Be a Fake Vegetarian

I became a vegetarian out of pure coincidence. Several years ago, I had a friend who was giving up meat for Lent. He loved meat. This was a true sacrifice for this Catholic man. By pure happenstance, a day or two later I came across a news story in my college newspaper about the rising trend of celebrities going vegan. At that time, I was vaguely curious about the whole vegetarian scene without really knowing why. I interpreted this news article as a sign. "Oh, why the heck not," I thought. "I will give up meat for a few months, and see what happens." Well, almost. I was still eating sushi and fish--and I blame that on my Japanese heritage. But I was coming from a point in my life where my idea of having a good time was going to an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ restaurant with my gal pals, giddily piling our plates high with stacks of raw meat of various mammals, and stuffing ourselves to oblivion. I considered it a blessing to be at the top of the food chain, where I could choose to eat a steak, Panda Express orange chicken, or a Quiznos turkey sandwich depending on what species I felt like eating at that hour. I loved my meat so much it was shameless. My self-imposed vegetarian experiment almost felt like a weird performance piece in delibrate irony. Having grown up loving my meat, I expected to have terrible meat-deprivations haunt me through the day like a persistent headache. But no, it was surprisingly, almost disappointingly anti-climactic. I even passed my first test, which occurred about a week into my personal experiment: I was invited to a barbeque birthday dinner, and I did not have a mental breakdown. I had my vegetarian fried rice, and I did not wrestle a chicken leg out of an unsuspecting party guest's hands. The point is this: I just got used to getting by without land meat without much of a struggle. I interpreted my lack of resistance as a sign that I didn't really love meat as much as I originally thought. A year later, when I came back from living in Japan, I zoned seafood out of my life. Now the only meat I eat is the occasional egg. No one lectured me with animal slaughter videos. No one blared statistics about cow flatulence and mammal murder into my face. It just sort of happened. My ideological shift came after the conversion, instead of the other way around. Two years later, I am more knowledgable about the benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle and I am fully convinced that sooner or later we will all be forced to give up eating meat if not for the simple fact that our planet will no longer be able to handle it. I would rather have it happen sooner, though. And I wonder what is the best way to push the vegetarian agenda to other people. Meat-eaters, in celebration of Earth Day and being friendly to the planet, consider being a fake vegetarian as a temporary experiment with these following tips:

• If you really can't see yourself giving up your turkey, chicken, pork, salmon and crocodile, at least consider giving up or consciously decreasing your intake of beef. Our cow consumption is really screwing us over.
• Have a no meat day once a week. It won't be that bad, I promise.
• Make it a bet with your other meat-loving friend. See who can go the longest without meat. Loser treats the winner to a whole Marie Calendar's pie.
• Keep your animal consumption, just eat less of it. Instead of a whole chicken, a drumstick. Instead of the burger, a few chicken nuggets.
• Humor yourself and try the fake meat in the vegetarian section of your local supermarket. I'm telling you, this isn't the grilled road gravel of yesteryear's veggie burger. They seem to keep engineering better and better fake meat every year, and you just might be surprised by the uncanny similarity between fake meat and real meat.

nYou just might surprise yourself and start craving meat less and less until you stop eating meat altogether. It happens to the goriest of meat-eaters. It happened to me.