WarpGirl wrote:Awe but would you EVER give it up? Veggie Pork'nbeans please elaborate, I'm trying to become a pescatarian.
Well, since you ask, I'll tell ya.
I grew up as a meat loving maniac. I'd go out with the guys and eat 35 chicken wings, and all
that. But when I was 23 I quit eating all meat, fish, and poultry.
This is what happened to me:
(not intended to judge anyone else's eating habits, just an analysis of my own thinking at the time)
1. I was 22 and I was cutting some raw chicken legs for dinner, and suddenly a bunch of tendons fell out of one leg and lay there looking like white cooked spaghetti, all flat and long. It really must have freaked me out subconsciously, cause I had a lot of trouble eating the chicken that night. Meat started grossing me out more and more from that specific point on. There is a barrier in a meat eater's thinking that allows you to envision eating chicken or cow and think "food", while at the same time envisioning a cat or human flesh and thinking "not food". This barrier started breaking down in my brain. I would look at the cat while I was eating, and the flesh in my mouth, (the muscles of some other furry animal), would suddenly feel weird and "not foody" like my cat. I knew I could never look an animal who trusted me in the eye and kill it, and so I felt a bit like I was having my cake and eating it too.
I started veering away from meat naturally, sort of against my will.
2. So I found myself not eating meat, but having no recipes to replace the missing meat ones. I got a few great books to educate
myself; one of my faves is "Becoming Vegetarian" by V. Melina and B. Davis. Many studies have been done on the impact of meat
diet on our health (especially colon health). One Seventh Day Adventist study in the book found "compared with vegetarians, people eating red meat at least once a week had a 37% increase in colon cancer, & those eating it more than once a week had an 86% increase in risk....Those eating white meat more than once a week had a 200% (two hundred) increase in risk." Going from this, we may have to worry that switching to white meat to help your heart, etc could increase the risk of cancer elsewhere. This is just one study of course, but there are a bunch of others out there with similar conclusions....plants seem to be better for your body's internal health.
I tried look at it logically: food sits in your gut for a while, yes?
Well, if someone offered me a bowl of corn to eat that had been sitting at 99 moist degrees for 2 days vs. a bowl of chicken sitting at 99 for 2 days, I'd take the corn hands down. The meat would have spoiled dangerously after sitting in a warm place for two days. It would be rife with bacteria and whatnot. I dunno....that thought felt gross to me. Your food sits IN YOU for lots of hours. Just fermenting away. I wanted that fermenting food to be as wholesome as possible while it was visiting my colon.
This was the reason I stopped eating fish finally as well (in '03). Earth's oceans are so polluted now, that though fish is a healthy thing for you, the burden of toxins fish gives your body when consumed in quantity is MEASURABLE in some people. Especially the long lived fish like tuna. Methylmercury and PCB's and other stuff that takes years to get rid of in your body. Lots of studies on that to Google o' a rainy night.
Health seemed to be a good reason to stick with this no-liking-meat thing.
3. I've read in many places that for every fast-food burger made with rain forest beef, 55 sq ft of rainforest has been cleared. Whatever the exact measurement is, the planet Earth cannot sustain each of its 6 billion people eating the way the average North American currently eats. Right now, only the richer people eat like that, and Earth can barely hold on.
It takes 100 times more water to produce 1 pound of beef vs. 1 pound of wheat. It can be calculated that it takes less water to produce the food that a vegan needs for a whole year than to produce the food that a regular meat-eater needs for only one month.
Some estimates say that the world's cattle consume the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people...more than all of us!
So with all this info buzzing around in my brain, I asked myself, What if all that farm land and resources, currently used to raise cows for slaughter (for the richer countries steaks and burgers) was used instead to feed the starving people of the world? If we raised food for the shamefully tragic lot of hungry children instead of raising food for of billions of cows who turn out to not be very good for our health anyhow? Would our human situation improve? It made me uncomfortable that the cow I was eating had eaten better and more consistently during its lifetime than that wee little African kid we support through a feed the kids program. This thought occurred to me again and again as I was easing unwillingly out of the meat food chain.
4. The last thing that cemented me for all time, were several videos I saw taken from within large North American slaughterhouses. I am not going to make anyone sick by describing the things I saw being done to animals (in *so* many different videos...not just a couple). But I will say that I *do* think this: if we all picked our meat up from the factory whence it originated from, (and not the grocery store) we would all be switching to organic family farms for our meat supply. Some of the slaughterhouses, the filth and the cruelty, are beyond...anything....beyond describing. It is madness that it is allowed to happen the way it does in some establishments.
And now, having seen it, I *know* what it looks like. And it's too late to un-know it. I'm squeamish enough and the things I've seen are yucky enough to turn sickening the thought of even the most succulent KFC, yes, even as my mouth waters for the taste.
So here I am. A veggie freak.
My weight has been so much easier to keep at a healthy level...I used to tend to gain easily. I get sick way less often. My kids have been sick one time each, and they are 1 and 4. And as healthy as two horses they are! They have never had one bit of meat, not even through pregnancy and breast feeding.
We get our protein from whole wheat (all our bread & grain choices are always whole grain), corn, beans, milk, eggs, cheese, a bit of tofu in some dishes, more beans, peas, peanuts and peanut butter, and we get lots of 16 grain cereal and make bread and stuff. There's vegetable (non soy) protein you can buy bulk from the grocery or health food store... it looks like cracker crumbs, kinda yellow cream coloured crumbly dry powder, and we add it to lots of stuff...stir frys, the "meat" for chilli, all kinds of places to sneak veg protein flakes in...they cook right in and you don't notice them. I take a B supplement as animal products are a good source of b vitamins, and I don't get any animal stuff now except milk and a bit of eggs and cheese.
A couple of my favourite meat-replacement products, which help when transitioning your recipes and habits are:
Schneider’s Au Natural Meatless Chick'n Nuggets and burger patties (no cholesterol!) which you can see
here, the Chick’n ones are awesome...the "beefy" one's not as much.
Also Veggie Ground Round by Yves is a super versatile + healthy pretend ground beef that you can use in place of beef in any taco, burger, soup, meatloaf, etc etc.
You don't want to go too soy, however, as soy is a weird plant that can do weird things to you if over ingested. We love the fact that a peanut butter on whole wheat sandwich contains 20 g of protein and lots of B vits and no soy! Whole wheat and beans and milk and stuff aren't going to do the same weird things to you as too much soy, so use lots of those, and then just have some soy.
Anyhow....good luck WarpGirl, hope this gave you something to work with....and I hope I didn't bore all you meat eaters to tears.
PS - If nobody minds, I'd love for this thread to be a rational discussion of vegetarian practicalities and so forth, and not a
bash on anyone's personal eating habits or beliefs. My explanation above was just to show where the heck I personally got the idea of getting rid of those tasty ribs from...it's a crazy choice to many, I know! Anyhow, I look forward to others' points of view!
PPS - A concern was voiced that stricter vegetarians hate other forms of "lesser" vegetarianism, like pescatarians, etc. I'd be kind of hypocritical hating a fish eater, as I eat milk and cheese, and also, hating people is stupid. So don't worry.
No hating from me.Aaaaaaand GO!
