Tara Austen Weaver - The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Womans Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis

I t is the week before Saint Patricks Day, and the butcher shop is awash in green. There are shamrocks decorating the walls, bags of Irish soda bread for sale, offers of free cabbage to go with your corned beef. As the butcher rings up my purchase, he looks up at me.

Have you ordered your corned beef yet?

I have never eaten corned beef in my life, but I hesitate to tell the butcher this. He seems so friendly, like a kindly uncle, and I dont want him to think less of me. What is corned beef anyway? I am fairly sure there is no actual corn involved, but you never can tell. I pause, not wanting to come out and say it, but at last I do.

The butcher doesnt say anything, he just stands there, staring at me. Into the gulf of silence between us I toss an excuse, inadequate and offered lamely.

Im not Irish?

He laughs. You dont have to be Irish to eat corned beef!

I then begin my confession, the one I shamefacedly pull out in situations like this. I grew up in a vegetarian household. I dont know what to do with large pieces of meat. They scare me. Understanding begins to dawn on his face.

If you need any suggestions for how to cook things, he says, I can help.

I laugh. Mecook meat? The idea is actually funny.

Maybe Ill just start at one end of the shop and cook my way to the other, I joke. I could do a different cut each month. The butcher laughs too, but he is serious in his offer. The idea is terrifying and slightly ridiculous to me, but I realize that, as I leave the store, a seed has been planted.

Could I really learn to cook meat? Would I even want to?

The bigger question, of course, is how does a vegetarian find herself in a butcher shop in the first place? I can count on one hand the number of butcher shops Ive been intwo, maybe three. Theres never been a need. I dont buy or cook meat, its as simple as that.

Unlike most vegetarians who adopt the lifestyle as adults or in an act of youthful rebellion, I was raised meat free from birth. My diet consisted of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and tofu, not a bit of flesh in sight. While our neighbors sat down to meat loaf, hot dogs, or fried chicken, my family was tucking into plates of steamed vegetables and brown rice. By the age of 10, I was an expert on millet, barley, and buckwheat. I know the technical difference between tofu and tempeh, but nothing in my background prepared me for blood or bones.

What am I doing in a butcher shop? I can answer that question in two words: doctors orders. It certainly wasnt my idea.

The problems started when I was about 12mild fatigue and weight gain after a childhood where I had been lean and active. The doctors diagnosed me as having a low-functioning thyroid gland and prescribed a supplement to correct it. My symptoms persisted, even on the medication. I woke up tired every morning and couldnt lose weight. Around this time I was given a questionnaire that asked: If you could spend a day doing anything in the world, what would it be? Other kids wrote horseback riding or Disneyland. My answer: sleep.

I continued to be active, as much as possible. I ran cross-country in the fall and swam laps before school. As I got older I worked as a backpacking instructor in the summers. I watched my diet as well. Despite plenty of broccoli and salads with no dressing, I remained plump, the only round member of the cross-country team.

My doctor didnt seem worried. Once I started on the thyroid medication my lab results returned to the normal range. According to the numbers, I was fine. The fact that I didnt feel fine seemed a lesser concern.

I muddled through as best I could, exercising and dieting the way they told me to in the magazines. I hoped that if I worked hard enough, I might look like the women I saw in those glossy pages: beautiful, sought after, smiling, happy. At the age of 12, I was waking up early to shower, don a leotard, and do calisthenics before sitting down to a breakfast of half a grapefruit and a slice of dry whole wheat toast.

Still my metabolism wouldnt cooperate. In high school I had a brush with anorexia that lasted about 4 hours. When I skipped breakfast and lunch and came close to fainting in my fourth-period journalism class, I realized that going without food wasnt an option for me. Eating healthfully seemed my best hope, though that didnt work either.

I continued to consult doctors. An endocrine specialist I saw after college told me to limit my carbohydrates and eat more protein. I was living in Japan at the time and horrified my friends and colleagues there by turning down bowls of rice. Instead I ate cartons of low-fat cottage cheese, blocks of tofu, and plenty of vegetables. I even ate fish, which Ive never liked. Nothing made a difference. I was always tired, my weight 10 to 20 pounds over where the charts said I should be.

When I returned from Asia, I consulted a naturopathic doctor. He put me on a series of herbal tinctures ordered from Europe, daily doses of barley green powder and rice protein. There were endless tests: blood, saliva, and a hair sample sent off to a faraway lab to check for abnormal levels of heavy metals.

The results seemed to mystify my doctor. More than once he called the lab for confirmation because he had never seen anything like it. I had weird hormone levels, sky-high progesterone (No wonder you cant lose weight, he said). Perhaps it was the shampoo I was using, he suggested, or a body lotion. I might be sensitive to such things. The lab said they had seen cases like it before.

I systematically discontinued and spoke with the manufacturer of every product that came in contact with my skin, to see if it might be the source of this excess progesterone. They all told me it couldnt possibly be their products making me sick.

Things got worse as time passed. I grew more and more exhausted. Some mornings I woke up and put on my running clothes, as usual, and walked the half block to Golden Gate Park and the beginning of my daily run. Id stand at the corner waiting for the light to change, and I knew I didnt have it in me. My legs felt weak, my head was light. I couldnt even trust myself to walk the route. What if I passed out and some stranger found me unconscious and crumpled on the sidewalk? I turned around and shuffled the half block home, blinking back tears. I fell into bed, pulled the covers over me, and wept.

When a friend of mine recommended her acupuncturist, saying She changed my life, it got my attention. Perhaps Chinese medicine held the key to my mysterious health problems. What did I have to lose? I made an appointment.

That afternoon my pulses were timed, my tongue inspected. The acupuncturist told me that my system was weak. This, of course, was no surprise to me.