What are your feelings about eating meat?
Ooooh! Now that’s a good prompt.
This summer, I decided Loved-One and would move toward vegan.
“Why would we want to eat just bacon?” Loved-One said.
“Not bacon,” I replied. “Vegan.”
Side note: slowly losing our hearing can lead to quite entertaining conversations.
Several months later, I proclaim that we are “Vegan Adjacent.” Our food is more plant-based than animal-based. But we still like a good bean soup flavored with a bit of ham.
We have cashew-based cheese and roasted soy or tofu on our pizza. It’s great. An omelette with tofu instead of eggs is pretty darned good, too.
But, you asked: How do I feel about eating meat?
I grew up on a small farm. All our animals had names, not numbers. We took good care of them and waved goodbye as they headed to the butcher.
“See you at dinner,” one of my sisters once cried out.
No hard feelings for raising our dinner. That’s just the way we got our food. I guess if you always go to the grocery store for meat, you never associate that ground beef with a brown-eyed cow that loves to have his neck scratched. But that’s the reality.
I always dig into the veggies first.
Growing up on a farm also meant we had all the fresh vegetables we wanted in summer, and plenty of processes vegetables in the winter.
We didn’t start down the vegan road because I wanted to protect the animals, or because it’s better for our carbon footprint. I did it for our own health.
Selfish reasons, I guess.
Still, our carbon footprint does diminish, and some animals are spared. So, my selfishness resulted in some communal good.
Now that I’m eating more soy and almond and cashew, there are new things to tug at my conscience. What does mono farming do to the soil? And what about the bee population?