Classic Essay: A Week Without Meat

Author's Note: I wrote this for a "social experiment" project for an advanced comp class. I have since gone back to my meat eating ways. 

I’ll start with the fact that I don’t like bacon. I mean, I really, really don’t like bacon. Just the smell of bacon makes me nauseous. On the first day of my proposed week as a vegetarian, I went out to dinner with my family. I’d gone to the restaurant thinking I would have pancakes or a salad. The first words that came into my head, and out of my mouth, as I looked at the menu were “hmm, bacon.” My husband laughed and I ordered the French toast.

My reaction to the bacon on the menu triggered a period of introspection, something I really hate to indulge in, but I got over it pretty quickly. Oh, sure, most people would have used that time to consider how many of their actions and thoughts are influenced by things they have unconsciously absorbed from their daily interactions with people, the media and advertising. But, hey, why ruin dinner? That was the last real craving I had that week but it wouldn’t be the last time my meat free week would cause emotion among my family.

An explanation is required to fully understand the scope of what I had gone into this week to accomplish. My husband, son and I live with my husband’s grandparents. My husband’s entire family is members of the Seventh Day Adventist church. This is important to the experiment only in that they are supposed to observe certain dietary restrictions. The Seventh Day Adventist religion follows the Jewish dietary laws in addition to a few of their own, including a ban on the drinking of alcohol. It is recommended, though not required, that their members become vegetarians. The first time I met my husband’s parents, I was eighteen years old and they offered me a ham sandwich and a beer.

My husband’s grandmother dislikes messes, particularly in the kitchen. To this end, everybody is discouraged from cooking anything. How does anybody eat? When they’re not eating out, they buy twenty Wendy’s or McDonald’s hamburgers at a time and refrigerate them. Occasionally, they will heat a Stauffer’s Family Size Lasagna with Meat Sauce in the oven and refrigerate it immediately. The only time I am grudginly allowed to use the kitchen is when the pastor of their church calls and asks me to make my famous Chicken Alfredo Lasagna for potluck. For the record, I don’t belong to their church and I’ve never actually attended a service or Sabbath school when I’ve gone to the building with my husband.

Knowing the resistance I was likely to meet when I tried to eat at the house, I armed myself with several recipes that I thought the other people in the house would like if I were to cook them. I would get glared at but I would survive and maybe expand my list of things I could make to take to potluck; after a couple years, I was getting tired of making that damned lasagna. In case of emergency, however, I stocked up on Four Cheese Pizza Lean Pockets. Those tasty little toasty pockets came in handy during that week.

My plan was to get up and have breakfast in the morning, make something simple for lunch then start making the family dinner in the middle of the afternoon, when there was less of a chance of everybody being home. This proved to be a bit ambitious for me and didn’t work out exactly as I planned. The first snag came when Monday morning became Monday almost noon before I managed to get out of bed. After taking my daily meds, breakfast ended up happening around lunch time. I wasn’t surprised but I was disappointed. The main reason I didn’t get out of bed until 11:30 is because I felt really hung-over. I spend most mornings feeling really hung-over, actually, even though I don’t really drink. That morning, I hadn’t had a drink of alcohol for close to a month. I managed to eat a SlimFast bar before finishing off a bottle of water and a handful of painkillers. I was mobile by one that afternoon and made an inventory of the ingredients in the kitchen.

We were missing several key ingredients which meant a trip to the grocery store was necessary. My husband’s grandmother offered to pay for dinner and we went shopping afterwards. I figured I was going to go a week without meat so there was no reason to deprive myself of good food in other areas. Whole wheat pasta found its way into my grocery cart, along with gourmet pasta sauce, ready to shred cheese, organic vegetables and fresh spices. Visions of a truly decadent breakfast sent me over to the red grapefruit. Though they would prove to be the least expensive things I would buy, it took me ten minutes to convince myself that I deserved to have something I enjoyed to eat for breakfast. When I was first reaching for the grapefruit, a voice in the back of my head said “you don’t deserve those, go get some pop tarts.”

