Eat Me.

For some, coming out as a vegetarian to one's family is a cataclysmic rift on par with admitting homosexuality, or affiliation with fringe groups like cults, Catholicism, or a local militia. I became a vegetarian mostly to lose weight, and to gain a measure of control over a life that had become more of a white knuckle affair than a gentle coast. My parents were very accommodating, cooking through squinted eyes various tofu products, and substituting pasta for traditional holiday meals.

I guess I got lucky to have on my side such gastronomically progressive parents, since, for my girlfriend, the opposite is true. It's entirely different when your biological superiors owned a steak-house for numerous decades, and brought home the bacon by, well, bringing home the bacon. Still, it's very personal for her, as she's seen the devastation wrought on her loved ones from years of high protein diets; obesity, high blood pressure, decreased mobility and overall quality of life. Between Sara and her extended family, dietary choices have become a key contention, points of endless persuasion and painstaking inculcation.

I don't think of food that way. For me, it's a quick bite of something ostensibly nourishing along my way. My sister and I grew up with stable meals, with fruit and vegetable, but nothing was verboten, and we never developed unhealthy habits from their reasonable approach to food. This isn't to say we never gorged on candies and confections; our cereal drawer had more cartoon characters than a Hanna Barbara retrospective, and more than a few mornings began with a cold Coke on the way to wherever. When we were full, however, we stopped eating.

For my resent visit, Sara insisted on making a pasta and vegetable dish, with a lightly buttered garlic bread, which drew rave reviews from everybody involved. Her uncle even remarked that he felt sated, without the heaviness of having eaten meat. It was undeniably delicious, and raised a brief conversation about vegetarianism and its benefits. And that's the point: Habits die hard, the good and bad, and relationships with food are too complex to deconstruct, especially ones that are tied to commerce and financial sustainability. Throughout the dinner, I found myself empathizing with both sides. By itself, meat isn't the enemy, just as drugs, cars, government, fashion, or any other human social construct is benign until projections are made, personalizing and contorting them to suit individual tastes and idealism. In the wrong hands, a pencil becomes a deadly weapon.

Her vegetarianism is much more central to her identity than mine ever was, even when I derived satisfaction from the recognition of others, I soon grew weary of explaining the foundation of my lifestyle choice, preferring now to simply say: it's for health reasons. For Sara, it's about more than that; it's about animal rights, environmental factors, and the personal reflections on bearing horrible witness to the very people who brought her into the world committing slow, insufferable suicide with the same products designed to support and prolong life.

I'm a vegetarian now because it's become habitual, like doing my laundry on Sunday nights, and driving a certain route to work. I don't think about it with any more cognizant recognition than getting a glass of water when I'm thirsty. People need causes, the impetus behind meaningful social change, weather it be civil rights, gay rights, environmentalism, or their own, idiosyncratic slant on how the world could be improved one petition at a time. Diet isn't a cause for me, the way it is for Sara, because it lacks the personal basis to give it any outward directive. I don't care if anybody knows I don't eat animals, because it's inexorably woven into my being, and is therefore incontrovertible.

If proof be needed of society's dietary duality, read the Time Magazine cover story from a few weeks ago, that discusses the economic disparity between food selection, and therefore health; how Sara and I can walk to the co-op and buy organically grown grub, whereas her comparatively isolated family members are resigned to the singularity of the local supermarket. This in no way should disabuse personal responsibility, for every grocery worth its sodium chloride carries apples, lettuce, and even the lighting rod of corporate bloat, Walmart, carries organics in greater supply, not from some spontaneous outpouring of civic responsibility, but because there's increasing consumer demand for healthier fare.

It comes down to willpower, which has to change internally, and in many cases slowly. Too much extrinsic badgering has the unintentional effect of becoming preachy, and of demotivating those that need the greatest dietary reconsideration. Hectoring turns curiosity into resentment, and further divides families, classes, and entire nations over right and wrong. Americans are a country of over-thinkers, who've managed to infect everything from sex, to employment, to food, with a twitchy paranoia. Again, I'm glad to not have to fight with food, and feel with significant sadness for those for whom it has become spoonfuls of life and death.