Yup. Plus sometimes you start feeling like you’re being expected to justify your “weird” habits, and it gets annoying to be cross-examined about “well why do you eat eggs/milk/honey then, huh?” Or, “Where do you get your protein, do you eat a lot of cheese/tofu?” Er, no actually, but… you know, I don’t always feel like going into a nutritional lecture.
So, I say it’s complicated. Because sometimes, it is.
I’ve been a vegetarian for 38 years. A very typical dinner for me takes me about 5 minutes to prepare and about 20 minutes to cook: broccoli, carrots and cauliflower, already washed, chopped and stored in the fridge cooked in the steamer part of a rice cooker, rice in the rice cooker, push “cook”. That part takes about two minutes. Non stick pan, sprayed with a little garlic Pam, teriyaki tofu (sauce is in the package), flip once.
Maybe because I’ve been a vegetarian most of my life it seems so easy and normal.
I stopped eating most meat when I was 2 but I’ve a vague, distant memory of eating a sausage and I remember it being sweet tasting. Growing up in a meat and potatoes house, my mom just served me everything but the meat for dinner.
I was raised by very “meat and potatoes” Midwesterners, so I grew up with meat at basically every meal, but for some reason never really liked it very much. I find most of it doesn’t taste very good. I was also always an animal lover, and found it sad to think of animals dying.
Seeing the movie “Food Inc.” was an eye-opening experience. My boyfriend still eats meat and I still eat eggs and cheese…but ever since we watched that movie we only buy such products from local farmers (we are fortunate to live in an area where the farmer’s market scene is especially robust). I agree with the person who said that pasture fed animals appear to be better for your health too, which is an added bonus.
I don’t think you’re missing anything by going for Indian food over meat. 
I love Indian cuisine and I wish that I had discovered it earlier in life. It makes being a vegetarian very easy!
Out of curiosity, why’d you stop eating meat at the young age of 2? (Surely it wasn’t a conscious effort on your part to go vegetarian…)
Okay, I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 13 years old, and at the time I had never known any other vegetarians. It was a bit of a scandal in my family, and they were concerned about my health. (Both of my sisters, one older and one younger, have since become vegetarians, and my family has gotten a bit of a grip.)
My reasoning has no sound byte. Morally, I think the way animals raised for meat is wrong, and it’s very difficult for me to think about. However, I do eat dairy, and I know dairy cows are not treated well either, and I feel guilty about that.
Psychologically, I have always felt that my coping skills are lacking. I can’t stand the thought of being responsible for any creature’s death. I hate the whole idea of the food chain, although I know it’s natural and not objectively wrong. But I have a very difficult time coping with death, and particularly dealing with the death or mistreatment of animals. Oddly, it’s not that I’m an animal lover, really. I like some animals under some circumstances, but I’m not an extremist. But I just have a soft spot for animals when I hear of them being mistreated.
Overall, when people ask me why I’m a vegetarian (and they so often do), I have no quick answer. And people sometimes tell me they admire me for my will power in being a vegetarian, but I always feel that’s misguided. It’s not difficult for me to be a vegetarian and it takes no will power on my part. I know it’s natural for humans to eat meat, but for me it seems natural not to. I don’t want to eat meat and I wish that nobody did want to. But I don’t hold it against them that they do, and I know we are biologically meant to.
So yeah, I have no good answer to this question. I wish I did, since I’m asked it all the fucking time. I just can’t claim moral superiority for my vegetarianism, since my reasoning is a bit dysfunctional. But I still am happy I’m a vegetarian, and I’m quick to point out that I was the first in my family to become one!
My life: a continual contradiction.
No conscious effort on my part other than “eww, yucky!”. If I tried to eat meat, I’d end up gagging so my parents just let me not eat it. I would eat all vegetables except peas, and I’d eat whatever substitute protein my mom made, so it wasn’t worth it to them to make it a battle seeing as I was getting all my nutrients anyway.
