Why I Decided to Eat Meat After 25 Years of Being Vegetarian

Most of the people in my life have always known me to be a vegetarian. We’ve never shared a hamburger or a meat-lovers pizza, never gorged on chili cheese fries or all-you-can-eat sushi. I’ve always been the vegetarian.

The Making of a Vegetarian

At 10 years old, seemingly out of the blue, I declared to my parents that I wasn’t eating meat anymore. No more chicken nuggets, fish sticks, tuna melts, bacon, sausage, brisket, or pork tamales. Nada. And I stuck with it. (Well, truth be told, I ate a hot dog a few months later at a friend’s birthday because “Becky” made me feel like a weirdo for not eating meat. I’m pretty sure that was the last time in my life I succumbed to peer pressure).

At the beginning, my family thought it was just a phase. I didn’t get any special meals, and I never expected to. I just ate a lot of side dishes, whatever was there. It took a while for my Mexican grandma to wrap her head around my no-meat decision. She always said, “I’ll just make you a chicken enchilada.” No grandma, chicken is still meat. Bless her heart. After a few years, she accepted it and I was greeted by plates full of cheese enchiladas and cheese and chili tamales when I visited. Mmmm, tamales [wipes drool from her mouth].

I never missed meat. I never craved it. It was not a big deal for me. I was still healthy, though it took a while for me to truly understand how to eat healthy as a vegetarian, to not turn into a carbo-tarian, a common happening among us veggies.

Challenges to my Vegetarianism

I remained vegetarian through high school and college, and through 2 years living in Ukraine. Though, often times in Ukraine, my host mom, school lunch ladies or occasional dinner host would try to sneak some meat into my borscht or rice. I’m sure I ate some meat in Ukraine, I definitely ate chicken stock, but I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it. I was more flexible, but I never deliberately or knowingly ate meat or fish. I had no desire, no necessity.

I did have some interesting conversations about being a vegetarian. After a shared bottle of vodka, my Ukrainian host dad told me how worried he was about me not eating meat. He said my bones would turn to dust. That I could not be strong if I didn’t eat meat. (Note: this was coming from a man who smoked a pack a day and drank vodka like water). I told him I was very strong, teasingly flexed my arms, showing my not so impressive biceps. I challenged him to an arm wrestling match, but he just laughed, shook his head and poured us another shot.

It’s hard to explain my reasons for being a vegetarian, especially to people who live in third world countries, where meat is expensive, a special treat for special occasions. And my reasons are not simple - it started from my love of animals and morphed into a conscious, ethical decision. As a child, as soon as I realized that what was on my plate was once running around, breathing air, thinking, living, I just couldn’t eat it. I couldn’t do it. It made me sad, like who was I to take this life for my own culinary enjoyment? That was the impetus of my vegetarianism, but as I grew up, my reasons grew too. Deplorable factory farming, heart-breaking animal abuse, the environmental effects of raising animals for consumption, on and on. There are so many reasons not to eat meat.

So what led me to take that first bite of chicken in 25 years?

Becoming Pescatarian

My journey away from vegetarianism began when I took a job teaching English in South Korea. Doing my research about how life as a vegetarian would be, I decided I needed to open up my food repertoire. In America, I could adequately get enough protein through the variety of veggie friendly protein sources. And living in California meant veggie and vegan restaurants and options were everywhere. But that wouldn’t be the case in Korea. So I decided to start eating fish. I made myself a tuna melt, and that was that. The next day, I met a sushi-fiend friend to show me the ropes.

I spent the next year in Korea eating tuna, cooking shrimp, learning how to eat crab, scarfing on whole grilled fish, choking down raw octopus, enjoying squid soup and experiencing some other seafood that I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Morally, I felt ok eating fish. (All except for octopus; no more octopus for me.)

I officially became a pescatarian.

The next year took me to Thailand, which opened up my food repertoire even more.

Traveling While Vegetarian

Now, I’m a traveler, I’ve lived in and traveled to different countries and have seen how animals are used, how meat is valued in different countries. I witnessed my host family in Ukraine slaughter its pig, which provided enough meat for a year. (Read about the pig slaughtering here). I pet the rabbits that would soon become their Easter soup. I wandered the village with the chickens whose bones would be used to make the broth for the borsch I’d eat later that week. I appreciate the closeness of the food source in these cultures. Who am I to come into a situation like that and say, “no, I’m not eating that, the way you do it is wrong. Think of the animals!”

It’s a viewpoint that can only come from a position of having enough, of living in a plentiful society, where I can refuse such an important source of nutrition because I have other options. I’m not stocking up on calories because I’m unsure where my next meal will come from. My moral reasons for not eating meat, based on factory farming, animal abuse and environmental degradation don’t quite hold weight in a small Thai village where, like in Ukraine, the animals are part of the community until they are needed. Witnessing the pig slaughtering made me see that this village pig’s existence was valued, and it’s death was carried out in the most humane way a slaughtering can be done. Every bit of the pig was used. It was one pig that fed a family and every now and then its neighbors for a year.

On my third day in Thailand, I did a home stay in Mae Klong, a small village a few hours outside of Bangkok. My host was incredible kind. In the morning, he brought me chicken fried rice presented on a beautiful platter with a plastic wrapped chocolate cake roll for a little breakfast dessert. I was sitting outside at a wooden table, after a restful night in my hut, with a view of the Mae Klong river where I just saw a baby crocodile swimming. Soaking in the moment, I dug in. I didn’t think too much about it. After 25 years, I had eaten chicken for the first time. And it felt alright. What else was I going to do? Eat around it, leaving the chicken, unused and unusable. The chicken was dead, likely one that I saw running around the day before. It would have been a waste of the chicken’s life. I gave thanks to the chicken as I ate it, with no regrets.

Why Am I a Vegetarian Anyway?

The whole chicken experience made me think about my real intentions and motivations for being a vegetarian. I still felt bad thinking about eating another living thing, but I gave proper thanks, and feel it’s even worse if something is cooked for me, if an animal was killed for me, and I don’t eat it. Sticking to something just for the point of it isn’t very useful. I felt proud when I said I was a vegetarian, especially one for 25 years. Can I still say that? There will be an asterisks there now. But who cares? My motivation for being a vegetarian isn’t to say I am a vegetarian. It’s to show love and appreciation for all living things, to not contribute or support animal abuse, to do my part to not harm the environment. And I can do all those things while eating fish and the occasional chicken.

The next week, I ate chicken one more time: at a street side restaurant in a small Thai village where there were no other options. I have no desire to order it when given another choice, and I can’t imagine I’ll eat meat back in the states. Only in specific situations, that can’t really be specifically outlined, but I’ll know when I experience them. And I’m ok with that.