My Grandpa was a rancher, and a hunter. Mom, Eloise, always had access to fresh beef, from her sisters, and she went hunting for elk and moose every year. Our freezer brimmed with white packages that were labeled with things like “CHUCK,” “T” and “SIRLOIN.” After I left home, I was glad to not live exclusively off of steak anymore, and it was awhile before I craved one again.

In 1992, I heard an argument against beef raising, which cited methane gas produced by cows as a reason not to eat meat, and thought how absurd this was, considering how many bison roamed the ranges before the cows were there. The argument seemed ridiculous until I drove through Kansas a few years ago. I could smell silage and feedlots pungently for so many miles that I decided, within my heart, we eat too much meat. Since then, I’ve noticed that all the advertisements on “free TV” ether use sex or bacon to sell things, and in the case of Carl’s Jr., sex and bacon. We seem to live in a very meat and bacon-centric society.

Last summer, I had nothing to do, so I watched TED talks. Every twenty minute lecture was a new world. From ten-thousand mile migrations of dragonflies, to eating bugs, to the ocean floor, and heart disease, each lecture was a new world of ideas. Many of the ideas are very progressive, like foie gras made from "happy geese" that aren't force fed, and special liners for refrigerator crispers that preserve vegetables longer.

Al Gore’s movie about CO2 was referred to several times, so I watched it. It makes sense, but I had to know, how could they measure CO2 levels from 10,000 years ago? I asked my chemistry teacher, and she said that ice cores taken from the polar caps have layers for every season of snow, and the years can be counted like tree rings. The air within the bubbles trapped in the ice can be analyzed to see its chemical composition, and arctic mud layers can be analyzed in a similar way.

Then I took an ethics class in college. I learned about “speciesism” which is like racism, but against animals. I learned about a man named Emanuel Kant, who said something to the effect of . . . people are not a means to an end, but an end in and of themselves, and I feel like people are often used, like cogs in an economic machine that is eating up the world and souls and pooping money into rich men’s pockets, and waste into the ocean, and landfills, and third world countries. I feel sad about this, and when I think of the factories where animals are simply raw material, and to an extent, people are treated exactly the same way, maybe not for food, but for some other economic reason. There is nothing I can do to change the world, but I can be sad, and protest in my small way, against unjust prison sentences, mechanical mal-treatment of creatures, tortuously painful medical procedures, imbecilic educational structures, the stupid resistance to moving away from the use of fossil fuels and the inefficient “take-make-waste” industrial practices. . . until environmental damage affects the economy, nothing will change. Until billions of people get organized against “the one-percent,” systematic persecution will persist. There is nothing I can do about all this, so I eat my vegetables.

After learning so many things about nature, technology, ethics and health, I decided to quit eating beef, pork and chicken. I also quit eating eggs, just out of pity. I can’t give up dairy or fish, and I’m glad I don’t have to give up beer. I’m also glad I didn’t have much to do that summer, and no one to do it with, because the change in my diet made me fart a lot. Usually, I can eat all the vegetables and starches you give me, but if I don’t have meat, I don’t get full. The exception to this is that I can virtually live off of cottage cheese. My body is slowly changing, and I have at times gotten full, off of a large plate of steamed vegetables, it’s weird.

The changes in my diet have been met with some resistance. My brother cooked bacon every morning after I decided to become a pseudo-vegetarian. I couldn’t take it anymore, but I didn’t want him to know that he had won, so I went to a restaurant and ate bacon. It didn’t feel right. It was the most delicious bacon I had ever eaten, but I felt miserable eating it. I had been challenged not to eat pigs because of their intelligence. I have known some very sentient pigs.

My boyfriend freaked out about me being a vegetarian. I’m sure he wouldn’t have dated me if he had known. In his family the word vegetarian is always followed by the word “bitch” and I was subjected to a family gathering where the “vegetarian-bitch” was the topic of a long conversation, but they made it clear that they were talking about an ex-girlfriend of someone else. I enjoyed the salad bar at the pizza place where this gathering happened, but that’s about it. I broke up with him shortly after meeting his horrible meat-eating family.

