Life without spaghetti?
My older brother and I were conceived, born, and raised vegetarians. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s that was considered strange and almost unheard of. Our parents often got harsh looks from people, as if being told, “Shame on you for ‘starving’ your kids and depriving them of meat!” Back then, people thought we were too skinny compared to the plump kids in hotdog commercials. As a child, I always thought, “If being overweight is considered healthy, then I must be very unhealthy — but how can I be when I feel so alive?” I couldn’t understand why people felt sorry for us. Not even once did my brother and I feel undernourished; in fact, among our peers, we were considered the fastest runners, we were very active and capable in school, and we hardly got sick. Moreover, my brother shot up to nearly six feet tall in high school.
During that time, it was tough being the only vegetarian kids in our circle. Imagine picking out each little piece of ground meat from the spaghetti during every kid’s birthday party. In grade school, the kids in my class loved to trade lunches. One classmate would trade his Spam with another kid’s chicken nuggets, and bright red hotdogs were traded with corned beef (which, as I recall, looked like it came straight from the can). No one wanted my baon of tinolang tofu, upo, and mustasa with chickpea miso — no matter how keen I was on insisting that it was my mother’s best home-cooked recipe and my absolute favorite. I also remember my classmates making fun of my “dirty rice with Caladryl” (that is, organic red mountain rice) and “dinosaur-booger-spaghetti” (now popularly known as pasta al pesto).
When I was in my early teens, I asked my parents why we had stuck with this kind of diet all these years. The only other reason I could think of, aside from it being animal-friendly (animals raised for food are bombarded with drugs and treated inhumanely in factory-farms and feedlots), was because it was healthier. But, I got much more of an answer from my parents, and it wasn’t just for personal health reasons. They handed me a ‘70s book called Diet for a Small Planet, and after browsing through it, I understood that vegetarianism is a choice one can make to help humanity, the Earth, and our planet’s future inhabitants. A friend once joked, “How on earth does avoiding meat help the planet? Isn’t it that in order to save nature and plant-life, we should instead eat a vegetarian?” At first, I also couldn’t see the connection. But then I realized how everything is linked — how a non-meat diet can play a big role in addressing global problems such as famine, scarcity of resources, wasteful and destructive consumption, and many ecological problems.
Natalie Portman and Jason Mraz join the long list of young vegans. It is said that a non-meat diet can help save the planet more than any other choice you can make. To give you one example, did you know that three days of a typical meat-eater’s diet requires as much water as one uses for showering all year? I, too, was shocked the first time I heard about this. According to John Robbins, author of The Food Revolution, “You’d save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you would by not showering for an entire year.” Moreover, about 650 gallons of water and 55 square feet of tropical rain forest may be torn down in order to raise cattle just so a single meat-eater can enjoy one juicy quarter-pound burger.
I’m happy that more and more of the world’s population are consciously switching to a non-meat diet. As for Filipinos, we are known to be big meat-eaters and it is understandable that the elimination of meat in our daily diets is not at all an easy thing to do. The switch need not be abrupt, and it doesn’t have to be absolute — even avoiding meat for just one day in a week will already be a sizeable contribution. Plus, there are so many restaurants now that offer yummy vegetable dishes on their menu, so it’s a lot easier to go non-meat now than it was during my childhood.
Give yourself time to think about it. And, once you’re ready, give it a go. Do it for yourself, do it for the animals, do it for the earth, do it for humanity’s wellbeing, for your children, and for your children’s children. Besides, apart from those unwanted pounds, there’s really nothing to lose, right? So, go!
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“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” Are you one, too? Let’s get in touch! Send e-mails to katrinaanntan@yahoo.com or visit http://www.katrinaanntan.ph.
