America is addicted to meat.

Anyone driving down an ordinary American road will see fast food joints, all with their primary ingredients being meat. Burger King. McDonald’s. Wendy’s. Arby’s. Roy Rogers. Hardee’s. You name it. They all serve meat. If you look at a sample school cafeteria, you will find nearly every product comes from the cow. Milk and meat. Thanks to the huge financial substay from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which gives out nearly $400 million a year to provide farms with a steady income, while fruits and vegetables only get approximately $175 million a year. Just how much America was addicted to meat didn’t strike me until a few months ago when I made a change in my lifestyle. I became a vegetarian.

If you had told me a year ago that I’d be a vegetarian  around this time, I’d have laughed and told you to stop pulling my leg. But, hey, anything happens in a year.

In a move that was more for the healthy benefits than anything else, my wife wanted to go back to the vegetarian lifestyle that she had enjoyed for most of her childhood. If you must know, she only turned towards meat after her mother married her stepfather. As for me, you’re looking at someone who was raised on meat. Heck, I even saw the meat being killed and served on my dinner table.

Last summer, my wife asked me how I would feel if I turned vegetarian. Of course, my first reaction was I wouldn’t mind (or care). I didn’t know whether to take her seriously. Several weeks later, she asked me again, and this time mentioned our daughter in the same sentence. The first reaction I had was to take her seriously, and to wonder what it would be like in our household with one carnivore and two herbivores. I’d seen too many dining experiences at my wife’s family house the last several years with two or three carnivores and three herbivores eating different meals at dinner. I didn’t want us to be like this either.

I ended up agreeing to this, mainly because I felt it was practical to do this together as a family, and I felt that my diet could improve. I could use less (eventually, no) meat and focus on more leafy greens and other earth-based foods. On August 31, I ate my last piece of meat. Since then, I’ve been eating purely vegetarian. The first few months, I got quite a few “what, are you crazy” looks, and a few “you’ve got to be kidding me…you???” expressions, only to get more looks when I said I was being sincere. People told me I wouldn’t last through Thanksgiving and all the meat and trimmings. Well, guess what? I did. That American holiday tradition is often considered the make or break for most carnivore-turned-herbivores, and I made it through both Thanksgiving and Christmas just fine.

There are definitely many pros and cons to this whole experience for me. The biggest confession right now is I still have some temptations when driving past a Burger King or sitting in a restaurant smelling the chargrilled steak. These things do smell good! It is also hard to find restaurants with a good variety of meals that are not so dependent on meat. Even the popular ones like Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday, and Bertucci’s all have a lot of selections with meat and few vegetable-based choices. I’ve even become more self-conscious about what is fed to these meat products that we ingest by the millions every year. What kind of hormones are cage-fed chickens being fed? What steroids are cows ingesting to produce more milk and produce calves faster? Everywhere you go, you will see results of our nation’s addiction to meat.

It even shows up in Congress. You will see the meat and dairy lobbyists stick together. An article in the January 2003 issue of Mother Jones states how the federal government does its part in supporting the livestock industry. I agree, livestock farmers need all the financial assistance to continue their livelihoods. But consider this: reducing America’s addiction to meat would immediately help solve four problems: world hunger, deforestation, soil erosion, and disease. If you are an avid traveler, you will see that America is purely the only nation in the world who “relies” on meat for its daily diet.

Indians in India consider the cow sacred. So do the Maasai of eastern Africa. A lot of the countries, either third world or modern, do not depend on meat as much as America does. And, do you see any nutritional problems there? No.

But, as I later learned, being a vegetarian does have its positive effects. I opened my eyes to more varied cuisine, noticed myself eating more diverse foods, making healthier choices, and even saw myself lose some pounds off. I do need to make sure I eat enough protein, but I get enough of that eating legumes, nuts, and soy-based products.

Even my own five-year-old daughter, who used to get off of seeing McDonald’s chicken McNuggets, doesn’t like them anymore. She has started eating pasta and other meals we prepare at home. While people out there may think we don’t have enough variety, you don’t need to look further before finding there are plenty of restaurants in the D.C. area that provide vegan or vegetarian-based menus. On an anniversary date last month, my wife found this awesome place called Great Sage in Clarksville, Maryland. What was cool about this place was at every table there was a sign listing some famous vegetarian eaters. Did you know Albert Einstein was a vegetarian? A simple Google search will give you choices of where to eat.

For those of you preferring to stay home, Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood cookbooks, based on her popular restaurant, Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, is a good guide to starting vegetarian cuisine at home. I would also recommend Good Housekeeping’s Vegetarian Meals cookbook, of which we’ve made several delicious meat-less meals for our evening dinners at home.

So, while there are some meat products I miss, especially my fraternity’s famous bratwursts, I know I’m not missing much by being a vegetarian.

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