This is a little bizarre, but, still, appropriate given the photo of mechanically separated chicken floating around. Either way, 4 October 2010 makes 20 years since I stopped eating meat.
Talking about the fact that I don’t eat meat is astonishingly boring to me, and I hate answering questions of the “why did you start?” or “don’t you miss?” sort. I find amusing people who apologize for eating meat in front of me, and I consider arguments about whether or not one should stop eating meat tedious at best (and resent myself for letting myself get drawn into them). There are plenty of books that argue living like I do (more or less), and I’m such not a vegetarian evangelist that I don’t have the arguments committed to memory.
I think that the only interesting thing about my decision is that I haven’t been tempted, at all, to go back on it except for once, while reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Michael Pollan’s book is, in general, very good, and I liked his exceptionally nuanced approach to not eating meat. He approached it clearly, without any agenda one way or another, and explained in detail why it’s a good way of living. But he also added that, basically, plants need nitrogen, and they get that nitrogen from dead animals. That sort of Cycle of Life thing made me pause to consider the effect of my removing myself from the nitrogen cycle. But I bailed, since by this point, a weak philosophical pro-meat position could not do adequate battle with what has become simple aesthetic revulsion regarding eating meat. The lack of temptation makes the very fact of my not wavering, of my sticking to this whole regime, equally uninteresting.
My mom once told me that she considers this quirk of mine proof of my ability to be stubborn and stick to something I set my mind to. I guess that’s about right, and that’s about all that’s left that bears remarking on this little anniversary, an anniversary I would probably have forgotten if not for the fact that someone asked me just last month how long it had been, and I calculated myself one month shy of my china anniversary. So there it is. I’ll celebrate with some lentils and couscous—the same thing I ate yesterday.
Tags: Michael Pollan, vegetarianism
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