Vegetarian

I subscribe to the Vegetarian Times magazine because I love to try new recipes with strange and exotic ways to cook veggies. I am not a huge fan of meat - except for bacon. I love bacon. I can do without almost every kind of meat.

One of the downsides of living in the Midwest is that, being a traditional agricultural society, we tend to boil or fry our veggies and slather them with butter and salt instead of getting creative with them. No wonder my husband wouldn't touch a veggie with a ten foot pole. There are a lot of veggies that I just recently learned to like because all of my life they were improperly prepared. Plus, I learned how to roast them - and that has changed everything. :)

Anyway, so I subscribe to the Vegetarian Times, which I appreciate for the recipes, but hate the politics.

So I'm going to cancel my subscription and start searching for recipes online again. I'm sorry about it, because I would really like this magazine if it wasn't so preachy!

Is there a single vegetarian community in the entire USA that ISN'T a holier-than-thou, liberal, tree-hugging, in-your-face, animals rights, environmental terrorist organization? Because I might have to start one pretty soon if there isn't. Where are the vegetarian communities for those who don't live in California and feel like the world is going to end if we don't stop eating meat? Are there any vegetarian communities that don't feel like they have to convert the entire country to their way of eating, which in itself is like a misguided form of religion?

Would you actually believe that there are people out there that would enjoy a vegetarian diet without shoving it down someone's throat and treating that poor carnivore like a convicted sex offender for enjoying his cheeseburger? The preachiness is what turns people away.

The issue of VT that I got this week had a former NBA player as a primary interview and he said "You can't be alive if you're eating something dead. You are what you eat after all."

FLAWED LOGIC.

Plants are LIFE. A carrot IS a living, growing, breathing, pro-creating thing. When you take them out of the dirt, and chop them up on your cutting board, you are killing something. So answer me this - just because it isn't staring at you with giant brown eyes like a cow, or bleeding all over the place, does that make it any less living?

Chew on that.

And since you're sitting there, thinking to yourself what a moron I am, there is a LOT of research to support a vegetarian diet, but there is a lot MORE research to support a well-balanced omnivorous diet. For every study out there that says we should eat a strictly vegetarian diet, there are approximately 5 completed studies that say we should be eating more vegetables and balancing our protein intake with carbohydrates and fiber.

So my vegetarian recipes and meal plans will be for people like me, who are simply looking to eat more veggies in new ways. I shall never hold any political ambitions, such useless endeavors anyway.

And I'm heading out to the market in about half an hour - we're going to have a vegetarian dinner tonight, because we ate McDonald's last night. Balance!