30 Days, then Boom! (Or Gobble)

I went for a month without meat, from October 25 to November 25th.

I started out with vigor. I gathered all my vegetarian cookbooks and magazines, went shopping for a pile of organic vegetarian foods, planned menus filled with yummy vegetarian dishes, and made several delectable dishes. But somewhere into the second week, I was wishing Jack in the Box served Ultimate Cheeseburgers with Veggie Patties. I determined I just didn’t have the energy to cook for two hours after work every night whipping up vegetarian haute cuisine.

I backslid to my bad habits of eating, only making minor adjustments. Like calling Dominoes and ordering cheese pizza instead of pepperoni, or eating blueberry muffins and chocolate cake for snacks because they were meat free. I realized how seriously pathetic my attempts at giving up meat were when I made biscuits and gravy using veggie sausage crumbles.

Not really the same as changing my lifestyle now is it?

I didn’t run out of ideas, but I did run out of energy. It seems that in order to change my eating habits, I will have to change everything; first and foremost my general laziness. You can’t really be a lazy vegetarian.

There are things to wash and peel and chop. No one is going to hand me a bag of freshly scrubbed and chopped veggies from a drive thru window. I have to work at this, and think about it daily until it becomes second nature to me. That might take awhile.

On November 26th, Thanksgiving Day, I ate a mound of turkey. Back to square one.

How It All Began...

My family was all about the food.

For New Year's Day we'd have Pork and Sauerkraut, a nod to my German part of the family. Supposedly if you took a bite of pig and cabbage at the stroke of midnight, it would bring you good luck all year long. There were a lot of years I had dreadful luck, but each New Year, I kept counting on the pig to buy me another shot.

When Easter rolled around, it was Ham, with a Mustard and Brown Sugar glaze that was my Grandma Alice's recipe. When you added it at just the right time, the brown sugar would get all crunchy around the ham fat and it was kind of like pig candy. There is nothing that tasted better to me all year long.

In summer, we had the trifecta of Barbecue Holidays, Memorial Day, the 4th of July, and Labor Day which all included piles of grilled hamburgers, hot dogs, with a touch of my Uncle Bob's Secret Sauce. It was never determined whether or not he made the secret sauce or if it was a bottle of Open Pit. It didn't much matter, it was yummy and we slathered it all over our burgers and hot dogs as the juicy meaty goodness dripped down our faces along with the butter from our corn on the cob.

Thanksgiving called for a turkey. Not just a normal turkey, but the kind of turkey that was so big we fully expected it would tip over our kitchen table like when Fred Flintstone ordered the rack of ribs that tipped over his car every week at the drive-in. For days after the actual holiday we would have turkey soup, turkey tetrazzini, turkey pot pie, turkey lurkey jerky, (when we ran out of real recipes we made up names for our concoctions.)

Christmas was ham or standing rib roast or turkey, and maybe all three, because the best way to celebrate baby Jesus' birthday is to eat all of the animals who visited him in the manger on the night of his birth. Okay, I made that part up.

The point here is this: my family's meals revolved around meat, we had meat and some side dishes, period. My Mom never said "Let's have a tofu night for a change!" and even if she had, my Dad would have soundly vetoed the suggestion.

I ate hot dogs at baseball games and bologna sandwiches in my Welcome Back Kotter lunch box. (Shut up haters, you know you wanted one.) I learned to make a good meatloaf and pot roast. Before I got married, I tried to lure various men into my spider web with my killer beef stroganoff or chicken paprikash.

But ten years ago, something dire happened. My husband Jeff decided to become a vegetarian.

His thought process made sense logically, I completely understood why he did it, I just didn't understand how he did it. I confess, I'm not much for self control.

There was a ballot measure in California asking us to vote on whether or not people should be able to eat the over abundance of wild horses. No seriously, they did. We both balked at the thought of Horse Burger restaurants popping up all over town. We voted no, of course no! We couldn't imagine someone trying to eat a symbol of the wild west as it galloped over the hill. It was just plain wrong.

But Jeff had to go and get all intellectual about it. He asked "Why are we so upset about the thought of eating horses, while we eat cows and pigs and sheep?" And that was that, he couldn't bear his own hypocrisy and stopped eating meat and never looked back.

On the other hand, I have been able to ignore my own hypocrisy quite easily. Until now. Recently I have read things about how meat production and consumption is hurting animals, us and the planet. I can't pretend I don't know the things I have learned. I want to change.

Thus, I am going to attempt to retrain myself to live a life free of meat. I expect it's going to take me awhile to get from here to there. This blog will be a record of my journey and I hope you'll travel with me.

-Tamilu