Always Too Much and Never Enough

by Jasmin Singer

  —

  Looking back on it, though I didn’t realize it at the time, the day I ate my last cheesesteak was the first time I gave any thought to where food actually came from.

  “Coming right up, Jazz,” chirped the mustached man who made the cheesesteaks on my route to school. Though I saw this guy more consistently than I saw many other people in my life, and he’d actually cared enough to ask me my name, I’d never thought to ask him his in return. Our relationship was based solely on a sandwich.

  “Thanks,” I said, then proceeded to comment on the sunny weather—feeling that if I didn’t say something, the only thing either of us would have focused on was the embarrassing regularity with which I consumed cheesesteaks. This was my second just this afternoon.

  Walking away a few minutes later, I held in my hands my three-dollar “home-cooked” meal. Why hadn’t I known that food could taste like this? It wasn’t even frozen in the middle!

  Frequently, with my cheesesteak in hand, I would walk back to my apartment and consume it in privacy, or, at the very least, I would traipse over to Rittenhouse Square Park and eat it while sitting on a bench. But on days like today, when my appetite was ravenous and my energy frenetic, I would simply eat and walk, weaving in and out of foot traffic as effortlessly as I avoided the searing reality that each one of my sandwiches held inside the bun an individual—several individuals, more likely. Like most people, I pushed that thought out of my head entirely, choosing to ignore the painful truth behind the meat I ate.

  But on this day, for some reason, reality intruded. I thought of Emily and her quiet boycott. I didn’t even know the driving force behind her vegetarianism—whether it was based on health concerns, animal welfare, or environmentalism—but something about her decision to forgo flesh spoke to me in a way that, suddenly, I could not ignore.

  With my sandwich in my hand and these thoughts occupying my brain space, I furiously walked across Broad Street, nearly tripping over my own feet more than once. I suddenly realized I was right in front of my school’s main building, and the cascade of stone stairs leading up to the entrance called to my tired body, so I parked myself and my meal there. I had taken only a few bites out of my cheesesteak by then, and I was still holding it, tightly grasped in my hand like a piece of evidence that shocked the jury. (Was I on the witness stand? “Yes, Your Honor—I watched as this individual’s flesh was chopped up and cooked by a person who then served it to me with a soda.”)

  An unfamiliar feeling washed over me like a wave, giving me a vague sensation of carsickness. I stared at my sandwich, but resisted the urge to go in for the kill—that is, to take another bite. Suddenly I realized what I was feeling, and the magnitude of it made me shudder. It was completely foreign to me, yet as soon as I realized what it was, there was no doubt: It was the feeling of losing my appetite.

  “Holy shit,” I said to the sandwich and to the ghost of Emily’s influence. I eyeballed the pebbly brown and mucousy white innards of my sandwich, and it suddenly didn’t seem like food to me.

  More than anything else, the impetus for my vegetarianism was precisely that: the sudden, lingering realization that meat was, by definition, not my food, but someone else’s flesh and organs. Not exactly a news story, I know, but it was a reality I had only glossed over before, accepting meat consumption as “normal” without even thinking to examine what that meant. I knew nothing about meat production, nor would I care to learn for many years, but the visceral reality that I was eating somebody else’s flesh suddenly made me want to retch.

  As I sat on the steps at the University of the Arts, I thought of my family cat, Rocky, who was the most remarkable creature I’d known. I allowed these images of my kitty, whom I missed fiercely, to assuage the angst of the moment. I smiled to myself as I remembered hanging out in the finished basement of our house on Anna Lane, then snapping my fingers two times, only to hear an exuberant and cooperative feline—my Rocky—sprint down two sets of stairs to join me in the basement, letting out a throaty coo as he ran the many stairs to be with me. I loved that cat.

  Again, the reality that my sandwich had been an animal—many animals, in fact, though at the time I didn’t think of that—crashed into my happy daydream of Rocky, and I was repulsed. It was a simple, and visceral, reaction.

