Green Living

I have been a vegetarian my entire life. I guess you could say I was very forward-thinking as a baby. I guess you could also say that my parents were vegetarians and that I didn't have any say in the matter. My parents have been vegetarians for as long as I have known them. Back in the motherland, where prion diseases were rampant and at large, they had to quit their meat eating ways in order to survive. Now that they are safely in New Zealand where all of the cows are sane, they have remained vegetarian. I don't know why they never went back to eating meat, I assume it's an old-dog-new-tricks situation. 

Although this was a lifestyle choice that I did not choose, I would not change anything. Vegetarian life has presented me with a great number of benefits. Namely that I never have to eat anything that is bleeding. I have a decreased likelihood of getting the diseases associated with the consumption of animals; colon cancer, rabies, salmonella. No one ever got salmonella from vegetables, they got it from salmon. I have also never been subject to any cognitive dissonance concerning the inner 'I love animals but I love meat' turmoil. 

My grandmother once told me a story about a time when she attempted to make fish head soup in her younger days. I don't know why anyone would ever decide to make fish head soup, it seems like something people should try to avoid doing at all costs, but my grandmother has always been a real OG and lived by her own rules, so there is no telling her what to do. Anyway, she beheaded a fish and began boiling the head in a pot on the stove. As it simmered away she was suddenly stricken with unease. She could not rid herself of the disconcerting feeling that the fish head was looking at her. She stared at the fish head's lifeless eye and it stared back. She continued to stare, transfixed on that unblinking eye with its unyielding gaze. Eventually, my grandmother was unable to continue boiling the fish head and ended up disposing of it, and never making fish head soup again. 

I'm not really sure of the relevance of this story. Perhaps it simply says that I am glad I will never have to eat anything that is watching me. But I feel as though there could be more to it than that. When my grandmother thought that the fish was watching her; forced to acknowledge the undeniable truth that the fish was once a living creature, conscious of it's surroundings, able to experience pain, with an understanding of the world, albeit a limited one, she was unable to follow through with boiling its head. Maybe if there was a cow's head included in every pack of mince at the supermarket, less people would buy them. Probably just because a decapitated cows head would be really disgusting, though. 

Nonetheless, it is probably easier to cook a faceless slab of meat and not acknowledge where it might have come from than to knowingly feast on the butchered remains of Bambi's mum. Perhaps if people knew they were about to chow down on Boxer from Animal Farm or every character from Charlotte's Web, then they would be less inclined to do so. 

All in all, I know that vegetarianism will always be the life for me. If Einstein, Da Vinci, and Russell Brand chose to be vegetarian, then it must be right. Also, Paul McCartney, the eye candy of The Beatles, with his well-known slaughterhouses-with-glass-walls quote. I suppose I will never truly know if I would have been vegetarian now, had i not been raised as such. There is always the possibility that I would have had an insatiable hunger for flesh like those baby tigers that people attempt to domesticate. But instead, as fate decreed, I prefer a diet consisting solely of chickpeas and satsumas. A classic combination.