Day 044 – The dilemma

Welcome to Day 44!

It was a beautiful Saturday.  The sky was blue with lovely puffy clouds which looked like some decent rain would join us some time over the weekend.

The day was uneventful, as we focussed on household chores and some grocery shopping.  Nothing too eventful.  The cast is still in place and the bone presumably doing whatever healing a bone has to do. 

Back in 1994 I started to become a vegetarian.  What I mean by started, is at the time I went to my first Vipassana meditation retreat in Medlow Bath, NSW, Australia. The beginner Vipassana course is a ten day silent retreat, meditating for 14 hours a day.   The 14 hours was broken up with breaks for: breakfast, lunch, fruit juice or soup masquerading as dinner, shower time, individual check-ins with teach and the evening discourse.  Days started at 4:30am and finished around 9:30pm.  

The monk that ran the course I attended was wonderful.   He was softly spoken, told cute stories about his early experiences into the world of meditation – which were oddly inspiring. Warmth, happiness and assurance emanated from his presence.   

During one of his stories from days one to three (the hard core meditation starts on day four), he responded to a question about whether being vegetarian was a mandatory requirement for life outside of the course.  His reply was surprising in that he mentioned that it was not.  Of course, he recommended that if you were able to live without harming a sentient being then you should do so.  If you weren’t sure, you should watch your actions and reactions to when you eat food provided by sentient beings and not.  Basically, listen to your body.  He mentioned that even the Dalai Lama had to occasionally eat meat for his health.

Following the retreat, I felt amazing!  Full of energy and so connected to everything.  Taking onboard the monk’s advice.  I decided to test my energy levels without meat.  I also decided to do it gradually.  First, I would stop eating red meat.  Both my parents came from landlocked countries where seafood was scarce which meant it didn’t become part of our family’s evening meal rotation and therefore easy to give up.  

After about six months of no red meat, my energy levels were still up.  So, it was time to give up chicken.  My last chicken meal was a KFC Zinger burger.  Years later I thought I really wanted to try one.  After all, I didn’t give up meat on a moral premise, it was a lifestyle choice.  I took one bite and realised that I didn’t enjoy the taste as much as I remembered.  From there, it was easy to not eat meat anymore.  

If my energy hadn’t dropped when I was playing squash three nights and going to the gym five mornings a week, over a period of six months, I was pretty confident that I could survive without meat.  However, vegan was a step too far for me.  The parameters were too confusing.  Ovo-lacto vegetarian was easier for me.  It was difficult enough to be a vegetarian in those days.  It meant that a lot of restaurants would serve up a token bowl of hokkien noodles with soy sauce and maybe a couple of florets of broccoli. 

For 25 years, I have been vegetarian, for the last five I’ve been weaning myself off milk.  Especially since vegan alternatives to cheese are becoming better, all the time. With my mother being Swiss, fondue and raclette are cultural foods not just something that happened in the 70s.  

Today when I went to the health food shop I went with the purpose of gaining something that would help support the healing process of my broken bone.  My thoughts were leaning toward something with calcium.  The shop assistant, who’s advice I have taken many times, recommended this product called Bone.  I wasn’t paying too much attention to what that actually meant because I take so for granted that the majority of stuff that the shop sells is plant-based that the thought of getting something called “Bone” didn’t hit my radar as not being plant-based.  

Before you go, “oh der!  What did you think you were getting?”.  I don’t know, is my answer.  However, you’re speaking to a person who about 18 years ago had to go find liver for my sick cat.  When I went to the supermarket I was stumped.  The whole meat section had become invisible to me, so much so that I didn’t know how to get to it, how it was sorted.  If it wasn’t with the cat food, it was “dead to me”, and that was 18 years ago!  The word “bone” no longer has the same meaning to me because I so rarely encounter the word, it’s become something in the abstract. 

When I got home, the abstract registered as I read that it was gelatin.  Gelatin is a weird thing in my diet.  Because I didn’t become vegetarian for moral reasons, it was more that I did not like the taste of meat.  At this point, I’ll mention the story my father liked to tell people when I said I was vegetarian and that was that at the age of seven he and my mother would have to fight me to get me to eat meat. 

Stuff like gelatin in foods, didn’t or doesn’t bother me.  I cannot change the fact that animals are going to be killed for food.  Grinding up the bone makes a more honourable use of the animal’s sacrifice than discarding it.   The changes I make are only those that affect me and hope that others will join me and do likewise.  Force, guilt trips, emotional blackmail do nothing for the moral cause.  

Being an example of physical and mental health as you age are better motivators.  It’s that whole lead by example thing.   It’s been my birthday wish to have my family eat vegetarian with me for my birthday for twenty years.  

By the way, my husband eats vegetarian dinners with me, cooking two meals each night isn’t practical.  He does however, have lunches to himself and the occasional breakfast with friends where they cook up meat products.       

Despite me not having an issue with gelatin in sweets such as, snakes, raspberries or hard jelly type sweets or candies.  I had an issue with this quite obvious flouting of my vegetarianism.  I felt like a hypocrite, when had I begun to take the moral stance on begin vegetarian?  Could it have been all the jibes that assumed that I was vegetarian because of that?  Had that pushed me unconsciously into that stance?  

Anyway, there was still the opportunity to take it back to the store unopened.  This is bigger than I thought, I’d been hoping for plant-based aid.  There is the situation where it came to me for a reason and got it all the way home before I realised.  Or is there?  There is so much of it too.  Do I take the advice from Laura Zerra in the TV reality series of, “Naked and Afraid”, and thank the animal/s for giving of their life so that I may further or improve mine?  Which I have already done.  Anyway, I’ll have to sleep on it.

Let’s see what the cards have to say.