The next morning found me bright, awake and hangover-free at seven in the morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt good first thing in the morning, much less that early in the morning. I ate half a grapefruit and a yogurt for breakfast. My son and I walked to the park and I wasn’t tired by the time we got there. We played until he was tired, instead of until I was tired. He actually lay down and took a nap when we got home, something he hasn’t done in over a year, and I got started catching up on some homework I’d been behind on. My husband’s aunt was keeping the kiddo for the night and ended taking him home with her when he woke up from his nap around two in the afternoon. A little later, I walked to the coffee shop up the street to meet one of my classmates and work on a group project.

My energy level was still high that afternoon and something must have showed. In the ten minutes it took me to walk to the coffeeshop, two people pulled over and asked for my phone number. I wasn’t worried about my safety but I was very perplexed about their reactions. Believe it or not, this had been a fairly common experience for me in high school, nine years and one hundred fifty pounds earlier. There was something different about me.

After that second day, I was no longer tempted by bacon. I made my pastas and sandwiches with an equanimity that would have been unthinkable a week earlier. On Thursday, my husband’s grandmother actually threw a hamburger at me and yelled at me when I told her “Thanks, Mim, but I’m making myself some spaghetti for lunch. Would you like some? It’s really good.” The contest of wills between Mim and me turned into a source of amusement for the rest of the family for the rest of the week. When I made manicotti, she declared it off limits for everybody else and bought Chinese take out from the restaurant down the street. While the orange flavored chicken smelled really good, I was surprisingly content with my cheese, mushroom and spinach filled pasta.

During that week, I went out to lunch and shopping with my mom. We talked about how much better I felt and speculated about the reasons behind my improved health. The only thing I had changed was my diet. When she got home, my mom sent me half a dozen vegetarian recipes to try. I still haven’t gotten through half of them.

At the end of the week I had set aside for my experiment, I was reluctant to go back to eating meat. The memory of waking up hung-over without the fun that should necessarily precede the feeling was still fresh in my mind, along with the contrast to the way I’d begun feeling. I mentioned my reluctance to my parents on Sunday, the last day of the experiment, and they asked me a question that I hadn’t really considered. Why couldn’t I just keep eating like a vegetarian?

My husband and father, the two men in my life who normally have nothing to say to each other, discussed ways to help me meet my nutritional requirements without eating things I really dislike, such as tofu. It finally came down to a thought that had been simmering in the back of my mind; I can’t be a vegetarian because I’m not a hippy. The minute I expressed the one thing that had really been holding me back, I felt like a complete idiot.

Very slowly, and very carefully, my dad said, “Kortnee, you don’t have to be a hippy to be a vegetarian.”

I know.

“And even if you were, your mom shops at the hippy store now. I’m sure she can pick up any hippy food you’d need so you can come visit.”

My husband snickered, my mom punched my dad in the arm and I felt much better. We all sat down and worked out a menu for the family birthday party we were having for my mom and I the next weekend. When we went over on Saturday, my mom had me help set out all the food and said “eat what you want, don’t eat what you don’t, and don’t worry.” While the boys enjoyed the steak and my mom her chicken, I enjoyed the macaroni salad, fresh fruit, corn on the cob and a wonderful day with my family.

I’ve been meat-free for two weeks now, a week longer than I’d planned, and I have no designs to return to my old eating habits any time soon. I’ve lost five pounds and have more energy than I ever remember having. I’ve even started jogging around the neighborhood, much to the consternation of my husband’s grandmother, who thinks I’m making a spectacle of myself. The pastor of the church tried the vegetarian alternative to my Chicken Alfredo Lasagna I devised and has asked me to make two batches for potluck; one vegetarian and one chicken. I guess the classics will never die but, hopefully, the vegetarian lasagna will be as big a hit as the chicken.

Fairies Don’t Live in Flowers and Elves Don’t Bake Cookies

Authors note: This is an essay I did for a class. I'm adding illustrations but leaving the formatting the same, complete with a works cited page. I've posted the poem I wrote this about as well. Comments are welcome but remember, this is old and already submitted (I got an A). I enjoyed writing it and it started my academic career for having 'interesting' takes on traditional literature and arguments. Should anybody come across this while doing research for a paper, please make sure to cite it correctly and check out the books I've listed, they were a lot of help. 

