Where’s my carrot?

On 24 December 2006, during Christmas dinner, I ended my family’s pesco-vegetarian diet of almost 3 years. And the first non-vegetarian meal we had was grilled baby back ribs.

You may ask, ‘3 years?! Why did you give up?!’ Well, it’s not a matter of giving up, really. It was a a matter of taste, as in flavor. I missed the variety-ness of eating. Yes, hard-core vegetarians would say that you can diversify taste and flavors and recipes with vegetarian substitutes. I used to say that myself. In fact, my kids and I have gotten used to the vegetarian flavor. But if you’re like us, and you’ve had years of meat in your diet and you’re practically the only vegetarians in your entire immediate family, sometimes you just give in to the yearning.

Okay, you might ask again, ‘What the hell is a pesco-vegetarian?!’ Sometimes called pescetarians, Wikipedia defines them as vegetarians who eat fish, as well as shellfish, crustaceans, and the like, but exclude other meats or animal products. In our case, we also ate eggs, dairy and dairy products.

Being vegetarian was not easy at the outset. In my case, my parents thought I was nuts and threatened child abuse cases against me (just threats, of course) for depriving my kids protein from meat. But the truth is, alternative sources of protein can suffice. My kids didn’t become sickly or get any thinner. In fact, my 12-year-old even got bigger!

I guess it’s different for everybody. All I know is we did for health reasons and we don’t regret ever doing it. If we wanted to, we could always go back to it. Who knows, my meat eating days may be numbered again.

Those who are interested in exploring an alternative eating lifestyle may refer to the following for information (they helped us a lot the whole time we were vegetarians):

Information on veganism: The Vegan Society
Vegetarian recipes and information: GoVeg.com
Recipes and nutrition: The Vegetarian Resource Group
Recipes and other resources: VegWeb.com
Resources and discussion boards: VegSource.com