Over the years, I’ve grown apart from meat products.
I can’t even kill a fly so I don’t like to imagine my food having been slaughtered. I go through phases where even farm-raised, organic blah blah blah makes me squeamish. It’s muscle. We rode on the backs of our beef animals for god’s sake! They licked us and had feelings. Rhoda had personality and free-will. The ducks? They existed to eat bugs and poop. But they meant well.
A few bad experiences helped expedite the break up with meat. I took a bite out of a McDonald’s egg McMuffin in college and was about to take a second bite when I noticed a big fat vein sticking out of the sausage! That is an image I cannot erase.
Friends had us over for dinner a number of years ago and served nasty hamburgers. When you’ve tasted the hamburgers I have in my day, anything else is sub-par. These should not have even been given the name hamburgers. I ate them to be polite, suppressing my gag reflex the entire time. I may have stuck a couple bites in my napkin. Yet, everyone else ate them with gusto. Gross!
I’ve found a way to connect meat with actual body parts in my imagination. Ribs are ribs. That one’s easy. Any other part is muscle. Why do we want to eat muscle? That’s just nasty! If I have to chew too much, that’s really disastrous.
I accidentally purchased pig cheek bacon from the local organic food delivery company.
Didn’t realize it until I made a second batch for my son. We both wondered why the pieces were so small and oval shaped. I didn’t tell him about the fact he ate pig cheeks until about a year or two later. Question: Why is eating pig cheek any worse than eating other parts?
Poultry I can do. No problem. As long as it’s mixed up with something else or super juicy grilled with just the right spice to cover up the mere notion that I’m chewing cooked bird flesh. Fish I eat. Eggs, a no brainer. But they have to be cage free and organic. Scrambled. I’ve got a line on a local farmer for our eggs, but in the meantime we’re going with the Costco organic. I know. Blasphemy.
Someone recently justified meat-eating as such: They’re raised to be our food. They wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for us. In other words:
“If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?” –John Cleese.
So I don’t eat meat. Most of the time.
A Halloween or two ago, I had pork because I had been drinking beer and the only other food available was candy. Even though, when my friend mentioned he had slow cooked a pork shoulder, I told him most of this story that you have now read. How could one even consider eating ‘shoulder?’ I have to admit, it was melt-in-my mouth-tasty.
A couple years ago, we received a couple of frozen packages of farm-raised grass–fed ground beef as a gift. It thawed thin blood in a bowl in the fridge, which made me gag every time I looked at it. My ecstatic son said, “It’s not blood, Mom.” Well, then what is it? The futile argument eventually dissolved. My son waved the grilled hamburger—otherwise known as mystery body parts—below my nose and I told him to knock it off. During a game of scrabble at the dining room table, I tried not to watch him devour what they said was the best hamburger. I probably ate some greens and nuts but can only recall the vivid tang of cooked meat.
I don’t proclaim to be a vegan, vegetarian, ovarian or whatever else.
I cannot be classified—a work in progress intermittent-arian I suppose. A meat flip flopper. My son used to say he eats beef at other people’s homes.
But now that I’ve found a local, organic farm source with grass–fed beef and free range chickens, I buy all sorts of meat. Mostly for my meat-lover son. (I don’t feel it’s right to force the issue. If he wants meat, it’s their choice.) Recently, I had my parents over for dinner and, guess what? I made and even ate hamburgers! Grass–fed, organic and… tasty. Maybe I’m cycling back around to eating meat.
I could live on nuts, veggies, ice cream, smoothies and dark chocolate. Oh, and popcorn. Sushi if I’m lucky. Which I haven’t been. Although luck can be over-rated.
So to those of you who raise an eyebrow to my eating habits, I hope you understand. And if you don’t, well that’s just going to have to do. I’m me. I love animals. I put bugs outside. I get sad if I accidentally step on an ant or wash a little bug down the drain. “I’m sorry,” I call to it, hoping it doesn’t have a family waiting for it to come home with dinner.
Meat and me don’t always get along. That works for me and it’s better for the planet.
Bonus:
Check out this Food-Phile podcast on adding some veggie love into your diet:
Listen to the latest full episode of The Green Divas Radio Show….
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Green Diva Meg
June 8, 2015 at 9:30 pm
great post! LOVE that wee pig. yea, hard to eat bacon after seeing a cute piggy. still chuckling about some of this post. “I don’t proclaim to be a vegan, vegetarian, ovarian or whatever else.” great stuff GD Lynn!
Green Diva Lynn
June 9, 2015 at 10:01 am
Thanks Meg! Now that I’ve seen Fork Over Knives, I will be reducing my meat intake again…