This week instead of the regular Foodie Friday recipe, I’m writing about my journey to becoming vegetarian.
My step-mom was instrumental in my decision to become a vegetarian. I met my her when I was 11 after she came to Canada to marry my dad who had met her on his travels in New Zealand. She was the most interesting person I had ever met up to that point in my life. Not only was she very kind, but she had a pretty accent and fascinating stories to tell. Her best stories were about growing up on a sheep farm and then traveling throughout Europe and The Middle East in the early 1980′s. During this time she climbed through the Himilayas and became vegetarian. She was the first vegetarian I had ever met and suddenly I wanted to become one too. I felt like I was meant to be one.
I grew up eating meat and potatoes. Mom served mostly whole foods, cooked very plainly. She baked from scratch. I wanted to learn how to cook but I was relegated to salad-maker-only duty. When I went to visit my dad and step-mom, food creativity abounded. At least I thought so. We ate Vegetable Pie with Grated Potato Crust, whole grain cookies made with honey, a drink called barley water and homemade ice cream! I poured through my step-mom’s cookbooks and started writing out the recipes that appealed to me (I still have the notebook I wrote them in). I started learning how to cook.
At first I wanted to eat like my step-mom to be more like her. But as I grew older it became about the animals. I suddenly realized in a way I had never let myself think about before, that people killed animals so we could eat them, and it didn’t feel right to me.
Flashback. I’m 5. Collecting eggs from the chicken coop. Our rooster, Stormin’ Norman (named after a grumpy uncle of my dad’s), comes flapping at my heels and flies into my face, pecking at me until I drop the eggs. I run as fast as I can to the gate. The next day my dad chopped his head off. As I watched him pluck, slice open and gut the rooster my stomach swirled with revulsion. He invited me to help him pull out the intestines. Curious, I did. I touched all the organs and watched my dad work until nothing was left but Norman’s shell, until he resembled nothing but the cold, naked birds in the supermarket. The memory of blood on my hands and the warm smell of death remain. I was not yet aware of the similarities between the organs of a bird and a human being, but I knew that something that had once been alive was now dead. Something that had had a name and a face and who I didn’t like, but knew, was muck in my hands. It felt surreal and wrong. Of course I wasn’t able to make my feelings understood. I didn’t even understand them myself. We ate that poor, wretched bird the next night. I have never been so conscious of a meal I ate as a child. This was 31 years ago.
I have always assumed that kids raised on farms were indifferent to animal slaughter. Some of my cousins grew up on farms and they didn’t become vegetarian. Some cousins even grew up to hunt animals in the wild. So why was I so sensitive? Was it out of guilt? Because I was the reason the rooster died?
As I got older I became more openly uncomfortable about killing animals. I hated going fishing with my dad. I hated seeing fish flopping desperately in the bottom of the boat, their mouths gapping, their eyes fixed on me as if to say, “Help! Help me please!” I hated watching the fish get bludgeoned. I hated the mess of gutting them. The same smell of death as the blood from the rooster. Thankfully I hated eating them too. I’ve never liked seafood. Eventually I refused to go fishing anymore. The last time I was with my dad when he went fishing, he was actually trapping crabs. As he drove the boat home I sat in the back tossing them back into the water.
When I was 16 I put my foot down. I refused to take Biology 12 after learning it was mandatory to dissect a fetal pig, and I told my mom I was going vegetarian. It was a gradual process. First, I stopped eating red meat that looked like it had been sliced off an animal. No more steaks, pork chops, ribs or roast beef for me. It was hard to stop eating ground beef because my mom put it in just about all my favorite foods, and I wasn’t yet allowed to cook for myself. But I soon started refusing that too. Then I stopped eating chicken. Finally, all that was left was holiday turkey. I went along with that tradition for three or four years before forcing myself to stop. I felt it was hypocritical of me. Turkeys were living beings too. It didn’t matter that I only ate them once or twice a year.
In university, I donated to PETA and made myself watch horrible videos of pigs being slaughtered and rabbits and mice being blinded by chemicals. I wrote big corporations like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble and told them I wouldn’t be buying any of their products until they stopped testing on animals, and I didn’t. I joined a local Animal Rights group and helped save an abused and neglected rabbit that lived next door to me. I read Diet for a New America by John Robbins and The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams. I took part in a public protest against fishing. Fish can feel pain too, you know. Inside, I always knew.
