A bit of insight…

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here or just on Dee’s Kitchen, but we are currently vegetarian.  Well, if you want to be precise, we are lacto-ovo-pescetarians.  In other words, we eat dairy, eggs and seafood (at least when in New Orleans), but no meat.  It all started about a year ago when our son, Chris, decided to go vegetarian.  This wasn’t the first time for him.  The first time was when he was five and it dawned on him that the hamburger on his plate was related to his grandparents’ cows in the pasture next door.  I don’t know how a five year old who has no vegetarian relatives or friends decides to become a vegetarian but this is Chris we are talking about.  This is the same kid who was asking questions about infinity at age three and trying to get me to explain why God doesn’t answer all prayers when he was four.  It’s my own fault; when I was pregnant with him I prayed that I would have a smart, non-boring child. 

Anyway, I indulged his vegetarianism at age five which lasted a few months.  He experimented with it again a couple of other times while growing up so I really wasn’t surprised when made this choice again last year.  Since he generally eats dinner with us, I figured it would be easiest if I prepared vegetarian dinners most of the time.  He often goes out with friends on the weekends so that’s when I’d cook meat-based meals for David and myself.  This really wasn’t a problem and even David didn’t complain about it. 

Then this past July David decided to give up pop, junk food (which I didn’t even realize he was eating away from home) and go vegetarian.  You see, he has a very dear friend with cancer whose doctor put him on a strict vegan diet.  Ron’s a meat-and-potatoes sort of guy so this was really difficult for him.  David wanted to do something to help support his friend and while he wasn’t willing to go vegan, he could go vegetarian for a  year.  As the family cook, that means that I am now vegetarian by default.  Theoretically I could eat meat for lunch when David and Chris are at work but I figured it would be simpler for all of us to be on the same diet.  The funny thing is that within a short period of time I didn’t even miss meat.  And in fact, if I think about it very much it sort of grosses me out. 

I don’t know if, after this year is up, we will go back to eating meat or not.  At this point I’m thinking that after this year we might indulge in some organic, humanely-raised chicken a couple of times a month.  Maybe.  And I did order an organic, humanely-raised turkey for this Thanksgiving so we can have a traditional dinner here at home.  However, when we have our big dinner with extended family at my cousin’s house, we will simply focus on the side-dishes and skip the commercially raised turkey.  Honestly, the side-dishes are some of the best parts of that meal anyway, as I discovered when I cooked an “almost Thanksgiving” dinner the other night. 

So, after four paragraphs of background, here comes the real point of this post (is anyone still reading?).  A couple of days ago I went to the library to get some vegetarian cookbooks as part of my ongoing efforts to find some new recipes.  In addition to “Linda’s Kitchen” by Linda McCartney and the Moosewood cookbook,  I picked up “Living Among Meat Eaters” by Carol J. Adams.  We live in rural Oklahoma where vegetarianism is somewhat suspect behavior.  There are many around here who think meat-eating ranks right up there with God and Country and pick-up trucks.  Of course, the fact I drive a Prius with a peace symbol on the back already makes me a bit weird in these parts so I suppose I should be used to living a bit outside the norm.  Still, I thought “Living Among Meat Eaters” might have some helpful advice for church potlucks and holiday gatherings so I checked it out. 

I’ve only skimmed it so far but I had one of those “a-ha!” moments when I read the section on saboteurs.  The author describes several different types of people who try to sabotage the eating practices of vegetarians and then goes on to explain why they do this.  When I read the section on “The Dominance and Control Saboteur” I immediately saw correlation with some of those people in our lives who seemingly went crazy when our political views changed.  Here is a little blurb from the book:

Upon learning that you are vegetarian, people may change their own eating habits, but not necessarily in a positive direction.  They may feel challenged to express their meat eating.  Where they used to eat meat without much consciousness, they must now proclaim themselves eager and happy meat eaters.  Sometimes they take on an air of belligerence, pronouncedly eating meat in front of you as an attempt to disgust or upset you.  It is actually an attempt to establish control over the situation.

And a couple of paragraphs later:

“What is underneath the bluff, the bravado?  People who are afraid to care, people who are afraid to change.”

Bingo!  I now understand why someone would purposely rub our faces in their disdain for our values.  Why they would go out of their way to wear t-shirts with slogans making fun our our views to family gatherings.  Or drive a totally impractical and uncomfortable gas hog of a vehicle to an event when they know they will see us because they disapprove of “evil environmentalists” and want to make that abundantly clear.  I always knew it was their issue, not ours, but now I have some insight into what that issue is.  Fear of change.  Because to change involves admitting, at least to oneself, that you were wrong and that’s too painful for some to even contemplate.  I get that.  I really do. 

There’s a particular issue I’ve dramatically shifted my views on and carry a certain amount of guilt about the way I handled it with someone on the opposite side of the issue several years ago.  This person is no longer a part of my life and I’m not even entirely sure where they currently live.  However, David and I were talking about it a couple of weeks ago and I told him that I had been thinking about trying to make contact with that person so I could tell them that I now understand where they were coming from and apologize if I caused them any pain. 

None of us really like to admit we were wrong but the positive side of growing older (hopefully!) is the growing realization that we all make mistakes, none of us has all the answers, it won’t kill you to admit you were wrong, and that sometimes change is good.  Now who would have thought a book about vegetarianism could yield so much food for thought? 

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