Why Do You Want to Know Why I’m Vegetarian?

Lisa Bigelow

“I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.”
– A. Whitney Brown

My senior year of high school, I went vegetarian, and it earned me more remarks than any of my previous antics (wearing tie dyed shirts, never going to a football game, and being able to write a proper thesis sentence, for example). Every person who found out, whether a close friend, a curious classmate, or a complete stranger, felt driven to ask me why. They asked politely, but they asked.

“Yes, and what about your pimples / gray hairs / family jailbird / Cyndi Lauper fetish?” I wish I had asked. Why had I gone vegetarian? That was a personal question! And I knew that they didn’t ask out of healthy curiosity; either their conversation skills were abyssmal — as if what I ate for lunch was more interesting than Great Books or Third World upheaval — or they wanted to “discuss” vegetarianism.

“Discussing vegetarianism,” in my contentedly suburban town, was not unlike “discussing politics.” People who initiated such discussions wanted to pulverize my point of view without listening to it first. They wanted to tell me why I should vote for a Bush; they wanted to tell me why I should be wolfing five pounds of beef a week and loving it.

I was always polite, however, and how much the worse for me! For, to be honest, I lacked a solid explanation. Why vegetarian? “I thought I might as well,” was about the best I could do.

But it’s true! Sure, I love the fuzzy animals, and sure, even at my tender age my cholesterol is 250, but the real answer is that I just did it — because. Throughout my adolescence, my mother had been cooking progressively lower fat and, accordingly, with less meat. (Impressive cholesterol counts run in the family.) By the time I was seventeen, we ate vegetarian five days a week. I, perpetually anxious person that I am, abhorred what seemed like an inconsistency; what was the point in being “mostly vegetarian” when I could go all the way?

So I stopped eating meat those remaining two evenings a week. And cut deviled-ham-on-Wonderbread sandwiches from my lunch menu, for I must confess that even now the mere thought of that gooey, fatty, salty, pink fluff from a can makes my mouth water. I envision myself peeling the pleated white paper from the tin, tugging back the lid, and using a butter knife to stir the congealed fat back into the “meat.”

That, right there, is precisely the reason why I should be allowed to be vegetarian with no questions asked. Can anyone in their right mind suggest that it’s to my benefit to consume Spam’s kissing cousin? Or sausage, or breaded fishsticks from the box, two other childhood vices?

In college, I met more vegetarians, the majority quietly content to munch on hummous and Szechuan tofu, but some rabid. I discovered another sort of vegetarian “discussion,” which I dislike as much as the first. As opposed to nonvegetarian vegetarian discussion, this is vegetarian vegetarian discussion. I don’t want to talk about vegetarianism as self-torture (it’s not), but nor do I want to talk about factory farming as animal torture (it may be — I buy the eggs of free range chickens, in case), or whether honey farming is cruel to bees, or whether it’s morally inconsistent for me to wear leather shoes. This latter I dismiss altogether; going vegetarian was never a moral issue for me.

Or perhaps my squeamishness over vegetarian issues is part of a deeper phobia: my meal preparation phobia. Perhaps, subconsciously, I went vegetarian to avoid skinning chicken thighs or forming patties from raw ground beef. If this is the case, removing meat from my diet has failed in curing my meal preparation phobia. After several years of non-Mom, non-cafeteria dining, I have realized an important fact: I don’t like to cook. I would rather eat beans from the can rather than use them a recipe. I can name two aspects of my personality that do much to support this phobia.

Impatience. I suppose I’m lucky that I rarely think about food unless I’m actually hungry, but once I’m hungry, I of course want to eat right away! I will eat cold leftovers, luke warm casseroles, and homemade bread still goopy in the middle. My catch phrase in the kitchen is, “Let’s just eat it.”
Creativity. I’m resourceful — too resourceful. I have invented many new dishes: cream of broccoli-chick pea-rice casserole; spaghetti with melted cheddar cheese and canned corn; and “pie” made of canned cherries and Cool Whip. DO NOT TRY THESE AT HOME. Even if it’s cold and rainy and you don’t have a car and you’re weak with hunger, sometimes going to the grocery store is preferable to throwing everything from your cupboard into the same dish and setting the oven to 325°.

Fortunately I have a boyfriend who is more domestic than I am. I would be spitefully jealous of him, if he didn’t cook most meals for me. Give Joe an assortment of vegetables (fresh, canned, or both) and a spice rack, and he can whip up something savory and delicious in half an hour. He doesn’t even need to use pasta or rice, the two key ingredients in my recipe file. When I die, I will bequeath my wok to Joe; unlike I, he actually deserves it.

During college, people occasionally asked me if I’d ever return to eating meat. I said, quite sincerely, that I would consider returning to poultry (I’ve never liked fish) if I married an omnivorous man, to make cooking arrangements simpler, and when I felt tempted by Thanksgiving turkey or an Italian sausage slathered with peppers and onions, I’d think it over and then say, “Today is not the day.” Gradually, though, I realized that “the day” would never come. The longer I go without meat, the more it will take to make me start eating it again; I have simply lost my desire for fleshy food. Some of the more persistent and thick-skulled discussants have said to me, “But if there a nice fresh steak held under your nose, wouldn’t you just...? No. I wouldn’t. In fact, I might just puke on it.