When I was 23 I went vegan. It lasted about a year during which time I beat myself up considerably every time I went to a restaurant where there was nothing to eat but vegetable lasagna lathered in cheese, fettucine alfredo or a veggie burger (made from cheese). Not to mention if I went to someone’s house and they offered me cookies made with butter, cake with eggs or bread with buttermilk, I felt uncomfortable refusing them (probably because of my sweet tooth, but I digress). I questioned the honey in my tea, the silk in my skirt and the leather in my favorite five year old shoes – was it ethical of me to continue wearing them? I felt I was a bad vegan. So because I wasn’t a perfect vegan I stopped trying to be one at all.
Now I’m just a plain old vegetarian. I’ve gone from being an ignorant junk food vegetarian who lived off tofu dogs, mac and cheese, and salad to a well-informed, I-think-I-was-a-nutritionist-in-a-past-life, lentil-loving vegetarian. I’m still vegetarian because I’m against animal suffering, but also for other reasons too. I don’t believe that most human beings need to eat meat to survive. Therefore, I think that animal slaughter is an unnecessary act, harmful to our environment and sometimes even our bodies. Without meat we wouldn’t have to worry about diseases like E-coli, mad cow disease, swine flu, or bird flu, to name a few.
But at 36, things are shifting again. I’m learning new things. I’m questioning some of the foods I have relied on as staples of my diet, like grains (that’s a shocker hey?) and soy foods. I can admit to you that I’ve eaten seafood on a few occasions. I’m not happy about it. In fact, I’m pretty much in denial about it because I still consider myself a vegetarian even though I don’t think I should. However, get this! Learning all I know now, if I had grown up vegetarian and wasn’t upset by the suffering and/or death of animals, I would consider eating meat for the nutritional aspects of it as a part of a whole foods diet. But I am against animal suffering so I don’t think I ever will. But my consciousness is raising.
Next week I plan to talk about raising my children vegetarian.
Please feel free to ask me any questions about my vegetarianism. I am open to all respectful discussion.
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See there’s the problem with labels. You stopped being a vegan because you weren’t a perfect vegan and beat yourself up when you screwed up. I’m a “vegan,” but I’m more comfortable calling myself a “vegetarian” because it gives me space to mess up — like those times when I want a piece of cake, like, at my daughter’s bday party. I don’t wear leather, but there is beeswax in my lipbalm….
Another problem with going vegan is that there’s so much to learn, so many conflicting nutritional programs. Soy is GOOD, I have learned, in moderation. Grains are IMPORTANT for vitamin E, among other things. But the raw foodists will tell you differently, and then the macrobiotic peeps will tell you grains are the fountain of health and longevity.
So, I guess what I’m saying is moderation. Being a vegan/vegetarian is, for so many of us (and for you, I see), about nonviolence and nonsuffering. This includes ourselves.
We do what we can without hurting ourselves, physically and emotionally.
Thanks so much for this post. xoxo
.-= Haley-O (Cheaty)´s last blog ..Thankful (Thursday): “Evvybody Luff Me?” =-.
What a great story of how your diet has progresses over the years. Life is a journey full of doors and decisions.
.-= Nicole Feliciano´s last blog ..Edamame for the Kids =-.
Thank you @Haley-O for your extremely thoughtful comment. It sounds as though you can really understand where I am coming from. This was as much a confession piece, a post extolling the fact that I’m not perfect in my eating habits (is anyone?) but that I have the desire to be. I know soy is fine in moderation, as are grains, and I don’t think I will stop eating either but I appreciate the new level of consciousness I have in knowing the things I know now. And as a lover of food and truth and nutrition, I will continue learning and questioning myself and other ways of doing things. But one thing that won’t change for me is the fact that animals suffer needlessly. I respect those who eat meat for their own reasons. I’m married to a meat-eater even! But I have my own reasons too. Hugs to you! Thanks for getting me!
