Personal

I started eating a lot of vegetarian food in July 2014. It was normal, I just replaced meat with other foods.

I think - and I don’t care about the science behind it, this is just simple logic - I think that plants are the only living beings on planet Earth that produce food, and are also edible & delicious themselves.
To me, if I want to eat vitamins and proteins, I eat plants. It’s the logical thing to do.
The alternative is to eat meat. But the meat comes from plants, because chicken, cows and pigs can’t produce food on their own from water, air and sun, they need to consume plants first.
Animals lose some of the useful plant in their inefficient digestion, then the animal is burning more energy to live and grow, and when we finally butcher the animal more energy is lost in all the cuts and bits we throw away. Even worse, the animals consume water, urinate, dump, so on and so forth.
This ugly process of producing meat first of all produces a lot of suffering for the animals, because their only purpose in their short life is to be murdered and cut into pieces. Second, producing meat takes a lot of time (have to wait months for the meat, and wait for the plants to grow), takes a lot of space (people cut forests to build animal farms), resources (water, food), logistics (transport all the resources and consume fuel) and produces a ton of trash, pollution and gasses.
The simplest and most logical way to consume nutrients is to take them directly from plants and algae, instead of waiting for the protein pass through a chicken and eat the cooked flesh later. Humans don’t even enjoy raw meat, so they have to spend extra time and energy to cook it.

And the biggest and strongest animals on land are vegetarians. I definitely won’t feel weak.

To me, being vegetarian is not that convenient, yes I got used to it, but I consider my options even after all these years. In today’s society, it’s much easier to buy a cheap chicken sandwich from a take-away, I would save money and time. It’s much easier to order meat in a restaurant, most of the places have 90% meat in the menu; as a vegetarian, I don’t have too many options.
I choose to continue to eat vegetarian food, but NOT to follow a trend, or belong to a specific group of people, or to become popular in a way, or because it sounds fancy.
I’m not even saying “I’m a vegetarian” when I meet someone new. I don’t think this little fact about me is that relevant, in comparison to all the other things.
I never try to sell it, or convince anyone that eating vegetables is the best thing they could possibly do and “Here’s 1000 facts you should know about it”.
I continue to this because it’s important to me.

All that being said, I don’t have and I will never have a perfect vegetarian diet.
When I go in a vacation, I don’t mind eating meat once.
When I go to a party at work and there’s pizza with ham, I don’t mind eating a slice.
I don’t precisely count how many times I eat meat, but from my memory maybe it’s once every 3 months or so.
That would mean roughly 1 meal out of 3x3x30. I other words, I’m 99.6% vegetarian.

Personal

Links