Between March 2010 - March 2011 I gave up fast food. It wasn't so bad. To this day I very rarely eat fast food. Maybe five times a year. Now I wanna step it up a notch and be pescatarian for one year. Why, you ask? A few reasons.
1. I never thought this would happen, but I feel guilty for eating meat. I've read all the books (Omnivore's Dilemma, Eating Animals, Fast Food Nation) and seen all the documentaries (Food, Inc, Super Size Me, Forks over Knives, Vegucated, Fat Sick and Nearly Dead) and they all say the same thing: Eating meat is bad! It's bad for the animals, it's bad for the environment, it's bad for society, and above all, it's bad for our bodies! Maybe if I was alive 100 years ago when farms were actually farms (as opposed to factories) and the food industry wasn't the disgusting monster that it is now, eating meat would be fine. But today it's not fine, and I don't want to be a part of that.
Yeah, I get a lot of slack from people when I tell them that I feel guilty for eating meat because of how poorly the animals are treated in factory farms. But even if you take away the emotion (the poor piggy is getting skinned alive, and the poor cow goes on a conveyor belt where it'll get it's throat slashed), there's still the whole "getting-pumped-with-hormones" and "living-in-its-own-shit" part of the food factory lifestyle to consider. THIS is why everyone's getting cancer! It's in the food!!
2. I've always thought of myself as a foodie. At first glance, you might think giving up meat will limit my horizons, but I think of it as the opposite. Do you know how hard it is NOT to eat meat when you go out to restaurants? In preparation of my new lifestyle, lately, every time I go out, I've started picking out what I would eat if I wasn't eating meat. It's a challenge! It's almost like a game! "Nope, can't eat that!" "Oh, that looks good--nope, can't eat it!" When scanning a menu, I almost always skip over the salad section. (I can't really eat leafy greens anyway, but that's beside the point.) But now I'll have to skip over the meat section.
By cutting out what I normally would eat, I'm opening myself to a whole bunch of options that I might not ever consider. This is will definitely expand my cooking horizons as well. I can't tell you how many ways I can cook chicken. But how many ways can I cook beans? Honestly, I've never cooked a bean in my life (unless you count emptying a can of beans into a pot of chili). I'll think of this as a gastronomic experiment.
3. I want to challenge myself, just to see if I can do it.
So why not go full on vegan? Because I don't like setting goals for myself that I can't keep. I know going vegan is really the only way I can save the animals, but let's be real. If you know anything about me and my eating habits, you KNOW going vegan for me is not an option. Baby steps. This is already a big deal for me. I'm not gonna go crazy and start asking the waiter if my vegetables were cooked in bacon grease or anything like that. But if I do see that there are bits of bacon in my salad, I'm picking the bacon out. Then I'll cry.
What I'm not eating:
Chicken
Cow
Pig
Duck (shedding a tear for this one!)
Ostrich
Buffalo
Rabbit
Basically, any land dwelling animal
What I am eating:
All seafood (fish, shellfish, squid, octopus, etc)
Dairy
Eggs
Cheese (because I would be perpetually cranky if I didn't)
Chicken/beef broth (I thought hard about this one. I realize the broth is made from the animal, and by drinking the broth, I am consuming the animal. But I like soup! I'm going to allow myself to eat soup as long as there are no chunks of animal flesh it. For example, what if I ordered shrimp pho? The meat is seafood, but the broth is beef based. However, if I do make soup at home, I will use vegetable broth.)
Honey
Butter
I'm going to start this early 2014. I guess you could call it a resolution, but I'm not convinced I'll keep it up for over a year. Unless by some kind of miracle it changes my whole life, and I decide that I don't need meat ever again...but I don't see that happening. I have to participate in a bacon cook-off with my friends first, which is going to be my big send off, but after that, it's goodbye land dwelling animal flesh!
1. I never thought this would happen, but I feel guilty for eating meat. I've read all the books (Omnivore's Dilemma, Eating Animals, Fast Food Nation) and seen all the documentaries (Food, Inc, Super Size Me, Forks over Knives, Vegucated, Fat Sick and Nearly Dead) and they all say the same thing: Eating meat is bad! It's bad for the animals, it's bad for the environment, it's bad for society, and above all, it's bad for our bodies! Maybe if I was alive 100 years ago when farms were actually farms (as opposed to factories) and the food industry wasn't the disgusting monster that it is now, eating meat would be fine. But today it's not fine, and I don't want to be a part of that.
Yeah, I get a lot of slack from people when I tell them that I feel guilty for eating meat because of how poorly the animals are treated in factory farms. But even if you take away the emotion (the poor piggy is getting skinned alive, and the poor cow goes on a conveyor belt where it'll get it's throat slashed), there's still the whole "getting-pumped-with-hormones" and "living-in-its-own-shit" part of the food factory lifestyle to consider. THIS is why everyone's getting cancer! It's in the food!!
2. I've always thought of myself as a foodie. At first glance, you might think giving up meat will limit my horizons, but I think of it as the opposite. Do you know how hard it is NOT to eat meat when you go out to restaurants? In preparation of my new lifestyle, lately, every time I go out, I've started picking out what I would eat if I wasn't eating meat. It's a challenge! It's almost like a game! "Nope, can't eat that!" "Oh, that looks good--nope, can't eat it!" When scanning a menu, I almost always skip over the salad section. (I can't really eat leafy greens anyway, but that's beside the point.) But now I'll have to skip over the meat section.
By cutting out what I normally would eat, I'm opening myself to a whole bunch of options that I might not ever consider. This is will definitely expand my cooking horizons as well. I can't tell you how many ways I can cook chicken. But how many ways can I cook beans? Honestly, I've never cooked a bean in my life (unless you count emptying a can of beans into a pot of chili). I'll think of this as a gastronomic experiment.
3. I want to challenge myself, just to see if I can do it.
So why not go full on vegan? Because I don't like setting goals for myself that I can't keep. I know going vegan is really the only way I can save the animals, but let's be real. If you know anything about me and my eating habits, you KNOW going vegan for me is not an option. Baby steps. This is already a big deal for me. I'm not gonna go crazy and start asking the waiter if my vegetables were cooked in bacon grease or anything like that. But if I do see that there are bits of bacon in my salad, I'm picking the bacon out. Then I'll cry.
What I'm not eating:
Chicken
Cow
Pig
Duck (shedding a tear for this one!)
Ostrich
Buffalo
Rabbit
Basically, any land dwelling animal
What I am eating:
All seafood (fish, shellfish, squid, octopus, etc)
Dairy
Eggs
Cheese (because I would be perpetually cranky if I didn't)
Chicken/beef broth (I thought hard about this one. I realize the broth is made from the animal, and by drinking the broth, I am consuming the animal. But I like soup! I'm going to allow myself to eat soup as long as there are no chunks of animal flesh it. For example, what if I ordered shrimp pho? The meat is seafood, but the broth is beef based. However, if I do make soup at home, I will use vegetable broth.)
Honey
Butter
I'm going to start this early 2014. I guess you could call it a resolution, but I'm not convinced I'll keep it up for over a year. Unless by some kind of miracle it changes my whole life, and I decide that I don't need meat ever again...but I don't see that happening. I have to participate in a bacon cook-off with my friends first, which is going to be my big send off, but after that, it's goodbye land dwelling animal flesh!
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