You are awesome!! For so many reasons! In our society very, very few people are truly strict vegans. Animal products are used in nearly everything, including brakes (if I remember right). So unless you walk everywhere, you aren’t vegan. I think its about the big picture and using your money to voice your values. We are a vegetarian family. My husband has been for 5 yrs, I have been for 20 yrs, and our son his whole life. We have every intention of keeping him vegetarian and when he begins to question we’ll educate him on factory farms. I have always been vegetarian for the animals and vegan a couple of times. My husband is doing it for the health reasons.
I think its great that you are bringing new thoughts to light to an audience already concerned about providing the best for themselves and their families. Speaking of John Robbins, here’s a link to his side of “the great soy debate”: http://www.foodrevolution.org/askjohn/52.htm
His site also discusses grains and all sorts of good stuff.
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Loved this and I think Cheaty’s comment is spot on. I’ve just recently gone (back to) a vegan diet, and the cheating potential (veggie burgers, like you mentioned, and chocolate) is a concern, but a much smaller one than the fact that overall, I’m not contributing to the animal and ecological mistreatment.
.-= Zoeyjane
´s last blog ..On being out =-.
Thank you for sharing! We have talked off and on about adopting a vegetarian lifestyle. We don’t do much red meat at all anymore – turkey, chicken and fish make up almost all of the meat in our diet. My motivation is two part: ethical/environmental reasons plus the fact that most red meats just don’t make me feel very good after eating them.
What’s holding me back? Fear that I won’t cook well. Isn’t that silly? I was raised in a meat & potatoes family, so I’ve adapted my cooking once (to lose the red meat) and I’m sure I could do it again. So maybe it’s more laziness
.-= Dionna´s last blog ..To Do =-.
Why was this on Food Renegade Fight Back Fridays. Umm, in case you hadn’t noticed, Food Renegade is part of the Real Food Media where raw dairy, pastured eggs, pastured pigs, grass-fed meats,and healthy fats – lard and beef tallow are eaten.
We are not vegans or vegetarians! And your posting will not change our minds. Did you bother to read what Fight Back Fridays were all about? Have you read Food Renegade’s posts?
Vegans are definitely misinformed and will probably end up being seriously ill over time.
If animals are let to live their lives the way they were meant to – being in the sunshine, eating grass in the case of cows or letting chickens eat bugs and worms, letting pigs pasture and eat what pigs eat then our animals would be healthy and our soils would be healthy. Without animals, our soil because seriously depleted and wouldn’t be good enough to grow veggies.
notavegan – your comment is extremely rude, ignorant and ridiculous. Melodie is sharing her PERSONAL journey.
The Fight Back Fridays statement says – “Who are they? Why, they’re the Food Renegades. You know who you are — lovers of SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical) food, traditional food, primal food, REAL food, the list goes on. I believe that by joining together, our influence can grow, and we can change the way America (and the industrialized world) eats!”
Well, Melodie is a renegade because she makes her own decisions. She didn’t tell anyone to join her in vegetarianism, she simply told a story of what works for her. Perhaps her vegetables are orgainic, local, sustainable and ethical. They certainly are REAL.
This judgmental stance and lack of tolerance makes me want to rescind my membership to Weston A. Price – can you believe they take my money?? I’m a vegetarian!! Best keep that nasty, dirty secret under your hat.
And if you’re such a stickler for analyzing rules you must’ve missed Melodie’s statement before comments – that she is open to RESPECTFUL discussion.
I may not eat meat but I eat the other real foods that Food Renegade is all about, and I am certainly not trying to change anyone’s eating habits. Didn’t you read the post? Or were you just so offended that you felt the need to leave me an angry comment?
I am fully supportive of the real food movement. I subscribe to almost all the related blog sites that discuss it. This post is just about who I am. And I’m not vegan either!!
By the way, that would be great if all the animals of the world were able to eat the way nature intended. I’d be really happy about that. But if the same number of the world’s population still ate meat then our soils still would be eroded, our rainforests still would be getting cut down to make more room for the billions of cattle that feed on the wheat that could be feeding the world’s poor instead. Our water supplies would still be running low. You speak of a utopia where everyone eats from local organic farms. But the reality is that huge corporations run our meat and dairy businesses and too many people can’t/don’t eat locally or from sustainable places. My choice is to thus not eat meat. To not contribute to environmental destruction or the suffering of animals. I don’t want to change your mind about what you do. I just want to tell my story. Sorry if that offended you.
