A Clockwork Vegetarian

I am no longer a vegetarian.

I've been meatless for roughly six years. Back in the day, when I was the fuzzy-headed, over-excited Buddhist of my youth, I tried to force myself off meat over half a dozen times. None of them took. I loved steak, bratwurst, hot dogs, bacon, all of it (except fish), and I'd always go running back to them no matter how much failure and shame I felt. Did I care about animal cruelty? Yeah, of course. Was that the largest motivating factor? No, although at the time I believed it was. I hated PETA (and still do) but non-participation in the killing of animals is a huge part of what was then my new religion/life philosophy, and I wanted to be the perfect Buddhist.

Despite many unsuccessful attempts, one day something finally fell into place. Not only could I resist meat, I found it was repulsing me. The texture came to be the worst--the word "gristle" went from an abstraction to something sickeningly tangible. One night in Phoenix as I sat on my balcony in the still desert air I knew the time had come, and I hadn't gone back. Aside from a couple rookie mistakes (bacon hiding under a thick layer of cheese, the omnipresence of gelatin) I never knowingly strayed.

But as the years went on I found myself tiring of this self-inflicted diet. In my experience it became too limiting, and either my waning youthful energy or dwindling compassion have tipped the scales enough that it just isn't worth the hassle. I'm sure some of this is due to my present environment as Hampton Roads isn't overburdened with meatless reseraunts, although I have good reason to believe much of America is the same. I'm also one of two vegetarians I know and I'm not the kind of asshole that expects others to kowtow to my individual dietary choices. Friends and family make allowances for me, but they don't expect me to eat meat and I don't expect them to forgo it. If I find myself somewhere with many "cruelty-free" restaurants my stance may change, but I'm too fond of convenience and certain fast-food establishments to go full veggie again.

Which is one of the reasons I'm going back. A vegetarian cannot get something on the go without many repeats of the same, unfulfilling items. I love French fries, but I want something more. Ironically I've never been much of a salad person and somehow doubt the drive-thru variety would be very good. I cannot count the number of times I've been in a car redolent of the smell of burgers, chicken sandwiches, and chili dogs while I desultorily munched on paltry fries. It makes sense for these establishments to be short of vegetarian fare, but it doesn't change the fact that it leaves me out, and I'm finally through with it.

Fast food joints aren't the only offenders. Regular sit-down restaurants are also ill-equipped to serve my kind. Unless it happens to be a specialty shop the choices are still sparse, and my aforementioned non-assholishness keeps me from subjecting kith and kin to places they will feel limited, usually paying more for a meal that to them seems lacking. It's odd and counter-intuitive, but natural, flesh-free foods cost more than those which require whole animals to be raised, killed, and processed for consumption. This isn't even taking into account the organic and free-range items usually offered at such places for even higher prices. Vegetarians are then forced into giving special instruction and modifying menu items, which yield mixed results and has the added worry that wait staff will make mistakes or simply disregard the wishes of a customer easily assumed to be nothing but an overly-particular nuisance. Waiters and waitresses have it hard enough, and I strongly dislike feeling like an extra bother.

Worse still, however, is the recent realization that I no longer have a choice to eat meat or not. After more than six years of a meatless diet my body is no longer used to animal protein. Earlier this year I performed a little experiment and ate a small amount of gelatin. "Intestinal gridlock" is how I'd describe the result, and that came from a single packet of Pop-tarts. Imperceptibly I had passed some border and could no longer choose what I wanted to eat. Merriam-Webster defines a vegetarian as "one who believes in or practices vegetarianism" (a little tautonymous, but it is a dictionary after all). If one doesn't have a choice are they truly vegetarian? Is someone who is forced from doing evil truly good? If not, then I haven't truly been vegetarian in some time, ever since I stopped caring and could go along by gastrointestinal coercion alone. Maybe I'm just being spiteful, but this is my biggest reason to return to the omnivorous lifestyle.

