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I’m not sure what has spurred me to take this leap.  It may have been all of the environmental classes that I’ve taken over the past couple of years,  it could have been randomly stumbling upon chooseveg.com and watching their slaughterhouse videos, or it could be an intesified desire to save the world after having watched the entire first season of 24 and Jack Bauer consecutively.

Whatever the case, I have decided to become a vegetarian over the next 30 days to see if I can do it and to see what it’s like.  For a long time, I have considered a vegie lifestyle. Despite coming from a background that makes fun of hippies, it always seemed to me that vegetarians were pretty well informed or at least passionate about good things like the evironment.  I don’t want to stereotype poeple however because there are many reasons why people choose vegetarianism.  People I’ve spoken to cite animal cruelty, resource economy, health, meat is gross looking and even “I don’t really have a reason. I just wanted to try it.”  Vegetarians also have various levels of eating habits, usually related to the choice of eating fish, eggs, dairy, or food that has been cooked with meat .  A common thread that I have noted with several of my successful vegetarian friends is that eventually they grow to severely dislike meat and to even find it discusting.  When I was a freshman in high school, a friend told me his reason for swithing over.  He said that every time he saw a strip of steak, he imagined a slice of his own forearm muscle on the plate.

For this month, I will pull strength from all of these reasons because I will need to.  I really like to eat meat, but I just decided that my affinity for meat could be put on hold in the interest of what might be a higher cause.  The reason that makes the most sense for me is natural resourse management argument.  For example, it might take 1000 pounds of grain to feed a pig over it’s lifespan, which would then produce only 10 pounds of pork meat.  If everyone simple ate the grain, there would be that much food for everyone in the world.  In one of my environmental classes I learned a statistic.  The way the world eats now, we can produce enough food for 1.5 times the world population.  If you ask why there is hunger, the answer is distibution problems.  If everyone in the world ate the way Americans eat, there would only be enough food for 0.7 of the world.  Lastly, if everyone ate the way people ate in India (many vegetarians) we could feed the world 3 times over.

I expect this journey to be quite difficult, as I have chosen to not eat any meat, eggs, milk, butter, or foods made with animals of any kind as far as I can help.  Being here in China will make it more difficult because I won’t always know the ingredients in the food.  Many times, the Chinese use small strips of meat as a condiment, and don’t even consider it as meat even if you ask!

Many people, namely my mother, have told me over the years that if you don’t eat meat, you won’t get enough protein and nutrients.  Well, I have known vegetarians that are very unhealthy, eating only potato chips and french fries, and I have also known and read about many incredibly healthy vegetarians.  I have heard that the complex proteins found in animals is very difficult for digestion, and many fish in today’s polluted waterways contain dangerous levels of mercury and other toxins.  All this to say, I have never had any nutritional deficiency that I’m aware of, and won’t worry about it until I do.  I will make an effort to eat tofu and beans, which are in high supply around here.

Another benefit of this project will be that I will be forced to cook for myself a little more because my standard habit of snack eating almost always contains eggs or meat.  I’ll keep you posted of my improvements in that area because I’m pretty much starting from scratch.  Meredith has promised to help