Even though we weren’t Seventh Day Adventists, there was a school near by and my parents wanted us to go to private school. They don’t eat meat as part of their religion so it was just normal for me to not eat meat and to be around all my friend who didn’t eat meat.
When I got married, my husband had been raised as vegan his whole life, he’d never even had an egg, so staying vegetarian was very easy.
As an adult I don’t eat meat because I can’t support the commercial meat industry. It’s just too cruel. However, I don’t have a problem with people eating meat. I just think people should either hunt for their meat or buy it from small, local farms with kind animal husbandry.
Alright, thanks for all the responses so far. I appreciate it. I’m actually getting feedback here, which is great.
Actually my problem is that so far, I’ve met two people who are vegetarians and who I knew well enough to talk to them about it. I mean, I know other vegetarians, but not well enough. One of them does sound like what you’re describing and he just says “it’s complicated”. I just didn’t know that was the norm, since I don’t ask any vegetarian I meet about his reasoning. The other one was a maniac who I didn’t actually ask about her reasoning. She just screamed them out at me, about how the meat industry is the same as the slave trade, about how she’d rather kill and eat a person than an animal, and so on. Obviously, I couldn’t ask her about her reasoning. So, I came here to see what normal vegetarians would say. And so far, it’s been very informative.
As for not reading a book, I don’t want to read 400 pages of someone trying to convince me not to eat meat in order to understand his opinion when I can read a few sentences from people who actually are normal, every-day vegetarians and get exactly the same information from both sources.
I was vegetarian for several years but am not now. I began because somewhere I read that people who had high levels of anger and hostility could become more mellow by eliminating red meat. So I did. And it did work to an extent. Even now I eat meat maybe twice a week. (Probably less if we don’t count bacon.)
Yah - lots of people call bacon a gateway meat. 
I stopped eating feedlot meat after I watched “Food, Inc.” I say I’m vegetarian just to make things easy (or easier) when I’m out, and for casual company. I work in the veterinary and animal rescue industry, so have been surrounded by vegetarians and vegans for a decade. I think that helped me make the “final straw” decision. While I had been aware of humane guidelines for slaughter, I had not really been aware that those guidelines are slim, indeed, and that the guidelines do not follow to how the animals are raised.
So, local farms that I’ve researched personally are the only places I’ll get meat from. So, I only eat meat at home, with meat I’ve purchased myself from a place I know the animal was pasture raised, healthy, and slaughtered humanely. I love meat, so there’s no way I’ll ever give it up completely. It’s a rare occasion now, though. I do believe that raising meat for slaughter is something humans do, and have done for a very long time, so that part doesn’t bother me. The whole feedlot business that cropped up in the last few decades is all kinds of wrong. Discovering how sick those cows really are, learning that they would be dead from being corn-fed less than a year beyond their target slaughter date, and finding out about feedlot runoff being part of the e.coli problem in vegetable crops, all are reasons I can no longer support the industry.
And that’s why I don’t explain “why vegetarian” in casual conversation. If someone really wants to know, I’ll explain it at a time we set aside. Lucky for me, most people I’m around who aren’t family are all people who see vegetarianism and veganism as a normal thing to do and don’t need any explanations!
Yeah. Or, “well what if…”, “Well what about…”, “well why do/don’t you…”, the accusations that me not eating meat is a judgment of them, even when I say it’s not (because it’s not).
I’m a “vegaquarian” (a pesce-vegetarian: I eat fish). Both my sister and I “lost the taste” for meat in early adolescence, almost like we outgrew it and we just thought it was kind of yucky. From the fibrous-rubbery cooked muscle texture to the mild muskiness - bleh! I’ve become so accustomed to it that now the idea of eating another mammal squicks me out as if it’s cannibalism or something. Except bacon. Bacon should be vegetarian. I don’t eat it, but I still crave the smoked pig.