Not surprisingly Google has more results for becoming vegetarian than the other way around. (As a side note to all those people who Googled "How do I stop being lazy/shy/gay" enough times to make it the top results: chin up; you're obviously not alone.) "Vegetarian" wasn't anywhere on the instant results list and I found only one article that was useful. The rest of it was pretension and self-righteousness as only the anonymity of the Internet can support, not surprisingly from angry fellow vegetarians and vegans. One person posing the question of safely adding meat back into their diet for health reasons was met only with derision: "Go hunting, then you'll never eat meat again." "All these people who claim they 'need' to eat meat for health reasons are just selfish. Man up and stick to your diet." "Go out and eat a rare steak right away, that will cure you of wanting meat." "Want to stop being vegetarian? Go vegan." Notice the original plea for help--how does one reintroduce meat safely into one's diet--goes completely ignored. It appears these people care deeply for the plight of all animals save one--the human animal.

And it's not just stereotypical PETA zealots that are dickish and rude. When the first vegetarian came into existence so did his antithesis--the heckling carnivore. Meat-eaters seem to love nothing more than a vegan or vegetarian to poke fun at, good-naturedly or otherwise. There have been no end to the comments and remarks at my expense every time the subject is broached, and with every new acquaintance and set of coworkers it begins again. The slights aren't offensive in and of themselves, rather the insult comes from their repetitiveness and their lack of creativity and wit. You can only hear "Hey, wanna go out for some steak? Haw haw haw!" so many times before it becomes unbearably old. Not as bad but still frustrating is the inescapable question of "So, what do you eat then?" in any of its forms and insinuations. In the beginning it was exciting to explain vegetarian diet to the inquisitive, but after so many years the luster has definitely been lost.

The one helpful article confirmed what I had suspected: after years of vegetarianism my body wouldn't be able to handle meat right away, and I'd have to gradually step myself up to full omnivore status. Broths would be first, followed by small portions of fish and white meats like chicken with the skin removed (mentioning skin removal is still a little unsettling), and red meat last, as it is the single most difficult food for the human body to digest, vegetarian or otherwise. In addition to the above advice, the author was also thoughtful enough to add a section on the psychological effects of consuming meat again. She warned of the possible ridicule from veggies and meat-eaters alike, and a sense of failure for abandoning a chosen diet. She suggested letting the insults roll off one's back, along with encouragement and support. It was really quite endearing, as well as refreshing in a sea of haughty jerks on both sides of the food pyramid.

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I found myself decided. That night I cooked pasta and held a cube of chicken bouillon over the pot; it smelled like concentrated, metallic chicken broth and was very yellow. I dropped it in with the multi-colored spiral noodles and meat-free pasta sauce without ceremony. Crushing the moist cube between the tines of a fork I hoped it would actually dissolve and not just hide in clumps within the sauce, to be discovered during surprise bites of intense chicken flavor. Luckily it did mix and I sat down to my first non-vegetarian meal in over half a decade.

It tasted almost exactly the same as the first half of the pasta I'd prepared a week earlier. I definitely noticed the taste of chicken, however, and would have noticed even if I hadn't known it was there, but it wasn't overpowering. I shared the pasta with my toddler son, the only other vegetarian family member until he started eating solid foods. I liked the way it tasted and kept an internal eye open for any impending stomach pain. None came, and even though I experienced brief images of hens congregating in a sunlit chicken coup and told myself I was eating them, I felt nothing. We finished the big bowl of noodles together and I slept that night, untroubled.

The next day I waited for indigestion that did not come. I went through my normal workday looking forward to lunch, where I'd have chicken-flavored Ramen noodles for the first time in years. I'd eaten the Oriental flavor for some months at the start of my dietary confinement before realizing it wasn't meat-free. Back then I was militant but lazy like many of the young vegans I knew, and couldn't be bothered to read the ingredients until later. I loved the cheap noodles in their warm Styrofoam cups and was excited to enjoy them again. Before Noon the smell of Ramen drifted down to me over the cubicle wall. My neighbor apparently had the same idea for lunch and I took this to be a sign that today was definitely the day. As soon as I caught a break I unwrapped a cup of noodles from the employee break room and filled it with steaming water from the coffee maker, closing the lid and keeping it there with a plastic fork. It smelled fantastic, and I returned to my desk to eagerly await the three minutes of required cooking time.