Fairies Don’t Live in Flowers and Elves Don’t Bake Cookies

Symbol and Allusion in Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott”

The Lady of Shalott was a fairy. She was not the winged, pre-pubescent girl who lives in flowers type of fairy. No, in the grand style of Celtic folk-lore, she was more than human. The Lady of Shalott’s place among the other folk is important. Not only does it give this poem the magic necessary to be included into the category of Arthurian Romance, it gives an added weight to many of the symbols Tennyson included.

The first thing necessary to understand the symbols surrounding the Lady of Shalott is her place in the world and the poem. The Lady of Shalott is a lady. While that may be self-evident it is important to point out that she isn’t a queen but she is still part of the upper-echelons of the other world. It also means that she has complete dominion of the island of Shalott and influence on the surrounding land. The fact that part of the surrounding land is Camelot is what makes this an Arthurian Romance and not just a fairy tale. However, most ladies in romances are paired with a knight, generally as the person for whom the knight does all of his heroic deeds. The absence of a knight to balance the Lady of Shalott shows an imbalance that will lead to the destruction of Camelot.

Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott

The second, and possibly more important, thing to understand is the Lady’s profession. The Lady of Shalott is a weaver. Of all the creative arts, none is so distinctly female as weaving. Penelope did it as she waited for Odysseus to return, the spider was created when a mortal woman, Arachne, lost a weaving contest with Athena. The Fates are also women; Clotho who spins the thread of life, Atropos who cuts it and Lachesis who measures and is sometimes said to weave the thread of life. For centuries, women wove cloth to cover their families and to sell; the textile trade made The Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales very wealthy. Nothing could illustrate the Lady of Shalott’s power and independence more than her act of weaving. The Lady of Shalott is weaving a cloth to influence the land surrounding her island but she’s cursed. The cloth she is weaving is very special and the story of the Lady of Shalott weaving her cloth gives a beautiful synopsis of the rise of Camelot and a premonition of it’s fall.

Many people see The Lady of Shalott as a symbol herself. Not all of them are particularly flattering to the poem, Tenneyson or the society which would romanticize The Lady of Shalott. Indeed, in her book Women/Image/Text, Lynne Pearce says:

[T]he lady is, as I first indicated, a bountiful symbol of material oppression; she is the imprisoned woman, the condemned woman, the murdered woman of many centuries. And she is also, more specifically, the middle-class, genteel and educated woman of too many Victorian novels and too many social statistics. Propertyless and hence powerless, she is the domestic angel condemned forever to a drawing room existence. (74 Pearce)

William Hollman Hunt I'm Half Sick of Shadow's

This simplistic projection of The Lady of Shalott onto every oppressed woman in history denies the fact that she was not created in a vacuum. Tennyson put very little description into the physical nature of The Lady of Shalott, though she was painted often by the pre-Raphaelites. The charge that she had no property is easily done away with by remembering that as The Lady of Shalott, she holds dominion over her entire island. As for being powerless, the mirror shows differently. The Lady of Shalott is a better symbol for the secluded intellectual writer who creates pale reflections of a world they never experience. Indeed, as Kathleen Sullivan Kruger notes in her book Weaving the Word that, “[b]ecause we habitually link female involvement to textile history, the recuperation of this history recovers a record of women’s participation in the creation of culture and its texts, thereby reclaiming a female authorship.” (23)

What kind of reflections does the mirror cast? Though usually a symbol for vanity, the mirror that The Lady of Shalott is looking at does not reflect her. At first glance, it would seem that the mirror is reflecting the world outside a window. However, a little knowledge of the kind of loom Tennyson would have been familiar with and the line “To wave the mirror’s magic sights” (line 65) shows that the mirror is reflecting the cloth that she is weaving. The Lady of Shalott is weaving a magic cloth, one with scenes of the road above Camelot. Far from being powerless, the magic cloth showcases The Lady of Shalott’s power.

