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hertinknessI just realized that the last six meals I ate were vegetarian. Two of them contained no animal products at all. I did not do this on purpose.
It started last night, when I was cooking some rice for stir fry and decided to try something different instead. I pulled a can of red beans off the shelf, and made some jerry-rigged red beans and rice. It filled me up for the evening, and I didn't really think about food until the next morning.
I rarely eat meat at breakfast, and when I do, it's usually in the context of eggs or a breakfast sandwich, so that wasn't a surprise. I had toaster waffles topped with the leftover syrup I smuggled out of The Cracker Barrel when The Dude Man came to visit for the weekend and we ate out. I also put some frozen blueberries on it, just for interest, and had a glass of milk.
Lunch was supposed to have meat- I was going to have a bowl of soup, but just when I was going to heat it up, my next-cube neighbor pokes her head over and asks if I wanted to go grab lunch. I realize that I'm not getting anywhere on my curve fitting, and that I wasn't really hungry for canned soup that will keep pretty much indefinitely anyway. We went to the pizza shop, and I ordered an Eggplant Parmesan sub sandwich that was the size and approximate weight of your average brick. I wasn't hungry again until just about a half hour ago, and even then I wanted to keep it light. Instead of cooking, I opened up a bag of salad, and set some aside for tomorrow.
And when I started sitting here and thinking about it, I realized that I had eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast and two slices of cheese pizza for lunch (I said vegetarian, not healthy), and had therefore not eaten meat since Tuesday, when I had chicken soup and a hard salami sandwich for dinner.
At least, I don't think this was intentional; I didn't wake up on Monday morning going, "Gee! I think I'll give up meat for a week!" and set out to do so (in which case I failed that one pretty miserably, because I had an ill-advised chicken sandwich for lunch on my way back from Baltimore that day). Maybe something in my body just decided that it didn't need meat for a while, and switched off the let's-go-grab-a-burger signal- I've been cooking with an iron skillet lately, and I hear that improves the iron content in your food, so maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe my subconscious realized that it wasn't that good for me or anyone else to keep eating meat at every meal after reading this article in the New York Times about meat consumption in the US. Maybe I was getting tired of hearing about how animal waste from Pennsylvania is fouling the Chesapeake Bay (and kindasorta looking forward to it maybe getting regulated, because, you know, work...). Maybe I just got put off by the description of factory farms, and especially the latest tidbit to come out about workers pouring water in cattle's noses so that they'd stand and walk into the slaughterhouse to avoid drowning- way to sell a downer cow! There's a reason why The Jungle caused such a stir, yanno! All I really know is that this week, I didn't feel any kind of craving for meat.
There isn't any kind of political point to this- I'm just writing about what my body is doing, and wondering why. I think I'll keep track of the days when I feel like I need to eat meat, and see if that correlates with stress or menstruation, turn it into an experiment. Whole new twist on the old food diary, huh?
I do have to wonder how long I can keep this up. Assuming I'm not snowed in tomorrow, it'll be another two meals before I decide if I want to eat meat- again, the breakfast thing, and it's Friday and we're ordering a veggie-lover's pizza (again, vegetarian doesn't always mean healthy). If I don't have fish for dinner on Friday, I'll have gone three days without meat, without really trying.
It started last night, when I was cooking some rice for stir fry and decided to try something different instead. I pulled a can of red beans off the shelf, and made some jerry-rigged red beans and rice. It filled me up for the evening, and I didn't really think about food until the next morning.
I rarely eat meat at breakfast, and when I do, it's usually in the context of eggs or a breakfast sandwich, so that wasn't a surprise. I had toaster waffles topped with the leftover syrup I smuggled out of The Cracker Barrel when The Dude Man came to visit for the weekend and we ate out. I also put some frozen blueberries on it, just for interest, and had a glass of milk.
Lunch was supposed to have meat- I was going to have a bowl of soup, but just when I was going to heat it up, my next-cube neighbor pokes her head over and asks if I wanted to go grab lunch. I realize that I'm not getting anywhere on my curve fitting, and that I wasn't really hungry for canned soup that will keep pretty much indefinitely anyway. We went to the pizza shop, and I ordered an Eggplant Parmesan sub sandwich that was the size and approximate weight of your average brick. I wasn't hungry again until just about a half hour ago, and even then I wanted to keep it light. Instead of cooking, I opened up a bag of salad, and set some aside for tomorrow.
And when I started sitting here and thinking about it, I realized that I had eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast and two slices of cheese pizza for lunch (I said vegetarian, not healthy), and had therefore not eaten meat since Tuesday, when I had chicken soup and a hard salami sandwich for dinner.
At least, I don't think this was intentional; I didn't wake up on Monday morning going, "Gee! I think I'll give up meat for a week!" and set out to do so (in which case I failed that one pretty miserably, because I had an ill-advised chicken sandwich for lunch on my way back from Baltimore that day). Maybe something in my body just decided that it didn't need meat for a while, and switched off the let's-go-grab-a-burger signal- I've been cooking with an iron skillet lately, and I hear that improves the iron content in your food, so maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe my subconscious realized that it wasn't that good for me or anyone else to keep eating meat at every meal after reading this article in the New York Times about meat consumption in the US. Maybe I was getting tired of hearing about how animal waste from Pennsylvania is fouling the Chesapeake Bay (and kindasorta looking forward to it maybe getting regulated, because, you know, work...). Maybe I just got put off by the description of factory farms, and especially the latest tidbit to come out about workers pouring water in cattle's noses so that they'd stand and walk into the slaughterhouse to avoid drowning- way to sell a downer cow! There's a reason why The Jungle caused such a stir, yanno! All I really know is that this week, I didn't feel any kind of craving for meat.
There isn't any kind of political point to this- I'm just writing about what my body is doing, and wondering why. I think I'll keep track of the days when I feel like I need to eat meat, and see if that correlates with stress or menstruation, turn it into an experiment. Whole new twist on the old food diary, huh?
I do have to wonder how long I can keep this up. Assuming I'm not snowed in tomorrow, it'll be another two meals before I decide if I want to eat meat- again, the breakfast thing, and it's Friday and we're ordering a veggie-lover's pizza (again, vegetarian doesn't always mean healthy). If I don't have fish for dinner on Friday, I'll have gone three days without meat, without really trying.
