As some of you have noticed, it is actually true that I am officially no longer a vegetarian. I made the declaration on Ash Wednesday, although it took until the following Sunday for me to actually consume an animal… Well, part of one, anyway…
How long did I last? Fourteen years, give or take a few days. Actually, if you’ll hang on for a mo’ I’ll go back, look at a calendar, and figure it out…
…
Yes, I’m really looking, right now, real-time.
…
Okay, Fat Tuesday in 1995 was February 28th. This past Sunday, when I ate my first animal since then, was… February 28th?! Really?
That simplifies things a little, doesn’t it? Fourteen years, to the day. Or, if you want to account for leap-years, it was five-thousand and one-hundred and fourteen days — four days over the fourteen years. Do we want to? Do we need to? Probably not. Suffice it to say that it’s been a while. An absurdly long while.
People invariably have questions for me. Why did you do it? Why did you stick with it? Why did you stop? There are others, but I’ll start with this lot. If I don’t answer what you want answered? Ask. If I have an answer, I’ll provide it. If I don’t? I’ll most likely make a vague apology, dance around the issue, and move on. That’s just me.
“Why did you do it?”
Honestly? I don’t really remember. This was not the first time I became a vegetarian. The first time was… earlier… That time, I remember catching “20/20″ or “60 Minutes” when they did an issue on slaughterhouses or something. If I had to guess, I would say it was somewhere around 1988 or ‘89. If I’m wrong, I’m sorry, and I’d love to know exactly when it was. Tell me if you know. I stuck with it for about six months or so, and lost interest.
There were no memorable side effects on either side of that transition. I had no “meat withdrawal,” and I had no “re-entry” issues. I just didn’t eat any meat for six months or so, and that was it. If I know me, I probably made sure it was exactly six months just on principle, and moved on. In 1995, years later, I did it again.
I used Lent as my excuse, but the timing was largely symbolic. I was seventeen, I think, and about to be graduated from my hell-hole of a high school. I think I just felt the need to make a decision in life — any decision. Vegetarian was the choice I made. I don’t remember there being anything moral or ethical surrounding it, I think I just wanted to make a choice…
Is that really it? I honestly don’t know, I don’t remember. There may have been more to it than that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was, but either way? Sometimes you’ve just got to make a change. I’m certainly not sure about it, but I think that was my driving impetus.
Sometimes you’ve just got to make a change.
I took it seriously, at least, every day. I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian. The rules thereof are pretty simple. No meat, including fish and chicken. Milk and eggs are okay, same with cheese. I defined this as meaning you were good as long as you didn’t require an animal to die so you could eat. Eggs? You could argue the point, of course, but my take was that they were unfertilized, so they didn’t count. In a weird way, the thing I miss the most from *before* is the Green Jell-O…
Gelatin (from French gelatin) is a translucent, colorless, brittle, nearly tasteless solid substance, derived from the collagen inside animals’ skin and mostly bones.
Not in my diet, no sir. Meat? No. Kill required? Yes. Like I said, I defined a set of rules, and I stuck with them for a long, long time.
“Why *did* you stick with those rules?”
For about a decade or so, “vegetarian” was my defining characteristic, or one of them. “Alcoholic” and “philanderer” were there, too, but those were accidental lifestyles, not the chosen one. I had made a decision, and by the gods, I was going to ride it out long term. Eventually, nearly everyone I knew made some attempt to trick, persuade, cajole, or otherwise force me to eat meat, and it became progressively easier because of that.
It became a war, and I was going to win it. Win it, I did, really. Other that one brief episode at the Corner Room when some poor waitress gave me the wrong soup, I stuck to my guns. I haven’t eaten Jell-O in fourteen years, or touched any candy that included gelatin. I read all the labels, and I followed my rules.
