Food and Family

I've just returned from a whirlwind of family activity! I saw the majority of my mom's and dad's sides of the family, caught up with my immediate family, and ran into old friends that I haven't seen in ages. What a weekend! I could go into detail about my weekend, but I'm not going to. I'll just say it was full, but not bad. I think that makes it good. I'm totally wiped out, but glad for it. I also got past the half-way mark on the audiobook of The Brothers Karamazov. A small victory but a victory, to be sure!

While I was home, I discussed some changes in my life with my immediate family. The biggest change at this time is that I've decided to become a vegetarian!  Some of you will remember that a few weeks ago I mentioned this book I was reading called Eating Animals. I finished it a couple of weeks ago, and have thought a lot about the things the author talked about. After carefully considering what I've learned and doing a bit of research on the health hazards and health benefits of vegetarianism, I decided that eating meat is not as important to me as some other things are (namely not putting a ridiculous amount of crap into my body and not killing the environment).

So I'm off meat. It's not going to be a big change for me, as I haven't eaten a whole lot of meat lately anyway, but there are adjustments and changes to be made. and I am sure that as I progress on this journey, I'll have plenty of thoughts and feelings regarding vegetarianism and meat-eating to blog about. A couple of things I want to make clear to all of you:
                  1) I know how snobby and mean vegetarians can be sometimes. I've always felt judged by them, like they see me as a murderer every time I eat a hamburger. I'm totally not that way. Everyone has to make his or her own decision on where they stand on the meat issue. I've made mine, but the fact that your decision is different from mine doesn't make me dislike you, and hopefully it won't make you dislike me either.
                  2) I don't want to fight with you about eating meat or not eating meat. It's not worth it. No amount of me yelling at you and no amount of you yelling at me is going to change anyone's mind.
               
                  3) If you would like to understand why I made the decision I did, I'd love to chat with you. You can also check out a couple of the resources that inspired my change. One is the movie Food Inc, and the other is the book Eating Animals. These two, I believe, give a good picture of what I believe to be wrong with the food industry today. Although neither is completely objective, I'm not sure that it's possible to remain so on an issue like this.

So that's the big news for me. No meat. No chicken, no fish, no meat. I'm still getting the hang of things. I ate a piece of deli ham the other day without even thinking about it, and I'm relatively sure that a few of the soups I've eaten have contained chicken stock. I'm still trying to figure out how to get around that at restaurants. Well, I would write more, but my office is a sauna right now and I've used up my last bit of energy on what you've read, so the rest will have to wait. I love you, blog stalkers. Have a good day!