4 Week Vegetarian: A Memorandum
An reflection on the past, and a look into the future
When I started out as a vegetarian, I thought that I would never be able to last for four weeks — but I surprised myself. I ended up not eating meat for basically the whole time that I was vegetarian. I even tried tofu, and I loved it! I felt a lot healthier not eating meat, and I was able to try a bunch of new foods. However, as I mentioned before, I was only able to stay vegetarian for almost the whole time. The last four days were when I fell apart. This was due to the fact that I was in China, and almost all of the dishes that I ate there had some sort of meat in them. Nonetheless, I was still able to save a substantial amount of meat during the time that I was vegetarian.
For example, in the four week period that I was vegetarian, I was able to save approximately 12.25 pounds of meat in total. That’s a lot of meat, and it goes to show how much meat I had been eating prior to my project. Then, when I calculated how much meat I would have saved if I had continued to go vegetarian for the whole year, I discovered that I would have saved approximately 159.25 pounds. For the day to day log of my four weeks as a vegetarian, feel free to take a look at my Google sheet!
Some of my friends have asked me if I will continue to go vegetarian indefinitely, and in short — no. I will not continue to go vegetarian. Now before you say that I am an animal killer and that I am a disgrace to the vegetarian community, let me say this. While I may not continue to go vegetarian, I will cut back on how much meat I consume weekly. It’s just too hard to keep a no meat diet. Look at what happened in China. I went all out. I’m afraid that if I tell myself that I can’t eat meat, I’ll just want to eat it even more.
There is something else that I’ve started doing in order to partly make up for the fact that I am not going vegetarian anymore, which is that I have started taking colder showers. I was inspired by my friend Nick, who took cold showers for his DOT project.
All in all, I very much enjoyed my experience as a vegetarian and I learned a lot from it. It opened up my eyes to the problems that we are creating, and how we can solve them. I hope that as our world progresses, we as a human race can find a way to fight climate change together. As a famous man once said:
“You must be the change you want to see in the world.” — Mahatma Gandhi
All it takes is a simple change in diet, shorter showers, or even using a refillable water bottle. So tell me; what will YOU do? Will you sit back and watch our world slowly die? Or will YOU become the change that we want to see.
