Vegetarian Bandster

I have mentioned that I am a vegetarian a few times, but it has occurred to me that it might make a good post topic so here I go.  I want to start by saying that I do not judge anyone who chooses to eat meat.  I think it is a very personal decision that everyone makes and I cannot say what is right for another person. 

I also know that a few of you have mentioned that you or your husbands have been hunting lately and I want you to know that I actually think hunting is the next-best-thing to being a vegetarian!  What do I mean by that?  Well, most people buy their meat in a grocery store and are really, really distanced from how their food goes from being a living creature to a yummy meal.  Not so with hunters!  You guys see your meat up close and personal.  Not only do you pull the trigger (or pluck the bow or whatever), but you also haul the carcass and often dress it too.

I grew up a meat eater.  My grandparents had a farm and all the kids helped with butchering.  I have plucked chicken feathers from  dead chickens (don't squeeze it or it will poop on you!) and cut beef from the bone to be turned into hamburger.  I also watched my beloved Boppie step on the chickens' heads ("Mama?  Why does Boppie step on the chicken's faces?") to butcher them and walked by the dog house to notice a hog's head in his dog dish.  I remember droplets of blood dripped on the patio as the women carried the dead, headless chickens from the barn yard to do the plucking.  While these things made an impression on me, they aren't the reasons I became a vegetarian.

When I was 18 I went to work for the local animal shelter.  I was looking for a clerical job and this was one of several that I applied for.  Right after I started working, I was called for an interview by Tyson Chicken.  Imagine how different things might have been if I'd taken the job there!  But I digress.  I took the animal shelter job and entered a world I didn't know existed.  A world where animals are abandoned, lost, abused and discarded.  It affected me profoundly.  There are shelters in nearly every city and county across this country and around the world.  Thousands, millions of companion animals pass through them each year.  The people working there do their best to care for the animals, unite them with their families, find new homes for them and give them a "kind" death when nothing else is possible.  It is heartbreaking.

Of course there are animal shelters that do not euthanize animals.  These are good organizations and people are a lot more comfortable supporting them, but what these places really do is further shift the burden onto traditional shelters.  These so called "no-kill" shelters are very particular about the animals they accept.  They take the small dogs, the puppies, the purebreds and they turn away the rest.  I visited one such shelter in New York state that had a screening staff that took phone calls for people wishing to surrender their pets.  On that day, they were turning away black and white cats.  They had too many already, you see, and just as you can't have a showroom full of yellow cars, you cannot have a cattery full of black and white cats.

The real problem is that pets are considered disposable in our society.  People are busy.  They get pets without thinking about what they'll do when they have to move and without committing to the training and exercise needs of their dogs and cats.  They select breeds that are not well-suited for their family.  They have unrealistic expectations about owning and caring for a pet.  And too often they fail to have their pets spayed or neutered.  Animal shelters quietly and without fuss "dispose" of the unwanted, excess so the rest of us don't have to deal with them.  And people blindly continue insisting that they can breed their pet if they want because they don't know and they don't understand.

My staff - Betty, Wilma & Lucy.  They produce eggs in exchange for chicken feed.

I am not nearly as passionate as I was at age 18, but back then as I learned about this problem and became a part of the system that enables the rest of society to ignore it, I became more and more angry and disenfranchised.  I became distrustful of people and again and again felt let down by those around me.  After about a year, I came to realize that I could no longer justify continuing to eat meat, knowing as I did that the situation was so much worse for the animals that are raised for food production.  For many years I also did not eat dairy products or eggs.   

Most people become vegetarian for reasons of either health or ethics.  For me, it was an ethical decision.  Any health benefits were secondary.  I also learned about environmental benefits of a vegetarian diet.  But as I said before, I don't expect others to think as I do.  I understand that most people will never become vegetarian.  I believe there is room for compromise.  For example, what would happen if everyone, vegetarian and non-vegetarian combined, refused to buy eggs from factory farms that house their chickens in cages so small that the chickens cannot stand up or turn around and are stacked on top of each other with feces dripping through onto the chickens below?

The righteous indignation of my youth has passed and I am a much more even-tempered person these days.  I've learned to live in this imperfect world and I try to make a little difference each day.  I don't really know if I have ever managed that, but I hope I have!    

(I am editing this post to add this last bit)

It isn't difficult at all to get enough protein on a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet.  I shoot for 50 grams a day and I am typically able to do it without protein supplements.  Some typical protein rich foods that I eat are:

Greek yogurt (14 grams)
Beans (vegetarian refried 15 grams)
Eggs (8 grams)
String cheese (8 grams)
Cottage cheese (14 grams)
Cheddar cheese (14 grams)
Chili (15 grams)
Tofu (5 grams/ounce)
Meat replacement items (Chix patties, veggie sausage, etc. 8-10 grams)