Being Vegetarian

If you hang around long enough, you'll have the privilege of seeing yourself go in and out of style several times. I became an ovo-lacto vegetarian 20 years ago. It was all about the animals. I had an epiphany, realizing that there was no moral distinction between a dog and a cow, or a deer and a fish. If I wouldn't consider eating the former, I shouldn't be eating the latter. At that time, my decision was cutting-edge, kind of weird, and not at all mainstream. My being a vegetarian provoked curiosity and sometimes hostility in others -- like the summer-camp cook who lied about the ingredients in her food to "see if I could tell the difference." I was asked to provide my Biblical justification for being a vegetarian. People said it was a phase and that I was just looking for attention. My then-boyfriend (now-husband, and still a meat eater) hated it because it was a pain to go out to restaurants, the majority of which were unable or unwilling to provide an edible vegetarian entre. He hadn't yet been turned on to the many ethnic cuisines that were veggie-friendly, although I'm happy to say that has changed.

When you're a teenager or a college student, it is cool to take a radical stand, so the opposition did more to firm up my resolve than to break it. I read vegetarian magazines and bought a tattered copy of "Diet for a Small Planet" at a used book store. I knew the environmental benefits of not eating meat, and about the terrible conditions of factory farming but no one else seemed to care. It was just not an issue for most people.

Down the road a few years, it seemed to become hipper to be vegetarian. By then I had discovered that it was a healthful way to eat, and so had everyone else. The low-fat diet craze and the discovery that eating red meat was bad for your heart made my life a lot easier. Restaurants started offering more (and more palatable) veggie choices. Supermarkets started carrying meat substitutes so those of us living in rural areas no longer had to drive to a city to find a health food store. I had been a vegetarian for long enough that everyone who knew me was aware of it, so I didn't have to explain myself ALL the time.

Fast forward a few more years, and being a vegetarian was routine for me -- I didn't think about it at all. It became common enough that it was easy and the stigma was gone. By this time I had some friends with hobby farms who were pushing the local food movement, and they were mostly saying that it was OK to eat meat that was raised organically and humanely as part of an integrated organic small-farm system. The animal waste was composted for fertilizer which then fed the crops and the parts of the crops that people couldn't eat fed the animals. Among these folks, my vegetarianism was "retro." I was out of style again. I never considered going back to eating meat. It no longer appears to be food to me and I can't remember what it tastes like, so why kill animals? I wasn't swimming upstream, I was just old-school.

Now it seems like, all of a sudden, several things have arisen all at once that are going to make me cool again. For one thing, the global food crisis has been taken up by the mainstream media. Back when I used to read the "radical" vegetarian press, 20 years ago, an often-cited statistic was the one about it taking 8 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat. I can't tell you how many times I have heard those numbers repeated lately in the context of the global food crisis. Another big issue is global warming. Suddenly, Americans accept that it exists and that it is a problem. The greenhouse gases emitted by cattle are a big issue. Eating less meat is on everyone's list of things an individual can do to help cut down on global warming. Water scarcity is also going to be a factor, along with food safety, evolving ideas about animal welfare, and the use of fossil-fuel derived fertilizers.

I'm psyched -- instead of being "old-school" and "retro" I'm going to be able to say I was ahead of my time! I'm glad I didn't throw away my values when I sent my zip-leg jeans to the Salvation Army.