Meat Limited

I have always made fun of vegetarians.  Any time I heard an argument about not eating meat I would happily bare my canines and ask "what are these for"?  We are omnivores and not eating meat just never made sense to me.  "If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?"  One of my sisters was a vegetarian until recently when she got pregnant and started worrying about enough nutrition for her baby.  I really made fun of her.  But I always semi-respected her reasoning.  It wasn't that she had a really strong conviction that eating meat is wrong.  Her justification was that you should not eat anything you would not prepare your self.  This included killing an animal, cleaning it and eating it.  She ate fish as she had fished and cleaned fish in the past and felt okay about it.

As I have opened my heart further to Buddhism and really began to feel maitri towards more than myself and my immediate cares I began to think about the food choices I was making.  I didn't decide to be a vegetarian.  I was already cutting way down on my red meat and meat intake to begin with.  Shopping organic, there are huge amounts of very tasty non-meat options.  I just decided that I would go out of my way to be even more meat free.  I had chicken and rice at my sisters house one night and the chicken was kind of tasteless.  It was blamed on the lack of spice added to it, but honestly I wondered why would i even bother to eat this piece of chicken.  I ate it as I was hungry and "that was dinner", but I did not feel that had I not eaten it I would have been missing anything.

This was my last non-fish and non-egg food from a slaughtered animal I have since consciously eaten.

I joke at my wife as she gobbles down  roast beef sandwich that "meat is murder" but I am not so sure about that.  I don't feel bad about people around me eating meat, I just don't feel I need it right now.  I eat animal products such as milk and cheese etc.  I also eat eggs pretty regularly.  I am strongly pro-choice  and truly believe that an egg is not a developed creature.  I try very hard to eat free range organic eggs from local farms, mostly because the egg episode on How It's Made on the science channel disturbed me.  (don't get me started on the chick production and chicken meat episodes...yuck)  I have also had fish on several occasions when a viable non-meat dish was not available.  I kind of feel like my sister did about fish, and honestly not having some animal protein in my diet scares me a little and fish has so many other nutritional benefits, but over several months I think this is maybe 3 times.

So here I am.  Newly Buddhist.  Newly vegetarian.  And, losing a little weight for my decision, and hopefully getting a few other health benefits.  I squatted down today to lift my 3.5 year old daughter up, and managed to stand right back up without to much trouble and my knees aren't sore now, which is nice change.  Maybe this is a permanent life change, and maybe not, but it is who I am for the moment and I feel content.