vegetarianism

I have been a vegetarian for the past 7 months. I don’t normally tell people; only when they directly ask me. This is in contrast to many vegetarians who wish to make it known that they are special at all times. The first question posed to a newly exposed vegetarian is “why?”. The answer is typically related to animal rights, politics, or health. While these are all reasons with their own bases, many of my reasons are not even related to those topics. Allow me to tell you some of them:

1)Quality of food. People are willing to eat really, really shitty meat. They seem less likely to eat moldy breads or rotten fruit. There is a huge range in the quality of meat; from frozen fish-sticks to freshly prepared salmon. On the other hand, oatmeal is -basically- always the same. Consider your personal tastes; the dish without meat is far more consistent.

2) Cost. It’s baffling to hear or see things like “I couldn’t afford to be vegetarian”. It may be true that if you compare the menu of ‘Billy’s fuckin’ meat deli’ to ‘The concerned world café and lounge” that the vegetarian place will be more expensive. Consider that there’s always a surcharge for pretentiousness. Shop at the grocery store. Buy enough to eat for the week with meat, and the next week do the same without meat. There is no possible way that the non-meat week is more expensive.

3) Excess. You can’t eat sausage and bacon for breakfast, cheeseburgers for lunch and fried chicken for dinner every day for too long. You have to calculate your hedonism. You can eat a lot of vegetarian food, breakfast lunch and dinner, and suffer no real discomfort and no health consequences. Now if you’re favorite vegetarian foods are ice cream, american cheese and maple syrup, you might be an exception. In that case you ought to die anyway.

4) Displacement. When you stop eating meat, you don’t just eat the same amounts of other foods. You eat more of them. As a result, you begin to eat a wider variety of foods, and eat more of them at a time. Those who think that a vegetarian diet is missing something(besides the obvious) severely lack imagination. Even if you ultimately choose to eat meat, I suggest trying vegetarianism just to have your eyes opened to the entire world of food. It’s good.

Those are some simple day-to-day reasons I am a vegetarian. Notice how for the most part I didn’t give you reasons not to eat meat, but reasons to be vegetarian, in a positive sense. You can eat a huge variety of high-quality cheap food in large amounts. Of course, it’s possible that you could do the same, with meat included. In my experience it’s far less likely. We all get trapped in the “every meal needs meat” mentality; and that’s what I’m quite glad to be without and couldn’t go back to.