“oh no thanks, I’m a vegetarian…”
At the end March, we decided to go vegetarian. It’s something I’ve toyed with for a long time, and tried twice in the past, but never been able to stick to. Not because I miss meat though, more because I miss the no thinking involved with eating meat in your diet. I mean, it’s so much easier to eat meat. You just cook it and eat. But when you’re a vegetarian, you have to think about what meals you want, what’s in them, and how to keep up with your body’s need for iron and protein and things that you get in meat. That’s the first question people always ask me. “What about the GIRLS! They need so much iron at this age!” Well, yes. I know that. I’m a girl too you know, and I also need lots of iron. You’d be surprised at where you can find iron though, and to be perfectly honest, we’re eating SO well these days, that I am 98% positive that all of us are getting a lot more iron than we were beforehand.
So why go vegetarian? Well, there are lots of reasons, but the biggest reason is because animals are being farmed like produce, and not living, breathing, feeling creatures. We watched Food Inc, which is perhaps the most devastating documentary I’ve ever watched. It took us a month to get all the way through it, and the girls kept walking out. In the end, we stopped watching it and waited until they were in bed. It still took me a month to get up the courage to finish it. I’m very glad we did, and though I know it’s based around food in America, New Zealand really isn’t that different. We have the same ways of breeding and farming animals, and you never fully know exactly where anything you eat comes from, unless you grow it yourself. The more I talked about it, the more interested Siobhan became. Ollie and Aleeya were a little more whiny, both of them weren’t very pleased about no meat in their diets, and Ollie still buys ham and chicken for his sandwiches.
Anyway, it took us awhile to get rid of the meat in the freezer and to fully commit, and I have to admit that, I really don’t miss eating meat at all. We still drink milk and eat fish and shellfish and eggs (I only ever buy free range eggs, and yes I know some fish is also farmed and poorly, I try to make the right choices about what I’m buying), but we’ve cut out everything else. It takes a little more planning, but I’ve started to go through our cookbooks – Elsie bought me a subscription to a Healthy Foods magazine which I get once a month and there are some lovely vegetarian meals in there too, and I write on our whiteboard the meals I’m going to cook for the week, which means I don’t end up with a bunch of ingredients that I then have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing with. It’s been great. We’re eating such lovely meals now, and most of them are amazingly fast and straightforward.
Siobhan has really taken to it, she loves it and Aleeya has slowly come around too. I let her help me choose a meal and prepare it, and she’s starting to get into it too. We eat so many different things now, instead of just mince, and everyone is a lot happier. It took me about three weeks to get used to the change in diet, but now I feel great. My moods are a lot more stable, I’m losing a little weight, and all the awful digestion problems I’ve had for YEARS are going away. I feel great! It’s definitely been worth all the effort, it’s not much more expensive and best of all, we’re not giving money to the industry who thinks that keeping an animal in a stall all its life, unable to move or do anything, just so that we can eat their flesh, is an okay way to treat another living creature. I thought I’d miss chicken terribly, but I haven’t even really thought about it. And while I at first decided that on occassion we’d eat organic meat, I’ve decided against that.
I’ve never felt so relaxed and good, mentally and physcially, and I totally credit the fact that I’ve replaced meats with beans, peas, lentils and a larger variety of vegetables. Whoever says you need meat to get a balanced diet is wrong. Iron is found in a lot of different places and we’re getting loads more of it, as well as more fibre, rich proteins, omega oils and vitamins than we did before, and you can see the difference. I’m really thrilled, and I don’t plan to ever eat meat again, I really had no idea how it made me feel. I no longer feel heavy and bloated after I’ve eaten, I have a lot more energy (though at first I had much less) and my children are learning more about where their food comes from, how it’s produced, and how to make lots of new and extremely tasty meals. We’ve only had one that was a flop. Everything else we’ve tried the entire family has loved.
