I'm madly carnivorous but am giving up meat and dairy for Lent

"I don't believe I have eaten any animal from the family Rodentia. Have you?" my friend David e-mailed me last weekend from Mississippi.

He asked because he was spending the weekend roasting a fat beaver ("It is quite disgusting," he admitted) for his Eastern Orthodox Church's last meat chowdown before Lent, which comes later this year than the penitential season for Catholics and liturgical Protestants.

I had just come home from a smoked pork ribs pig-out as my farewell to meat eating. Though Orthodox Lent doesn't start until tomorrow, we've been meat-free since last Sunday and will be until Easter on April 27. But, yes, as a matter of fact, I have eaten rodent flesh. When I was a kid growing up in rural south Louisiana, we would eat stewed squirrel in brown gravy in the fall.

The thought of stewed squirrel today makes me queasy. In my childhood, squirrel meat was a seasonal delicacy. In my father's childhood, it was a necessity. He grew up in the Depression. Many was the night that the only meat on the supper table was squirrels he and his brother picked out of the trees with their air rifles that day.

I suspect that's why we ate so much steak in my '70s childhood. For people of my dad's generational experience, being able to feed one's family steak had deep emotional and cultural resonance. And if it wasn't steak, it was some other kind of beef or pork or chicken. Every. Single. Night. We weren't remotely rich, but compared with what my father had grown up eating, we dined like Windsors.

Have ordinary people in any society in history ever eaten as bountifully as Americans do today? I am madly, passionately, deliriously carnivorous and have come to think of having meat twice a day as my constitutional right as an American. Which, when seen from a global or historical perspective, is crazy.

The austere Orthodox Lent – no meat or dairy products for almost two months – reminds those observing the fast how blessed we are in ordinary time and how much we take for granted amid our prosperity. Lent draws us back from forgetting, from moral and spiritual lassitude, and teaches a lesson that most of us in this land of plenty could stand to learn.

This is especially true with regard to our diet. We have come to expect that our food will always be there, such that eating becomes an automatic, unreflective act. There is spiritual danger in this. The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel constantly spoke on holiness, on the command to face life with an attitude of awe (a virtue that can be philosophical as well as religious). Holiness, said Rabbi Heschel, entails "intuition for the creaturely dignity of all things and their preciousness to God."

In that sense, Eastern Lent, with its command to abstain from animal products, forces us to confront how much we depend on the sacrifices of living creatures to sustain our own lives. For Orthodox Christians, and even more for kosher-keeping Orthodox Jews, the phrase "you are what you eat" has profound moral meaning. One is simply not permitted to be indifferent to the animal products one eats, how they animals were raised or how they were killed.

A church friend who had been reading Michael Pollan's bestseller, The Omnivore's Dilemma, said the book convinced him that the industrial way of raising livestock for human consumption was – his word – "evil." I thought that a bit harsh, but then I read the Pollan book and had to agree.

It wasn't simply the ordinary cruelty with which cattle, pigs and poultry are raised in confinement. It wasn't simply the dehumanizing effect of mechanized mass slaughter (though we're content to fob that grim labor off onto Mexican immigrants). It was the corrupted spirit that comes with viewing living creatures as mere products that can be folded, spindled and genetically mutilated beyond the bounds of natural limits, without troubling our consciences.

The thing is, I once knew how evil factory farming of livestock was. Several years ago, I read Matthew Scully's stunning 2003 book, Dominion, in which the conservative essayist, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, made a galvanizing moral critique of the way we treat animal life, especially farm animals. I previously thought that kind of thing preoccupied only the minds of liberal goo-goos. Mr. Scully's powerful work challenged, largely from the right, everything I believed about the American way of eating meat.

But then I forgot, over time, my ethical awareness of the call to mercy dissipating in everydayness. Truth to tell, I'm lazy and subject to the spoiled-child ethic so common today. When we latter-day Americans want something, we have grown unaccustomed to denying ourselves for higher reasons. We live as we like in our individual bodies and deny the consequences to our communities and our idividual souls.

Which is why we need Lent. To remember who we are and what is asked of us. To sit down to a steaming platter of succulent pork ribs or, God help us, gamey beaver hash with a new appreciation for what it means to live as responsible stewards of creation.

Orthodox Easter is coming at the end of April, and meat will be back on my family's table. But to the best I'm able to provide, it will be meat raised by Christian small farmers in the Dallas area or otherwise produced in a morally responsible way.

Yes, it's more expensive to buy meat from a real farm, not off an assembly line. But as Mr. Pollan has pointed out, "Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation."

Most of us can afford to eat ethically sound beef, chicken, pork and lamb. The more you think about it – and boy, oh, boy, does the arduous pilgrimage through the tofu-ridden Land of the Vegans force you to think hard about meat – how can we afford not to?

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. This column originally appeared in that paper. Rod is also a regular contributor to Come Receive the Light, the national Orthodox Christian radio broadcast, and "Just Thinking," an OCN podcast that examines current events and social trends from an Orthodox Christian point of view.