How One Avid Meat Eater Convinced Another to Become Vegetarian

February 7th, 2009

Disclaimer: This is not a vegetarian treatise. Your dietary choices are your own. This article is simply my personal experience with modern carnivorism and a discussion of that which inspired me to go from a jerky lovin’ burger eater to a granola crunching couscous muncher.

I’m a unique type of vegetarian; while I haven’t eaten meat in over a year, I would have little moral dilemma doing so. In the olden days little could please me more than a beer and a big steak. I unwaveringly made the switch and don’t plan on turning back mainly for selfish reasons. Here’s why.

To understand how an enthusiastic carnivore could make such a committed change, it’s important to understand the situation I was in. My mother was a cook in the “old country” and growing up, food was in abundance. Couple a mother’s encouragement to eat with my hyperactive metabolism and I was consuming more than my fair share of meat. My trick at parties was to shame the biggest endomorphs with my bottomless stomach like some kind of Canadian Takeru Kobayashi.

In my early twenties, beer and overconsumption had caught up with me. No less, clinical depression was my new challenge and the antidepressants destroyed my metabolic ability. In short: I got fat. Really fat.

Several years later when I had lost much of the weight I had gained, I moved in with my wonderful wife. She has been a vegetarian since childhood, yet never once tried to convince me to join her way of life. She taught me you can be a vegetarian without being militant. That typical vegetarian militancy always turned me off since I always felt it was no one’s business how I ate but my own.

Living with a vegetarian posed a logistical problem. I couldn’t eat a whole meat lasagna by myself so more often then not I would suggest something vegetarian that we could share. I made huge batches of beef burritos and froze them to order to have single serving portions of meat readily on hand. I also made my own beef jerky and kept it available nearby at all times.

Despite my attempts to compensate for the meat loss, I was eating less flesh and seeing renewed weight loss progress. Since I meticulously gather data on all my exercise and fitness progress I was able to identify that yes, unfortunately, the more meat I ate, the harder it was to lose weight. What a sad discovery.

So I begrudgingly began to eat less meat since it promoted progress in recovering from that huge weight gain years earlier. It wasn’t that hard really since I felt less… I dunno; heavy. Less toxic, perhaps. Whatever the case, there was a palpable increase in my energy levels. Besides, it was easier to purchase more groceries I could actually share with my wife.

Things went on this way for a few months until I read a book called the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. A remarkably accomplished journalist and writer, Pollan doesn’t exhibit any of that militant “meat is murder” attitude I find so pointless. He, an avid meat eater and food connoisseur wrote the book not to convert people to vegeratianism, but rather to examine the history of modern eating. In his extraordinarily interesting book he documents the meat manufacturing process from beginning to end.

Although I can’t help but feel bad for the living conditions CAFO (Caged Animal Feeding Operation) animals exist in, I’m mainly concerned with how this affects humans. I don’t object to people eating animals; they are just maintaining their lineage’s rank on the food chain. The problem is that indirectly we eat what meat eats, and they eat crap. I’ll let Pollan do his job of exposing the details but I assure you, it’s shocking, even though he doesn’t endeavor to make it that way.

So I decided to drop meat. And with it I dropped those final 20 pounds that I had been fighting to loose forever. Perhaps the rest is mostly psychological, but I feel better and definitely have much more energy.

So for me, vegetarianism offered more advantages than sacrifices. Perhaps that’s why it’s been so easy. I don’t have cravings for meat at all. As a matter of fact, I get the opposite reaction. Meat is now somewhat repugnant to me, however should I find myself in a survival situation I’d have few qualms about hunting, gutting and eating a deer. Wild animals live active lives void of forced feedings and hormones and antibiotics. As a result, in many I see hunting as more humane than CAFO meat, although that’s not a popular or palatable belief.

The irony is that giving up meat, in my own very tiny way, helps fight the shameful conditions in which CAFO animals are raised. Giving up meat for selfish reasons becomes an inadvertent boycott, although truthfully that ranks low on my list of reasons to go veggie. Afterall, I’m actually pescetarian, hoping to profit from the benefits of omega-3s.

In the end I was surprised to find you can be a granola cruncher without being an animal rights activist, wearing Birkenstocks, or even growing up on a hippy commune. My motivations are selfish and I assure you that committing wholehearted to vegetarianism has many benefits to the individual without sacrificing quality of living. So there you have it. That’s my experience; take from it what you wish.