Falling Off the Turnip Wagon
Mary was not the first vegetarian
I'd lived with but she was the most vocal about her dietary philosophies. I
listened to her talk about rainforest deprivation, the horrors of poultry processing
plants and veal fattening pens as I consumed the usual collegiate fare of Manwiches,
Oscar-Meyer wieners, Hamburger Helper and Chick-fil-A biscuits and I often felt
guilty about the apparent political incorrectness of my meat laden diet. That
is, until I returned home early one day to find a barbecue-sauce-covered Mary
sitting on the floor of her closet clutching a McRib sandwich. I 
would soon find out that Mary wasn't the only
veg-head to, shall we say, fall off the turnip wagon and what continues to intrigue
me is the way in which backsliding into meat consumption for a vegetarian has
been inducted into the great hall of Addiction & Recovery. "Hi, I'm Mary,
and I'm a meataholic. I've been clean for about two years but last night I hit
bottom and my roommate found me . . . "
I eat meat. All of the vegetarians, be the ovo-lacto, pescetarian, fruitarian, or herbivores, can now commence with the scorn, judgement, and belittling that seems to follow so closely on the heels of such a confession. I am aware that, as a vocal meat eater I am a minority here. In fact, according to a 1995 poll performed by the Vegetarian Resource Group, the largest nonprofit, U.S. educational vegetarian group, that was recently cited in USA Today, this area has, per capita, the highest rate of vegetarianism in the United States. This didn't surprise me, but learning that the Triangle also has one of the highest rates of fast food consumption in the country, coupled with the "falling off the wagon" stories I'd heard from many of my vegetarian friends, made something click.
Robert Campbell, a 30-year-old Carrboro
native was a vegetarian for almost six years before he reverted to his carnivorous
ways. "I started fantasizing about chicken, well, not just any chicken," he
said. "It had to be
Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I would drive by there and it was as if I could taste it. Then, after about
three weeks of this I succumbed. I went into this kind of trance and ended up
buying and eating an entire bucket of Original Recipe in my car, still sitting
in the KFC parking lot. It was a fix and I felt like shit, physically and emotionally
after it was over. It happens every once in a while but I feel like I have it
under control now," he said.
Talking to Mary, who is now 24 and has since moved to Portland, I was interested to hear her liken eating meat to substance abuse in much the same way Robert had. "It's like being an addict," she said. "When I have a craving, I wouldn't go buy meat, bring it home and cook it. I wouldn't want a bite of my friend's healthy broiled chicken dish. It's extreme," she said. "You know it's self-destructive, but you let go of that for a minute. You go to a fast food place where it's quick and ready so you can sneak it. It's like a fix. It's like being an ex-smoker and having a cigarette in a club as opposed to going out and buying a whole pack. When it's fast food, it's not a real meal so it doesn't count but there is an enormous amount of shame attached to eating meat once you've become a vegetarian."
It is that shame that most concerns me about all of this. I am fully aware of the animal rights, economic, health, and environmental philosophies that are usually cited as an answer to the question, "so why are you a vegetarian?" I am not writing to oppose those philosophies. I also understand that the addictive process will often venture into the realm of food, as one can see from the constant talk show parade of bulimic, anorexic, and overweight people that have fallen into the trap of believing that food, or the lack of it, can impart happiness in a person's life. What bothers me is that it seems that many vegetarians become or remain so not because of their conviction that it is immoral to kill animals or because they are concerned about the earth's finite resources and world food shortages, but because of externally-applied shame.
While authentic guilt is a valuable signal that we've violated our own, or a universal, moral code, shame is a manipulation tactic used to impose rules usually someone else's rules. I see people who have yet to develop their own sense of self succumbing to the overwhelming peer pressure of the pop-cult of vegetarianism rather than operating on any kind of complete understanding of or belief in the philosophies that healthy vegetarians embrace. It is no wonder that so many of them have stories of late night fast food binges that violate the tenets of vegetarianism.
Thomas Schurr, a 24-year-old film studies major, was a vegetarian for
two years and acknowledges the peer influence factor in his decision to cut
meat from his diet. "I was working at Noah's food co-op during my Freshman year
of college and it was my first exposure to natural foods and lifestyles where
diet and general health were important. There was definitely a peer element
to all of it. I had a lot of support for choosing that lifestyle and I gained
acceptance for the dietary decisions I made." When asked about the last time
he fell off the wagon, Thomas replies, "it was when I realized that there wasn't
a wagon. These choices are arbitrary. Healthy eating is important to me but
I realized that it is better for a sense of my own well being to move away from
externally applied restrictions and begin to listen to my body." In fact, it
wasn't until Thomas started eating meat again that the sociological impact of
eating beef hit him. "Even the concept of eating animals was something that
I wasn't truly sensitive to until I started eating meat again," he said during
our interview. 
A vegetarian who has fallen off the turnip wagon may have mild or severe attacks of shame and these occurrences seem to leave a person with a sense that he must apologize for his existence rather than apologizing for a mistake. Regardless of the endless debate over the morality of meat eating, if one understands and is content with a belief system, dietary choices, be they vegetarian or carnivorous, will become part of a holistic system of self-nourishment rather than part of the cycle of addiction and recovery.
Lisa C. Hyatt