Choosing to be vegetarian can be hard.
You’re often misunderstood -
(People don’t realize that I don’t hate meat. I do still have cravings. I just commit to my choice.)
It puts a damper on your social life -
(I always feel bad when hosts have to make special provisions for my choices.)
And there’s a lot of options out there in terms of what kind of vegetarian or semi-vegetarian route you want to take.
I’d like to think I’ve done a pretty good job in the roughly two years since I made my choice. I’ve been mostly a lacto-ovo vegetarian. Tried to go straight lacto vegetarian, but it was too hard for me because eggs are in so many processed foods. Briefly considered going full vegan, but that basically eliminates eating anything but my own cooking, and I don’t have the resources to handle that right now. I have made a couple of exceptions at major holidays with family.
Honestly, at this point, I’m just used to it. I don’t have to think about what I can eat, menus are just mentally filtered. But lately, some articles I’ve been reading have been changing the way I’ve been thinking about vegetarianism.
One talks about how oysters are “safe” to be eaten, even for vegans, because they (and other mollusks) can’t feel pain (at least, not as we know it) because they lack a central nervous system and farming them has little-to-no negative impact (or even a positive impact, according to some) on the environment (unique to oysters).
The other article is one that I posted a while back on Facebook about how responsive plants are to attacks.
Science, why you gotta go changing everything up on me? What an odd world it would be if I could eat oysters and not plants.
But I just have to look back to my original reasons for becoming vegetarian and I know what I must do. Even if mollusks and plants don’t feel pain as we do, they obviously feel something, since they can react to attacks (and even counter-attack). Ideally, I want to become fruitarian like some Buddhist monks. But that’s probably not going to happen.