A Meaty Issue

I still remember the moment to this day: standing in the kitchen, trying to conjure up the words to explain to my mom how there was this girl, and she was different, and I thought I might be like her, and no, it wasn’t a lifestyle choice but something that was really true, felt deep down inside.

And I still remember my mom’s incredulous looks, and the disappointment in her voice when she looked me square in the eye and said “Are you sure you’re a vegetarian?”

That was in high school. I had gone on a science trip, and for some reason, spent an exceeding amount of time with the school’s foremost vegan, she who won the Concours d’art oratoire, like, a zillion years running with her speech about how awesome it was to be a vegan and if you weren’t a vegan then you probably weren’t that awesome. I remember one part of her speech was about how being a vegan meant she had more choices than other people in terms of diet, which is technically false, because of – well, logic; but also kind of true, because there’s about 400 varieties of beans and legumes and curds and whatnot that meat-eaters don’t even know exist, let alone serve up for dinner.

So, on this one particular trip, she lent me a book (isn’t that always where it starts? Curse you, literature! Socrates’s dire predictions were true!) that seemed pretty persuasive. And I returned home struggling with how to come out to my mom.

Because in our house? Not eating meat was an unheard of thing, right up there with regular church attendance. Like we were some sort of bizarro rednecks: if He happened to drop by, Jesus would be welcome to dinner, as long as he liked his steak medium-rare and didn’t talk about Himself.

Like any good mother who thinks that her daughter’s gone completely wacko, my mother tested my resolve.

“You’ll have to cook for yourself”

“That’s fine.”

“I’ll need you to come to the grocery store with me.”

“Alright.”

When those two failed, she pulled out the big guns:

“I’m making teriyaki chicken wings for dinner.”

And that was that. I was a vegetarian for all of about four hours.

It’s kind of strange, but twice I’ve taken up smoking on a regular basis (once in 2000 and once in 2004, both because of roommate conflicts) and twice I’ve quit cold turkey, no problem. I’m not trying to be flippant about a serious issue, like “Oooh, I’m so special, look at me, quitting smoking is easy, tra lalala, everyone should do it!” But it’s just that smoking doesn’t quite do it for me the way a pile of BBQ spare ribs does.

And that’s the real key, isn’t it? We all have our addictions, our crutches that allow us to deal with the insanity of the world. Some people smoke, some people drink, some people watch reality TV, some people watch reality TV with plate full of bacon.

But lately (as in the last year or so) a strange thing has happened: I don’t quite have the same taste for it. Reality TV, I mean. Also meat.

I don’t quite know how it happened. I mean, I still think meat is both tasty and delicious. And the whole “it’s wrong to hurt animals” thing is both true and yet somehow totally irrelevant in my mind. I’ve always been of the mind that if you couldn’t kill dinner yourself, you shouldn’t eat meat. I’ve never had to prove myself in that regard, but I’m pretty sure I could follow through.

I think what really got me was a)the nagging voice in the back of my head that tries to get me to live sustainably, and b)the discovery that there’s plenty of good non-meat food to eat out there.

In terms of sustainability, it finally sunk in that meat is just not an efficient source of food. You pump in tonnes of grain and water, you get back a few hundred pounds of meat. Sorry, Bessie, but that’s just not a good return on your investment. And, to make matters worse, in order to get a better return, Bessie gets pumped full of steroids and antibiotics and other crap which now means that the average age of menstruation is, like, 11 in girls (14 in boys).

In terms of diet, I had the good fortune to have a vegetarian roommate who loved to cook, and share what she cooked, and was a good cook. And all of a sudden, I’m like – damn, this is good! (This is in contrast to a vegetarian roommate whom I lived with for all of two months, who once came upon a pork chop I was defrosting and snarked “Who left animal in the microwave?”).

And I’ve also got the support of my body, who actually started telling me some nights “No, you don’t want any chicken in your stir-fry”. It was a little terrifying at first, like “Whose body are you and what have you done with my body, which used to pack away 6 pieces of cold KFC for breakfast?”

So it’s not that I’m meatless, it’s just that I meat-less. And while that’ not going to win me the Concours d’art oratoire anytime soon, at least it’s a start.