Meat Three Times a Week?: The Experiment

In college, it was the chicken nuggets. Now, we are not talking about good chicken nuggets. These were not homemade-from-golden-bird, chick-fil-a, or even McDonald's quality chicken nuggets. These were college cafeteria nuggets, grade E but edible meat, chicken lovingly referred to within our group as "sponge chicken." Yet this sad, spongy, piece of hyperprocessed meat leftovers was the thing that, over and over, kept me from my goal. That goal was to be a vegetarian.

Maybe the badness of the nuggets was the reason they were so appealing. If you're talking about a delicious, well-made chicken wrap on a spinach tortilla with dressing and fresh tomatoes, I mean, that makes you think about food. What could I do to capture all the fantastic qualities of this sandwich, but still skip the meat? Would a meat substitute work? What about a veggie patty? Felafel? Hummus? Or maybe it would be almost as good - just as good? - with no substitute at all. Just a few extra veggies and a good dose of dressing and maybe you've got the perfect wrap. Right?

Thinking about food is fun - and in fact, one of the most appealing parts of attempting vegetarianism for me is imagining new ways to cook foods both familiar and unfamiliar. How do you make a fritatta? What can I do with asparagus besides boil it? And how many of the million and one things you can do with a chickpea have I tried? But the point, my friends, of a chicken nugget is the EXACT OPPOSITE of this. A chicken nugget is not about thinking. It's about not thinking. It's about pulling up to a drive through window, taking the box of meat that the cashier gives you, and popping meat round after meat round into your drooling little mouth. Sounds gross, right? But oh no - it's so good.

Later in college, it was boil-in-a-bag chicken tikka marsala (I got that in England - you can't get the same thing in the states). Don't think, just boil - soooo good. (It really was.) Then after college, it was burger king at my work cafeteria; sure, you could get the veggie patty there, but it's so easy (and delicious) to just say, "Number one with cheese." In later life, it's been the ease of sticking something in the crockpot or oven or george forman grill - pot roast, chicken breasts, meaty steaks - they're all a lifesaver on a busy evening, and so effortlessly they transform from frozen blocks to delicious meals. You don't have to look up recipes or pick up produce - sometimes you don't even have to chop an onion. You just stick it in, pull it out, and it's done.

But the trouble is, once you start to think about your food, it's hard to stop again. This is what got me moving (slouching, crawwwwwling) toward vegetarianism in the first place - I was sitting, unsuspecting, in a science class one day and learned that our current system of meat production is environmentally unsustainable. Just like that - like it was nothing - I learned that our meaty way of life cannot be sustained. It fills the environment with methane; it destroys the value and the loveliness of our land; and, of course, it causes the lives of countless animals to be cruel, brutish, and short.

But it's not just that kind of thinking that keeps me trying to be a vegetarian. I also think about the great foods I never, ever would have discovered had I not been trying. I recently had a Hempnut burger at Jack of the Wood in Asheville. Would I have ever tried a food by this description were I not trying to be a vegetarian? Would anyone? I gotta say, I doubt it. But it was not only the best non-meat burger I've ever tasted, it was, for me on that day, better than a burger ever would have been. It was delicious. It was great. That's the kind of slightly scary discovery that can happen when you start to think about your food.

So, starting this week, I've set myself a goal of eating meat three times a week - the equivalent of one day of meat per week. Is this doable for me, the chicken nuggets queen? I'm not sure yet - but it's easier than going cold turkey. And I think if I can do it, and if everyone could someday do it, we might suddenly find that we've moved from a meat industry where sustainability is impossible and cruelty is a way of life, to one where sustainability and harmony are natural and cruelty unnecessary.

I'll keep the blog posted on my progress.