Dinhternet

In ten days, I will have been veg­e­tar­ian for six months!

It’s been a long road, fraught with chal­lenges. There were times I just couldn’t get some­thing truly veg­e­tar­ian, so I had to pick meat off dishes. There were count­less times when I almost gave in to ran­dom crav­ings — steak, lob­ster, sushi, even ran­dom things like walk­ing past an AM/PM and see­ing their hot dogs on sale was hard some­times. The hard­est day, though, was a cou­ple of weeks ago when I went down to LA. In LA, my extended fam­ily basi­cally only goes out of the house to eat. One night, we went down to Santa Ana to eat a bo bay mon — “seven courses of beef” place. When I got there, my aunts told me to go to the chay restau­rant next door and bring back a to-go box. The worst part was, I had non-Viet friends there who didn’t know bo bay mon, so I had to teach them how to eat it, too.

As I come up on the six-month marker, though, I’m really torn about whether I want to continue…

On one hand, I talked about this with my uncle, who told me that around this point, if I made it, I should be really care­ful, because around here, my body will have used up all my reserves of the nutri­ents I nor­mally get from meat, such as iron. And there are these news arti­cles about the dan­gers of a meat­less diet.

On the other hand, I’m really proud of myself for being able to do a sim­ple thing that upholds my ideals and helps myself and the world. Sup­pos­edly, it’s bet­ter for my health. It def­i­nitely helps my moral health. It very slightly decreases the suf­fer­ing of crea­tures in the world. It helps the envi­ron­ment, since rais­ing meat is more resource-intensive and pol­lut­ing than rais­ing plants. And I’ve been get­ting praise from oth­ers, too, espe­cially my mom, who has wanted to go veg­e­tar­ian for a while, too.

I guess it comes down to my per­sonal beliefs, and how strong they are. Being raised Bud­dhist, I was taught that the most impor­tant rule is not to harm oth­ers, and since killing is the ulti­mate suf­fer­ing you can inflict upon another, you shouldn’t kill to eat. As Michael Pol­lan points out in Omnivore’s Dilemma, though, killing and eat­ing other ani­mals is just a part of nature. Even Bud­dhists don’t deny this fact. But Bud­dhists act as they do because they are try­ing to tran­scend nature and the mate­r­ial world to enlightenment.

The ques­tion is, what is my goal? Am I happy to be part of nature, or do I want to be tran­scen­dent as well? Even if I was to eat meat again, I wouldn’t want the ani­mals to suf­fer, so I’d still try to go for humanely raised and slaugh­tered meat, which is such a small indus­try right now that in prac­tice it would be no dif­fer­ent from what I’m doing right now. And my own self­ish­ness tips the scales as well. It’s folly to think that food could be bro­ken down into three sim­ple cat­e­gories, and as long as I got my pro­tein, carbs, and fat, I’d be good. (In fact, this is the same folly that led to the mess of the over-industrialized food indus­try we have right now.) So yeah, the med­ical risks of my choices also mat­ter to me.

I’ll be mulling this over (and over) for the next ten days. Please weigh in with your thoughts!