How It Feels To Be Vegetarian Me
Tori M

 

I am vegetarian but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only vegetarian outside of India who doesn’t try to convert her friends to vegetarianism.
I remember the day that I became vegetarian. Up until that Thursday in February of 2011, I had dined with my family every night. Each meal that my mother cooked consisted of a protein, usually chicken or steak, vegetables, and a carb. The only vegetarians I knew were aunts that lived in distant towns. They appeared to dine exclusively on tofu and thai takeout. We knew these women, but we never stopped eating our steak dinners when they came to visit. We observed their eating habits with curiosity while we enjoyed our usual meals. The more venturesome would try a bite of tofu parmigiana or a spoonful or miso soup when these aunts came to visit, but thought nothing of it once they had left town.
These meals seemed peculiar to some, but they were a novelty to me. My favorite vegetarian delicacy was breaded eggplant. Glasses without lenses to a hipster blogger. Not only did I enjoy the dish, but I didn’t mind my aunts knowing it. I usually complemented their cooking, asking them to explain how it was made. I’d say something like, “This is amazing. I totally see why you’re vegetarian.” Usually the aunt would smile and raise her eyebrows at me as if to say “don’t let your father hear you say that” as is often said in my home. If my mom happened to try a dish with me, she’d compliment it vaguely and offer to heat me up a chicken breast to eat later. But even so, I was the first “would-be-a-vegetarian-if-meat-didn’t-taste-so-good” omnivore, and I hope PETA will please take notice.
During this period, every vegetarian I met seemed to sense my vulnerability the second they saw me. They liked to have me sample their favorite “protein substitutes” and hear which ones I liked and how they compared to the flavors of meats they hadn’t eaten in years. They frequently took me out for meals just to hear my opinions, which seemed strange to me because I liked the meals so much I might have paid for them myself. Only they didn’t know it. Non-vegetarians were not so excited at the prospect of dining with me. They deplored any flower child tendencies in me, but I was their Victoria nonetheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby steakhouses, to the meat industry- everybody’s Victoria.
But changes came on that Thursday in February, as I was picking at the breaded chicken on my plate during dinner. I had sat down to eat, as an omnivore, as Victoria. When I began to feel nauseous at the prospect of eating another bite of the deceased bird on my plate, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered an appetite change. I was not Victoria of Outback Steakhouse anymore, I was a new vegetarian. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in my dietary choices, I became an instant herbivore- warranted not to frequent a butcher shop or deli counter.
But I am not tragically vegetarian. There is no great sorrow damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my book of vegetarian recipes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the shouting mob of activists who hold that mankind has done nature wrong and who gets their feelings all hurt about a friend who orders pork barbeque. Even in the dawn to midnight marathon that is my life, I have seen that the world is to those who stand in their convictions regardless of a little meat more or less. No I do not weep at the patrons of McDonalds- I am too busy looking for high-protein snack ideas online.
Someone is always at my table reminding me that I live in a world of omnivores. It fails to change my course. My last plate of breaded chicken is two years in the past. The dietary changes were successful and the girl is not anemic, thank you. That inner monologue that made a vegetarian out of potential life-long chick-fil-a customer said “It’s an animal!” The fork I put down next to my half eaten plate said, “You don’t need it!”; and my stomach said “Have some boca burgers!” I am running at the sound of the gun and cannot return to borrow it, shoot a deer and dine on venison for three weeks longer. Giving up dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets is the price I pay for a clean conscience, and the choice was not with me. It was my inevitable course and worth all the money my aunt spent taking me to obscure asian restaurants in the city. No one on earth ever had a greater chance to impress the football team with their ability to refrain from eating a burger at Steak’n’Shake. It is thrilling to think- to know that for any food I order, I shall get twice as much admiration or twice as much ridicule if I ever were to cave and order my fries with bacon bits. It is quite exciting to incite the curiosity of my peers, with them not knowing whether to applaud my willpower or convince me to try pigs-in-a-blanket.
The position of my meat consuming friends is much more difficult. No river-polluting slaughterhouse or meatpacking industry pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark cow ghost chews grass wistfully in my dreams while I’m asleep in bed. The game of eating the same foods as one’s acquaintances is never so exciting as the game of planning your own unusual diet.
I do not always feel vegetarian. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Victoria-who-loves-chicken-nuggets before the thursday night. I feel most vegetarian when I am eating at a restaurant with no suitable protein substitutes.
For instance at Mcdonalds. “In the world’s most popular fast food chain” I feel vegetarian. Among the thousand Big Mac combo meals, I am a small drink and a bag of apple slices from the kids menu, overpowered by the pervasive smell of greasy, animal by-product soaked fries. I am overwhelmed by the scent, but through it all, I sip my drink slowly and stick to my animal friendly and heart healthy life choices. When surrounded by the unwrapped burgers and overflowing fries on red plastic trays, I do; and going home to hummus and raw sugar snap peas but reveals them again.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A meat-eater is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit at a table in the swanky vegan restuarant Sublime with my omnivore parents, my vegetarianism comes. We enter chatting about the desserts we will both enjoy and are seated by the well-dressed waiters. In the normal way that restuarants bring food to tables, we are faced with complimentary polenta squares. It loses no time on common foods like chips and salsa, it gets right to the unusual snacks that make non-vegetarians wary. It caresses the teeth and causes little stress on the digestive system with its soft flavorful appetizers. The dishes grow more adventurous as the meal goes on and attacks the sensibilities, breaking those that suggest applesauce cannot replace butter in a recipe. My taste buds exults in these new and interesting favors. I consider going full-on vegan, protesting outside of Purdue factories and passing petitions to end factory farming around door to door. My excitement is barely noticeable, like a cow in a pasture. I don’t want to slaughter anything- give pain, give death to any creature I do not know. But the meal ends. The waiters carry out the coffee and soy creamer, bringing our check to the table. I examine my parents carefully, listening to my mother assert that the “chicken” picatta didn’t really fool her.
“Good apple pie they have here,” she remarks, scraping it from a small plate with her fork.
Pie! The great urge to participate in excessive activism has not reached her. She has only met what I have adopted. She is far away, separated by the increased risk of heart disease and various cancers that I have evaded. She is so at risk for health concerns later in life and I am so vegetarian.
At certain times I have no diet, I am me. When I order a slice of banana bread and a coffee of the day at starbucks, feeling as snooty as the business people who talk urgently into their bluetooth headsets as they wait in line, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Rachel Ray, with her published cookbooks, renowned recipes and daytime talk show have nothing on me. The culinary Victoria arises. I belong to no dietary restriction nor frozen foods aisle at Publix. I am the eternal epicurean with its whisk and spoon.
I have no separate feeling about being a person who consumes food to survive and being a Vegetarian. I am merely one customer to the Great Grocery Industry that serves developed countries around the world. My source of food, selling dead cows or not.
Sometimes, I feel judged, but it does not make me offended. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of a Veggie Burger #1 from Elevation Burger! It’s beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a blade of grass in a grazing field on some rural ranch. On the field in company with other grasses, green, yellow, or brown. Kneel on the ground, and there is an occasional weed dispersed amongst the green tendrils, tiny and harmless. A four-leaf clover, a buttercup, a dandelion whose white tufts flutter off in a great gust of wind. Under your feet is the field. On the ground before you is the grass and weeds, dead and alive, interspersed, could they be consumed by grazing cattle, flower, weed or grass, without altering the nutrients sustained by the creatures too drastically. I bit of crabgrass more or less makes no difference. Perhaps that is how the Rancher intended it in the first place- who knows?

 

 

Copyright © 2013 Tori M
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