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For years, I’ve been making a lifestyle choice that few people agree with. It is unnatural, against some people’s religions and makes Thanksgiving dinners uncomfortable. Though I don’t force others to participate in my lifestyle and never mention it except to others who share my decision, I am constantly ridiculed and mocked for my “agenda.”
You see, readers, I am a vegetarian.
I’m not a guy with a “meat is murder” T-shirt. I don’t hold up signs next to ice cream stores that say “Milk is Rape,” but I have friends who have and, well, no one was convinced. I find PETA annoying.
I am not trying to convert anyone. I am just trying to eat my tofu lasagna in peace. Yet the minute the word “tofu” escapes my lips, I meet a litany laced with a thousand references to steak. After that, I am told that vegetarians are pushy and annoying. All I have ever done to merit this outpouring of annoyance is answer a question about what’s inside the Tupperware.
Ultimately, I think it’s selfish to make anything else suffer in exchange for my own comfort. While McDonald’s may have told you that hamburgers grow in gardens, they do not. Instead, they are taken from a cow, which dies after a hook is inserted into its neck and it is left to hang until its blood stops dripping long enough for it to be sliced open.
This seems, at the most fundamental level, rude. It is rude to ask a cow to do that so that I may eat a hamburger. If someone were to ask me to do it so that they could eat one meal, I would say no. So, I don’t eat meat.
The other reason I don’t eat animals is that I don’t want humans to die. Producing one cow for consumption requires a disproportionate amount of food for the cow, food that could go to humans. Cows eat too much. The same acre of land that could produce 40,000 pounds of potatoes only produces about 250 pounds of beef. If Americans ate just 10 percent less meat in a year, we could feed 60 million people in what we save in grain.
I am not an activist by any means. I’m a passive vegetarian. Yet, it’s as if vegetarians are exclusively capable of insipid sentiments about love, chanting to bring peace to the earth. What I eat for lunch, apparently, renders me incapable of serious thought.
As a means of defense, I used to mention that Albert Einstein was a vegetarian. People inevitably inform me that Adolf Hitler was also a vegetarian. The fact that my diet has made me neither a genius in physics nor a genocidal dictator should be enough to end that argument, but for the record, Hitler wasn’t a vegetarian. He ate Czech ham after conquering Prague, according to a New York Times article from the period. His vegetarian dietary restrictions prevented flatulence, which is ironic, since I am often told that, as a vegetarian, I must fart a lot. It’s a classy topic, but it’s not true.
Some ask, “Don’t you know that it’s how humans evolved? That’s why we have incisors!” Well, heaven forbid I don’t use my teeth for their intended purpose! Others ask me why I would go against God’s assigned relationship of man and animals. In the battle of religion and science, it is clear that vegetarians are the losers. My continued existence – and relative health – does not seem to dissuade people from the idea that vegetarianism is unhealthy. But it’s simple enough: vegetables are the most crucial part of a diet resistant to cholesterol problems, heart disease and cancer.
Meat-eaters of the world, I call a truce. You keep eating your wasteful, unhealthy diet because you have certain kinds of teeth or whatever, and I will not go into graphic descriptions of what happens to veal. Be rude to cows; but don’t be rude to me when I happen to say “veggie” in front of “burger” when you ask me what I am eating. In exchange, I won’t tell you how many years that fast-food hamburger has been kept frozen. Deal?
Eryk Salvaggio has been honorably discharged for disclosing information about his dietary orientation.
Bangor Daily News