Going Cold Tofurkey Part I: Why I Became a Vegetarian

Editor's Note: This is a guest-post from Tatsy Skreinig. Find her here!

I remember it as if it were yesterday: March 26^th, 2011. A Saturday.

Tatsy

At the time I was living away from home, but always visited my family for the weekend. On that fateful day, we were sitting in the kitchen making lunch – my mother, one of my sisters and me – discussing our changes in lifestyle. The three of us, the “women of the house” (my sister is only 2 years younger than me), had already suggested to try out a “greener” lifestyle for a while. 

We've had a vegetable garden for years, mostly tended to by my sister, the biggest driving force in our new “green habits” movement, we recycle and we save what we can, where we can – trying to do our part in saving the world.

But this particular Saturday, somehow, we were all thinking about the same thing: 

How eco-friendly our diets were – or actually weren’t.

Ironically, we were just making a “Schweinsbraten” (an Austrian pig-roast), when my mom dropped the ball on me and said that she’d been thinking about cutting meat from our diets. 

Now, I should tell you: Everyone who knew me back in 2011, would have expected me to freak out right about then. At that time, I would never have turned down a steak, or chicken nuggets, or a Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Ever.

But I had to admit, since moving out from my parents house to go to college, I had already reduced my intake of meat considerably anyway. This reduction was not just due to my students budget, but also because I made a few vegetarian and even “hobby-vegan” friends (we’ll get to that in a bit). 

So, although a part of me expected my reaction to be a kind of “omg-how-should-i-live-without-bacon”-sort of thing, I was actually all for it!

So I took the first step. (Needless to say, we still ate the pork roast for lunch that day.)

You see, before I actually take big steps such as this one, I like to learn more about what I’m intending to do. And so, I did a little research and found a long list of non-meat-eaters – some of them are actually people I greatly admire!

Here are a few names from the list I made myself:

·    Some of the greatest thinkers of all time, such as Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Martin Luther and Leonardo Da Vinci;

·   Some of my favorite actors and actresses, such as Natalie Portman, Brad Pitt, David Duchovny, Dustin Hoffman, Jerry Seinfeld, Michael J. Fox, Ted Danson, Richard Gere, Kim Bassinger and Drew Barrymore;

·      Some amazing singers and musicians, such as Shania Twain, Leonard Cohen, Billy Idol, Bob Dylan and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney;

·      And also the amazing authors Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw, among many others!

Yep… They are all vegetarians or vegans!

Though I’m usually not the type of person to follow a trend or pretending to be like someone else, reading names of people you sort of look up to, united for a common cause that interests you, too, is a booster. 

But names weren't enough for me, I had to do more research!

This time, I did something a bit more extreme: I went face-to-face with the mind-bogglingly horrible truths shown on the PETA website.

Tatsy and Theodore

 I have to admit, I couldn’t even finish going through the pictures of the poor animals. I should probably tell you I have two dogs whom I love as if they were my children (especially the older one, Theodore), and I’ve also had fish, rabbits, baby chicks and turtles as pets before. 

Though I may not be the biggest fan of the odours of some animals (key-word: pigs and cows on farms), I’m a huge animal person, and always have been. Still, even though I love animals, I have somehow managed to ignore the fact that the very animals that have to suffer from pain and fear, before they are killed for our food, are just like the ones we take care of and keep in our homes as pets. 

That’s when it hit me. 

That’s when I took a look into the mirror and asked myself: 

How would you like to spend your last hours locked in a truck, packed into a cage with hundreds of other terrified animals, and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked chamber of death?

After this confrontation with myself, I tried to put myself in the position of the turkey on the table at Thanksgiving. This turkey had did alone and in fear, so that I could eat it. I admit, it honestly curled my stomach. 

Before closing the PETA tab on my browser, I read that in a lifetime, the average meat-eater will consume around 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 750 chickens and/or turkeys. 

WOW

That’s not counting the cows, bulls, deer or other animals eaten, and still, it’s already 822 animal lives  per person.

OK. Animals are dying, so we can eat them, that’s not new. But how is any of this linked to “going green”?

I bet you have heard at some point that half of the rain forests in the world have been destroyed for cattle. The burning of the forests, in order to make space for the animal farms, contributes 20% of all green-house gases (plus, it puts so many little critters out of their homes, and they have feelings, as the song says…!). 

Since a percentage is never that easy to imagine in “real life”, let’s try it this way:

·        Roughly 1,000 species a year become extinct because of the destruction of the rain forests

·        Around 80,000 acres of tropical rain forest are lost every day

·       Approximately 60 million people a year die of starvation

·      100 acres of land can produce enough grain to feed cattle which will become beef for 20 people

·       100 acres of land can produce enough wheat to feed 240 people.

Now, I’m no mathematician, but wouldn’t 250.000 acres of land then be enough to feed 60.000.000 starving people? 

That's some food for thought! 

If you ignore the protection of nearly extinct animals, and the whole “save the rainforest” movement (which I also support completely, by the way), and just focus on the human population here:  

Couldn’t 60 MILLION lives technically be saved, if a small percentage of the grain used to fatten cattle and other farm animals were used to feed starving humans?

You see, when I read these numbers, even after nearly 2 whole years (ignoring the fact that they probably have increased since then), it still shocks me that we are either unaware, don't care, or ignore the fact that we are actively contributing to the burning of forests, the killing and exterminating of animals - instead of feeding starving humans. 

 It just seems to me that if we’d all eat the plants we grow, instead of feeding them to animals, the world's food shortage would disappear virtually overnight! 

