Could I become a vegetarian?
Anyone who knows me, is likely to laugh at this suggestion. I am from Calgary, where saying you are a vegetarian is likely to stir as much mingled derision and baffled curiosity as a proclamation that you practice polygamy.
My family are meat eaters; our family dinners were the entirely typical meat/starch/vegetable composition. When my family went to a vegetarian restaurant when we were on vacation, my father, a grown man, pouted and sulked the entire time.
I dated a vegetarian. For almost three years. An at-home vegan, in fact (most of the time). And never once while we were together did I even consider embracing a vegetarian diet. Every time we went out, I revelled in the opportunity to order meat. An environmentalist, he would tell me about how much more environmentally sustainable it is to produce a pound of vegetables than it is to produce a pound of meat. The carbon footprint of a cheeseburger has been well documented. And the North American dependence on meat is a recent development that points more to a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, right to indulgence mentality than any physiological need for meat protein.
I should add (you're welcome, Chopper) that he is very fit. He lives an active lifestyle, he played and coaches rugby, he does crossfit. He was not anemic or pale or scrawny.
Only once did I witness him yell at someone that he doesn't eat animals.
I knew all this, and yet...
I think I will openly chalk this one up to stubbornness. I was not prepared to abandon something I honestly liked, just because someone, and even someone I loved and respected very much, thought I should. The numbers didn't matter as much as "staying true to myself" did. And don't get me wrong, I think that is a very important thing in a relationship, and to his credit, John never got on my case about vegetarianism. I'm simply realizing more and more that the things I had been rejecting may have been entirely true to my priorities and sensibilities. The older I get the more I realize who I've been is not necessarily who I am. Not in a fluffy, self-help, fit-spo kind of way - in the sense that I have been (and I would guess many people are), in a lot of ways, the product of my parents. But as I form my own opinions and priorities and watch those diverge ever so slightly from the priorities of my family, making unique decisions about what course to take my life feels less like compromising some core sense of self.
But the question remains; could I become a vegetarian?
I don't think so. I think that part of the self I craft, not wholly distinct from my family, is one who is passionate about food. There is great vegetarian food, but most foodies will tell you that life without chicken stock is not much of a life at all.
But I had been thinking about cutting down on meat and animal products significantly. And why does it have to be one or the other? And while this very thought had been ruminating in my mind I stumbled across this TED Talk...
It's a post-modern world - fuck binaries. So while "no meat" may not be something I can reconcile myself with, "less meat" certainly is. And that's not nothing.
