Today, March 29th, marks exactly one year of being meat free. To be clear, I am a vegetarian and not a vegan. Veganism is next, when the time is right.
The year has flown by, and I can’t believe how remarkably easy I have found being a vegetarian to be. I feel it is one of the best things I’ve ever done.
I’m sure there are some vegetarians and vegans here who will be happy to weigh in with their own stories, advice, and tips in the comments. I sure hope so. Please note that I’m going to mention some brand names here. I do this solely as assistance to the reader and I have absolutely no link to or financial interest in any of these businesses.
I thought I’d mark my one year anniversary by answering the questions I most typically get from folks regarding my diet. And at the end, there will be jokes! That’s right, stick around for the vegetarian jokes!
How do you get your protein? By far the most common question I get. Tiresomely common. As I said, I am not a vegan, so I continue to eat eggs (more on that later) some cheese (more on that later) and while I no longer drink cow’s milk I do consume milk products such as yogurt. I also eat beans, nuts, peanut butter, and some soy.
So why did you become a vegetarian? A great question, as there are so many reasons to give up meat. Some people do it for health reasons, others because of the mistreatment factory farmed animals suffer in our country. Others do it for environmental reasons, or because feeding the vast majority of the plants we grow in this country to livestock is not a good way of delivering nutrition.
While I appreciate all those reasons, for me it came down to a matter of ethics. And it may have been triggered by a “meat orgy.” Allow me to explain.
It was Easter weekend. On Saturday I met a friend at a local restaurant that serves the most ah-may-zing burgers and ribs. I’d been looking forward to enjoying a half slab all week. But once I sat down in the booth and imagined myself looking down at what would inescapably be the side of an animal, I decided to go with a burger instead. I even joked to my friend about my hypocrisy in opting for the product that had been processed enough that I could look at it and not recognize the animal it came from.
And I loved the burger. It had avocado and bacon (yes, another meat sufficiently processed as to be unrecognizable) and it was delicious.
The next day was Easter and my sister and I went to a Greek owned restaurant (yeah, I know, sorry for the redundancy.) I customarily have lamb on Easter and I was very much looking forward to having it again. But the management had miscalculated their demand and there was no more lamb left.
So I thought “Well, what else can I have that I eat very rarely but that would be a special treat?” And I chose calve’s liver, with bacon (again!) and fried onions. They brought me three huge pieces, pink in the middle. It was the best liver I’d ever had (other than the one I served up with fava beans and a nice Chianti, of course.) At one point I mentioned to my sister “Well, I wanted them to kill a baby sheep for me, but instead they killed a baby cow for me.”
The following day I took my sister to a doctor’s appointment, and has become customary in my family we followed up the appointment with a stop at Denny’s.
I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew it had to be something considerably lighter than what I’d eaten the previous two days. I settled on a turkey sandwich with a bowl of chicken soup.
And they were very good. But about half way through the meal I just thought to myself “This is the last meat I’m ever going to eat. This is the last time I’m going to pay somebody to kill an animal so I can eat it, when that’s not necessary for my survival.” Call it an epiphany, call it a spiritual awakening, whatever. All I know is that I very calmly but very definitely knew I was done. Two weeks later I “came out” to my family and friends.
What was the best advice you received? It came from a dear friend of mine who is the most passionate lover of animals I have ever known, and who, simply through knowing her over the course of our friendship has greatly elevated my consciousness regarding animals and their care. Ironically, she lives in the country with the highest per capita meat consumption in the world. She said “Don’t aim for perfection. If you try to be perfect you’ll fail, and you’ll get discouraged and quit. Do the best you can do under the circumstances.”
Are you sure you’re getting all the vitamins and minerals you need? No, I’m not, or rather, I wasn’t sure at first. I very quickly decided it would be wise to take a good multi-vitamin and mineral supplement, especially in my early days of vegetarianism, to make up for anything I wasn’t getting in my new diet. I found a marvelous product on Amazon, DEVA Vegan Multivitamin & Mineral Supplement, at a very reasonable price. It hadn’t occurred to me that many meds and supplements aren’t vegetarian in that the gelatin caps are derived from animal carcasses. But these tiny little pills are vegan. I take two a day and I’m more than covered. Mind you, I still try to eat properly as well.