  It is estimated that a vegetarian saves ninety-seven lives a year. It’s a good thing I’m vegan now, because I probably ate my entire estimated “allowance” of animals before I turned eighteen. In retrospect, the amount of meat I so mindlessly consumed as a child breaks my heart. Aside from the negative health consequences of meat consumption, I gave zero thought to the individual lives behind my burgers—the suffering, the lives cut short. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know that meat was, by definition, a dead animal. But, as with most people, that fact began and ended there. Nobody around me was giving it any thought, and I didn’t feel compelled to, either. And even if I had actually contemplated what it meant to consume an animal, I would have thought that the animal was there for the purpose of being my food—end of story. I certainly would not have considered the needs or desires of that particular animal—an animal who had, just like me, been an individual with unique experiences. And just like me, too—though in much more severe and radical ways—that animal had been seriously misunderstood.

  Being a suburban kid who didn’t have any idea what a cornfield was like, much less a factory farm, maybe I assumed that what I ate originated at the Foodtown down the street, magically appearing on the shelves with the wave of a wand. At suppertime, it was placed in front of me in much the same way that the evening news regularly flickered on the nearby screen as my family and I chewed our dinner. Like the news, my food was just there, waiting for me to consume, to accept it as is. The fact that there might be another side to things didn’t even occur to me. In the midst of a toxic relationship with what I ate, the truth behind food would have been too difficult to swallow.

  None of this really sank in as I sat on those steps; it would be years before I would give a hoot about the politics or social justice implications of animal agriculture. In fact, when I first became a vegetarian—and for years afterward—I would only bring it up in conversation by saying, “Yes, I’m a vegetarian—but not the mean kind!” Even though the knowledge that the meat in my sandwich was indeed animal flesh entered a new part of my consciousness, and abandoned the section of my brain known as “denial” (where my sexuality firmly remained), I was uninterested in converting others or in making “too radical” a statement. I wanted an identity, not a bullhorn.

  My friend Ronald approached. “Hey, Jazz,” he said, not having any idea that at that moment, in my silence on the stairs, I was going through what would become a massive life transition.

  I looked up, snapped out of my inner dialogue. “Oh, hey, Ronald,” I said.

  “I was just about to get one of those myself,” he said, pointing at my flesh sandwich. “Can’t beat the guy on Walnut and Broad.”

  “I’m actually not hungry anymore,” I said—which, I realized as I said it, was the first time in my life I uttered those words. “I took a few bites already, but do you want the rest of mine?”

  Nothing like a broke college student to wash the blood off your hands. “Hell yeah,” he said, then he sat beside me and gobbled up my indecision, allowing me the momentary space I needed to fully digest the gestalt shift I seemed to be in the midst of. “I love food you can eat with your hands,” he continued, talking with a mouthful of beef—and I meekly smiled, suddenly keenly aware that the only cutlery in sight was the fork in the road.

  —

  Two weeks after going vegetarian, I ate a cheeseburger.

  I was visiting my TM and my stepfather, Wayne, in New Jersey, and we were having lunch at the Rainforest Cafe at Menlo Park Mall. It was Wayne who said that he didn’t believe I could pull it off (“I’ll believe it when I see it”)—and, apparently, he
was right. Though in retrospect it sounds like he was being unsupportive, the truth is, given the amount of animal flesh I had consumed up until that point, it was not even remotely surprising that Wayne doubted my commitment.

  In that moment, I doubted it, too, so I ordered my good old standby—a thick, juicy, melty, substantial cheeseburger.

  Habit is a force to be reckoned with.

  But that glimmer of truth that I had felt on those steps in Philly shone through once again at the Rainforest Cafe. After I finished the cheeseburger, I felt immediate guttural regret at having rejected the newfound identity I had been carving out for myself. As someone who never, ever fit in—not even in my prestigious performing arts college program that was full of weirdos, pariahs, and queers (oh my!)—having a label that I could come home to and making a decision about who I wanted to be in the world was like a tiny piece of feeling at home within myself.

  That was the last time I ever ate meat.

  —

  Of course, becoming a vegetarian did not quell my love of food, nor my ravenousness, nor my unrelenting appetite, nor my rapidly expanding waistline. It turned out that once I got over the initial emotional attachment to meat, ditching it was pretty much a no-brainer—and I simply flooded out my meat-centric dishes with cheese and eggs. Grilled cheese, cheese omelets, macaroni and cheese, and pizza became my new standard fare. (Not exactly health-promoting foods, and certainly not foods that are free of animal suffering—but it would still be a few years before I saw it that way.)

