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vegetarian x carnivore = ?

March 18th, 2004 · No Comments

The other day I looked at my shopping list and someone had scribbled on the top in large purple letters: m e a t .

I knew the culprit immediately: my five year old Abigail. I’ve been blogging a bit about how I chose Ted over vegetarianism, but also how I hope to cook a bit more meatless when he’s away next week. Abigail’s scribbles revealed her carnivore tendencies. So much for my vegan plans.

Oh well, what could I expect? I studied genetics. Patterns of inheritance. She’s her father’s child! Maybe it’s dominant. Maybe it’s destiny.
Perhaps vegetarian x carnivore = carnivore.

Jorrit Wiersma responded to my most recent post on vegan lovers. I appreciated his perspective as a vegetarian who loves a meat-eater, although he was more of a vegetarian than I ever was:

My situation is more like Julie’s: I’m a vegetarian and Saskia is not. I’m even no longer what I consider to be a vegetarian because I’ve taken up eating fish again, so it’s more the reverse from what she writes about. I don’t know much about Jay’s girlfriends, but note that the people quoted from the newspaper were all already vegetarians before they converted each other to veganism. Maybe it’s easier to make the change from vegetarianism to veganism than it is to stop eating meat.

My ideal really is to be vegan, but it’s just not feasible in my life, especially because I don’t want to force Saskia to eat vegan (actually, we had rice, lentils and broccoli for dinner yesterday, so I guess that’s vegan), and, to be fair, I feel that finding meat substitution products is too much of a hassle. My solution used to be mostly to eat milk and cheese products. I don’t really consider those to be strictly fitting for a vegetarian diet because it’s unavoidable to kill cows in the process of making milk products (at least in the current industry). Because of that, and because it isn’t all that healthy to eat so much cheese, I recently decided to also eat some fish. We now eat fish about once a week and in exchange I (try to) eat much less cheese, milk, and eggs. I think Saskia is also much happier now that she doesn’t have to eat vegetarian dinners all week. Well, and I’m also quite a big fan of fish myself, so it’s also a bit selfish.

I like how he’s worked to find a solution that would fit Saskia’s diet too. Ted and I have had to work through some dietary dilemmas in our relationship. I wonder what Jorrit and Saskia’s daughter Silke will think about it all. I think she’s a bit younger than my Abigail, so maybe she doesn’t have many questions yet. Abigail questions everything…even the food on her plate…

Tonight she was curious about the corned beef. Where did it come from? Why was it so stringy? So Ted started to explain to her what corned beef is. How it is cow muscle. How muscles move our bodies.

Abigail’s reaction : Ugh!

So maybe those vegetarian genes still got a chance yet…

Tags: marriage