Is Vegetarianism for you?

There was one novel that I read when I just turned 18 that really made me consider becoming a vegetarian. That novella being Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, A Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Now, if you aren’t familiar with this book, let me give you a quick summary. Santiago Nasar, a young man who is thought to have taken the virginity of a young woman named Angela Vicario, is murdered by her brothers. The story is non-linear and throughout you learn that the village was aware that the murder was to take place, but no one did anything to help.

Now why did it make me want to become a vegetarian I hear you cry!

Well, throughout the novella it is laced with grotesque images of meat and they always reference to a significant ‘smell’ of Santiago Nasar. The most significant image for me was the scene where they describe his murder as though they were gutting a pig and that really highlighted to me that there really is little difference between the gutting of a human and the gutting of an animal.  

 “Santiago Nasar’s horror when she pulled out the steaming guts to the dogs. “Don’t be savage,” he told her. “Make believe it was a human being”

Nasar appears to have the exact same outlook as myself, as you can see he is truly horrified as he witnesses his maid skin and gut a rabbit before his very eyes. The barbarity is too much for him and little does he know that he too has the same fate as the rabbits.

 

“Trying to finish it once and for all, Pedro Vicario sought his heart, but he looked for it almost in the armpit, where pigs have it. Actually Santiago Nasar wasn’t falling because they themselves were holding him up with stabs against the door. Desperate, Pablo Vicario gave him a horizontal slash on the stomach, and all his intestines exploded out.”

The most poignant part of that image for me is not the guts exploding, but rather Pedro’s struggle to locate the heart. Referring to what he knows best (he is a pig farmer and slaughterer), he reduces the human body to an animal no longer distinct in character. Nasar becomes yet another pig to slaughter, essentially a lump of meat. This imagery really made me consider the idea of eating meat in another light, why is killing an animal any different to a human?

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This notion is heavily laden in today’s society, aside from religious reasons for not eating meat, there has been a great increase in the number of vegetarians and vegans in the world. Documentaries such as “Cowspiracy”, which confronts the impact of mass meat farming on our environment, have convinced many people to opt out of having meat on their plate. Not only will this help the environment, but it will save a lot of animal lives. So, if you’re like me and find it difficult to remove meat from your diet (thanks mum and dad), or if you just could not imagine having a meal without it. Try to go 1 or maybe even 2 days meat free, the environment will thank you for it and so will the animals you saved!