My path to vegetarianism is a less than exciting one. Like most children who grew up in solid gold, cookie cutter, whiter than snow suburbia, I had more than enough exposure to healthy eating. My parents hopped on the ‘organic life’ bandwagon along with the rest of America after neo-hippie 2000’s media drew focus to animal cruelty and dangerous eating habits with pieces like "Food Inc." and "Supersize Me." We began to pay closer attention to what we ate as a family, but never did my parents force any changes as extensive as vegetarianism into my diet, let alone my four siblings’. Whether or not this was due to my father’s unwillingness to give up his priceless grill, or because it’s just too easy to pop a 50-piece batch of DinoNuggets in the oven on those busy weeknights, I will never know. We were thoroughly, organically informed, though, and that’s half the battle.
In public school, I had seen the warning signs of not eating right. The poster children for early onset obesity, the ones whose packed lunches sported a giant ‘M’ that to me seemed much more festive than my brown paper bagged foods. I also saw the healthy eaters, those kids who held their heads high as they meticulously spread each represented food group in front of them. Then there were the ones who barely ate at all, even in middle school where eating rubber cement with a fork would have received barely a sideways glance.
I was later educated enough to recognize that eating is a lifestyle habit affected by almost everything around us, from religion to culture to upbringing to social class. Adults and the Internet (and in rare instances, adults on the Internet) presented me with two holy commandments in regards to eating. The first, that the food pyramid is Buddha, Jesus, and Dumbledore all wrapped into one. It is our guide to healthy eating, it ought not be questioned, and if people question it they will become unhealthy and die. The second, that any comments about other’s eating habits should be wrapped in barbed wire and buried under a mile of dirt. This is because it can never be known what conditions impact the way someone eats, and it is better to say nothing than to make an unimaginable fool of oneself.
You can imagine my confusion when I met my first vegetarian.
She was a girl in my sixth-grade health class and she was giving an informative presentation on the health benefits of her vegetarianism. Vegetarianism, she said, is the decision to remove all meat products, and occasionally other animal products, from one’s diet. She gave a brief explanation of veganism as well, from which all I registered was that it is a thinly veiled method of humans transforming themselves into herbivorous animals. Her title was, “Why I’m a vegetarian, and why you should be too.” I was shocked. She just remorselessly, without hesitation, broke not one but both of the healthy eating commandments! Without meat, how will she follow the all-seeing food pyramid? And how could she have the audacity to tell the entire class how we should eat?
It didn’t take long to discover that this girl was not even close to the only vegetarian who savagely breaks these commandments. The first violation became less important to me once it was explained that there are plenty of alternative protein sources that allow for the removal of meat from one’s diet. In fact, once I saw the practicality and logical benefits of vegetarianism, I found it to be pretty appealing. After taking an environmental science course in high school, I was sold.
But the second violation still gnawed at me. If I have been slapped on the wrist for my entire life at the mere acknowledgement of someone’s eating habits, then why do I so frequently hear vegetarians making the claim that any eating more extensive than their own is wrong? If I don’t adamantly and unendingly disapprove of others’ eating habits, does that make me a phony vegetarian?
We live in a world of justification. A world where we may understand that our actions are objectively wrong, or that they may cause hurt in others, we tend to find reasoning that explains why these actions are ok. So, consequently, we also live in a world where someone can go as far as to call another person unhealthy (or god forbid, fat) purely from watching them eat. And in this constant, remorseless judgement of one another’s diets, we end up tugging at the seams of human self-worth.
People feel the need to reinvent themselves in a way that will make them feel valued, not in their eyes, but in others’. More and more people then choose to be vegetarian so they can feel justified in thinking highly of themselves, even though everyone already has the right (and in my opinion, should be encouraged) to do so. Superficialities like diets and weights become so ingrained in culture and personal identities that it is often stereotypical of vegans and vegetarians to prioritize that fact about themselves before anything else.
I am a vegetarian because, to me, vegetarianism is the personal decision to eat healthily and improve the environment. Unfortunately, this is not how much of the world sees that choice. And they could be right. So if vegetarians and other non-meat eaters are defined by demeaning others’ decisions about their health, criticizing the world around them, and caring more about their diets than their self-worths, then I guess I’ve been doing it all wrong.
