Oops! Forgot you were vegetarian!
Amnesia: my mortal enemy in my fight against meat
This has happened to all of us: we have gone into a room to do something and then forgot what we were going to do, or we had a question but didn’t get called on for a while and then forgot the question. Or maybe you just happened to go into a restaurant, start watching a March Madness Elite Eight game, and you ordered a burger even though you’re a vegetarian. You happily scarf it down and five minutes later you realize what you have just done — the crime you have committed. Just kidding. That hasn’t actually happened to me. The problem is, I actually did slip up the very first day of my attempt at becoming vegetarian by eating a pepperoni pizza slice while we were having pizza in class. I realized after a couple of bites, and I quickly put my pizza down and acted like it didn’t happen. By then, I had already eaten two pepperonis and it was too late to take it back. I had already decided that I would put the incident into my data table and this post but the the fact that a lot of people saw it erased any doubt I had about owning my mistake because they could tell our teacher that I had eaten the meat but not recorded it.
My parents do it too!
Maybe a week later, I was up in my room and my dad called me to dinner. I walked downstairs and I realized that he was cooking steak. I was quite confused, and asked him if the whole thing was just for him, as I was a vegetarian. He put on a kind of “oops” face as he thought about what he would do. Luckily, there were still some vegetarian sausages left from the day before (which I recommend, they are pretty good) and I was happy. It is very hard to be vegetarian, and I imagine it is even worse for a long time, because anytime you want a snack or a quick bite to eat, instead of getting a ham sandwich or something similar, you get something with more sugar, the processed kind. You might have the discipline to reach for a fruit instead, but I certainly don’t and many people become “horizontally taller” than they were before going vegetarian.
Animal agriculture and water: forever intertwined
On another note, there is a different problem with animal agriculture: water usage. All animals require water to live, as we humans do, but we use up so much water for other purposes. For example, all the grain that is being used to feed livestock is a very big factor, and all in all, one third of all daily water use is for animal agriculture. According to National Geographic, “While nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh…Even then, just 1 percent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields.” A one pound burger takes 660 gallons of water to make because of everything that the cow needs. If we keep using up this much water, even if most of the water gets reused somehow, we will eventually run out of water. Even if we don’t run out of it this year or in the next twenty years, at this rate it will happen. To anybody who is reading this, stop wasting all of this water and eat less meat!
