Community Corner

A Vegetarian's Plight on Biggest Cookout Day of Year

There is not a day that passes that I don't have meat on my mind, but it's worse on Independence Day.

Like many holidays, Independence Day gives us time to discuss politics, catch up with cousins, make predictions about the looming football season and lay down a wager on whether Joey Chestnut or Takeru Kobayashi will shovel down the most hot dogs.

Independence Day parties are American by virtue of being on our nation’s birthday, yes, but the real tradition lies in what is on the backyard grill. The one rule seems to be: eat as much charred meat as you possibly can.

Give me liberty or give me death by cardiac arrest, if I so choose.

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But a subset of the population endures this glorious tradition with frustration. It's a group to which I belong—reformed meat lovers of America, it might be called; vegetarians who once enjoyed the fruits of the barbecue but who now abstain. I am one. I am a meat-loving vegetarian.

It takes a sort-of masochistic disposition to be a meat lover who, for a number of reasons, decides to abstain from consuming the cooked morsels of flesh that make one’s mouth water and heart flutter.

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The pressure to dive into a rack of ribs or a plate of bacon-wrapped scallops is exponentially greater on holidays like today, when so much time, effort and conversation revolves around food, especially meat.

But that’s what we signed up for when we first decided to go “veggie.”

We knew the temptation would be only a fork-length away at every family meal. We knew our Boca burgers and tofurkey wouldn't compare to the gastric experience known as steak.

What many of us did not knowingly take on, however, was the need to perpetually explain our lifestyle choice to endlessly inquisitive friends and family.

If I had known my diet would still be a major topic of conversation at the family dinner table five years into it, I honestly may have scrapped the whole thing before I started.

It is during this celebration of freedom that I have noticed how my people have shackled me: I am free to abstain from any food I wish, but I am not free from having to explain myself.

I have avoided lunches and dinners with new acquaintances for the sole purpose of eluding the question, “So, why don’t you eat meat?”

Imagine, if you are carnivorous, that you live in a society composed of 99 percent vegetarians, and every single day you have to defend your choice of eating cows, pigs and chickens.

It is not a task for the weak-hearted.

But I'm not defending my abstinence from meat in this column today. I am exercising my rights as an American to fill my plate with salad, pasta and bread. And, I will plead the fifth when one of my family members shines a spotlight on my meatless plate.

I will not put on trial those of you who never give a second thought to the moral implications of your hamburgers.

But remember this: Eating meat is just as much a lifestyle choice as not eating meat.

So on behalf of all my people, if you know a meat-loving vegetarian, please do not discuss his or her dietary choices while holding aloft a burger or dog on the Fourth of July. Believe me, he or she is probably suffering enough.


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