Campus Eye

After finishing teaching the other day, I went to the campus bookstore for a snack. There, talking with a friend and looking puzzled, was a student complaining that this store sold nothing but junk food. A true observation, as it is full of various chips, cookies, and candies. Butting into her conversation, I said, "Well, there are some natural food bars here. They are pretty healthy," pointing to the apple, blueberry, and strawberry variety. She turned, stone-faced and frowning, and said, "They contain milk." That was it for her. She shuffled off with her vitamin water to the register.

Now judging a book by its cover -- based on her raggy appearance and petchouli oil odor, she was quite clearly of the hippie genus -- I do not think she was lactose intolerant but a vegan. And a deadly earnest one at that, who obviously thought I was insufficiently informed on the extent of bovine suffering, and hence a demonic member of the faculty. The encounter reminded me of my undergraduate days, when my roommate's mother came to visit and marched into the kitchen while I was making dinner. Observing me cooking hamburger for a batch of chili, she coolly asked, "So, you are a flesh eater?" I refused to give her the reaction she wanted by simply chuckling and saying "yes."

Again, it was the earnestness I found remarkable in both cases, that cold seriousness of purpose that went looking for earthly suffering and its perpetrators. That purpose was not to save my immortal soul (perhaps armed for the uphill fight with 2000 years of Christian history, literature, and philosophy) but a mortal cow (instead armed with the shocking information that humans do indeed eat animals for food and have since the dawn of time). A shock that transformed itself into self-righteousness when made aware that most disagree and do not mind eating a steak. The greater the lack of "awareness" (translation: those who are as upset and committed as I am), the greater the outspoken indignation.