Assignment 4 — Theodore

Not all tofu looks drab. New additions to the tofu aisle, such as Smart “Bacon” and Field “Roast” look just like meat. In 2016, the meatless meat craze swept me up. I started spending time staring at vegan meat, disturbing my proudly carnivorous brother, who exclaimed “Theodore’s looking at the fake meat again!” My months-long challenge to my family’s omnivorous culture had begun.

Attractive packaging sucked me into the world of artificial meat, but I soon found an ethical justification. Mr. Behler had just introduced the class to the philosopher Peter Singer, known for his work with the animal rights movement. He has written dozens of essays, arguing that a plant-only diet is best for the environment, as well as describing the gruesome (too much so to include here) lives and deaths of animals bred for meat. The plight of turkeys especially worried me.

After weeks of cajoling, my mother agreed to buy a fake sausage and serve it for lunch.

How did it taste? To understand, imagine a polyglot, someone who speaks all modern languages. Every day, three times a day, she reads a poem. Just as we sample the cuisine of different cultures, perhaps Thai food on Fridays or Swiss chocolate on holidays, she samples poetry in various languages. But one day, she comes across a poem with this line of gibberish: “Ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned geong in geardum.” It defies comprehension at first, but she examines certain words — “wæs,” “æfter,” “in” — and hypothesizes that it’s related to English. With the help of an Old-English-to-Modern-English dictionary, she identifies the line as part of Beowulf. Having toiled to identify the poem, she doesn’t enjoy reading it.

Likewise, I determined that the creators of this beige cylinder intended it to taste like sausage, specifically turkey sausage. It didn’t. I stopped flirting with veganism. After all, the world has endless problems; I’ll tackle one with a more palatable solution.

Sources about Peter Singer and Beowulf

• https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/beowulf-oe.asp
• https://lccn.loc.gov/2016935598