I recently went vegetarian. Like most good Americans, it took a movie to help me see the error of my ways. The movie was Food INC and it scared the crap out of me. But what disturbed me most was the footage of the meat processing plants where they literally had these pigs on a conveyor belt into a gas chamber and then the dead pigs would come out of the gas chamber in a pile on the conveyor belt and then were dumped into god knows what kind of huge death receptacle.
The first thing I thought of when I saw that was this:
Then, the next thing I thought of was this:
My kitty Albert
And before I knew it all I could think of whenever I ate meat was Nazis killing my cat.
So, you know, that was bad. It’s been probably about, oh, 3 months now of not eating meat, and for the most part it’s going pretty good. The hard part about all of this is that I didn’t give up meat because I didn’t like it, I gave it up because I was traumatized. I loved eating meat. It tasted great. It smelled great, and the majority of street food contains meat. I love street food. Granted, I rarely purchased meat at the grocery store and hardly ever cooked it myself, but damn I liked me a good greasy diner burger or a juicy steak at a restaurant.
I’m really fortunate in that I also really like other food groups, and there’s no way I could ever go vegan because I love me some cheese like, um something that really loves stuff. I was trying to come up with a clever comparison but I really failed. My point being, I have other options and most of my home cooking is pretty much vegetarian anyway.
So far so good. My grandma’s been a vegetarian for over 30 years and she also happens to be the fittest 80 year old I know. She’s running races still for pete’s sake. So I can totally do this. I just need to figure out how to get my greasy snack-food fix. This is especially important if I plan to continue drinking alcohol and/or menstruating with any regularity. My greatest fear about going veg is that I’ll be fine for years and years and then one day I’ll be a bit hungover and also having PMS and I’ll be driving down the street and I will catch a whiff of fried chicken from a KFC and suddenly loose all my self control and this will happen:
Bucket of Yummy
I really hope that doesn’t happen though because you know those grease stains are a BITCH to get out.
-Girl Normal
samho13
July 28, 2010
Don’t worry, I’ve been a vegetarian for 10 years and still drink plenty of alcohol. It gets easier, trust me. At first I would crave baby-back ribs (they were my absolute favorite) but the more I became educated on how animals are slaughtered, the less even the smell appealed to me. Now the smell of meat is actually a bit of a put off. Keep going, and good luck!
DJ
July 28, 2010
Food Inc was an eye opener for me as well. I definitely focus more on whole foods in order to avoid pink slime from the fast food dives.