Eventually, it became about spite as much as anything else. Have you ever had someone tell you that you need a haircut the day before you’re about to get one, and put it off for another week because that someone told you that you needed one? It became like that after the first decade. I could have come back, but too many people wanted me to. Was it my decision, or was it theirs? I couldn’t be sure, so I had to keep going, just so as to be sure that it wasn’t theirs.
What can I say? At the end of the day, I’m one stubborn ass prick. If you say you like my natural hair color (which you won’t) then I’m going to bleach it. If you like me as a platinum blonde, I’ll be a red head. After I’ve gone through the circuit so many times that nobody remembers what’s natural or not, I’ll just keep changing it up randomly to make sure that my decision is my own, even if I’m making it with a set of big, brass dice…
Incidentally, I’m a stubborn ass prick who *does* happen to have a set of big, brass dice. I stole them from Wink when I moved. He got them as a gift from Marlboro. Nobody’s sure why.
Was spite enough to keep me going? Obviously not, but that wasn’t the end of it. Eventually, I just couldn’t sustain the hostility towards the vague concept of my decisions being influenced by the people around me. Eventually, I was the vegetarian on inertia and nothing else. Don’t quote me on the numbers, but I basically didn’t eat meat for four years because I hadn’t for the previous ten. Yes, there was some element of fear involved — fear of what would happen to my digestive tract if I went the other way, but mostly it was just inertia.
Keep on keepin’ on…
“Why did you come back?”
Good question, lots of answers, all of which can be couched in television.
Reason Number One? Evil Willow from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” She only appeared in, like two episodes, but she had the best delivery of the best line ever: “bored now.”
That was it. “Bored now.” If I recall, she delivered it while she was in the middle of torturing someone to death, and just plain lost interest. It was cold, it was callous, and it might have been the sexiest moment of television I’ve ever seen. The sheer hedonism of being so hedonistic that you get bored in the midst of the heights of your cruel and unusual hedonism?
Hot. As. Hell.
That was part of it for me. A big part. I’d utterly lost interest in doing something that I’d done only for the shallow gratification I received for doing something that I’d only done for shallow gratification. It didn’t start out that way, but that’s where it ended up.
Reason Number Two? Anthony Bourdain. Let’s all be honest. He’s smart as hell. He’s cool as hell. He’s hot as hell, and regardless of your gender or sexual orientation, you’d at least consider bending over for him just for the chance to go to some exotic place like Bolivia, Indonesia, or Queens, just to have lunch with the man. He’s a world-class chef that can revel equally in the experiences of sucking the fluid out of a seal’s eye or chomping on a properly prepared hotdog.
I want that. I *so* want that…
Reason Number Three? It ties reasons one and two together. Think of every TV show where anyone you’ve ever watched has eaten anything that didn’t appear in the first half of “A Christmas Story” by Jean Shepherd. Honestly? That’s what I’m thinking about. Ignore the duck’s smiling face. Look at everything else. Look at the most boring menu in State College. Take your pick. There are at least a dozen things on that menu that I’ve never eaten.
Ever.
“Do you like fish?
People ask me. How the hell would I know? Fifteen years ago was before the food revolution. I didn’t like fish that wasn’t breaded, rectangular, and deep-fried, but there almost wasn’t any fish that wasn’t breaded, rectangular and deep-fried. There was fish that was breaded, tubular, and deep-fried, but basically, there just wasn’t any fish.
Hot wings? Cheese-steaks? Never had ‘em. They’re pretty ubiquitous now, but they were basically bar food then. I was a vegetarian at age seventeen. I didn’t spend much time in the bars. Lamb chops? My family was poor, and those were rich. Spare ribs? Yes, but only once, and I don’t remember them.
Jambalaya? Nope.
Shawarma? Nope.
Fucking General Tsao’s? Nope.
Nothing.
I’ve basically had *nothing.*
I’ve spent a long time stagnating and drowning under the weight of rules that long since ceased to hold any meaning. Why did I finally decide to come back?
Sometimes you’ve just got to make a change.
