Our first grocery shop came to about $180, thats up by about $30 from our normal spend. Kind of a surprise since we expected going vegetarian to save us money.
The temptation to break has been minimal when we have been cooking for ourselves. The meals have been very tasty, and our energy levels have been as high as ever. We have noticed that we don't get that 'full' feeling that we normally get when eating a meal with meat, so regulating our meal sizes has been a bit of a challenge.
When we go out to eat, things have been more challenging.
The first time we went for a potluck dinner, someone had brought along some chicken nibbles that smelt absolutely DEVINE! So much so that I expressed how good they smelt before Melissa reminded me that it was chicken. I had completely forgotten about the diet before she did.
At the same dinner, I struggled to find tasty, nutritious options until someone suggested that I try the cream corn. It was great and I had a couple of servings before I spied a piece of ham stuck to my dipping bread.
You know, its strange rationalizing the feeling of guilt that comes over you when you have accidentally eaten meat only a couple of day after leaving a life long meat eating diet. A couple of days ago this would have just been lunch. And now today it is suddenly a super sized serving of guilt. Strange. Stange indeed.
Similarly outings to eat at malls, or anywhere else in public where meat is on offer has been a challenge. Why does meat have to smell so damn GOOD!
Our first meal was Salmon and vege's which we felt quite bad about since it was our first night striving to eat vegetarian and we had already added some kind of meat.
It did however bring up discussions about the ethics of mass produced salmon, and a little research showed up that indeed mass farming of Salmon does have detrimental environmental effects. So, in the interest of ethics, mass produced Salmon has also been black listed from our diet for now.
In fact, all week our thoughts and discussions have been pre occupied with the theme of ethical eating, and we have thought long and hard about issues that we really took very little notice of before. As such we are thinking seriously about also cutting down on our dairy intake, at least from mass farmed sources.
And then there comes the issue of where ones Vegetables are sources from. Since monoculture is also damaging to the environment, it would be better to source ones vegetables from sources that are not megalithic monoculture aswel.
This all becomes no small task to perform, but I think we are going to give it a try. As we ponder the question of what it takes to eat ethically and try to change our diet to suit, it becomes apparent that it is very hard to do so, and that society is not only heavily reliant on food sources that are in essence unethical, but also propagates this further due to the lack of availability of ethical food sources.
What started out as an innocent dabbling with vegetarianism is very quickly turning into a necessary complete changing of lifestyle. I am not going to make any promises here, but at first glance, this appears to be the path that we are on.
