Drawing by Julie Seyler.

BY JULIE SEYLER

Around April 2012, I was having dinner with a friend at a Thai restaurant, and was pretty excited about ordering some Chicken Pad Thai, you know those yummy rice noodles laced with chicken, a little egg and some peanuts. I asked her what she was having. She has some food quirks and rules, but was never averse to meat. This time though, instead of a beef or chicken curry, she went with something vegetarian. And as she was telling me what she was ordering, I can only describe the look she gave me as enigmatic – basically begging me to ask what was up.

“You’re off meat these days?” I asked.

“Well, I’m reading this book, and if you read it you’d be off it also.”

“Please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I have enough concerns. I don’t want to take on the animals!”

“I won’t,” she said.

And with that, I ordered my Chicken Pad Thai, and asked her, “So what else is new?” But of course, the pink elephant was on the table. And as much as my sensible inner voice screamed, “Don’t ask!” my curiosity of the secret knowledge that my girlfriend possessed was 10 times greater, and before that plate of sauteed chicken with slithering noodles was placed in front of me, I had to ask, “OK. OK. Tell me about the book.”

She was in the middle of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals.” She regaled me with how the chicken industry treats chickens – how they fatten them up with steroids, and stuff them into 2″x4” windowless cages.

“But what about kosher chickens?”

“Worse!”

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