As a rule, I don't eat animals bigger than I am. A sea bass I can handle. Chickens and turkeys, fine. But a cow gives me a problem. I can't convince myself that a cow is an insubstantial entity that no one will miss. The animal weighs more than a Fiat. Eating it seems presumptuous on my part, and humiliating for the cow. If my body ended up as brunch for some badger or dachshund, I know I'd be pissed. Which is why I haven't eaten red meat in twenty-two years.

My colleagues recently decided that if I could just taste steak again, I'd see the light. I agreed to allow a fellow editor to take me to Peter Luger's in Brooklyn, which has served prime porterhouse since 1887. Wood walls, bankers, a bartender who calls us "gentlemen," a selection of vegetables ranging from potatoes to potatoes -- that sort of place. You walk in and it smells like blood.

I slice off a chunk the size of a Lucky Charms marshmallow and dangle it on my fork for a minute. Two minutes. Don't think of the cow, I tell myself. Don't think about its swishing tail and its droopy eyes. Don't think about whether it can experience pain or joy or schadenfreude. God, give me some Buddhist disassociation. It's just a food unit. Soylent red. "Trust me, the cow was an idiot," urges my colleague. "Plus, it was destroying the environment with its farts." I take a bite. Damn, I'd forgotten how heavy steak is. How chewy. How meaty. You can tinker with soy and gluten till kingdom come, but a veggie burger will never have the texture of flesh. And then the taste. I can't deny: It's absolutely delicious. Salty and charred. It gives me a Proustian jolt back to my grandmother's house, when I used to eat roast beef off yellow plates. Or maybe it takes me back further, to the Pleistocene age. I wouldn't mind clubbing a wildebeest and then scratching some stick figures into a wall. "Come on, eat the fat," my colleague says. "Don't be a pussy." He points to a jiggly hunk of white. I can't. I finish off two and a half pieces of nonfatty steak, wash it down with Chianti, and accept a backslap from our Balkan waiter.

Trouble starts in the cab home. I had barely eaten all day, so consuming red meat was like dropping a cluster bomb in my stomach. I burp and rumble. I get to my apartment and am bent at the waist. I scour the bathroom for the only antinausea medicine we have: my wife's special berry-flavored Tums for PMS sufferers. I swallow half a bottle. But it's more than physical. I take the dyspepsia as a sign that my brain has decided I shouldn't eat mammals too big for me to bench-press, and it's a mental switch I can't flick back on. Tomorrow, it's back to plants and tiny animals.

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