Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,67

it would present no problems….

That’s it! I suddenly realized. That’s the winning argument.

I dialed his number. “I won’t publish this with the reference to PETA as it stands. And if you don’t want to change it, you can surely sell it somewhere else. But you don’t want to do that.” I sounded a great deal more confident than I felt. “You didn’t write this for a bunch of effete intellectuals for whom the whole thing is hypothetical. You wrote this for cooks. You’re hoping that no cook will ever blithely throw a lobster into a pot without pondering the morality of his action. Isn’t that true?”

There was a long silence.

“Yes,” he said at last.

I hung up feeling victorious. Later, however, lying in bed, I thought how much easier it would have been if I’d lost the battle. This was by far the edgiest article we’d ever published, and if he’d pulled it I would have had an honorable out. I fell asleep to dream about angry subscribers descending on my office to chase me from the building and woke to the certain knowledge that I was about to lose my job. Giulio might be right: Our advertisers might be ready for articles like this one. But I was not so sure our readers were.

The night the magazine went to press, I was so jittery I couldn’t cook. Michael was out of town, working on a documentary about the heroin epidemic, so I took Nick out to eat.

“Let’s go to Honmura An.” It was the calmest restaurant I could think of, a spare, elegant space, soothing as a spa.

Walking in the door, I thought about our first visit to the restaurant ten years earlier; I’d carried Nick up the stairs. Now he towered over me. At fifteen he was almost six feet tall, with an appetite to match. He watched me order seaweed and soba, and then he asked the waitress for shrimp tempura, chicken meatballs, and a big bowl of udon with sliced duck.

“I love these shrimp,” he said as the waitress set the plate before him. The giant creatures, larger than any I’d ever seen, were flown in specially from Japan, and as Nick picked one up, a wave of nausea bubbled through me.

“Mom!” Nick looked frightened. “Are you all right?”

I waved my hands, took a few deep breaths, trying to quell the feeling. The shrimp looked just like baby lobsters. “I’m fine.”

“Are you going to faint? You’ve gone completely white. Drink this.” He handed me his glass of water.

I took a sip, concentrating on the sensation of the cold liquid sliding down my throat. I took another and felt the blood return to my head.

“What’s going on?” Nick picked up a shrimp. I looked away.

“Have you ever heard of David Foster Wallace?”

“The Infinite Jest guy? He’s Zack’s favorite writer.”

“We’re running an article of his.”

“Wow. Cool!”

“That’s what I thought. I was excited he was writing for us. And then I got the article.”

Nick picked up another enormous shrimp. “What’s wrong with it?”

“The readers are going to hate it.”

“Why?” He took a bite; the batter crackled loudly as it shattered.

I hesitated; was it fair to bring up the ethics of eating at this precise moment?

“Why?” Nick repeated, taking another shattering bite.

“We sent him to a lobster festival….”

“That doesn’t sound very hateful.”

“As he stands there watching lobsters going into the boiling water, he starts to wonder what they feel. Does it hurt? Can they feel pain? The next thing you know he’s asking whether we have the right to kill animals just because we happen to like the way they taste. In the end it comes down to whose life matters most.” I pointed at my pristine seaweed. “After all, we don’t need meat. It’s perfectly possible to stay alive without killing other creatures.”

“But don’t you think cooks should be asking themselves those questions?” Nick had stopped eating, and as he stared down at the shrimp I knew he was imagining a sleek animal gliding gracefully through a turquoise sea.

“Uncomfortable, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah. But I want to be aware of those things!” He spoke with so much heat that I remembered how it felt to be a teenager filled with ferocious passion. “Don’t you think one of the problems of the way we live is that we’re disconnected from the whole life cycle?” He stared earnestly at me before asking, “Do you want to know what I really think?”

I had the awful feeling I was about to