Recently the New York Times magazine did a food issue, and every article I read made me feel dissatisfied. There was an article about Jamie Oliver, whom I love and adore and which made me want to cook more, and an article about calorie restricted diets, which made me wish I hadn’t eaten half a pack of Trader Joe’s cookies beforehand. And there was an article about meat by Jonathon Safran Foer, about his periodic flirtations with vegetarianism.
I was a vegetarian for a couple of years in high school, and that ended with me standing outside the refrigerator gorging myself on a leftover hamburger from a family barbecue one hot summer evening. I was ashamed, but it was good. So there went vegetarianism.
In college, many of friends were vegetarians, but they tended to eat a lot of beans and weird grains, and as a result they were typically gassy and bloated with self-righteousness.
GB & I talked about the article and it made us both wish that we were vegetarians. This is the ‘two’ of a ‘one-two punch’ which the NY Times has inflicted on me relative to meat in recent weeks, the first being the ground beef article I linked to awhile back. As it is now, we don’t eat nearly as much meat as the average American family – usually only once or twice a week. But the moral, ethical, and environmental arguments are extremely compelling for us.
Not enough, currently, to actually sway us into becoming vegetarians, though.
As the writer points out in the article, there are lots of times when meat is just right. I CANNOT countenance a ‘tofurkey’ for Thanksgiving. On Sundays I love GB’s roasted chicken. I would miss Snoop’s ‘rib dance.’ Shepherd’s pie, an occasional slaw dog, bean soup with a big hambone in it – I wouldn’t want to give those things up. They can’t be replaced.
Besides, I know the minute I said, ‘I’m a vegetarian, darn it’ I would instantly begin to crave a burger or a slab of ribs, even if I hadn’t wanted either of those things for weeks. The quickest way for me to set myself up for failure is to define myself as something. Whereas, if I just casually tell myself, ‘I can eat meat whenever I want it,’ then I don’t usually want it very much.
Yes, I play strange psychological games with myself rather than having to enforce actual self-control.
the line in front of me, half-hour pre clinic, above; the line behind me, below




















