Meat is murder (hey its a Smith's song)

My son proudly announced that he is a vegetarian today. We were in our local answer to whole foods, pomegranate market, and he made the declaration to the world.

I had to smile, and breathe a sigh of relief.

For years he's been doing food therapy to "encourage" him to eat meat, as well as some other foods. Success has been fair to middling on the other foods-and a catastrophic failure with the meat. His birth parents were vegan, and while you can raise extremely healthy vegan kids, you really have to put a lot of thought into it. They didn't, and he was underweight & was nutritionally deficient.

It's a matter of.finding other protein sources or combining foods to make a whole protein. It's actually rather easy to be vegan now, as compared to when I first went veg 20+ years ago. There are all sorts of frozen dinners, and commercially available products, which makes it easy.

Heck they even have vegan bacon.

We, even as a joke, bought the biggest carnivore I know-the Big Man-vegan bologna. He dutifully ate it but I don't think he liked it.

He will never be persuaded to lead a meat free life.

When I first went veg, I was in college and I didn't really know what I was doing. I didnt know about combining foods or complex proteins. I thought cheese pizza & French fries counted for healthy choices.

In addition to growing up, I've learned a lot about being vegetarian. One is how to answer people's prying questions.

No, those are not leather shoes. No its not a leather purse. Yes I only use products that were never tested on animals. Yes I recycle. Yes I support cleaning up the environment and sustainable farming/fishing/etc. Sure I'm kind of a hippie, but a post punk one.

I'm not crazy about all of this. I prefer natural cleaning products because it reduces chemicals in the home-including our pets & our kiddo. I try to limit ingredients I can't pronounce because who knows what kind of damage it does to us. I prefer to eat stuff that I can recognize. I dont want my son to have to consume pesticide residue if I can help it.

But overall, I'm just a mom who wants what's best for her kiddo.