I Was a Vegetarian Until I Wasn’t
My Time as a Vegetarian
Why I Became Vegetarian and Why I Stopped
I have always figured I was born a latent vegetarian. I was raised in a family of confirmed carnivores. Every meal featured meat. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, seven days a week, every meal had at least one meat somewhere in the mix. I think a lot of this was driven by my Dad. Every now and again, my Mom would suggest working a vegetarian meal into the lineup. Dad would immediately shoot the suggestion down with a sneer and a withering comment along the lines of, “I can’t live on rabbit food!” In Dad’s mind, vegetarian meant a plate of cold lettuce, carrots and celery, and not a whole lot else.
Dad was raised in the South, Western Kentucky to be precise. That area is dominated by hog farms. I have been to his home town. The profusion of home grown pork products, especially sausages, is incredible. Barbecue is huge there too, as is smoked ham. Meat, and specifically pork, is king. He was also career Navy. Sadly, he treated his family the same way he treated the sailors under his command. He didn’t ask us to do anything. He just barked orders and expected the rest of us to snap to. If anyone questioned his orders, his justification was, “Because I’m bigger than you” or, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as you’re told.” Sometimes he’d double over his belt and give it a good crack. Nothing like the sound of a whip to get those pesky kids in line. Yeah. Dad wasn’t into sparing the rod.
The result of all this was that pretty much, what Dad wanted, Dad got, and he expected meat on the table every meal. If my sisters or I had tried to go vegetarian, it would have meant a beating following accusations of, “What, your mother’s cooking isn’t good enough for you?” Ok, two things on that. One, Mom’s cooking sucked, but nobody dared to point out that the Emperor had no clothes. Two, when you’re a little kid and you have a 250 pound man threatening you with physical discipline for daring to think for yourself, you quickly learn to fall into line. That’s just survival.
When I went off to college, I continued eating meat out of force of habit. It was what I knew, and my cooking repertoire was limited. I remember that as late as my early twenties, I would have been happy to eat steak for dinner every night. The only thing that stopped me was finances. Decent cuts of steak are pricier than a college student’s part time job can support. I started looking for cheap meal alternatives. I worked instant ramen into the mix. I also branched out a bit and started doing things like having a bowl of fruit or a simple salad for dinner. For lunches, I would cook a big pot of rice & beans to take to work. I found those little 1-pound Shedd’s Spread containers were perfect for packing to-go lunch kits. It was filling, and more importantly, cheap.
By the time I was getting into my mid-twenties, I was in graduate school, still not earning much money, and also finding that I really did not digest fatty meats as well as I used to. I was starting to find myself suffering gas pains and diarrhea if I ate too much beef. I didn’t exactly go vegetarian at that point, but I did dial way back on the meat intake. It cost less, and I felt a lot healthier.
I got married in 1997, and my wife and I moved to Hawaii not long after that. We went back to a more meat-heavy diet while living in Hawaii, largely because Polynesian cuisine is heavily focused on pork, and it is indeed yummy. The temptation was just too much. We both loved Hawaiian food, and ate it as often as we could. Possibly a little too much. We both had to have our gallbladders removed while living there. In conversations with others, we learned that gallbladder problems are prevalent in Hawaii, and just about everyone we knew had to have their gallbladders removed.
Best we can figure, it’s the fattiness of the local diet. Different people react differently to having their gallbladders removed. Personally, I’m glad it’s gone. That thing caused me pain for years before I had it out, and I have never felt better. Other people react less well, and end up with digestive difficulties as a result of losing the gallbladder. Gallstone pain is a pain like none other. It has been compared to the pain of childbirth. Go ahead, Google it. I’ll wait. La la la la…back? See what I mean? The pain of a gallstone blocking your bile duct is a pain straight out of one of the suckier circles of Hell.
We moved back to the mainland in 2007 and lived a year in Pittsburgh, PA. Pittsburgh is a great city. It is a city in decline, sadly, but there is still a lot to be said for it. The local culture has a strong Polish influence, which means lots of meat eating, among other things. We embraced the local cuisine. After a year in Pittsburgh, we relocated to Seattle, WA. We were pretty unimpressed with the Seattle restaurant scene. The ambiance was so-so and the food was terrible. We started preparing almost all of our meals at home. More and more, those meals did not contain meat. That was not so much a choice as a consequence. The local meat supply was uninspiring. There was a butcher shop a couple of blocks from us, but their shelves were always empty. No idea how they stayed in business. After about a year in Seattle, we decided to turn over some new leaves to adjust our lifestyle choices. We were making a bunch of lifestyle changes at the time, and one of the first was the decision to go vegetarian.
We had a few reasons for the choice to give vegetarianism a chance. The biggest was that we were already almost completely vegetarian anyway. We did not really have to give up all that much, as most of our favorite dishes to prepare at home were already free of meats. We are also both pretty appalled by the meat industry’s treatment of animals, so there was a moral component to it. We had also been noticing that quality meats had just gotten difficult to find for anything like a reasonable price. All those things went into our decision to cut out meat.
One concession we made was that we did not want to give up seafood. One of my co-workers pointed out that made us pescatarians. I’m not really into labels, but it seemed important to my co-worker to find a cubby to file me in, so there it is. I continued to just say vegetarian. Less explanation needed when talking to people who don’t get the term “pescatarian.” That plan worked pretty well for us. One problem if you decide to go vegetarian is that your stool gets a lot bulkier. A lot. Invest in a good plunger; you’ll need it.
We stayed vegetarian for about ten years. After that, we were fed up with Seattle, and decided to get back to our Southern California roots. We got rid of everything that didn’t fit in the car and drove down to San Diego. In February. 2020. Yup, THAT 2020. The one with the pandemic. We arrived in San Diego about two weeks before the national lockdown. We had no jobs and nowhere to live. Few places were hiring. We spent the next five months living out of hotels and eating whatever food we could. Much of that had to be procured through delivery services. That meant fast food, which meant almost everything on the menu was meat.
We talked about it and decided the vegetarian thing wasn’t all that important to us anymore, and decided to eat meat as much out of necessity as desire. By mid-Summer 2020, we had secured jobs and an apartment, and were glad to not be living in hotels anymore. We talked again about whether to return to being vegetarian, and decided against going back wholesale. We started having meat on about 2/3 of our dinners, and the rest vegetarian. A few months ago, we reduced that to meat on 1/3 of our dinners and the rest vegetarian. Breakfast never includes meat, and lunch rarely does. That balance seems to be working.
While having a little meat in our diets does make us feel better, we are not unaware of the travesties in the meat industry. California passed a law, Proposition 12, that goes into effect in January 2022. Prop 12 mandates, among other things, more space for breeding animals, including cows, chickens and pigs. Essentially, the law requires that pork, eggs and veal products for sale in California come from facilities that do not confine animals to small cages for their whole lives¹.
The beef and poultry industries are largely in compliance with Prop 12, but for whatever reason, the pork industry has been unable to get on board. The result may very well be that pork products become scarce, unavailable and/or very pricey. If the pork industry cannot comply, I won’t be sad to lose pork from my diet. I’m not that into bacon anyway, and anything else I use pork for, I can easily substitute chicken or beef.
As to the question of vegetarianism, I doubt I will ever go back to being fully vegetarian. My digestion is just better with a bit of meat. I am not going full carnivore either. I think the balance I have struck, just having a couple of meat meals a week, satisfies my dietary needs while not encouraging overdependence on the meat industry, with all its ethical and environmental baggage.
