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You Eat Chicken, Don't You? |
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December 1, 2008
Becoming a vegetarian is easy. Explaining to those around you that
you do not eat meat and having them respect your position is an
entirely different story. I don't even want respect. I am now to the
point where I wish they would just leave it be, and I have a feeling I
am not alone.
The argument I continually hear is "How do you get your protein?"
There is not a single person in this country suffering from a protein
deficiency. My own grandmother practically had a heart attack when I
told her I no longer eat meat. "Why, that can't be healthy. You have to
eat meat," she fussed the last time I visited. Grandma makes three
things - Spanish rice, goulash, and chili. All with ground beef. She is
the ground beef queen. Eating ground beef is healthier in the eyes of
some of my family members than eating plants. Go figure. They sit and
stare at me. "What are you going to eat?" I try to explain that it's
simple to eat pasta without meat sauce. This is not a concept that
comes easy to them.
The phone rings once a week. Another person having difficulty with
my decision to eat an almost exclusively plant based diet has been my
mother-in-law. Mind you, this is a person whose life is dedicated to
the crusade against fat. She abhors fat, and talks about how healthy
she herself eats to the point of exhaustion. "I had a third of a muffin
and three strawberries for breakfast." The question on the answering
machine this week, the one before Thanksgiving, is "Lorie eats turkey,
right?" When my patient husband calls his mother to explain once again
that poultry is meat, she counters with "Well, what fish should I
prepare for her? She has to eat something." When I first switched to
vegetarianism, this went on for months, with the same question, feel
free to substitute in whatever meat you like. "She eats chicken,
doesn't she?" "You eat fish, don't you?" As an acquiescence to me, she
made rice once - with beef stock. She now acts as if I am a difficult
eater. I ask that nothing be made special for me, and I try to be
extremely gracious when it comes to the food prepared for me. I used to
eat it just to be polite, but I soon realized that going against my
principles because someone else is offended by my good intentions does
neither of us any favors. The invites to my in-laws for dinner have
ground to a halt, with the exception of major holidays.
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