The Lady of Shalott can see what she is creating in her mirror but she can’t see it actually happening. This is the nature of her curse. She cannot stop weaving the magic cloth because, as soon as she does, she stops creating the scenes on the road to Camelot. To stop and look at the real world instead of the shadows would be an end to the very creative process that is creating those scenes in the real world. When she first started, The Lady of Shalott had no other care in the world but to continue her weaving until she begins to become dissatisfied, envious of the people in her weaving. Tennyson show’s the beginning of her end with the lines “She hath no loyal knight and true / The Lady of Shalott” (line 62-63) and “ ‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said / The Lady of Shalott.”

Waterhouse Looking at Lancelot

Though it is often Guinevere and her affair with Lancelot that is blamed for the beginning of the fall of Camelot, Tennyson indicates otherwise. Lancelot, it seems, carries the destruction of women with him. It is Lancelot’s arrival that prompts a dissatisfied Lady of Shalott to leave her loom to look at him. However, the scene on Lancelot’s shield give an indication that he was not meant to be the downfall of Camelot. The scene on his shield is that of the Red Cross Knight and the Faerie Queen from Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. Spenser intended his poem to be the ultimate English epic. The Red Cross Knight was representative of St. George, the patron saint of England. In his marriage to the Faerie Queen, The Red Cross Knight weds the physical world to the spiritual world in the ideal union. Lancelot bearing the scene of the Red Cross Knight on his shield is a reminder to his readers that Camelot was not the perfect kingdom that it is often supposed to be but it could have been.

In her mirror she can see the shining beauty that is Lancelot. If he’s that beautiful in the mirror, what would he look like in real life? The Lady of Shalott never gets to see Lancelot before the mirror breaks.

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces through the room,

She saw the water lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She looked down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide

The mirror cracked from side to side

“The curse is come upon me,” cried

The Lady of Shalott. (109-115)

Walter Crane Lady of Shalott

Two things break as the curse comes upon The Lady of Shalott; the mirror and the web. The web is what The Lady of Shalott was weaving. She was very likely weaving bits of herself into it and when it fully unravels, she dies. The glass reflects what she is weaving. When it breaks, not only does it disconnect the influence of the web on the outside world but it also curses the scene it had been looking upon. With the coming of Lancelot, The Lady of Shalott was effected by her curse and things began to fall apart in Camelot.

Had The Lady of Shalott stayed on her island, nobody would have known that anything had happened to anybody that day. The reapers would have noticed the absence of her singing but even that would have been forgotten eventually. All authors wish to be remembered and grasp at the immortality that creation can offer them. The Lady of Shalott knows she’s dying and, with her creation unraveling behind her, she grasps at the only way she’ll be remembered. The Lady of Shalott goes to Camelot.

There are two physical descriptions given of The Lady of Shalott in her poem. The first describes her robes as she lays down in the boat that will take her body to Camelot. “Lying, robed in snowy white” (line 136) is a great deal different from the “magic web with colors gay” (line 38) that she was weaving. The absence of color in her garments leads the indication that all of her colors, all of her life, was woven into the tapestry that is now a mess. She’d woven her own fate in with that of Camelot.

When the body of The Lady of Shalott floats into Camelot, the knights and lady’s cross themselves in fear, probably with a sense of foreboding at seeing the dead lady in a boat on the river. Whether the knights and ladies were aware of the Lady of Shalott as the reapers were, it is impossible to know although one could assume that everybody who had been there awhile would have heard some story of the singing of The Lady of Shalott. The only knight who hadn’t been there long enough to know about The Lady of Shalott is the one who caused her destruction and that of Camelot; Lancelot. “He said, ‘She has a lovely face, / God in his mercy lend her grace, / The Lady of Shalott’” (lines 169-171). He doesn’t know who she is or that he is the cause of her death and the doom of Camelot.