  I changed the route I walked to school (I couldn’t take the chance that my cheesesteak guy would see me—surely my newfound vegetarianism was negatively affecting his bottom line), and I became a regular, instead, at the pizza joint beneath my apartment.

  When I told Emily I was joining her team, she winked at me. It took a moment for it to sink in what she thought I meant, and I became beet red. “No,” I objected—a little too adamantly. “Not that team,” I said, with an eye roll that I wonder now if Emily had been able to see through. “I went vegetarian,” I continued. A moment later, I quietly added, “That team . . .”

  “That’s good,” she responded with a salacious smile, squeezing my shoulder. She kept nodding and looking at me, giving me the feeling that she knew more about me than I knew. And she probably did.

  ELEVEN

  the most personal political issue

  In case you haven’t been paying attention thus far, my early twenties were tumultuous years for me when it came to food and body image. My vegetarianism—which I had embraced at nineteen—simply came along for the ride as I left Philadelphia, moved to New York City, stopped eating altogether, and then reincorporated food and fatness into my life as though they had both been lost friends (the toxic kind that you hang out with despite their smarminess and manipulative tactics—at the end of the day, they’re always there for you). But while vegetarianism was in the background during my dramatic, toxic relationship with food, it was, looking back, actually my constant throughout all of it, the one part of me that was unwavering, even when the rest of me seemed to be lost in space.

  Another constant—at least for a while, after I had returned from the New Hampshire debacle—was Smoochies. Smoochies was a popular, low-calorie frozen yogurt chain that had locations throughout Manhattan, most of which I was intimately familiar with. You could presumably eat a vat of it and keep it to under eighty calories—or, at least, that was how I interpreted the company’s vague, at least to me, marketing materials. I ate something from Smoochies roughly three times a day—always making sure to get different toppings on my frozen masterpiece, just to shake things up a little. If you had cut my wrists, Smoochies soft serve would have bled out of me.

  “I’ll have a medium chocolate, with pieces of banana on top of it, and—why not?—hot fudge.” I was at the Flatiron location at Twenty-third and Sixth, where I was a regular. Ice cream and its cousins (frozen yogurt, sherbet, sorbet) were the only things I ate relatively slowly (i.e., not at lightning speed), savoring each spoonful like it was rare art. I smiled to myself as I recalled my family trip to the ice cream place in Grandpa’s van over twenty years prior—where I had also chosen to get chocolate with more chocolate on top. When it wasn’t numbing or distracting me, food had the keen ability to transport me back in time, to happy memories of more food.

  My watch beeped—I had a half hour to get to my audition in Midtown. I scraped my plastic spoon around the inside perimeter of my cardboard cup, just to make sure that I didn’t leave any behind, and I made my way to my fourth “cattle call” of the week.

  A cattle call is an open audition where all the out-of-work actors in New York show up en masse, then wait for hours in a crowded room for the casting team to call them in for an incredibly brief tryout. They are soul-sucking undertakings, and yet they are par for the course if you’re insistent, as I was, on doing all you could to get a part.

  When your name is finally called, you walk across a large dusty studio to stand before a table of tired casting directors and producers—“Hello, I’m Jasmin Singer, and I’ll be performing a monologue from the play Suburbia by Eric Bogosian, where I’ll be playing the part of Sooze . . .”—and then you throw everything you’ve got into what you hope is the performance of your life, as the timekeeper dutifully counts the remaining minute and a half until he can say, “Thank you—next!”

  And that’s that. Your afternoon is shot. You spent all that time doing your hair and your makeup, you waited for several hours for your moment, you finally got your two minutes—and before you know it, just as quickly as you are shuffled into the room, you’re shuffled out. If you’re like me, it’s likely that the casting directors didn’t even take you seriously, once they looked up from their notes and realized that you were what no audience (let alone director) wants: chubby. Chubby, as in disqualified.

