarians’ sanctimony is a lively chorus of apparitional cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and fish. Our lives, regardless of our choice to eat meat or not, and regardless of the meat we eat, are so filled with death and killing we might as well plant ourselves atop an abattoir and call it a day; our bodies are charnel houses, memento mori for the countless critters we’ve eaten, and the American industrial meat complex enables our complicity with its cellophane-wrapped acts of oblivion.
