To eat or not to eat

I understand that this isn’t common practice on a farm, and that this rarely ever happens, but it did and it created my subject position:

In my freshman year on high school I was hanging out at my friend’s house and she happened to live on a farm. When it came close to dinner time, her father asked us what we wanted to eat and my friend’s older brother eagerly responded that he wanted steak. Their father agreed and went back outside. From my position at the window in their living room I watched him shoot a cow a few feet from the house and a couple of hours later, fresh steak was served. I always thought that eating meat was kind of creepy, I never really liked it but I ate it when I was younger because it was what mom put on the table. But this incident pushed me over the line to being a vegetarian.

Fast forward to the present. My friend Caitlin that I met here at the U is as carnivorous as a hungry lioness in the jungle. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but she definitely eats meat for every meal. Her subject position comes from living in a rural town in Wisconsin where farming and the meat industry were vitals parts to the livelihood of many families living there. She said that she knew of no one in her high school that was a vegetarian, it just wasn’t even a considered option. She thinks that meat is tasty and finds consuming it to be completely natural. She shared with me that she used to think that vegetarians didn’t eat meat because they wanted others to see them as a good person. She carried a type of stigma that all vegetarians were annoying hipsters that “moo-ed” when someone was eating a hamburger or people who worshipped PETA. She also thought that vegetarians saw meat-eaters as barbaric or unsophisticated. When I told her that I was a vegetarian, she was shocked that I didn’t fit in to these models.

I cannot speak for all vegetarians so I won’t try. But personally, I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with eating meat, it’s just I chose not do. Explaining this to her, I think she was refreshed that I wasn’t trying to force it on her but just explain my beliefs to her. And in return, she changed my view on meat-eaters. She told me that she never made a choice to eat meat, it was part of her culture, and the way of her town, how she grew up, and the thought of deciding to not eat it was foreign and not even present. It was just how things were. It was interesting for the both of us to see the whole perspective on this issue. She actually sucked it up and became a vegetarian for a week, employing the “don’t knock it ‘till you try it” philosophy. And from her I learned how meat is normally processed. We built a bridge that I think is achievable for all vegetarians and non-vegetarians, eat and let eat.