happy v-day

Veggie day, that is. Today marks for me 15 years as a vegetarian! To celebrate, I thought I'd blog my answers to two of the most common questions I get about being a vegetarian.

1. Why are you a vegetarian?

Well, to be honest the reasons have evolved over the years. Meat always grossed me out. Gristle, fat, veins, whatever, I thought it was gross. I started making the connection with the hunk of meat on my plate and the living thing it once was, and I could eat it no more. I made a new friend who was vegetarian, and I thought that was cool so I decided to do it too. At my friends Sasha and Melanie's 14th birthday party, I decided I was a vegetarian, and after a few days of mishaps with pepperoni pizza and KFC popcorn chicken, I really was. I have not intentionally eaten meat ever since.

The easiest way for me to explain why I am a vegetarian is this - I don't believe in loving one animal and eating another. I believe and animal is an animal is an animal. There are some animals which have been socially constructed as more acceptable to eat than others. It drives me bonkers when I hear omnivores saying things like, "oh I could never eat (insert cute cuddly animal of choice here), that would just be wrong!” I think if you're going to eat one, you should be open to eating them all. I also think that most meat eaters are hideously detached from what they're actually eating. Those sterile styrofoam trays of meat in the supermarket don't really leave people with the true image of what it is. I have the utmost respect for my uncle's fiancée and her kids, who eat the cattle they raise. I have absolutely no difficulty understanding what I am eating when I am looking at an eggplant or a soybean. It is what it is.

Then there are the ethical reasons - the factory farms and the conditions those animals are raised in, the amount of land it takes to grow feed for animals vs. the amount of land we could be feeding people from, the hormones those animals are given, the waste seeping into water systems surrounding big productions. Yuck.


2. I could never be a vegetarian, isn't it hard?

Umm, no. Picture the food you find the most repulsive, that you never want to eat. Do you have a hard time not eating that food? Me neither.

I'm not one of those militant vegetarians who tries to force it on everyone around me. I don't believe in pushing my beliefs on other people, and I expect to not have theirs pushed on me. Paul is an omnivore, and we live and eat together in harmony. It's not an issue unless people make it one.

So have a happy V-day. Eat your veggies!