Last week, for the first time in more than five years, I ordered chicken off of a restaurant menu.
I’ve been a vegetarian for half of a decade now, a decision I made during my senior year of high school while taking a class called “Protest Movements in American History.” In “Protest Movements,” we studied Carlo Petrini’s “Slow Food” movement, a 1980s campaign that focused on promoting alternatives to fast food and limiting overproduction, food waste and exploitative factory farming.
“If food was no longer obliged to make intercontinental journeys, but stayed part of a system in which it can be consumed over short distances, we would save a lot of energy and carbon dioxide emissions,” Petrini once wrote. “Just think of what we would save in ecological terms without long-distance transportation, refrigeration, and packaging — which ends up on the garbage dump anyway.”
Petrini is not a vegetarian, and Slow Food doesn’t advocate for the elimination of meat in human diets. Rather, the movement seeks to support local farmers and ranchers, making individual regions self-sufficient and ending the process of shipping food around the world.
But, as a 17-year-old moved by Petrini’s mission to reduce my carbon footprint and think more ethically about my consumption (while living in my parents’ house and on their grocery budget), I decided to stop eating meat.
I’ve loved being a vegetarian.
My best friend from college also didn’t eat meat, which often allowed us to act in tandem — I knew exactly how to order for her at a restaurant, and she, me. It was, among many other things, a shared interest and love between us, acted out through cooking and shopping and “I’ll go halfsies with you at dinner.”
I learned to love the ease of ordering at restaurants, where, more times than not, there were only one or two options for me on the menu. Psychologists have long observed that when faced with too many choices, human beings often become anxious and sometimes make no choice at all. The past five years have been a (sometimes frustrating, but) oftentimes pleasant journey into the land of no choices.
And, I’ve grown to love the wide array of dishes that vegetarian cooking has opened me up to.
But, for a few reasons, I’m beginning to reintegrate meat into my life. This weekend, that took the form of sun-dried tomato chicken pasta.
The change has made me sad in some ways.
I still believe deeply in Petrini’s mission, and I feel strongly about reducing my carbon footprint. I’m aware that my own culinary choices won’t make or break our warming planet, but vast bodies of literature show that even going meatless on occasion could help slow the effects of climate change. A recent study calculated that cutting out meat just one day per week can reduce a person’s carbon footprint from 2,000 kg of greenhouse gas emissions per year to 1,600 kg. Not bad, right?
I’ll miss the ease of not reading menus and the camaraderie of bumping into other people who don’t eat meat. I might even miss people giving me a hard time about vegetarianism, which happens quite often. I don’t think this change is forever, and it is certainly not an abandonment of Petrini’s movement, or of my desire to make choices for the betterment of the planet. But for now, my life is changing, and so is its accompanying menu.