@SCB – Thank you for your supportive comment. You got here before I did and I appreciate what you said, especially “I believe that by joining together, our influence can grow, and we can change the way America (and the industrialized world) eats!”
And just for the record I do eat (as much as possible) organic, local, ethical , sustainable foods.
Oops. Forgot to mention that the above comment was meant for @notavegan. But that was probably obvious.
@Shelly – Thanks for the link and the comment. You’re right about it being pretty difficult to be a perfect vegan. I had forgotten about all the other products out there that have animal-based ingredients. No wonder it was so hard!
@Dionna – It sounds like you could use a really good and easy-to-follow vegetarian cookbook! One of my first ones was called Vegetarian Cooking for Hungry, Busy, Lazy People and another one I like is called How It All Vegan. But if you don’t want the vegan side of the dishes you can easily use dairy foods where it asks for soy milk or margarine. I do all the time.
Enjoyed your post re your preferred eating and cooking habits. Although I’m not vegan nor vegetarian I know that my spouse and I adore great vegetarian food even though the chopping of everything is a lot of work – still we love the taste of freshness in vegetarian dishes. I’m wondering if you have a favorite or a couple of favorite cookbooks that you use or have you lived in this fashion for so long that it’s second nature to you and cookbooks are a thing of the past? Thanks.
BTW – although I think objections to one’s posts are good for conversation, I love to receive some opposition or something controversial when I post, I like to think that most bloggers can state their case in less than inflammatory style. Disagreement can be just great for mind exploration and expansion:)
.-= Sunrise Sister´s last blog ..Friday food lovers – who knew? =-.
@Sunrise Sister – SOme of my favorite cookbooks are The Re-Bar Modern Food Cookbook which can be bought on-line but comes from one of my favorite veggie restaurants in Victoria, BC. Another fave is The Hollyhock Cookbook from the famed Hollyhock retreat on Cortes Island, BC. Yet another favorite is Yoga Kitchen (lots of ayurvedic recipes) that comes from a retreat in Boulder, CO. Hm, I see there is a trend here. Okay, I also love Moille Katman’s Moosewood Cookbook and then there are a few obscure ones I don’t think you can find anywhere. Over time I have learned to cook by trial and error and by learning from roommates. One rooommate taught me about blending spices. She was from Venezuela but enjoyed ayuvedic cooking. Another couple did a lot of Chinese cooking and introduced me to lotus root and eggplant dishes. I’m thankful I grew up in a whole foods kind of home because even though I didn’t get to cook there I was influenced by my mom’s cooking from scratch approach and her use of real food.
I don’t generally mind objective comments. I do wish I had responded with a little more grace, but it was the first thing I saw when I was still lying in bed this morning after not having slept most of the night so I did my best with what my mood allowed for at the time. It’s funny. I have a breastfeeding blog which can be a pretty touchy subject for some people, but I have never yet had a negative comment about one of my breastfeeding posts. Only about my food-related posts. I find this very interesting. Perhaps I should make myself more well known in the real food community so people can get a better sense of who I am. An ally instead of a foe. Thahnks for your lovely comment!
I have issues with the vegetarian because of the animals standpoint. I’m totally for animal rights, but in a normal way. I don’t have time to research every little thing. And I don’t have money to buy only organic, or only whatever. I do think it’s hypocritical to be ok with leather, an obvious and direct animal product. But in the long run, I have my rules and others have theirs. I eat meat, but not a lot of it. I have similar repulsions to raw meat. I can’t go in butcher shops. I only eat cage free eggs. (Fell off that wagon for a little while because of money being tight, but seen a documentary and now I’m back.)
The big reason that I have qualms about the being vegetarian for the animals issue is because, well, plants are living things too. They communicate with each other. They have defenses to try to protect themselves from being hurt or eaten. Why is it ok to eat one living thing, but not another? And we’ve gotta eat something. Yes, it’s not necessary to eat meat. But if we’re going on the be kind to living things stance, you’re going to starve.
I do agree with the eating little or no meat because of the way that animals are treated. But I think that making the point of eating meat that is raised in a way that still lets the animal exist in a decent way is best. I can’t afford to observe that ideal. I buy discounted meat at the grocery store like a normal person. If it were up to me, I would only be eating meat once or twice a week, but my husband gets grouchy when he is forced to eat a meal without meat.
