Well hello there. This is the first of what I hope will be many posts in my journey to becoming a full-fledged, PeTA-wearin’, veggie-veganite. I don’t think it will be easy, but it will surely be worthwhile.
I have always been an earth-lover. Ask my fourth grade teacher or anyone who in the past two years has tried to use a plastic bag in my presence. I compost, I recycle (even if I am the ONLY person on my street and my neighbors look at me like I am nuts every Friday playing with the trash on the street corner), I use reusable sacks and shop organic whenever possible. I believe that we can save the polar bears and have been doing, or at least I thought, my part to slow the melting of the polar ice caps.
Well as it turns out, I haven’t. All my plastic bag and organic buying has fallen short to this one nasty little habit I was raised with. We all were raised with. Eating animals. Well crap. That’ll knock you down a notch. It seems that no matter how many plastic bottles I recycle or how many pairs of Toms I buy, it will still not equal the impact I could have if I just stopped chowin’ down on the flesh of our bovine friends. It turns out that going vegetarian is the single best thing you as an individual can do for the planet. Einstein said it, and he is pretty smart, so maybe we should start listening.
The whole thing sparked while I was visiting my dear friends for what would be my first ever vegetarian and partly vegan Thanksgiving dinner. What’s this! Thanksgiving with no turkey? No buttery, golden stuffing? No gravy-dripping mashed potatoes filled with creamy goodness? Yup, that’s right. None of it. My non-vegetarian friends and I even went out to dinner for a “Meat Feast” Wednesday night hoping to load up on protein in case we couldn’t quite cut it the next day. But you know after a delicious “turkey dinner” of crisp salads, savory timbales, crunchy green beans, sweet potatoes and heavenly vegan apple pie, I was stuffed and I couldn’t even recall why we ate turkey on Thanksgiving to begin with.
After arriving back home from this feast, a friend of mine informed me that he was going vegetarian for the New Year. Okay, this is no ordinary friend. He’s a good ol’ boy raised in the South who wears a Cattle company hat on a daily basis. If he could do it, there is no reason this wanna be hippie couldn’t. So that was that. Here I am starting the New Year meat free. I stocked up on cookbooks and read the PeTA website until I had nightmares and couldn’t sleep and have already started living the lifestyle.
Here are my rules for the New Year: I am not going to eat anything unless I saw it meet its end (for those of you who know me, this is not a common occurrence. I once saved a fly from a bucket of bleach water). I am also going to eat vegan as much as possible with the exception being the delicious eggs I get from the nice lady I work with which I can assure you were raised in a loving environment free of any sort of torture except the occasional attempt at a hug. Basically, if I can’t account from how it was raised and what animal was sacrificed to get it to my plate, its out.
I hope that you will join me on this journey as I explore and share great new recipes, trials in the kitchen, interesting facts on why we should all be eating this way (I will try to avoid the soapbox, but forgive me if I have to climb up there every once in awhile), and the crazy stuff that happens along the way. I hope that you will share my triumphs, my failures and keep me motivated to live the best way possible.
As for the gnome, he is a little friend who lives in my kitchen reminding my that we should love the earth. And look cute doing it.
Cheers!
Lindsey
