Above, a reading from the audiobook edition of On Eating, read by me. We could only offer a snippet or it would be too long. Here is a longer excerpt from the middle of “On Lamb,” an early chapter of the book.

Lamb was the meat I loved, the only meat I prepared, but it is a meat of a loss of innocence. I think of Catholic Mass, of Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (have mercy on us). I think of paintings of Jesus holding a lamb—who does that lamb represent? It bleeds in Jesus’s arms, harkening back to his own crucifixion, his own taking on of our sins, and is an image from the Book of Revelation, about when Jesus returns to bring us all to heaven (or send us to hell). He is the lamb; he shows us the lamb.

A lamb is a symbol of purity and innocence, a lamb is “sacrificial.” Its death is meaningful for what it represents, not as a death unto itself. Lambs are baby sheep. They are one of the few animals killed for food who retains its name in death and life: Is this a sign of respect or its opposite? The meat of a full-grown sheep is mutton, which doesn’t have the same cachet, the same culinary ring to it as lamb. There’s nothing sacrificed, nothing gained, through the death of an old sheep. A lamb, though, doesn’t have to die. Is that why it tastes so good?

And how does it taste? Why was it so delicious to me from the beginning? I have my memories of its flavor, of how it was different from steak or pork or chicken—more special. Could I eat it now, in secret, for a reminder? Yes, but it wouldn’t taste the same to me as it had when I was a child anyway; it would be inseparable from the life taken. To eat lamb now would feel grotesque, cannibalistic. I think about it and feel nausea. Far, far away from the joy and hunger of me as gluttonous toddler, competitive teenager collecting bones, young adult playing the part of hopeful gourmand, stuffing her seventy-five-dollar meat with garlic cloves. So I google, “what does lamb taste like,” and I see it described as gamey with a hint of sweetness; firm, yet tender. Most lamb is “grass-finished,” they say, as though describing a pot that’s been given a glaze, but American lamb can be “grain-finished,” which might cut the earthiness to soothe a palate reared on industrial beef and chicken.

I loved the lamb chops most of all, the racks, with the bones right there. You could collect the bones, as my brother and I did, to see who ate more; this might be why I’m now, as my mom says, “the Rain Man of oysters”—I always know how many everyone at the table has eaten, without consciously paying attention. They were red and tender, and I read now that they have a lot of fat, which might have accounted for my preference. I’ve always loved fat, the fattier the better.

When lamb was spiced, as for the gyros from the Old Olive Tree, that was incomparable—when the fat and earthiness of the meat came together with garlic, oregano, cumin, marjoram, rosemary, and thyme, then it was plopped atop tzatziki sauce (the only yogurt I ate, because I didn’t know then that it was yogurt) and a fresh, pillowy pita. Yes, there was nothing better than lamb, when I didn’t think about the lamb itself.

In my early vegetarian experiments, I was taken to a vegan restaurant called Foodswings in Williamsburg by friends, and because I loved lamb so much, I wanted to try their seitan gyro. How bad could wheat gluten made with the same spices, cut the same way, be? It was too uncanny for me to eat beyond one bite, and this—years before I’d make the full transition—let me know that if I were giving up meat, I would be giving it up. There would be no imitation that could satisfy the same urges, and my only real meat urge, the one I couldn’t fathom giving up, was lamb.

There is little factory farming involved in the raising and slaughter of sheep. They’re raised on grass, as they’re supposed to be, unlike cattle, who are often grain-fed in the industrial system that the corn and soy farmers rely upon to keep them in business; it’s a cheap way of fattening the cattle. Lamb is neither as cheap nor as common, though the fact that they feed on mother’s milk and grass alone means there’s less money for a farmer to spend: They’re not buying grain. Those who eat it understand its sense of occasion and perhaps even its seasonality, coming as it does around the spring equinox, in time for Easter.

A lamb is usually slaughtered at six to eight months to provide forty-six to forty-nine pounds of meat. They’re adorable animals, all covered in white fluff with their telltale white ears. At Easter time, when they’re most often eaten as a celebration of spring and Christ’s resurrection, they’re also depicted alive—in decorations, on cakes, where their fur is buttercream and their faces different pieces of pastel candy. The lamb, slaughtered; the lamb, beloved. Both at the table, for dinner and dessert.

