This may soon change.

In my case, vegetarianism was simply a peaceful, principled, meat-free existence. Like any good "-ism," it required more time spent pondering than acting. Now, thanks to British artist Sue Coe's aptly titled Dead Meat, my down pillows squawk with cries of vengeance, and my sole pair of leather shoes clomps on tile floors like cloven hooves.

Coe--also a vegetarian--spent several years making the killing-floor circuit among slaughterhouses in the U.S. and England.

The result is this unnerving but impressive collection of graphically stark sketches, accompanied by Coe's own journalistic observations. (Alexander Cockburn's informative, and extremely thorough, introductory essay on the history of the meat industry spans the first thirty-five pages of the book.)

The premise of Dead Meat is quite literal. Coe captures in her sketches a blood-bathed world that is gloomy, dark and surrealistic. Her characters--shrieking animals, sometimes half-dead, and the manic line workers who shadow them--would feel right at home on the film sets of Terry Gilliam's Brazil or Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Coe's figures have sad, unbelieving eyes and detailed frowns. Misery--of the animals and the workers--is a constant. Heads hang, tongues hang, limbs hang, carcasses hang. Coe approaches her mise-en-scne with little delicacy; no concession is granted to the potential churning stomachs of squeamish readers like myself. Those of us who, at the sight of something icky, have intestinal reactions akin to an unbalanced washing machine in the middle of a spin cycle, are a captive, if mesmerized, audience.

Dead Meat might easily rank with Mapplethorpe and Madonna as a quick fix for the voyeuristic, but its many layers cannot be tamed by a cursory thumb-through. Coe's drawings are intricate, detailed, and complex. Hectic and crowded slaughterhouse scenes are captured in candid stills, like frames of a film, often with bloody subplots unfolding in the background.

For example, "Cut and Run" depicts a slaughterhouse worker, wearing a butcher knife in a holster at his hip, elbow-deep in the abdomen of a hog suspended from a chain. The hog's severed head falls to the floor as the man plucks out the animal's innards; other animals' entrails lie at his feet. Interestingly, the slaughterman casts no shadow on the wall behind him. His victim does.

Not all of Coe's sketches are this straightforwardly grotesque. "Modern Man Followed by the Ghosts of His Meat" depicts a contemporary figure shadowed on a dark night by the spirits of his own sustenance, long since digested and forgotten. While he despairingly clutches a McDonald's bag to his chest, the phantoms of meals past (pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, chickens) trail behind him, sneering and laughing at some darkly comic karmic punchline. In a nearby butcher's window hang less fortunate incarnations of this motley crew. A lone piglet peers from the back seat of a nearby car with a vanity plate that reads: "MEAT."

This kind of unsubtle, emotional tweaking of a reader's conscience is, thankfully, relatively rare in Coe's work. No one should register surprise when Coe addresses the undeniable fact that animals arrive at a slaughterhouse alive and leave it in chunks. Indeed, arguments on this very point are what one invariably expects from an animal-rights activist who has spent a little too much of her free time observing mass slaughter. But Coe does little outright evangelizing, instead focusing on the inevitably--but often unnecessarily--cruel treatment to which live animals are subjected during their stays at the meat motels. While it is always apparent that she has very definite and strong opinions on what goes on inside the plants, Coe uses detailed, frank, sensate observations rather than pleading, stop-the-madness rhetoric to accompany her sketches. (Coe spent several years researching the book. She persuaded meat and slaughterhouse companies, who were understandably reluctant, to allow her entry into the factories to see how the animals are actually killed and processed. On the occasions when company officials refused, with the help of other workers she posed as a prospective worker herself.)

Coe's descriptions of cattle with eye infections, sheep with exposed intestines, pigs with unnatural growths, are almost disturbingly matter-of-fact. In one instance, she describes the killing of a young calf, or "veal": "One stunned veal swings towards us, hanging upside down, chained by the legs. I have seen a lot of animals not properly stunned before throat cutting, but this one is stunned. It's a misconception that animals are dead at this stage. It's important that the heart pumps the blood out of the animal, once its throat has been cut....The tongue hangs out of the mouth. The man cuts the carotid artery. Because of the weight, this hole becomes elongated, looking like the throat has been cut, but it has not. The blood comes out like a red glass rod, a moving, solid rod. The next stunned veal is waiting to come down the line. I am thankful not to be splattered with blood, but notice my shoes are covered, and I am standing by slivers of flesh. The veal then swings along the line, with a slight push, and the blood continues to drip. The veals wait in line to be decapitated and to have their hooves cut off by power tools. As I watch, I see one veal that is about to be decapitated--alive. Although almost completely drained of blood, this veal has come out of the stun, which means there was not enough electricity or the...bolt did not hit the right point."

Hamburger-chomping Americans cling loyally to the sentimental notion that their meat matures in green valleys or in fields awash in amber waves of grain, with plenty of open acreage to roam and romp and play happy little livestock games. These are the blissful idiots targeted by Sue Coe's pen, not the line workers with the visible blood on their hands, whose only ulterior motives are to support their families. Coe makes a point of noting that the consumer with the bottomless wallet, who believes that good steaks are born in shrink-wrapped packages, allows the horrors of the slaughterhouses to continue by not asking questions and not caring to look closer.

E. coli, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease--the dreaded human equivalent of "Mad Cow" disease--and other food-borne illnesses are serious threats these days. (More recently, the recent American Cancer Society warned against a diet heavy in animal fats--especially red meat.) Although neither Mad Cow nor CJD have been detected in the U.S. so far, the fact that U.S. agribusinesses have for years relied upon ruminant feeding (the practice of feeding livestock a feed mix that contains byproducts of other--possibly infected--animals) makes the consumption of animal products a tricky proposition. The meat industry recently volunteered to temporarily ban ruminant feeding, but this is small reassurance in light of the average eight- to ten-year incubation period of CJD.

The threat of such diseases can also be greatly increased by unsafe slaughtering practices, and by the use of diseased, crippled and generally unhealthy animals for feedstock--a point Coe would have surely made had the mad cow threat been recognized during her slaughterhouse stint. (For those whose first instinct is to trust frequent claims that U.S. butchering practices are as safe as they could be: note that few advances in meat inspection have been made since the Food and Drug Act of 1906, and there is strong political and industry pressure to weaken even these safeguards.)

Sue Coe nobly refrains from emphasizing health concerns as her primary argument; she acknowledges these questions, but the intestinal well-being of meat eaters does not motivate her crusade. Still, anyone who is not moved toward more careful and conscientious carnage consumption by Coe's bloody sketches would do well to adopt Alexander Cockburn's reasoning: never eat a dead animal unless you know how well it lived.

As for me:  I'll stick to carrots.

Freelance writer Amanda Toering is also the Circulation Manager for the Texas Observer; she freely distributes happed upon meat products to otherObserver staff members.