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The moment of reckoning was months, if not years, in the making.
September 17, 2017.
Sunday at the annual Brooklyn Book Festival.
Outdoor tables celebrate the latest releases: hardcovers, paperbacks, graphic novels, major publishers and independent labels. It is a banquet for book lovers.
After a morning of poring and purchasing, we are ready for lunch. Borough Hall in Brooklyn is a granite valley of courthouses and schools. Most restaurants are closed on the weekend. But there, on the corner, the Country Chicken Café is open. Grilled chicken sandwiches for two.
And then they arrive. Gelatinous slabs of pink and white flesh stranded on a bit of white bread. A seemingly undulating pale mass of muscle. Revolting.
Simultaneously, my husband and I lift our heads from our plates and look deeply at each other. In an act of revelatory communion, we both decide, nonverbally at first, and then in a burst of language – No more.
No more meat.No more chicken.