  But every now and then, while you’re in the waiting room wondering how many more hours until they call number 235, you spot a familiar face in the pool of equally frustrated and hopeful actors, and you smile at her, knowing that at least you will have a friend to pass the time with as you waste your Saturday afternoon.

  Sated from my Smoochies—at least for the time being—I headed up to Midtown to try out for an Off-Off Broadway play that paid a fifty-dollar weekly stipend. The studio was spilling over with actors, many of whom sat on the ground since there were no more chairs in the waiting room, and I had to avoid stepping on them as I made my way to the sign-in sheet.

  That was when I spotted Marisa sitting on the stairs and reading the actors’ trade paper, Backstage. I had met her through a coworker in my AIDS-awareness theater company, David, who was utterly enamored with her. It was obvious to me what had first caught his fancy. Marisa was your classic, all-American beauty—long blond hair, big brown eyes, full lips, and a figure that even models would envy. Yet there was something quirky about her expression, something endearingly comical about her mien, something surprisingly offbeat about her style. She was far from ordinary, and her staggering beauty seemed to be a nonissue to her. Unlike so many other beautiful women I knew, Marisa did not seem to notice—or perhaps to care—that she was the prettiest in the room.

  “Marisa—hey!” I said, as I stepped over actors and made my way to her. She seemed genuinely happy to see me, and as grateful as I was to have someone to pass the time with as the audition gods ignored and abused our schedules.

  “Jaaaazzzz!” she responded, like I was a long-lost relative. She closed her Backstage and focused fully on me. I squeezed in next to her on the stairs and got ready for what I was sure would be a long afternoon.

  —

  Admittedly, I was already somewhat fascinated with Marisa, even though I barely knew her. The first time we had met was at a picnic in Central Park. David had invited me to come along with them for this outing, which was a part of the weekly ritual following their Unitarian Universalist Sunday s
ermons.

  I had arrived late and spotted David talking to this adorable blond woman who, even from ten steps away, was clearly extremely passionate about whatever it was they were discussing. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt with a pig on it that was captioned, Friend, Not Food. David had recently told me that his newest crush was a gorgeous vegan—and it was clear to me the moment I spotted her who this bombshell was. I got closer and realized the reason for her emotion: Marisa was lecturing David. It was in a playful way, but one that was nonetheless obviously and completely genuine.

  “You’d better eat that entire sandwich, David, I swear to God . . .” she was saying.

  “Okay, I am. I will,” David replied, clearly as smitten as he was terrified.

  “Those sweet tunas were killed and are now smeared all over your bread,” she added.

  And, with that, David noticed me standing there and introduced us—“Jazz, this is Marisa,” he said, and I shook hands with the person who would change the trajectory of my life.

  —

  After the audition (I didn’t get the part), I bid farewell to Marisa and treated myself to a thick, warm, soft New York hot pretzel—licking off each morsel of salt before even taking my first bite. It was the middle of the day and Times Square was full of eager tourists who walked too slowly for the fast-paced rhythm of the city. I thought of Marisa and how she was vegan. Before meeting her, veganism was nothing I had ever really given any thought to, and now that this new person was in my life, my gut reaction was simply to label it “radical” and push the whole idea aside. Despite the fact that I hadn’t consumed meat in five years, veganism remained a foreign concept to me, as odd—I imagine—as rabid meat-eaters considered my own vegetarianism to be.

  But when Marisa invited me to a screening she was organizing of a new documentary about animal agriculture, I decided to show up. Perhaps embarrassingly, up until that point, even though I was a vegetarian, I really had no idea about the issues involved with factory farming. I had never cared to take the time to learn, and I’m not sure that it even occurred to me to find out in the first place. I was comfortable with my decision to ditch meat and to leave it at that. I considered vegetarianism simply my own personal choice, an identity rather than something I would soon start to see as a moral imperative. I decided to show up to watch the film partly because I was being nice—I liked Marisa and wanted to be supportive of her event—and plus, I felt I already had a leg up by being a vegetarian. Then there was the fact that I was indeed intrigued by why Marisa had taken this “extreme” step of labeling herself vegan. I honestly didn’t understand how it was possible to enjoy life as a vegan. It seemed so unnecessarily complicated.