ETA: I sometimes wonder if it’s genetic. Most of my mom’s side of the family rarely eat meat. No one has a reason for it, it’s like no one has a palate for it or even really considers it as an option. It’s mostly absent from the menu. They’ve never been real meat-eaters.
The philosophical and environmental issues are secondary. More like an added bonus, but really it’s honestly more that I don’t like it much. There are other foods that I hate more, so with a gun to my head, given the choice between eggplant and a steak, I would eat the steak. Eggplant is nasty!
Our parents are proto-hippies, so there was no problem with a switch and enough research to ensure proper nutrition rather than just feed us salad and expect us to thrive. We were offered a lot of alternatives and got plenty enough protein.
My distaste for meat was more gradual than my sister’s (she’s slightly older than me). I ate chicken well into my late teens and became fully vegetarian by about 20. My sister was practically a vegan throughout most of high school.
My wife and I eat fish now because we’re really active and we were having a tough time getting enough protein for our muscles to recover. This wasn’t an issue in my 20s, but now it seems to be. Although we’ve found a vegan protein powder with branched-chain amino acids which is making a difference. Fish doesn’t have the same muscle fiber texture as mammals and isn’t as ooky to eat.
My wife is more of an"ethical vegaquarian" and stopped eating non-gill bearing meat more due to farming practices and the “I feel like a cannibal” thing.
(bolding mine) That sounds like you’re simply describing gelatin, which is not in any way unhealthy. However … you’re boiling chicken? No wonder you didn’t like the taste! Bleh.
Yikes. It’s people like the woman you described who give vegetarianism a bad name. Out of curiosity, did she just turn vegetarian? [broad brush warning]I’ve noticed that some people who already have born-again tendencies go all out when they make a lifestyle change. I’m a good example. When I was younger and lost a lot of weight, I recall walking around saying cockily, “I can’t imagine how anyone could have a problem losing weight. It’s not like it’s hard!” Until I had children, things got complicated, I got fat and, lo and behold, losing weight fell to the bottom of my list until I realized how high my cholesterol was. Humble pie, fortunately, has no fat or cholesterol.[/broad brush]
Anyway, I’m not vegetarian. I was for a long time and we probably only eat meat at home about 2-3 times a week (including fish). I wish I could say it was for ethical reasons. Or even health reasons. But a lot of it is pure laziness. I hate that I have to worry about cross contamination with meat - you cut it up, toss it in the pan or grill or oven, then if you need to use the cutting board, you have to wash it all over again, plus the knife, plus anything else the meat might have touched, then you chop whatever non-meat on it and wash it all over again. That makes me nuts - it’s way too much work, especially when I can just mash some black beans, mix with some corn, peppers and onions and make bean cakes or homemade veggie burgers.
Also, my husband was raised in India in a mostly-vegetarian household (meat was usually only something they got when they went to a restaurant, which wasn’t often since they had a cook), so he doesn’t care if I make something with meat or not. My son loves chicken and fish, so I often keep them around for him, but we often eat something slightly different from what he does because we like super-spicy food and his 4-year-old palate can’t handle it yet.
Anyway, to me food is just food. In other words, many people automatically classify veggies as sides and meat as the entree. My mom does this all the time and I used to as well. When I met my husband, I started seeing the “place” of meat and vegetables in a meal differently. I’ve been trying to convince my mom of that for years because she insists on doing all the cooking when she visits - to her, a meal isn’t a meal unless meat is the centerpiece.
Personally, I find nothing wrong with meat *qua *meat. We’re designed to eat it as part of our diet, it’s the most convenient way to get some things that are essential for our body to function, and it’s tasty as hell.
However, I have a strong dislike for factory farming. I think it makes meat “cheaper” by hiding the true costs–treating animals terribly, pumping them full of prophylactic antibiotics, storing their waste unsafely, etc. Back when I was a broke-ass student, I couldn’t afford to buy on a regular basis meat that has been raised and slaughtered in a way that I could agree with. Now I could, but I’m just too lazy to do the research and start buying and cooking meat. I’m sure I’ll start eating meat again at some point, especially given the upswing in restaurants that source as many of their ingredients locally as possible.
