More on being vegetarian

I was inspired to write on this topic after reading Andrea Lutz's article "On Being vegetarian". I have to warn you that it may be somewhat rambling, but it is short and (I hope) interesting.

I grew up in Madras (now Chennai) in South India, in a fairly conservative, Tamil, Brahmin family. South Indian Brahmins are vegetarians who do not eat meat or egg.

Along with my family, I consider myself a vegetarian by constitution; meat is foreign to us; we basically don't like it. For me however, meat has been an acquired taste and this is how I came to acquire it. When I came to the USA at age 23, I continued to be a vegetarian for about two to three years.

I remember when my University of Toledo, Ohio roommates and I went to Burger King on some Friday nights, we would ask for a "vegetarian burger" and milk shake. Well, we didn't realize then that "burger" actually referred to the meat part of it, so what we actually got was a sandwich minus the burger (this was in 1988-89 when fast food restaurants didn't have veggie patties like they do now). I remember liking the taste of tomato, lettuce and cheese with mayonaise in a sandwich role, and the really thick milkshake which was quite an effort to drink through a straw.

During this time I once tried chicken wings that my rommates had ordered and sort of liked it. That was my introduction to meat.

Two years later I was at Auburn University in Alabama. At that time I had decided to acculturate myself to America. And to me that meant eating what most other people were eating. I once tried a cold cut (or something, can't remember what) with pasta and sauce ... yuck! It was a bad idea!

Years later, when I had a job in central New Jersey, I discovered a take-out restaurant on the corner of a busy intersection that sold chicken wings. There was a very small bar with a view of the steet where you could eat, but most customers ordered take-out which I did as well. The wings were great. They had a whimsical scale for hotness: mild, medium, hot, spicy, atomic, nuclear, and 911! All clearly illustrated with color codes on a thermometer chart by the menu. I made sure not to venture beyond spicy. Yeah, I definitely liked chicken (and still do). This vegetarian was no longer one.

Over a period of a few years, I had started eating beef burgers at restaurants and thought I liked them. I thought I also liked bacon (bacon and eggs). But by and by I started having this feeling, these doubts, about whether I really liked these foods deep down. It became clear to me that I had to wear a different culinary hat when I ate these foods.

Gradually I stopped eating beef and pork (by the way, I never liked lamb). Later, on occasion, when I had bacon with eggs, I clearly did not like it; and a few other times when I had beef burgers, I realized that I didn't like that either. This decided me: I only liked to eat either veggies or white meat: chicken and fish. Since that time, I have always followed this food preference.

It is interesting that, to westerners, being vegetarian often means to resist meat, whereas to me, it has meant following my preference for veggies, and the occasional white meat.

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