By the time I was able to get to it something like twelve minutes had gone by, but the cup was still very warm in my hands. The wavy noodles always remind me of permed hair and the broth was the same waxy yellow of the bouillon cube. It tasted as delicious as it smelled, and I can't remember enjoying a lunch at my desk quite as much. I ate three-quarters of it before I realized there were small soggy pieces of actual chicken in it, something I'd forgotten in the intermittent years. "Oh well," I thought with the anticlimactic indifference of a virgin who unexpectedly finds himself deflowered. I'd crossed a threshold but felt no change. Chicken broth was one thing, but actual flesh was another--I was no longer a vegetarian.

The next night I put a small pan on the stove and began cooking half a package of kielbasa for my son's dinner. He has the infuriating habit of eating only part of whatever we make for him (unless we've cooked for ourselves, in which case he wants it all), and I half-planned on trying a bite or two of whatever he didn't finish. As the crescents of sausage began to hiss in the pan I looked at the packaging before wrapping it in tinfoil: "beef kielbasa" it said between the horseshoe shape of the meat. Maybe I wouldn't be scavenging his leftovers. But as the sausage began to brown and crackle in its own delicious-smelling grease I thought maybe a few bites wouldn't hurt. I constructed a plate of mozzarella cheese and French bread slices, adding the seared disks into a small pile and pouring the remaining grease over a few pieces of bread. The smell was tantalizing, and I hardly sat down before eating one of the flavored bread slices. It was fantastic, with a hearty, spicy flavor I hadn't tasted in years, all from a humble piece of bread with sausage drippings. My tongue overrode my trepidation and by the end of the night I'd eaten the majority of the sausage myself. As I ate my first bite of beef--a meat I wasn't planning on eating for some time, if ever--my girlfriend watched my face expectantly for signs of disgust. She saw nothing but enjoyment.

My biggest fear in making the transition has been painful indigestion, but so far there has been nothing. I wouldn't hazard a bucket of KFC but things are progressing surprisingly well, and by this rate the legendary Chick-Fil-A could be in my near future. At this point I plan to stay "mostly vegetarian", a term that would annoy me if I wasn't the one using it. (Just like being pregnant, either you are or your aren't, and I've ranted against too many faux-veggies claiming to be full members to let myself by without comment.) I've come to love certain meat substitutes more than the products they originally replaced and cannot see myself abandoning them when grocery shopping.

Aside from pain my two biggest concerns are health and, unsurprisingly, weight-gain. Accurately or not I consider a meatless diet the main factor in my more-or-less state of thinness during a period of otherwise very poor eating and no exercise. In the two years since Jonas' birth I have had no physical exertion aside from the constant lifting of an ever-expanding child, and somehow have stayed relatively skinny and kept a surprising amount of definition in legs that were carved on two straight years of heavy bicycle riding. While a vegetarian diet can be more healthy than one containing meat, in many cases (mine included) the only difference lay in what it lacks. Candy, soda, junk food, and a constant stream of coffee the approximate color and sweetness of vanilla ice cream have composed my food intake for the past six years--proof that vegetarians are at least as unhealthy as anyone else. Regardless, I do still worry that the added strain of animal fats and flesh will be the monkey wrench to my system that finally brings on the merciless weight gain I'm certain is waiting for me on the eve of my thirties. I could start exercising and use the momentum of this change to enact other, healthier changes in my diet, but I'm not going to. I know myself better now than I ever have, and I just won't be able to muster the energy required.

At the time of this writing I've consumed approximately an entire package of beef sausage on my own to no ill effect, aside from a heaviness after eating that vegans and vegetarians are exempt from experiencing. This morning, however, I packed up my vegetarian rib-lets (one of the many miracles from Morningstar Farms, who will continue to enjoy my patronage even after I've become fully converted) and headed off to work, and will be happy come lunchtime with my meal of meatless magic. But who knows, now that I can accept any lunch invitation from coworkers the possibilities seem endless...