Why Vegetarian....

Has it seriously been 2 weeks since I last posted (almost 3)!? I will have to use another posting to update generally...I'm kinda on a rant right now!

I've been getting the "why are you a vegetarian" question a lot lately. Maybe it's that we have a new class of graduate students, who are getting to know me, who want to understand. One of them invited me over for dinner recently, and I accepted, and she made a great little vegetarian dish (what she called polenta pizzas, which consisted of sliced polenta from the role, with a little bit of spaghetti sauce and a little bit of cheese on top, baked for about 10 minutes at 400 degrees-they were delicious little bites!)---of course, she also made a meatier, hardier something-or-another for herself, so that was kinda weird for me. I mostly want for people to not go to super-huge efforts to make two separate meals when cooking for me, but she's also on a gluten free diet, so I get the feeling that she's used to it!

Anyways, when I get the question, I never quite know what to say. Of course, I want to say I do it because I want to be an ethical eater, because I care about animals and their lives, because I care about sustainable environments about eating local and fresh and the like.

But, mostly I don't eat meat because when I did eat it, I felt like poo!

Of course, I also carry these other reasons in my heart because my partner, my husband, my love is a vegan, and I want to respect him in our household and at our dinner table. Vegan, though, is a different story. I just don't know that I could do it. I suppose I have considered it, AND when he's cooking, I can definitely do it (minus the late night ice cream snack!). But, on my own, it's harder for me to do...

Interestingly enough, the Speaker's Forum topic this semester is "Do we eat ethically!?" And, I gotta say, I'm super excited about it! The Speaker's Forum is one of the events my department uses to invite students (undergraduates) to engage in civil discourse, by presenting a public speech to a broader audience. It's also a good way to recruit undergrads to our department, and with Illinois' budgetary crisis at the moment, our department (all departments) are interested in recruiting students to ensure we don't get cut too badly! I'm hoping that even I can learn a little something this year, given my already blooming interest in the topic!

This is what I'm thinking about this evening...though, admittedly, I should be reading The Macho Paradox by Jackson Katz for my "Gender and Communication" class.

Happy evening....