At the Time
carnivorism
The chicken parmesan came out of the oven at six fifteen, right on schedule. Sylvie set the casserole dish on the trivet and stood back to admire it the way she always did, just for a second, before plating. The breading had crisped to a deep, uneven gold, and the mozzarella had melted into lazy pools across the surface, browning at the edges where it met the sauce. She spooned a generous portion onto Lisa’s plate, then her own, and carried them both to the table.
Lisa was already sitting with her legs folded under her, sketching something on her tablet. She looked up when the plate landed in front of her and her eyes went wide.
“It smells so good, Grandma.”
“Wait till you taste it.”
Lisa cut a piece with the side of her fork, dragged it through the puddle of marinara, and put it in her mouth. She chewed slowly, then faster, then smiled with her mouth still full.
“This is amazing.”
“I know,” Sylvie said. She sat down and spread her napkin in her lap. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”
They ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Outside, the neighbor’s lawn trimmer hummed its slow, autonomous path across the yard. Lisa was halfway through her plate when she set her fork down.
“Grandma, when did you start making this?”
“Oh, forty years ago, maybe longer. But my grandmother used to make it for me when I was about your age. She’s the one who taught me.”
“Your grandmother.” Lisa said it the way children do when they are trying to fathom a span of time that exceeds their entire experience of being alive. “So that was, like, the 2020s?”
“Around then.”
“Did she use Meridian?”
Sylvie hesitated. She picked up her water glass and took a slow sip. “No. Back then, cultured proteins weren’t really available yet. Not for regular people. She used real chicken.”
Lisa stared at her. “What do you mean, real chicken?”
“I mean chicken that came from a chicken. An animal. A living animal that was killed and processed for food.”
Lisa’s fork hung in midair. A piece of breaded cutlet dangled from it, forgotten. “They killed it?”
“They did. That was how people got meat. For thousands of years, that’s how it worked. You raised animals, or someone else raised them for you, and they were slaughtered and sold.”
Lisa pushed her plate forward about an inch, an unconscious gesture. “That’s horrible.”
“It seems that way now.” Sylvie chose her words carefully. She had lived through the transition herself. She remembered the factory farming footage that went viral in the late twenties, the protests, the slow legislative battles. She also remembered that she had kept eating meat for years after she knew better, because it was cheap and it was easy and everyone around her was doing the same thing. The moral clarity had come later, after the economics made it painless. “But at the time, it was completely normal. Almost everyone did it. Your great-great-grandmother was a wonderful, kind person. She loved animals. She had a cat she absolutely adored. But she cooked with real meat, because that was simply what people did.”
“But you knew it was wrong.” Lisa said it as a statement, not a question.
Sylvie paused. “Eventually, yes. But I ate real meat too, Lisa. For a long time. Even after I understood what it meant.”
Lisa looked at her grandmother the way she sometimes looked at the historical clips they watched in school: footage of oil rigs, of plastic-choked oceans, of industrial slaughterhouses. As if she were studying a species related to her own but fundamentally different.
“Did they eat cats?”
“No, honey. Not where we lived.”
“What about Muffin?” She meant the beagle asleep on the living room rug, fifteen feet away, twitching through some dream. “Would they have eaten Muffin?”
“No. Dogs were pets. People loved their dogs just the way we love Muffin.”
“What about squirrels? And raccoons? And the hummingbirds that come into the yard?”
“No. People didn’t typically eat those either. It was mostly certain animals that were raised specifically for food. Pigs. Chickens. Cows. They were kept on farms, sometimes enormous farms, and that was their entire purpose. Their entire lives were spent in those places.”
Lisa looked down at her plate. The cutlet sat in its shallow lake of red sauce, still steaming faintly. She knew it was cultured. She knew nothing had died for it. But something had shifted behind her eyes, and Sylvie could see it happening, the way the knowledge of what the dish once required had contaminated the dish itself.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Lisa said quietly. Not “people.” Not “they.” You.
Sylvie felt the word land. She had expected it, in the way anyone who has outlived their era’s assumptions expects to be judged by the era that follows. She folded her hands on the table.
“You know what I think about, Lisa? When you’re my age, something that feels perfectly ordinary to you right now, something everybody does without a second thought, will probably seem like a moral outrage. And your granddaughter will sit across from you at a dinner table and look at you exactly the way you’re looking at me right now.”
Lisa shook her head. “No she won’t.”