From: mad4@ellis.uchicago.edu (Bill Maddex)
Newsgroups: rec.food.veg
Subject: Re: What made you become vegetarian?
Date: 27 Jan 93 00:25:53 GMT
Reply-To: mad4@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: Pranksters for Peace

This has been a neat thread, and before I start to babble I thought I'd chip
in a bit from one of my favorite cookbooks.  This is from the preface to
_The_Now_and_Zen_Epicure_, Nihsimoto, Miyoko, Summertown, TN, The Book 
Publishing Company, 1991:

	"My own interest [in food] began at the age of twelve when, for reasons
not fully understood even to myself, I becaume a vegetarian.  Our seventh grade
class had gone on a camping trip.  We had been divided into several food 
groups, in which we prepared our own meals.  I got stuck in the vegetarian
group with the teach and the only two vegetarians in the class.  I didn't know
how I would manage to get through those three days without the meat I loved and
thought necessary for stamina, but I kept thinking of it as an experiment and
challenge, and thus survived.  However, to my sruprise, I was unable to eat the
pork chops my mother placed in front of me for dinner when I returned home.  I
decided to give vegetarianism another week's try, again simply to see if I
could make it."

She goes on to talk about her parents' certainty that she'd die and all that
stuff most of us are familiar with so it doesn't need to be repeated.  Buy the
book, though.

When I was in second grade my mother came to pick me up at school one afternoon
and started talking to my teacher about an event we were going (unbeknownst to
me:-) to that evening.  It was some world hunger thing, and I overheard her
talking about the Diet for a Small Planet bit-15 pounds of soybeans -> 1 pound
of cow.  I, gifted child/obnoxious know it all that the public school system,
my Jewish mother and the Dairy Council had made me, (I know a life of crime
has led me to this sorry fate--I-I blame society.  Society made me what I am:-)
chirped in "you have to eat meat."  Well, that evening I got disabused of that
notion.  About a year later I first found out that one of my schoolmates was
a veg, and a while later I learned that several of my school and Hebrew school
teachers were vegs.  The stuff they ate had always seemed kinda weird to me
so it should've been obvious:-) :-) :-), but I was a gifted child after all.

I started thinking about not eating animals by the time I was about ten, but
I didn't really know what to do for like another three years, when we had just
moved to Takoma Pk. MD, where my dad was on sabatical doing research @the Lib
of Congress.  There, in the international capital of Seventh Day Adventists,
I found one of my best friends @school was a veg (well, actually he ate fish, 
but I was 13 and not totally clued into these things).  That did it.  One day
in October I came home and told my mother I wasn't eating meat anymore.  She
sort of said oh, having seen it coming at least a year before.  That 
Thanksgiving we went down to Orange, VA, to visit my dad's parents, who were
damn sure it was 'a phase,' or the rural Virginian equivalent.  (I sort of
wonder whether they think my dad was switched-he's been a Marxist, a union
member and still is a radical after thirty odd years)  It wasn't, obviously,
seeing as how that was more than twelve years ago now.

So why did I become a veg?  Like Miyoko, I don't really know--there wasn't any
single experience, though both various farm trips in school, the anatomy class
I took in seventh grade and the Diet for a Small Planet movie all had something
to do w/it, I think.

And that's the way it is,

I'm Billy Magic

Good evening.
Newsgroups: rec.food.veg