her real world

On being flexitarian: Beginnings

I’ve always eaten meat. I was raised on a cattle farm, I grew up eating ‘organic’ (we didn’t call it that, but it was home grown, free range, hormone free and all that good stuff) beef, poultry and lamb. The only thing I’m pretty sure we ate that was from a store was pork. I also ate various game meats, venison most often and sometimes duck or goose.

Animals were a part of our life.  In addition to having crop land, we raised cattle, sheep and chickens. I helped do chores, shovelled poop and picked eggs. We were a small farm who cared more about farming than making money and in the early 90s we were told that we were not profitable enough. We still ate local meat, but we more often got it from other farmers rather than raising it ourselves.

And then I moved away to go to university. And being a poor student I ate what I could afford, which generally was rubbery bonless chicken thighs that I’d bought as a family pack on sale and then frozen and then thawed and made into a stir fry or something. These were times where I dreamed of the meat I grew up with, meat that tasted and felt like meat in my mouth. I dreamed of going to a grocery store and being able to buy ‘the good stuff’.

Eventually I became done with university. But it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to say that I’m ‘done’ with eating like a student. I still enjoy shawarma and the odd hot dog. And even make myself a MSG free version of ramen noodles.

What I have been doing is eating organic meat. As well as I can afford (as I’m not a bajillionaire by any stretch of the imagination), I’ve slowly replaced all of the ‘other’ meat in my diet with food that is well to me just more real. This means that the amount of meat that I’m eating has decreased, but the quality has increased substantially.

This makes me a flexitarian. There have been many reasons to do this, some of them political, some of them moral, some of them for my health. I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it in the series of posts that I have planned.

It’s been somewhat easy so far. Most of the time I’m able to choose a veggie option (the vegetarian platter at my favourite shawarma place is actually really fantastic) and when I’m not I’ve been choosing a sustainable type of fish. Or if I’m lucky enough to go to a place that serves organic meat, I will eat that.

But barbecue season is coming and bacon (and his big brother prosciutto) is always around. Which means that temptation lurks in the likliest of places.

But I’m going to keep trying this eating less meat thing.  And I’m going to drag you all along kicking and screaming.