Whenever I am in a getting-to-know-you-situation and someone asks for an interesting fact, I always say that I am a vegetarian. It is a pretty lame fact at the surface, and I surely have better ones. There are too many vegetarians out in the world now for my choice to be truly interesting. However, when I say this, I usually do not get the chance to elaborate on why I have been a vegetarian my whole life and how my reasoning behind being a vegetarian seems to be a long story.
These details that I leave out until I start answering the questions people have are what make this piece of my life so complicated and interesting. It is complicated because I have never eaten meat throughout my life, I have no strong reason behind my choice, and vegetarians seem to run in my family. It is interesting because I am going to be a sophomore in college and I have no idea how to decide if I should stick to vegetables and meatless alternatives or if I should enter the cultural richness that is meat.
My mom decided to be a vegetarian in her twenties because she never loved meat and she hates to see how industries harm animals. My dad became a vegetarian when they got married, but he still eats seafood when we go out to eat. Therefore, I have always been vegetarian, but it has never been a strict practice. I have never felt pressure to believe that meat is always bad, and my family’s choice to be vegetarian is not for religious or health-related reasons that have to be kept. I have always taken on this bold lifestyle of never eating meat in sweet home Alabama just because I always have.
I do not want to jam everything I know as a vegetarian into one article because I have a lifetime of experience. However, there are so many details I would like to write about because they add to this interesting fact about me. For example, the idea of a menu that I could order anything from is almost unimaginable. During the few visits I have had to a vegetarian restaurant, the knowledge that I could eat anything on the menu is too overwhelming and foreign to me. I have no idea how people choose what to eat on a regular basis; I am so used to skipping the entrée section completely or just scanning the menu for the little green circle with a “V” to indicate what I can eat. It is just something tiny like my pure wonder over an expanded menu that is so personal to me in comparison to anyone who has eaten meat before. This detail is something that even differs from my mom who has eaten meat for half of her life.
So, this article is the introduction to my analysis of my life in the realm of food. I will not only write about being a vegetarian from now on, but I plan to dive deep into my life as a vegetarian that is much different from anyone else’s life as a consumer. Stay tuned, and stay interested
