I eat the fish and the eggs and the cheese, but only eat meat once a year (usually on Fat Tuesday).
Initially, there were three overlapping reasons:
1. There was a girl. We went out for a while. She was a vegetarian. I figured I'd return to campus after summer break as a vegetarian, but she stopped talking to me, mysteriously. (not the best breakup strategy, not talking to someone.) Sigh.
2. During that summer, I was visiting family in Germany and South Africa. That's Germany cold cuts for breakfast, sausage for lunch & deer for dinner and South Africa, home of the braai. A braai is like a barbecue, only without the freakin' potato salad. Everywhere we went, uncles were like "oh, the American family is here, we must greet them with a proper braai!" and we'd glut down steak, boerwors (a beef sausage) with the occasional dead chicken to break the monotony. The only relief was when I stayed with Uncle Nick, who was a transcendental meditator and vegetarian. It was such a break, I felt so much better for those two or three days, I decided to try it all the time.
3. I figured it was a good way to build character. It was a sort of my way of refining my self, working on the mind/body interface, whatever. It was about self control. (and this was the most important reason, although the hardest to explain. it's certainly the reason I stuck with it for years.)
Lemme think, that was... uh... 1989.
Sometime after that, the first summer or so, a conservative family friend tried to put the fear in me about "the pernicious anemia," so I decided it might make good health sense to eat a little red meat every once in a while. Once a year seemed easy enough. Reminds me where I come from, what good ribs taste like, that sort of thing.
And since then, I've pretty much come across a lot of the other concerns stated above, so I'm pretty glad to keep with it. It's more efficient, agriculturally, and it's less cruel - less *needlessly* cruel, I should say. Those reasons have risen to the top of the list now.
Though, as I said before, I eat the fish. Most of the ones I get are what you'd call "free range," I suppose. But that's just an excuse. I've killed enough of them in my life that I know where it comes from and how it's done. I just like 'em as food.
I should also mention that I'm not picky about it. If I'm in someone's house (someone who isn't a close friend) and I'm given something with meat in it, I'll eat it. And when I'm places where I don't know the language, it's usually not worth the hassle. I ate a brain curry once thinking it was a well-done cauliflower. Mmm. It registered about halfway through the meal that no way was that a cauliflower and that the consistency was about the same as soft sweetbreads. |
