Categories
Living in Society

A Vegetarian

Slicers drying on the counter.

It is ironic that I used to be a member of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America Local 431 and am now vegetarian. This is because in 1982 I married a vegetarian who recently became vegan. More precisely, I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian, as long-time readers of this blog may know. It is not hard to get enough food as a vegetarian in the United States. There is no deprivation in it either.

In my childhood home, countless meals were prepared in the kitchen, typically by Mother. When my grandmother visited, usually on Sundays, she helped prepare food. I don’t recall Father cooking hardly at all.

Because Father worked at Oscar Mayer, where there was a butcher shop for employees to buy meat at a discount, meat was a main course at most evening meals. We had a family cuisine different from other families in the neighborhood. Although I don’t recall exactly how it differed, it became a discussion topic among my friends and neighbors.

I learned how to cook, beginning at university. With fresh ingredients and an array of information sources about culinary preparations, I got better over the years. Any more, I don’t like eating in restaurants. Partly because I prefer food I cooked myself as I know what’s in it and it tastes better. Partly it is an economic consideration: eating at home can be less expensive.

Our meals resemble non-vegetarian fare often: pasta sauce, pizza, chili, casseroles, and tacos all adapt well to being vegan. What is more interesting, though, is making soup with fresh ingredients from the garden. It is almost always good, always different, even when fresh produce is less available in winter. Stir fry is another difficult to do badly meal that changes with the seasons. Over forty years we developed a cuisine distinctly our own and we enjoy it. It also keep us nourished.

There is no going back to eating meat. It doesn’t fit into our culinary world view. I’ve moved beyond meat to another place where plants provide what nourishment we need. In many ways, it is a better place.