Eating in restaurants became more difficult, forget McDonalds, except for fries. I order loaded baked potatoes, no bacon, and it comes with bacon every time. I eat the bacon without too much guilt then, because it seems wrong to ask an animal to give the ultimate sacrifice, then turn up my nose at it. A friend of mine ordered a large order of chicken, then changed her mind and was going to throw it away. I took it, but my body has changed so much that the meal turned into about five meals for me. I can’t eat as much meat as I used to, even if I wanted to.

I found that I like meatless Rueben sandwiches. The best one was from a bar that makes them with thousand island dressing, and substitutes tomato slices for the pastrami, or corned beef, or whatever meat.

I have had a lot of wonderful food experiences since I decided not to eat as much meat. I used to eat a hamburger and fries every day, which is pretty boring. Now I snack more. I nibble on crackers and hummus. I eat more pizzas, because it’s easy to get a delicious meatless pizza. Soups are great. Mexican food lends itself to meatless well, beans are very substantial when I get supper hungry.

A few years ago, I went into a New Seasons, Whole Food, or a Trader Joes, and felt lost. Now I revel in all the different types of crackers, and I discovered that I really love coconut water. After changing how I eat, I found all kinds of new things to try. It has been an adventure of new tastes and foods. Discount Grocery is a wonderful place to shop for inexpensive vegetarian food. My brother fussed at me saying that I must be rich to eat a vegetarian diet. With an unlimited budget, I spend about $25 a week for food, but I can comfortably live off of less.

When I first made the change I only ate fish occasionally, as a treat. A while ago I went deep sea fishing and caught two large Coho salmon, and so I’ve been eating more fish lately. I’ve never really eaten fish. Experimenting with new ways of cooking it has been fun. Last time I doused it with lots of tobacco and salt and baked it until it dried out a bit. It was a bit over salted, but still yummy. The puppy, Scooby, has begun to expect the skin and he yowls the whole time I eat my fish.

I’ve discovered that tofu, cooked in my brother’s left bacon grease, with veggies is lovely, and a purist would shoot me for desecrating holy tofu like that, but that’s what tofu it for, to suck up meat juice and make vegetable taste like meat without having much meat in it, so pah and bah, and humph to purists.

My favorite new restaurant, probably won’t be in business very long, because they don’t put much meat into their dishes. It’s an Asian restaurant of some sort, with lovely curry and pho, and “drunkard’s noodles” and glass noodles, and Japanese beer. Almost everything on the menu can have meat exchanged for tofu. I love it, because I can guiltlessly eat it all, so don't you dare put a guilt trip on me for consuming meat broth, just don't do it.

The change in my diet has given me an aggressive hunger for vegetables. I begged a friend to let me grow a garden this year. It was important to me to have peas, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers. One of my favorite treats is snap peas dipped into spinach dip. I feel a bit guilty about eating this in the winter time, because it throws the economy of starving southern hemisphere countries out of whack and makes food too expensive for people in these vague starving places, so my friend who lets me garden says. It’s impossible not to do damage, but I’m sad about it, and the change is my way of showing remorse for driving a gas-guzzler, and breathing, and that time I dropped batteries in the trash (I always do that).

My friend who lets me garden at her house, I live on a houseboat, has laying hens, sheep, and pigs. I really enjoy getting eggs from her. I’ve started getting spring water from there too, yummy stuff. I know the names of her chickens, Patricia, Strawberry, and Rocko-Rooster, only Rocko is dead, the neighbor murdered him early one morning. Sometimes she cooks me up some pork, and I can’t resist. The meat tastes right. That was one of the things that caused me to change, the meat here, near Portland, doesn’t taste right to me. It has an aluminum flavor. It has a slimy, tender quality that is gross. The meat in the stores in Texas tasted like the meat I was raised with in Montana, but Oregon meat is simply disgusting. All labels such as “grade A” and “sirloin” aside, I can’t choke down most of the crap they sell as meat, here. No amount of salt and spice covers that fatty, greasy, not-right taste. People here are big on “aging” their meat. This aging is simply hanging the meat until it’s sort of rotten. This is medieval, and it produces gross tasting meat, no wonder I had to become a vegetarian-ish person. I think my vegetarian thing might be kind of selfish, rather than self-righteous, I just don’t like the meat here, but I do sincerely feel bad for industrial laying hens, that part was sincere.