East Grove Blues

I generally will avoid eating meat and dairy. Though today I have eaten both.

When I first came to Japan I decided not to eat meat while I was home. I would eat it at restaurants and at school, but I would not buy any meat for my house. This lasted until spring when I started training hard for my race in the fall. It was then that I started eating both meat and dairy in fairly large amounts (to my own reckoning). This was fine while I was training, but it still didn’t sit well with me.

I like the taste of meat and dairy. In fact I love cheese, too much perhaps. What I don’t like is the way most animals are raised and how they are processed before they reach my stomach. I won’t go into the details of the food industry. There are enough sites on the internet that do that already. What I will say is that I detest it and they say the best way to vote is with your wallet.

In the Peace Corps I knew exactly how any meat product I ate was raised and I almost always knew who butchered it. I had no problems with eating meat like that, especially since I was lacking a source of protein in my diet, and my body was always pleased to have it.

Now is a different story. I have access to enough foods that have large sources of protein that meat is not really a necessity. So I have once again gone off of meat, and for the first time, dairy as well. For the most part I don’t miss them. In fact thinking about milk makes me gag at the moment. I am hungry a lot more and I have to plan my meals a lot better, but I don’t think that is a bad thing. Another bonus is that my food bills are much cheaper. Meat is expensive.

So how is it that I ate both today if in fact I eat mostly like a (dare I say it) Vegan. I won’t buy those products, but if they are given to me I have a hard time turning them down. Both were in my school lunch (beyond the normal milk carton) and if I didn’t want to stay hungry for the rest of the afternoon I had to eat it. I hate being hungry and I hate wasting food, so I ate what I could get. I had a stomach ache shortly there after and felt sluggish until I came home and ate something.

What will happen when I come home? If I know who is butchering the meat and how it was raised (or hunted) then I will most likely partake in said food. I will not buy anything unknown to me. Its just not worth it and I don’t want to support it. That being said I look forward to fresh caught fish and deer sausage, but I also look forward to green beans and fresh tomatoes straight out of the garden.