I had always been a big meat eater. It was not a choice so much as it was a cultural thing. Every meal was focused on meat. Seven days a week, it was meat, potatoes, and an over-boiled vegetable. Nothing fancy to say the least. As a child I never gave a thought to it. I just wolfed down the meat and hid the veggies under the potatoes. As an adult I wolfed down the meat and spread the veggies about on my plate. Life continued this way until my late 20s, when I began to spend quite a bit of time with athletes, feminists, environmentalists, and combinations thereof. Several were vegetarians, and they introduced me to a number of dishes which I found entirely unappealing. I didn’t sign up then and there, but I began to give the occasional thought to the matter.
Due to time constraints, I got out of the habit of cooking, and instead ate out a lot. Because I was a very busy person, I gravitated toward fast food. In my mid-30s I returned to school, and found myself only getting five or six hours of sleep per night between work and school. Fast food eaten in the car became the norm. I mushroomed from a 46" chest and 32" waist to a 48" chest and 44" waist, my energy level decreased dramatically, my blood pressure went up, and I caught every cold and flu that went through town. I tried cutting back on the fast food, but had no success. The willpower just was not there, despite my best intentions. Eventually, I decided to cut out fast food altogether. This helped stabilize my weight, and my health improved, leaving me a blimp, but at least bringing me back from the brink. I was still too busy to cook, so meat, being an embuggerance to prepare, disappeared from my menu at home. I did not think of myself as a vegetarian, but I was not eating meat nonetheless.
Eventually I ended up in a relationship with a vegan chief, and spent quite a bit of time helping with menu planning, food preparation, taste testing, and touring restaurant kitchens. It was quite an eye-opener as to health and nutrition (and the kitchen tours were a blast). Whatever desires I once had concerning meat quickly disappeared as I was presented with new satisfying foods. It was during this period that I began to think of myself as a vegetarian as I realized that I would not be going back to meat.
Through a graduate environmental science seminar series I spent quite a bit of time looking at water and land use in agricultural areas. I was from northern Ontario, and had spent many years working on environmental assessments for timber management and power generation, but never had ventured into agricultural issues. We don’t have many farms in northern Ontario. The seminar series, however, was in south-western Ontario, which is in cow country, and introduced me to quite a few issues, ranging from factory farms to desertification.
During that period I also had the great pleasure of paddling in Idaho a few times, and leisurely driving the back roads of many great plains and western states, where in the west in particular I observed environmental degradation first hand, much of which was caused by unsustainable agricultural practices, particularly concerning cattle. I had traveled through the west previously on several occasions, but had not really noticed anything amiss. With what I had come across from my veggie contacts and from the seminar series, I looked at the land with new eyes.
These factors all combined to make me realize that my turning away from meat was no longer solely based on personal health, but now also environmental concerns had become a factor.
Since then, I have spent a fair bit of time reading up on animal welfare (I grew up across the street from a chicken farm, so for many years it never occurred to me that animals ought to have rights). The more I look at factory farms, the more revolted I become. Thus my reason for being a vegetarian now includes health, environmental, and animal welfare factors.
Now I am once again back in the north, where a lot of people eat what they catch, where some people would not eat without a catch, and where vegetarians are relatively rare. The plus side, however, is that I am now back where I can be closer to the land, which has always been very important to me as long as I can remember. I’m not signed up for the Gaia hypothesis, but my sympathies lie in that direction.
When I eat with others for the first few times, they inevitably ask why I am a vegetarian, and if the evening is long, I give them my story, but usually I simply reply with, “Hey, that cow never did anything to me.”