I've been a vegetarian for nearly twenty years now. People often ask me why I became one and, depending on who I'm talking to, I usually mention these factors:
I'm an animal lover and it makes me too sad to eat them. I know this sounds kind of sappy. And I know about the food chain and cycles of nature, etc. But it still upsets me. It's like venison = Bambi I used to feel sorry for, and a little afraid of and grossed out by the lobsters that my Dad brought home live to boil. I still remember my cousin Larry sneaking up on me and thrusting a live lobster in my face when he and his family were visiting NY for my Bat Mitzvah (we may have been the first Jewish family in history to serve shellfish at a post-Bat Mitzvah celebration. But it was on the weekend following the ceremony, not the day itself.)
A vegetarian diet is better for your health. I know this isn't always true. A meatless diet consisting of potato chips and ice cream clearly wouldn't cut it. And there are, of course, non-vegetarians who are very healthy, eating lots of fish, etc. But all other things being equal, the person eating veggies and whole grains is going to be in better shape than the one living on steak and potatos.
The idea of what I'm eating grosses me out if I know it's a formerly living creature. My imagination is vivid this way. I've often told people that one of the early influences in moving me toward vegetarianism was my father's dinner plate. He used to have these slabs of blood-rare steak and I sat next to him at our family dinner table when I was growing up. Just looking at his meal pushed me toward the veggie lifestyle.
If I don't know what the food is, and so can't imagine the living creature it came from, I may like the taste. When I was little my Nana used to make chopped liver that I loved. But I was too young to know what it was. Now I can't bring myself to eat the stuff. Fortunately, in the U.S. anyway, there are variations on this theme, like veggie pates, that have a similar taste but aren't upsetting to eat.
Sometimes I'll eat fish if there aren't veggie options at a meal and I'm hungry. This isn't as hard for me mentally as the prospect of consuming mammals, I think because other mammals are more closely related to us humans in the families of the animal kingdom. But I don't want to see its eyes. I know I'm limiting my potential culinary adventures here in Korea by not trying new kinds of seafood, but I just can't help it; the thought of squid just turn me stomach.
Another thing that particularly upsets me are the awful conditions under which many animals are raised, both in the U.S. and here. I'm glad for the whole free range trend back home. It should be possible to participate in the food chain without torturing other living creatures.
My first week here I saw a website connected with the Korean SPCA. I showed pictures of live dogs being hang up by their necks at a market. This made me burst into tears. There's an ongoing debate here among some of the expats about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of judging our host country by Western customs, such as which animals to eat, and I understand the reasons not to try to impose our values. But my big problem with dogs being eaten here is about how they're treated when they're alive.
Thank God for rice and kinchi.
But, back to the dogs. What's hard for me to grasp about the persistence of the tradition of eating them is that now they're common household pets doted on by their owners, jut like in the States. And they're food. Probably not the same dogs (I don't think Fifi is put in soup). I understand how eating dogs here isn't really all that different from eating cows in the U.S., except that we don't have pet cows at home, and not just because of their size. And I understand that this used to be a poor country, not even very long ago, and if you're hungry and living in the countryside then of course dogs are part of your diet if you can get them. Cats too, I imagine.
It still horrifies me though. But I even feel sorry for the crabs you see in the aquariums in front of restaurants all over the place here.
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