Don’t you miss meat? Yes, sometimes I do. You try driving by a Portillo’s and not thinking how yummy an Italian beef or a Maxwell style Polish with mustard and grilled onions would be. But you know what? It passes. It passes quickly, usually, and if it doesn’t I just imagine what it would be like if in order to eat the food in question I had to kill and butcher the animal myself. And just like that the craving is gone.
Mmmmmmm, Portillo’s! What else do you miss? I missed Buffalo wings, until I found that Whole Foods sells a vegan product that mimics so-called boneless wings. Dip ‘em in blue cheese dressing and I’m in heaven. I think the thing I’m going to miss the most once the weather gets warm is tuna. My mother had a signature recipe for tuna salad and I had my own signature recipe as well, and I used to enjoy both in the Summer.
You’re Irish, what about corned beef and cabbage this St. Patrick’s Day? No problem! I discovered an incredibly wonderful restaurant in Chicago called, appropriately enough, the Chicago Diner, whose slogan is “Meat Free Since ’83.” And their signature dish is the Remarkable Reuben, which is the best realization of that sandwich I’ve ever had. They make it with seitan, which is basically wheat gluten. Buddhist monks created seitan a long, long time ago, and this restaurant has figured out a way to marinate it (the recipe is online) and you pile it on some rye bread and you’d swear you’re eating (admittedly very lean) corned beef. And of course the cabbage, potatoes, and carrots were no problem.
So how have you fallen short of perfection? Cheese. What’s that you say? Cheese is vegetarian! Nope, most of it isn’t. The cheese making process involves introducing an enzyme called rennet (sometimes spelled rennin) into the milk. It is this enzyme that causes the milk to form into curds and whey (cue Little Miss Muffet.) And rennet is derived from the lining of one of the stomachs of a veal calf. Mind you, the calf is not slaughtered for the rennet, it’s slaughtered for the meat. AND the rennet.
Although I love cheese I rarely buy it, partly because it is so expensive and partly because it is so caloric. But when I do I can find cheese made with microbial rennet quite easily. I don’t even have to go to a specialty store. But when I have a veggie pizza at the restaurant I work for or almost anywhere else for that matter I’m pretty sure the mozzarella melted so invitingly on top was made with animal rennet.
And three times over the past year I have sinned and purchased some fries at McDonald’s. You might have heard that Mickey D’s isn’t frying their, um, fries, in beef tallow anymore. Not true. They don’t use beef tallow at the restaurant, but the fries are pre-cooked at the processing plant and fried in beef tallow there.
BTW - Did you know that a McDonald’s cheeseburger made without meat is almost indistinguishable from a McDonald’s cheeseburger made with meat? It’s true.
So what DO you eat? I’ve pretty much always eaten a vegetarian breakfast. Bacon and sausage are just too expensive, too time consuming, too much work, and make too much of a mess. Cold cereal with rice milk, oatmeal, bagels with vegan “cream cheese,” avocado toast, Special K Spinach Breakfast Sandwiches. I had to give up my beloved Frosted Mini Wheats, as they contain gelatin.
Lunch is a big salad usually, and on infrequent occasions a veggie pizza or spaghetti with marinara sauce.
For dinner I sometimes make up a big batch of some sort of veggie dish to serve over rice or quinoa. But the big revelation has been a line of frozen foods, Amy’s, that are some of the best convenience meals I’ve ever eaten, vegetarian or not.
What about eating out? Well, sometimes my choices are pretty limited. The place with the fabulous burgers and ribs makes the best grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever had. Denny’s has a couple of veggie omelet and skillet meals, and I can order a “Build Your Own Burger” with a veggie patty. And of course I can always order a breakfast and just say “No bacon OR sausage, please.”
My fast food consumption has dropped (not a bad thing by any means) but I can still enjoy an egg and cheese biscuit at McDonald’s, along with their Southwest Chicken Salad, without the chicken, which is surprisingly good. The seven layer burrito at Taco Bell is also vegetarian.