Joe has made it easy on me, however. Technically he’s an omnivore, but once we moved in together he stopped eating meat at home, with the exception of canned tuna. After a year and a half, even the tuna has ceased to grace the shelves — and stink up the refrigerator. He’ll eat poultry at restaurants, and he’ll eat his father’s hamburgers, but that’s about it. Joe makes returning to meat a laughable suggestion.

I can think of one good reason — well, two — to start eating meat again. The first is nuclear holocaust or a similar catastrophe. If I happen to survive, and I find myself living in a Stone Age environment, of course I’ll learn to hunt bunnies and squirrels to feed myself if necessary. My survival instinct is stronger than my stomach. The second reason is if I suffer a terrible accident and am left an amnesiac who does not remember my vegetarian ways.

Lest you think me overly righteous or naïve — “How can she be so sure that she’s lost her taste for meat?” — let me tell you that my system has, indeed, been scathed by meat since that fateful day in high school. There are a handful of general means by which this has come to pass.

Patterns of ignorance — an ongoing affair. After I went vegetarian, it was still some time before I learned to recognize that seemingly innocent foods may contain animal fat or gelatin. Among these are marshmallows, Pop Tarts, Hostess fruit pies, Gummi bears, and Jell-O. To prove that I’m not an anal vegetarian, I will eat marshmallows and Pop Tarts occasionally. But not fruit pies. Beef fat has no place in fruit pies. Nor will I eat Jell-O. It’s inherently gross the way it wobbles and makes that splooshy noise when you sink your teeth into it.
Sabotage — infrequent and unhappy occasions. These incidents include pepperoni hiding in what innocently presented itself as a cheese pizza, bits of ham floating in my Spanish “vegetable” soup; the Afghan restaurant in Baltimore serving me the beef version of a casserole rather than eggplant (and they had the nerve to tell me I’d ordered the beef! It’s not my fault that their meat and vegetarian menus were identical!); and chunks of ground beef nestled in the “vegetarian” quesadillas out at camp.
Intentional meat consumption — very rare indeed. I can think of only once, in fact, that I intentionally ate meat after going vegetarian. I was at the wonderful Italian restaurant Carmine’s in Manhattan, and my friends were raving over the fried calamari. I’d loved my mother’s fried calamari when I was a child, back when we didn’t try for low fat. So, just to see if it really was all that and a bag of potato chips, I ate a piece, sinking my teeth into that chewy, battered, greasy, flavorless squid. I was not tempted to eat another piece.
Dream cuisine — not to be properly counted, since it happened only in my unconscious mind. I have dreamed, on occasion, of eating a cheese and tomato sandwich and finding that my mother has slipped in a piece of bacon; of eating vegetable soup and ending up with a mouthful of ground beef; and forgetting my vegetarianism and finding myself halfway through a hotdog — even though I have never been a fan of hotdogs. I take little stock in these dreams, beyond a sense of my own paranoia. As far as I know, in spite of many joking threats to the contrary, no one has ever intentionally sabotaged my food with meat; nor have I ever forgotten that I am a vegetarian.

Recently Joe and I have made certain augmentations to our vegetarian menu to quench any lingering unconscious desire for things flesh. That’s right: we have fallen to faux. We discovered Whole Foods, the hippie/yuppie/health-nut grocery chain, in California and, later, were delighted to find that even middle-American, blue collar Chicago has a couple locations. Whole Foods carries no less than half a dozen brands of soy or gluten-based imitation meats.

In addition to teriaki seitan and mesquite tofu, we can buy vegetarian versions of hot dogs, bratwurst, ground beef, ground sausage, chicken patties, chorizo, salami, Canadian bacon, turkey, ham, and bologna (though who’d want to buy it?). No, not all of these products “tastes like the real thing,” but at this point, I’m not into the real thing. The primary function of faux in our diet is diversification, but it also serves the purpose of reminding me of my taste — or distaste — for meaty flavors. I can eat the hot dogs, but only a couple before I get sick of them. Salami yes, turkey no. Ground beef, in limited quantities; ground sausage in great heaps.

And meanwhile, I see the world around me succombing to vegetarianism. How different the world seems from seven years ago! Most grocery stores carry at least a limited selection of tofu and faux meat. I rarely find my restaurant menu options limited to pasta primavera (though I must remark that at a certain Silver State Saloon in rural Nevada, grilled cheese and cake were the only vegetarian items available). Even my carnivorously inclined brother opens his mouth uncomplainingly to Soy Crumbles and Gimme Lean sausage. (To be entirely fair, however, the next night he ordered the “meaty delight” from our favorite pizzeria.)

My point is, I am actually seeing a drop in how many people ask me why I went vegetarian. Assuming that it’s not just that people have learned how to mind their own business since 1995, or that I’ve become more of a recluse than I realized, it may be that America is really starting to understand that vegetarianism is not only potentially healthful but also potentially delicious! Understand just a little. A teensy, weensy bit. Maybe?

In the meantime, I continue on my merry vegetarian way and demurely decline all offers at elementary schools to buy their pork rind sandwich for the low, low teacher’s price of two dollars. And if the kids poke each other in wonder when they see my bagged lunch (“Is that yogurt? Really? Wow!”), well, it just means they haven’t yet grown into the amazing cosmopolitan world in which they live, where carnivores and herbivores share the water hole in peace. As long as they don’t discuss what they had for dinner.