Oh, but meat is SO TASTY!

Yes, meat can be really, really tasty.

A nice barbecue at a Brazilian churrascaria (basically the best type of barbecue house in the world, for anyone into that sort of thing), was something I never thought that I would turn down one day. 

Yet, besides all the things I mentioned above, consuming large amounts of meat is not only bad for our environment. Is the momentary pleasure of the spices on our taste buds (yes, the spices – unprepared meat is HIGHLY unappetizing, as opposed to unprepared fruits and veggies) really worth endangering our health too?

By eating a meat (and animal protein) heavy diet, we’re all at risk of developing anemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, constipation, diabetes, gallstones, gout, high blood pressure, indigestion, obesity, strokes, varicose veins... just to name a few. 

(Editor's Note: If you want to read up on some facts about nutrition and how animal protein can affect our health, read The China Study. It has radically changed my views on our societies relationship with food, how we are lied to about what is healthy and what isn't and what good nutrition is really all about.)

Statistically, lifelong vegetarians go to hospital 22% less often than meat-eaters and have 20% lower cholesterol levels. Besides that, some farmers use tranquillizers to keep animals calm or antibiotics to eliminate infections, and most supermarket-bought meats are full of industrial pollutants and sex hormones (ewww…!). 

As time passes, and the animals become more resistant to the drugs, drug dosages are increased, and finally, we consumers have no idea what these medications are doing to OUR bodies. 

Food for thought: Biologically, are we really “meant to be” meat-eaters?

Let’s take a quick glance at the similarities between human beings and other meat-eating inhabitants of planet Earth. I’ll sum it up for you:

·      Most of us have to cook and disguise the dead animal we bought, so that it bears no resemblance to its original state. Unlike carnivorous animals, we don't naturally salivate at the sight of raw meat (though we do for raw fruit)!

·      Meat-eaters have claws, no pores on their skin (they perspire through the tongue) and pointed front teeth to tear raw flesh. Plant-eaters perspire through pores on the skin (since they are searching for food during hot hours, not hunting at sunrise/sunset or in darkness as meat-eaters do) and flat back molars, to grind food

·      Meat-eaters have very strong hydrochloric acid in the stomach to digest animal muscle, whereas plant-eaters have well developed salivary glands needed to digest plants and grains, with stomach acid 20 that is times weaker than that of meat eaters

·       Meat-eaters have an intestinal tract only three times their body length, so that rapidly decaying meat in the stomach can pass out of the body quickly. Plant eaters' intestinal tract is several times their body length, since plant foods don't decay as quickly

What do you think - Do humans resemble meat eaters or plant eaters more?

So those are the facts. But what happens now?

Well, after reading all of this (and writing about it), I can say: That “Schweinsbraten” was the last bit of pork or beef I have eaten since. 

That’s right – I went “cold tofurkey”. And amazingly enough – it was EASY!

Though for a long while I kept fish as a semi-regular part of my diet (once or twice a week until last Summer; since then, maybe once every six weeks), I managed to find ways of still getting all the protein I need, and I don't miss the taste of meat at all. Not even when my brother, boyfriend, dad or any other friend of mine eat a big burger, or some spare ribs right beside me. 

I used recipes from the Internet, got tips from friends, and learned how to cook and eat healthier with great delight. 

Sure, society doesn’t always make it easy for non-meat-eaters, but it is still possible. Buying a quick ham and cheese sandwich in your lunch break and eating it in between classes or work might still be more practical than buying an egg salad and a banana at first. 

But I visited help and how-to sites, I found meatless alternatives on restaurant menus and I turned into the biggest consumer of veggie burgers at our local Burger King. 

My dear friend Shauna taught me about being a hobby-vegan, which basically boils down to actively trying to eat vegan meals every now and then for fun, and it turned into something I love to do. 

I’ve never regretted going tofurkey, not one moment!

The chicken-relapses

Ah, but I am also only human. 

I was raised to have carnivorous instincts, and as a young woman living in modern society, the need to be practical is sometimes bigger than our moral strength, amirite? OK, maybe it’s not exactly that extreme, but you see, this is the part where I admit that I have eaten chicken on exactly 6 occasions since I decided to “go veg”.

I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it. I knew from the beginning I would not be able to completely cut meat out of my diet all at once, but I did manage to cut back enough to make a difference (at least to my consciousness). 

But I realized that every now and then, like on an especially bad day, I would feel the need to eat chicken nuggets or a McChicken (yep, always fast food). It didn’t make my day better, but since it’s so rare for me to want to eat animal nowadays, I didn’t want to “deny” it to myself on a day I was already not feeling too great. I am proud to say, though, that I haven’t had a chicken-relapse in over a year! J

To sum it all up…

If you’ve never considered the possibility of becoming a vegetarian, maybe this text gave you some impulses in that direction.

From the bottom of my heart, I can tell you that it is easier than it seems, and after you have taken the first steps, you will most probably feel fitter and healthier after cutting meats out of your diet. 

And anyway, even if it’s only for a while, or one day a week, it can't hurt, right? J

If you are interested in cutting back on meat or turning vegetarian, I would highly recommend trying it. 

Without pressure, without charging yourself, without feeling bad, if you don’t manage immediately and without shame. 

I would definitely recommend reading about different definitions (such as types of vegetarians – there are many!) and giving it a try over a short period of time. Being vegetarian can really improve your health and help protect the environment. 

But the most important thing is: You have to feel good. 

If you do it, do it for the right reason - YOURSELF!

Light and Love!

Tatsy