When I was 12, I saw a documentary on slaughterhouses on PBS. Not only did it ‘gross me out’, but it made me feel disgusting and horrible. I knew that chicken tasted yummy, and I dug the occasional burger, but every time I ate it I felt genuinely guilty. At around 17 I was hipped to PETA after reading further into animal cruelty and how members would splash red paint on those wearing fur coats. Then I read about how fishermen in Alaska would club baby harp seals because the seals were eating up all of their fish- along with the fact that baby harp seal fur (the nice soft new kind) is pretty valuable in Europe. By this point I was already pretty fucking infuriated. The last straw was reading on the PETA website about not only the cruelty consequences of eating meat, but the environmental and health consequences as well.
At 17 and-a-half years old, I vowed to not be a meat eater. I followed Lisa Simpson’s 8 year old lead, and abstained from chicken, beef, pork, and seafood. I lasted quite a while, until the Holiday season came around. That first year, I was so torn. I did not want to eat meat, but my grandma’s gumbo is SO GOOD. I finally decided that there are 364 other days in the year, each of those days there are 3 meals. This means 1,092 other meals that I had that did not comprise of a single iota of meat. That’s got to be over 100 little chickens I saved all on my own that year. Eating my grandma’s shrimp and craw fish gumbo on Thanksgiving wont hurt my health or the environment.
I did this for 3 years until I started working at Trader Joe’s; a pseudo-health food store (i say pseudo only because although they carry healthy and organic foods, they also have very fattening and non organic food too). I discovered Tofurky, which is essentially tofu baked and seasoned to perfection. I started buying this for Thanksgiving and Christmas because it’s just so yummy. This lasted about 6 years.
In September of 2008 I took a trip to Savannah Georgia to visit my boyfriend. I was so excited about the vacation, and I refused to deny myself of anything. We went to so many different restaurants and I ate so much seafood. I figured if I were going to eat meat at all, I should do something safe, rather than having deprived my digestive system of red meat for so many years and then BAM! Here’s a steak!
I got back to California and went back to the veggie diet for a while, but money started getting tight. Cans of beef stew and cans of tuna are cheap. By the time December hit, I was already eating meat, full throttle.
I moved to Savannah at the end of December, and my boyfriend and I have been going to super-tasty-restaurant after super-tasty-restaurant ever since, and I’ve been comfortably eating meat products as though I’ve been a meat-eater my whole life. Simultaneously (and without having the light bulb go off in my head until just recently) I’ve been having consistent stomach and headaches.
This week I decided to go back to the vegetarian diet. I have a brand new life; I want to be happy, healthy, and energetic. It is known that women benefit from a vegetarian diet rather than the aggressive testosterone-filled chemicals in red meat. Although I spent a lot of my vegetarian years nursing a ruthless eating disorder, I want to do it right this time. I want to eat leafy greens, oats, and grains. I want to eat a meal and feel satisfied rather than weighed down. I want to be a healthy woman.
I used to work as an activist for greenpeace, and one of my biggest environmental concerns is our oceans. Not only does global warming effect our waters, the acidity causing the phytoplankton to die off, but the garbage from plastic bags, mcdonalds cups and starbucks coffee lids is monumental. There are islands in the oceans that are constructed based on the oceans currents, and they are composed completely out of trash and are the size of Texas. This is in our ocean! And when you buy fish, where do you think the fish comes from? A giant bottom-trawling vessel goes mutilates the oceans floor (obliterating whatever organisms that scientists have not yet discovered, and never will for that matter), scooping up whatever they can. Approximately 10% of that catch they actually use, the rest is by catch and they toss it right back into the ocean either dead or dying. And when you eat fish (and when I ate fish) you were endorsing that. Not only that, but if our oceans are more acidic and filled with our garbage, what do the fish eat, if there’s a phytoplankton shortage? Garbage. And what do we then eat? The fish. And a lot of the bottom trawling methods are illegal, and the fish do not get reviewed by the FDA. Those fishermen just sell their fish directly to the supermarket’s distribution center…so what the fuck are we eating?
I did the veggie thing…then I did the non-veggie thing. I’ve decided which side of the rope I’d rather be on, and it’s definitely the veggie side. That’s not to say that I’ll never eat meat again, I just know that by the end of the day, my impact on the environment and on my health is less.
I think a pescitarian diet (fish only being eaten once in a while due to mercury issues and the above mentioned ocean considerations) is much better than an omnivorous diet. More so now, with the intense impact the meat industry has on global warming and the amount of agriculture it takes to maintain all of our cows, pigs, and chickens. That wheat and corn could go to Americans and promote an abundantly healthy diet, rather than the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of animals so that Americans can get cancer and high blood pressure. There are ways to maintain a more sustainable pescitarian diet, which you can find on lowimpactliving.com
Although the most ideal situation would be that every American stopped eating meat and started eating veggies. Impossible, much? Certainly. What’s not impossible is loving meat while being at least a little responsible. Have a meal or two a week comprising of meat products. Institute more yummy veggies like avocados. Venture outside of the ‘meat and potatoes’ mentality and find other foods that you might like, just eat less meat.
