My childhood family dinners lay neatly nestled between after-school activities and bath time. I look back on my youngest years and
remember meals consisting of roasted chicken sitting in a pool of mushroom
sauce and vegetables with islands of dumplings rising out of the thick salty
swamp. I remember tuna noodle casserole with squares of greasy cheddar cheese
sizzling on top, frozen chicken nuggets, gigantic pork chops seasoned with a
hearty amount of Lawry’s Seasoned Salts, and wing nights, when my father and
sister would each put down 20-30 sticky barbecued wings in one sitting. But as activities increased and schedules
became busier and busier, daily family dinners turned into weekly meals, and soon,
only occurred every once in a while.
As family meals grew sparse my independence from the
typical American food culture grew as well. By age 12 I was experimenting
in the kitchen with delicacies like curried lentils and rice noodles, and I had
built up the idea of vegetarians to an unhealthy saintly standard. In my
mind, vegetarians were animal-loving beautiful activists capable of an
insurmountable level of self-control and self-confidence. They were my
idols. Someone had only to say “I am a vegetarian” and they turned into a
god. My middle school years were a blur
of days when I declared myself a true-blooded vegetarian, and other days when I
realized that there was no real point to depriving myself of meat besides an
inflated title and boosted ego. I had once gone an entire week without
eating meat, and then my mom made me stop because all I was eating were french
fries and iceberg lettuce. After that I pretty much gave up the idea of
becoming an enlightened earth-warrior bearing kale and quinoa as weapons and
settled on the mediocrity of chicken pot pie and pepperoni pizza.
It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school that
my entire view of vegetarianism shifted from an exotic political statement and
representation of someone’s worth to a practical and healthy lifestyle choice.
I came to this decision through a combination of short-lived childhood dreams,
Robert Kenner’s documentary film Food, Inc., the surprisingly
informative guidebook Vegetarianism for Dummies, and horror of the
United States meat industry. Rather than simply wanting the label of “vegetarian,”
I now also wanted the health benefits and wanted to stand for the food justice
cause that so many vegetarians had spoken of.
The meat industry freaked me out, and who wouldn’t get queasy watching a
hundred pigs being simultaneously slaughtered after months of forcing food down
their throats?
The first three years of vegetarianism were bliss. I was enlightened—I had discovered that the
meat industry was bogus, and was reaping the benefits. I learned how to cook myself vibrant and fun
meals filled with vegetables and grains, how to get the right combination of
amino acids from my meals to form complete proteins, and how tofu could soak up
pretty much any flavor it was cooked with. Those first three years I was
blissfully unaware that meat even existed; I had no cravings for it, and I was
having too much fun making my own meals to go looking for it. It wasn’t
until nearly three and a half years after my induction into vegetarianism that
I came face to face with the most viciously tasty meats of them all: bacon.
This came as a complete surprise; when I was little I had always thought
bacon smelled like cat vomit mixed with baked beans. I had rarely eaten
it.
After a night of fun (maybe a little too much fun), I
woke up in my bed with a pounding headache and the distant memories of skinny
dipping and riding around the streets in a golf cart. I slowly got out of
bed and shuffled towards the kitchen. That’s when I smelled it. The
smoky fragrance of the bacon and the sound of its fat sizzling in the pan hit
me like a smack in the face. My mouth started watering and all I could
think about was sliding one of those crispy greasy strips of pork into my
mouth. I had never wanted bacon this much in my life. I didn’t
understand. Bacon? The very thing that had sent me running for
vegetarianism in the first place? I
tried imagining the squealing pigs and unsanitary factory this bacon had been
prepared in, but the smell was relentless.
I spent the morning talking to my father, the heartless culprit who had
made the bacon in the first place, and avoided eye-contact with the growing
pile of succulent pig bits. I wasn’t allowed to eat that. I hadn’t
eaten meat in three years, and I was not
about to give up that accomplishment in order to fulfill this hangover-induced
irrational lust for a bite of what seemed at the time to be the best bacon in
the world. I was at a cross-road, each successive thought contradicting
the previous one, complicating the situation. I was about to get up from
the kitchen table to leave the room when my father abruptly left the kitchen
(and the bacon) to go wake everyone else up. I was left there, stranded,
the pile of bacon waiting for my greedy fingers to snatch it up and let the
heavenly slice of pork fill my mouth with exquisite and earth-altering flavor.
Before I could stop myself my feet had taken me to the
counter and my hand had seized two slices of bacon. I devoured it without
a second thought. By the time my father came back with my sister and
step-mother in tow, I was sitting back at the table acting as if nothing had
happened. They suspected nothing. Relaxing a bit, I closed my eyes
and remembered the crispy bacon hitting my tongue, overwhelming my taste buds
and setting my senses ablaze. It had been so good, so deliciously
succulent. What was wrong with me? Could I even call myself a vegetarian
anymore? My thoughts morphed from bacon
bliss to vegetarian hell. I panicked. Was I now one of those “flexitarians,” who
only claimed the vegetarian diet when it was convenient for them? What was I now? A traitor? A fraud?
A liar? The labels ran through my
head, each one cutting me deeper, making me feel worse. And then I realized, these were all just
labels. Why had I become a
vegetarian? When I was little simply the
label was enough for me, but when I had actually committed I had done so out of
purpose. I had done so out of health for
myself and health for the planet. I could
still smell the bacon, could still taste the slimy residue in my mouth, but it
tasted different now. It tasted like
freedom; it tasted like the harsh reality of infrequent family dinners and the
creativity their absence sparked within me; it tasted like new understandings
and new meanings of idolized labels and perfect lifestyles. It tasted like an indulgence; it tasted like
a rare occasion. It tasted like bacon.
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