In regions where there isn’t sufficient land for cattle to roam, lamb is a popular meat. “It is rare to find anything but lamb at butcher shops in this part of the world; there isn’t enough grazing land for cows, and goats are too destructive to keep in large, uncontrolled flocks,” wrote Anissa Helou in Saveur in 2009, about the prevalence of sheep in North Africa and the Middle East. Sheep were likely first domes- ticated in the region over 11,000 years ago, for meat, wool, and their milk. She notes that after leaving her native Lebanon, she found lamb to be treated simply in the West or quite rare in the United States outside of restaurants. Perhaps this was because it was, as she writes, an “expressive” meat—a meat that tasted of the ground it once lived upon, a meat that couldn’t be boxed in.

Our cultures provide our tastes and preferences, but our cultures are informed, bound to our lands. Why was I so into lamb as an American child? Why didn’t I reject its gaminess, its terroir, its evidence of life? It wasn’t a preternatural degree of sophistication. It was simply part of my own initial making, at the hands of grandmother, mother: a taste for it was regarded as natural, a birthright.

“Nothing can be as local as what emerges from the ter- roir of a single self,” wrote Charlotte Druckman, when covering the Pauillac lamb of Bordeaux. I read about these lambs from a French region known mainly for wine and realize Charlotte has told me about this piece before, about the notion of a terroir of the self. It’s the kind of idea I get excited about, that we all reflect the flavors of those places where we lay down roots, the flavors of all our meals and lessons and curiosities. I hadn’t realized this came from reporting on lamb; likely she hadn’t told me because I don’t eat meat, and friends assume I’ll be upset that not everyone on earth is a vegetarian yet.

These Bordeaux lamb are born of sheep who graze on the riverbanks; after subsisting solely on mother’s milk for two and a half months, they’re slaughtered. Without any grazing, they’re less gamey than one might expect. Lamb is specific like this. In Iceland, prized flocks of sheep wander the island until September, when they’re herded into their specific farms. This is when the lamb, a local commodity so economically prized it has a Designation of Origin from the European Union, is killed. “Icelandic lamb” or “íslenskt lambakjöt” is certified to its terroir, to the local processes. The lamb is not protected from slaughter, but from economic competition and market confusion.

Older breeds of sheep only give birth once per year to one to two lambs. Their birthing season tends to come in the spring, and come summer, the ewes will finish milking, go into heat, and then become pregnant again by a ram. The lambs that become meat are usually the males, who won’t be producing more, though one or two will be saved to continue the cycle of birthing. When they’re no longer producing lamb, sheep lose their purpose. But lamb—it’s desirable for maintaining its terroir on the plate, for giving up its short life.

That’s the interesting thing about prized livestock: It’s not for their own sake that they’re special. But lamb having this status in so many cultures as important, as specific, might be why it’s not common in the United States, where industrial agriculture and grain-fed livestock are prioritized for efficiency and profit, not flavor.

I want to know why my grandma loved lamb and served it the way other Americans might put beef or ham on the table, but there’s no good answer. “She adopted a lot of traditions on her own,” my uncle Rich said. Though she grew up in a house among German family, the Hoelzers, there was no one overarching ethnic influence on her cooking. Like I didn’t have the typical Puerto Rican abuela, I didn’t have a grandma either who passed on some sort of culinary tradition beyond curiosity, dedication, and care. Every time I go looking for my culinary roots, I hit rock at her: We eat this because grandma did; we make it this way because grandma did. My ethnic culinary lineage begins in Brooklyn and ends out in Smithtown, with a tributary leading down to the Caribbean.

She had more she wanted to do in her life than raise children, maybe—more to offer. “This woman gave up her whole life for us losers,” my mom said over a martini. What I can imagine is that she used food to travel and to learn from within the confines of the suburban family home. I might have inherited this through genetics, but here, I think, nurture did more of the work to gradually nudge me toward food. To make food the thing that would finally make me a little bit more free, like I’d hoped for.

Though lamb had been the last meat that I could give up, I did give it up. That meat, that dead baby animal, that I thought I couldn’t live without: I could. I could live without so many things I’d become convinced I needed, that I thought were integral to the person I am. This is what my twenties were about: assertions, refusals, course corrections. I could be single; I could be platinum blond and bare my skin; I could give up lamb and not replace it with seitan.

I’d worried that because I didn’t fit the mold of a food writer I saw a magazine like Lucky Peach establishing, I couldn’t write about food at all. But then I realized that my eager omnivorous upbringing had provided my tongue enough context already: I knew what people were after when they replaced the lamb with seitan; I knew where the failures were, the nuances, the imbalances. My veganism wasn’t so animal-rights-driven that I wouldn’t eat at an omnivorous restaurant with a great vegan dish, and that also meant I wouldn’t pretend a dry cupcake was good when it wasn’t. I’d gone vegan because I’d found out I could do so without really sacrificing my obsession with food, with the joy that it provided me every single day. Couldn’t I use food writing to show people this was possible?