Dante Gabrielle Rossetti Lady of Shalott

The Pre-Raphaelites loved The Lady of Shalott. In fact, she was one of “the most favored of all Tennysonian subjects among Pre-Raphaelite and late-Victorian artists” (71 Speare). Two of the best known paintings done of The Lady of Shalott are by Dante Rosetti and John William Waterhouse. Both show The Lady of Shalott at the end of her story. The one by Rosetti shows Lancelot examining her face and the one by Waterhouse shows her alone in her boat as it’s beginning to float off down the river. Something about the way these artists have captured The Lady of Shalott at her most vulnerable, with no island, no loom, not even any life, illustrates a poignancy captured by the fate of The Lady of Shalott.

Could The Lady of Shalott avoided this fate and her death? No. People will argue that if she had just stayed with her task she wouldn’t have died and Camelot would have become the perfect kingdom it was meant to be. However, The Lady of Shalott was losing the joy she had originally found in her task. Initially, she must have wanted to sit down at her loom and begin weaving the story of Camelot. She doesn’t care if she’s cursed, she simply continues to weave. No matter how much somebody enjoys what they’re doing, everybody needs a break. Sitting so long at a task she once enjoyed turned her weaving into a burden. She was burnt out and longing for the things she was weaving into her story of Camelot. With the coming of Lancelot it becomes obvious that she wishes her own Red Cross Knight, if only for companionship, but she is not a fairy queen.

When The Lady of Shalott rebels and steps away from her loom to look out at Camelot in the hopes of seeing Lancelot there is a sense of doom but also one of liberation. The Lady of Shalott is no longer a slave to her creation and her creation is no longer being dictated by her. She had been weaving the events around Camelot for a very long time. It would now be up to the people in and around Camelot to create their own fates. The Lady of Shalott dies and comes to rest in her beloved Camelot at the feet of Lancelot. She doesn’t get to see him but he sees her and thinks her beautiful. Would he have thought her beautiful had he known who she really was and what she’d been laboring at for years? It is unlikely that they would have thanked her for stepping away from her loom and thus it is only in her death and the destruction of her creation is she given any praise. This is an early rendition of the old cliché that an artists work is worth more after he dies than it was ever worth while he was alive.

Works Cited

Kerenyi, C. The Gods of the Greeks. New York: Grove Press, Inc, 1960.

Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan. Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production. London: Associated University Presses, 2001.

Lord Tennyson, Alfred. "The Lady of Shalott." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead et al. eighth edition. Vol. 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1114-18. 2 vols.

Pearce, Lynne. Woman/Image/Text. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Enlightenment Through Children's Programming

A Flash Essay I wrote a few years ago.

I remember watching my son fall over giggling when the rabbit puppet stole the Blue Wiggle’s bananas. With simple plots, simple music and lots of action, The Wiggles were perfect for my three-year-old son. The fact that they were all slightly attractive men who encouraged a three-year-old to shake, wiggle and be silly enough to get all of his energy out in time for his nap made me welcome them into my home with open arms.

As I’ve watched my son transition to the more complex plots and music of Little Einsteins and Star Wars, I can’t help but notice a few things. Not only does he like the classical music, which I am very happy about, but he is also more able to accept more complex ideas. With greater complexity comes a greater chance of corruption. As he begins to understand more complex ideas, I can see the teenager he will become in a few short years and I pray for the adult I hope he will be.

We do this to our kids. Slowly but surely we introduce them to the world around them, a world that will not always be kind but seems oddly forgiving while they’re young. We bring them into a world of disappointment and pain and hope we’ve given them the things they need to survive it without too many bruises. We protect their wild optimism for as long as we can and hope, when the first cracks start to appear in the shield we’ve created, that the first blows won’t be too deep.

I’m glad my son likes more sophisticated music and shows. While they don’t include the adult stimulation I crave, they do introduce my son to many things he would be resistant to learning from me. I do miss The Wiggles, though. Especially the blue one.

Older Essays

The Author as a young child.

I have been encouraged by some of the people close to me to share some essays I've written in the past. Mostly, they were written as creative non-fiction pieces so they start to resemble blog posts. Watch this space for upcoming writing.