On Vegetarianism

For a long time, ever since I actively made the decision, I have no eaten meat. To me, eating meat comes rather unnatural and I have never really enjoyed eating it, except for the less distinguished tastes of meat varieties that exist like plain sausages and minced meat. The older I got the less and less I liked meat until, after spending two weeks in India without eating any meat, I couldn't bare the taste of minced meat anymore, worse, it almost made me throw up. My body was having a hard time processing the fat meat I was trying to stuff down my throat. After that I never ate meat again, except for  the time that my brother semi-accidental fed me leftovers that contained bits of chicken, I felt repulsive.

These days, after being a vegetarian for almost seven years now, I carefully watch what I eat. It just seems to get harder by the day, there is so much to think about when trying to eat as responsible as possible. There are so many types of ingredients, brands that are not environment friendly, animal friendly or have unnecessary meat in it. For example, at times I want to replace milk so I don't have to worry about how the cows have been treated, but then I realised that soya and rice is damaging the environment and the ground used for it even more. The lasagna verdi (vegetable lasagna) I can buy at the supermarket has meat in it, I wonder why. It is supposed to be vegetables only, why does it need meat? Probably because it is a cheap way to add flavour to the tomato sauce. Everything seems to have added pork meat, it drives me nuts to read what's in some of the foods and realising I can't eat it because a moron has decided it needed pork meat, even though it is like 1%, it is ridiculous. Almost all candy has gelatine it in, not that I eat much candy, but it just makes me mad that factories pick the easy way out, the cheapest way, to produce their products by using the cheapest ingredients or way to produce things. It is so easy to replace gelatine, but it costs a little more, but they don't want that, they want cheap.

Things that I can eat has almost come down to solely vegetables and pasta. All other things are either made in a way that in contains traces of meat, has gelatine in it, damages the environment or is owned by a large company that tests on animals for other purposes. I do realise that I am really close to being vegan, but unconsciously I start to realise and hate the way I eat and the way food is produced is this modern world. There is a long list of things that I like to avoid or don't eat at all, also there are things I wish I wouldn't eat but in my position, as in a member of a family, I cannot ask my mother to cook a whole different meal solely for me. I think I will just give you a list of things I don't eat and rest of it with comment to why.

1. Meat, fish, seafruits and crustaceans, in other words I don't eat any kind of animal.
   I simply don't believe in the killing of animals, it is unnecessary, as we have enough vegetables to keep ourselves healthy. If you have a balanced diet you won't need to eat any meat and so far I have never had any problems.
   
2. Milk and eggs.
   I try avoid these because I wouldn't like it either when I give birth to a calf, have it taken away from me so that other can use my milk. It is not that the cows part of their milk to use, no, they have to produce so much milk that by the time to have to get milked their udders hurt when they have to wait too long. Nor would I like to poop out eggs of my vagina because others like to eat them. You will also never be certain where you eggs come from because apparently they like to mess around with the labels and when they say they are free-range you have to chance to eat battery eggs because they happen to have used the wrong boxes.
   
3. Gelatine
   When I think of not eating animals, I don't want parts of animals either that come from the fact that the animals needed to be slaughtered to end up on your plate. In fact, I want to stay as far away of the animal slaughtering as much as possible. Every time I hear about a cow trying to escape for the slaughter I know the poor animal had all the right to do so, those bloody people just don't see that even for a cow it is normal to be scared to death because they know they will be slaughtered.
   
4. Certain companies.
   You know companies that buy up smaller ones, test on animals because testing for certain ingredients on animals is not prohibited. I rather buy from a small company that is animal and human friendly. Unfortunately that group of companies get smaller by the day because those big ass companies have the power and the money. Why the hell would a company like Mars, Incorporated test pet food on animals?? What else but meat is in that food? I don't want to give a company like that my money, not even for a bar of snickers, that they of course own, that and they use whey in their products which comes from a calf's stomach lining, nice.

Of course there is lots of hypocrisy in here.  Not for all the money in the world will I be able to stop eating cheese. But I guess that cheese is the only product that keeps me away from being vegan. There is no way in the world that a vegan cheese will taste as good as real mozzarella or brie or Goudse (Gouda Cheese for you Americans and Brits). Oh and to smash in the dreams of any of you thinking that being vegetarian will make you lose weight, it doesn't. Cheese is the worst enemy of your weight. Cheese is probably the only thing why I keep adding on weight, it is my bible, if you would eat the bible that is. I vow by cheese. As my friend Mark once said: "If you'd be more obsessed with cheese it would be a fetish".