10 Year Vegetarian

Sometime in March 2002, I completely stopped eating meat. For most of the year before that I was down to only eating chicken. My last chicken meal was at The Olive Garden and you can thank them for nailing down that coffin. I had no desire to eat that again.

For the most part, I don't miss meat at all. I will get a strange longing for my mom's pork chops or chicken wings occasionally, which I think is insane b/c you can't get much closer to a dead animal than meat still on the bone. However, those longings are not anywhere close enough to break my diet. I did once eat stuffing from the turkey my first year in California, mostly due to lack of willpower, but ever since then I've been a very good girl.

See, the thing is, I like meat, but I just don't feel the need to eat it. I'm totally fine with other people eating meat, but with the world's population as big as it is, we're not all eating some naturally raised meat from down the street. I'm happy to be a vegetarian and try to help balance out this crazy world.

It took a while to wrap my mind around making a meal that wasn't centered around meat. I got the knack of it, and while I'm not super trim (mostly due to lack of exercise than diet), I'm actually pretty healthy. So I try to cook myself meals more often than not and keep learning how to make better meals for myself. I even bought myself a vegan cookbook. While I don't make meals from there often, I do put the effort in at times.

My mother really came around to it after being stumped why I couldn't have the spaghetti sauce that had sausage cooked in it. She will send me recipes from time to time and when I go to visit, she always goes out of her way to make veggie meals from scratch. My dad doesn't know how to even go about cooking a meal for me (he's a real meat / potatoes / 2 vegetables kind of guy) but he is nice enough to buy me a subscription of Vegetarian Times every year. It's nice to have the support... and it doesn't hurt to have a couple friends who are also vegetarian or vegan.

10 years. Amazing. It seems like no time at all.