So, you said you hope to become vegan, but you aren’t yet. Why, and why not? While in theory I suppose that animal products could be collected in a humane way, the reality is they are not. While I no longer purchase milk because of the abuses of the dairy industry, I continue to consume milk products, such as yogurt and the aforementioned cheese. I purchase only eggs laid by free range hens, but the egg industry is by default brutal, for a reason that I suspect has never occurred to most people.
And that is that half of all chickens born will never lay eggs. Because they are male. What happens to the male chicks? Well they’re not raised for meat, as brooders and broilers are very different birds. No, what happens is really quite horrific, I think. They are scooped up by shovels and fed live into grinders. What comes out the other end..the bone and blood and feathers.... is sold as cattle feed. Believe it or not, it has been determined that this is actually the least inhumane way of “disposing” of the unwanted chicks. Gassing, suffocation, and decompression chambers have been determined to be even worse. Oh, and BTW, chicken shit is also sold as cattle feed.
And I love eggs. You know that scene in Forest Gump where Bubba lists all the ways you can prepare shrimp? Well, that mirrors how I love eggs. I love ‘em fried, poached, scrambled, hard boiled, soft boiled, devilled, egg salad, etc. etc.
But I have found becoming vegetarian extraordinarily easy, and I think it is because I didn’t force it on myself. The day simply came when I knew “I can no longer be a part of this.” And I believe that day will come with veganism too. Just typing that paragraph about the baby chicks has moved me closer to that day. Maybe next week, maybe next year. But I think I’ll be most successful if I wait until it comes to me, the same way that vegetarianism did.
Did your heart problem last year have anything to do with all of this? Actually no. And yes. Once I awoke my standard joke to visitors in the hospital was “I can’t have heart trouble! I’ve been a vegetarian for three whole months!” But prior to the surgery to repair the mitral valve, while I was still unconscious and on life support, an angiogram was performed to see if I had any blockages. The reasoning being that since I was going to be cracked open anyway, they’d perform any necessary bypasses at the same time.
And my arteries were clean as a whistle. The cardiologist told my nephew, who’d flown up from Atlanta, “Your uncle has the heart of a 35 year old.” Since I’m decades older than that, I found that to be extraordinary news. I wish I could get myself some other 35 year old organs, if you know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge say no more! I’ve obviously inherited my father’s genes in the heart department, and not my mother’s, but I also credit the fact that even when I was a carnivore I ate very little red meat.
But learning that my heart was in such good shape, other than the since repaired mitral valve, made me commit even more strongly to keeping it that way.
And so, do you feel better physically? More energy, more stamina, sleeping better, less pain, that sort of thing? Nope. Not one....excuse me.....fucking bit. No worse, certainly, but no better. I’ve lost the sixty excess pounds I was carrying, and I feel that, but I don’t believe it would be fair to attribute the weight loss to going meatless. I mean, I can think of all sorts of delicious things that are vegetarian that can still pack on, or keep on, the pounds. Sugar cookies, anybody?
Okay, do you feel better in some other way? I do. Every time there’s another story in the news of animals suffering horrific mistreatment, chickens that are bred to grow so much breast meat so fast that they can’t support their own bodies and scrape along the urine soaked floor until their skin is raw, pigs raised in pens so small they can’t turn around, neighborhoods ruined by the stench from manure ponds, I think “I’m so glad I’m not a part of that anymore.”
Okay you self righteous prick, you promised us jokes. So I did.
Q: How many vegetarians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: How do you get your protein?
Knock Knock!
Who’s there?
Vegetarian
How do you get your protein?
Two vegetarians walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says “How do you get your protein?”
I ran into a nutritionist today. Oh wait, no, it was just another person who instantly became one the moment they learned I’m a vegetarian.
Hey, I promised jokes. I didn’t say they’d be funny.
EDIT: Thanks so much for the rescue, Rescue Rangers. And many thanks to those of you who participated in the comments. I’ve tried to stay on top of the comments, but it’s been tough. If I didn’t get around to recommending you, don’t think I don’t appreciate your participation.