I *do *eat fish; I started that up again before I went to Japan in 2004, since it’s almost impossible to be a strict vegetarian there.
I went vegan three weeks ago. I have always been one of the fastest players on my softball team, but after sitting behind a desk for the last two years my coach/friend joked that it looked like I was carrying a piano on my back. I had gone to about 30 pounds over my ideal weight. And I felt tired and sluggish at work.
Went out for a drink after the game and a teammate, now in his late 40’s and still one of the faster guys on the team, talked about how when he went vegan he’s kept his youth and feels great. And it just struck a chord.
I’ve lost 11 pounds in three weeks and finally feel some quickness returning. That said, I’ve also REALLY cut back on white flour/white sugar and am not eating after 9pm. I miss cheese. I smelled somebody barbecuring a steak last night and I wanted to jump out of my skin. the biggest issue is a matter of convenience, though – what is there to eat around here??? But it feels like a good choice so far.
I will still eat fish on Fridays and sushi whenever – I’m not crazy!
:rolleyes: There’s nothing about not eating meat that’s inherently healthier than eating meat. It’s entirely possible to be a fat and/or unhealthy vegetarian.
And a hearty :rolleyes: for you, too. Asserting that any vegetarian meal that doesn’t take hours to prepare is bland or disgusting is just as ridiculous as insisting that they’re all healthy.
I’m not a full-time vegetarian anymore; I was for about six years in college and grad school. But since I eat meat only once every two weeks or so, that puts me way outside the American mainstream on this issue so I’ll consider myself a vegetarian for this thread.
I minimize meat because animal farming is so bad for the environment. Everyone in my area knows that the Chesapeake Bay is badly polluted, but mostly people probably think it’s from industry, oil, the usual suspects. Actually the Chesapeake Bay is full of shit. Literally. All the manure from the cattle and chicken farms in the watershed gets washed into the rivers and ends up in the bay. Because the manure is full of unnatural chemicals (that’s a result of industrial farming techniques) it is poisonous and it’s killing off the sea life in the bay. There are large dead zones throughout the bay. The same thing is happening across America and the world.
Also it takes vastly more land to raise meat than plant food. 1,000 calories of meat requires 5-10 times as much land as 1,000 calories of bread. Also much more water, fertilizer, etc… Much more transportation is required for meat, so reducing meat would help fight global warming and move us towards energy independence.
I have many, many painfully delicious vegetarian recipies that the culinary gods crave unabashedly and they are in no way whatsoever healthy. One of my casseroles will slam you arteries so fast you should proactively call 911 to come hastily with a defibrillator so that by the time you’ve cleaned your plate they can restart your heart.
However, in general, monitored diets tend to be healthier. If only because you are scrutinizing the stuff that goes into your gob. Weather you’re on Atkins, or you’re diabetic, or vegetarian, or you have a food allergy, or you’re trying to eat American produce only, or you are trying to avoid all foods that contain guar gum: people who are very actively engaged in their diet and are very selective with their choices (and have the finances to be able to afford to discriminate) tend to have better shopping habits and more awareness of what’s in their food. It’s not so much the kind of diet as it is that people are knowledgeably monitoring what they consume on a regular basis.
Vegetarians who don’t take the time to learn about how to make sure they get complete proteins and ensure they are getting a balanced diet, can suck back the carbs and sodium like crazy and eat just as shitty as the McDonald’s addict.
Yes. In my case, we are lazy and we are usually very busy. (This week, we have yet to have dinner before 10pm). We have lots of flavorful/zesty/fun meals that we can whip up really quickly. If you can’t find fast vegetarian meals that are yummy, you need a new cookbook.