The Meat Wagon

During most of my time practicing yoga I have eaten meat, all meat. The scope of my meat consumption was breathtaking: deer, elk, rabbit, shark, turtle, conch, and I don't even want to know what I was eating in China. I ate my fish raw and my beef rare. I look pride in ordering the lamb Vindaloo when going out to the Indian restaurant with the yoga studio. I looked around at my wispy, pasty dining companions and felt a smug glow of flesh consumption rise in my cheeks.

Then a funny thing started to happen, I started to lose my taste for meat. This process started with bacon, believe it or not. Finally I was down to salmon sushi by the end of 2005. So for New Years I took the leap and decided to go total veg. So far I have kept to the veg plan. I have only had one dream of eating meat, and it was barbecue.

This weekend I tried to throw myself off the meat wagon at Red lobster. I originally agreed to go to the Red Lobster thinking that they must offer something, anything, without some form of meat. Wrong. Then I thought, well, a shrimp is practically a bug. I would kill a bug, therefore I can eat a shrimp.

The scampi arrived. I was starving and it looked tasty. I put the shrimp in my mouth and chewed. Everything was fine at that point, seeing it on my plate, placing it in my mouth, chewing. No problem. Then I swallowed. A sickening feeling washed over me. I tried one more shrimp, the same.

Becoming a vegetarian was not a conscious moral choice. I don't think that's wrong for other people to eat meat; I believe that some people even need meat. All I know is when I try to swallow it I feel queasy. When I then go to practice yoga I feel heavy.