Me, vegetarian? You must be joking
I like to think of myself as an “ethical” omnivore. I love chicken and beef and lamb, but it’s important to me (for mental and emotional reasons as well as health and environmental factors) that the cow or duck or whatever it is had a happy, free-ranging, well-fed life.
In other words, I eat expensive meat.
I firmly believe that, as farmer Alexis Keofoed said in this New York Times Magazine story, “cheap food is a lie.” In other words, what you “gain” in very cheap chicken you lose in other things: living conditions for the animals, which are often crammed into barns or feedlots with no light or room to move; wages for the people who make their living on such food production facilities; and the safety of the animals, which have been injected with antibiotics but frequently still harbor illness-causing bacteria. (And now I’m getting preachy. Ahem.)
Anyway. I put “Eat vegetarian for a week — twice” on my neglected “101 Things in 1001 Days” list about six months ago as a way to save money and stretch my meat-free dinner repertoire. But it was this article (also in the New York Times) that made me put my metaphorical foot down. This woman ate a burger (certified safe by the USDA!) cooked by her mother on a grill, and a little over a week later, the E. Coli it gave her paralzyed her from the waist down. She’ll never walk again. She was 20. (Photo at right: Ben Garvin for The New York Times)And that was it. No more McDonald’s burgers on road trips. No more sliders at Bluephie’s during happy hour (nothing on the menu indicates they’re sustainably sourced). No more inexpensive steaks from Jenifer Street Market. I am trying to eat beef once a month, and it has to be from somewhere like Black Earth Meats.
All of this is a long way of saying that I’m about to embark on my first week of temporary vegetarianism. I’m armed with some cool new recipes from the January Food and Wine — linguine with broccoli rabe/walnut pesto, baked butternut squash and cheese polenta — and some fabulous cookbooks, including Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” and Heidi Swanson’s awesome “Super Natural Cooking.” And I love vegetables. That should help. Any vegetarians out there want to weigh in on the transition? If you decided to go vegetarian, you know, for-ev-er, what was the transition like? Did you go cold turkey, so to speak? Did you ease into the tempeh and tofu lifestyle? Did you always dislike meat, or did you love it but go meat-free for ethical/health/other reasons?
Help me out here. I’m already feeling the itch to eat extra bacon just knowing my week (my one week!) of deprivation is coming. I need to suck it up, right?
I don’t think I could become a vegetarian. I do eat consciously like you do and buy the expensive free range stuff. Luckily, it’s easy to find around here. How are you doing on your new diet so far? PS I had some local nitrite free bacon this morning! Yum
Ooh, nitrite free bacon? For sure yum. I usually get Neuske’s — it’s so good — or Willow Creek if I’m at the Willy Street Co-Op (which I often am).
I am no longer trying to eat *only* vegetarian but I have cut out beef except for once a month and I deliberately make things vegetarian now that I never used to. The beef thing has been pretty easy actually, and it’s fun to try to figure out how to add flavor without adding fat or animal. I’m also trying to work with cheaper cuts of meat — check here next week for my attempt at chicken pate. (Heaven knows it might turn out terrible, but I’m going to give it a shot!)