Yes, animals are treated horribly. But we have to live in this society. There are some compromises I’m willing to make. But not ones that affect my quality of life. I still want to eat out. And I have better things to do with my time and energy than study food labels. But we’re animals too. And my family happens to be carnivores!
Great post. I’m veggie too, and have had similar bouts of vegan-ism, but it is so hard. I haven’t eaten meat since i was 12 though, and enjoyed reading about someone who has similar reasons for not eating meat as myself.
first time commenter i think, but I do love your blog
I was a vegetarian for almost 20 years – started in college and stopped when my thyroid went all wonky (I ate way too much soy, not enough beans) and I couldn’t get pregnant. And, I was one of the vegetarians that wore leather – I had problems with that, but I needed shoes and vegan shoes were not easy to find, nor very pretty. Now, I try to play the moderation game. We don’t eat meat (mostly chicken and sushi – and the red meat we eat is bison, beef makes me feel crappy) at every meal (try for one or two meatless meals a day) and I buy a lot of meat from a local, sustainable farmer. Since I returned to being an omnivore, my mood is better, I have more energy and I feel stronger. Still, what is great about our lives is we can chose to eat whatever makes us feel good and happy!
.-= georgine´s last blog ..Recap of the Week: Isabel, Kids, House Rehab and B’s Pictures =-.
A little context for your scary-disease-avoidance argument, but first… an observation, via Kryton (the Red Dwarf character):
[after serving the crew bbq'd shoulder of the dead guy they'd recently walked by] “Well, I didn’t have any behaviour protocols to run it through, so I thought ‘well, you eat chickens, so clearly you’ll eat anything …otherwise you’re just picking on the chickens’…”
And my point: everything we eat dies for the pleasure. The germ of wheat is alive until we digest it… carrots were alive until we chewed them up. Everything we eat was alive and through the process of preparing it and eating it, dies (except some of the bacteria) –even the raw stuff. The smell of death should be on the broccoli as much as the veal, no?
Or, to paraphrase Kryton, aren’t we just picking on the carrots?
And, to correct a few misunderstandings:
E.coli is a bowel-borne bacteria that can contaminate *anything* –including washed produce– with or without animal farming. People manage it in their own kitchens right in the middle of the city. One outbreak was attributed to mountain lions, and another to deer.
There is still not sufficient evidence to make it clear that mad cow disease is directly related to creuzfeldt-jakob in humans –the disease is very similar, but the causes only *may* be identical (soil-borne is also possible, and it may be hereditary or a spontaneous mutation) and may turn out to be completely unrelated to eating meat –for humans. To date, no known ‘lifetime vegans’ have been diagnosed, but they are so rare anywhere in the world, it would be hard to find one in the extremely small numbers of C-J victims. 200 worldwide –out of 6 billion, far more than 98% of whom are, or ever were, animal product eaters (there is some indication that prions infect milk as well as blood) means that there would need to be more than 30 million ‘never in their life had any animal products, including in utero’ vegans to get a large enough proportion of the population to be statistically represented by 1 case, supposing the tremendous bulge of cases in the UK is irrelevant. That’s nearly 40% of population of India… still supposing the bulge is irrelevant.
Still, at 200 cases ever out of 6 billion, it does rather seem to be cherry-picking risks compared to, say, driving a car (about 3000 deaths every year out of 33 million people in Canada) or eating raw spinach (just one of many e.coli outbreaks last year, killed 3 out of 206 confirmed cases in the US population of 300,000,000)…
One of the unfortunate side-effects of a vegan diet –and even some vegetarian diets– is the much larger volume of food needed because although our bodies are super-efficient at getting fat and sugar out of things like meat and milk, we’re not so fast at getting the nutrients out of all that fibre that’s sweeping through too quickly and taking lots of other nutrients with it. It is good and healthy to eat a lot of fibre, but this dramatically increases the number of calories needed to intake to get the same number of calories absorbed, which is even more dramatic when foods are not cooked before eating… and unless you’re one of the smart folks with a composting toilet, a lot more water to wash the waste into the sewers.
I think there are a lot of reasons, all of them deeply personal, for eating a carefully-planned plant-based diet. The one I’ve encountered to date that makes sense to me is ‘I prefer it.’
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