I also enjoy the timing and the irony — I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I’m giving up vegetarianism for Lent, in a sense. Glenn said “I don’t want the christian god to get a brain aniurism (can’t spell).” Sara said “Too much irony… cannot compute…” I love the irony, and I love the idea of giving *any* god an aneurysm.
“What did you eat?”
Not much, really. Not before. That’s precisely the point…
Or did you mean in the past few days? I’m actually only two meals into my non-vegetarian life. Sunday, I picked up a shepherd’s pie from Zeno’s / The Corner Room. I brought it home, re-heated it in my oven, and tossed on about half the requisite amount of turkey gravy. JP recommended that over the beef gravy, and I took his word. What do I know from gravy?
“What did it taste like?”
It tasted like New Year’s Day, in two senses. First, I vaguely remember that when I was a kid, there was a family tradition of having a big noon mea on New Year’s Day. There was meat, of course, of a sort I don’t recall, mashed potatoes, and peas. I remember that the peas were symbolic of something, probably the other things, too, but I don’t remember what. Does it matter? In the first sense, it tasted like that, physically. It tasted like what I remember from being a kid. In another sense, it *still* tasted like New Year’s Day. It tasted like I was turning a corner. It tasted like I made a decision. It tasted like I made a resolution.
Looking back, I guess I did. For years, I was afraid of abandoning the only decision I ever made. In retrospect, I didn’t abandon an old decision at all. I made a new one.
I’m okay with that.
Monday and Tuesday, I ate no new meat. It wasn’t a reversion to the old rules, it was just that I didn’t need it, and my body was still adapting to the new rules. Wednesday, today, I had two slices of pepperoni pizza for lunch. Glenn persuaded me. I asked him, while we were waiting at the Brother’s on West College, “what is pepperoni, anyway?” He said, “Well, it’s… Uh…”
I had to look it up later.
It wasn’t the best decision I ever make. Since then, many of you have asked what the hell could have possibly made me think that was a good idea. It wasn’t a good idea. Glenn was having some fun at my expense. That said, I knew this was going to be an unpleasant experience, and all told, it hasn’t been nearly as bad as I expected. The pepperoni, as did the shepherd’s pie a few days ago, made my stomach “twitchy.” In neither case was it as out-and-out rebellious as I expected it to be.
Should I have thanked him, or should I have kicked his ass for that? I did, in fact, kick his ass, but only symbolically. He let me do it. There is much more unpleasantness to come, but I’m looking forward to most of it. Shana is anxious for me to go out for Indian food with her. Am I going to? Hell yes! Not in the next week or two, probably. I’ve still got quite a few dinners that I take home before I trust myself out eating the meat in public. I still never know what’s going to happen. Glenn said something about grilling steaks next week. I said “give me three.” Am I going to do it? Absolutely. I just need to work up to it.
The smartest person I ever know told me, before the shepherd’s pie, that I should start off with a vegetable soup made with chicken stock, and follow that up with chicken soup. A day or two after that? Then I should take a plunge.
Did I listen? Fuck no. Do I ever?
I wanted to jump in to the deep end of the pool, not the shallow. I didn’t want to jump straight in to the ocean, for sure, but I wanted the deep end of the pool. I may not feel great, as a result, but I do feel alive. More importantly, I feel like I made a choice.
Why did I come back to the “dark side?” Why did I switch teams?
Sometimes you’ve just got to make a change.
Sometimes you’ve just got to make a choice.
You know damned well that I’m not handling this as well as as I could. Honestly? You know damned well that I’m not handling this well at all. You also know damned well that you’re enjoying the show anyway. Most importantly, you know damned well that you’re the lifeguard in this show, and nobody ever drowned in a swimming pool when a lifeguard was on duty. Seriously? Do me a favor, and do your damned job. Minimize the damage, and get us both to a place where we enjoy experimenting with food the way undergrads enjoy experimenting with sex.
No matter what is your favorite food, you know I’ve never had it.
You know I want it, and you know you want to give it to me.
- Leo July 23 - August 22