Still Not Good Enough?!

I am a vegetarian and have been so for quite some time now...relatively. However, I did not become a vegetarian for environmental reasons, instead it stemmed from health and spiritual (moral?) reasons. When I was seven years old I stopped eating red meat, much to my father's sadness. My father, while a corporate businessman during the week, is an amazing Italian chef on the weekends. Or at least he should have been. I digress; the point is that even though my father always cooked everything to perfection, leaving everyone's taste buds longing for more, I just could not digest meat properly. So instead of having a constant upset stomach and feeling lethargic, I just decided to never eat it again, and I haven't since. That was as far as I thought I would ever go, until two years later my parents, brother, and I took a month-long trip to a small town in India. It was a life-altering journey because it was the first, and only, time in my life when I experienced peace. The tiny town in the Punjab Valley, was isolated from all the mayhem of the cities and it was completely self-sustaining. The residents fed from their own farming, purified and recycled all of their own water, and lived on a lacto-vegetarian diet. There, the law of the land was serenity and harmony; to each other and to their surroundings. So much love and care went towards the land that they worked, they truly respected their environment because they knew that without it, they would not longer be around. It was unlike any other place I had ever been to, and as I grew up and moved from country to country, that place still remained in my mind as the best place on Earth. Whenever it seems like all hope is lost and this world is just too much, I just refer to that place as a beacon of light, because it proved to me that peace in this world is a possibility, we just have to make it a priority.

After we got back, I knew I eventually wanted to be a vegetarian, but it was a very slow yet steady transition. My mother has been a vegetarian for about thirty years, and while she never tried to force her vegetarianism on us, it definitely made an impact because I always knew that being a vegetarian wasn't this crazy-scary thing that was going to make me unhappy, pale, and sick. Instead, I always saw how much fun my dad was having when he would experiment in the kitchen and create some new dish for her...and how much fun my mom had eating it!

Little by little, as I believed more and more in karma (I know, I'm so weird), I would give up different animal products. One year it was ham, then it was turkey, later still eggs. Then when we moved back to Venezuela and I learned that the chicken was blasted with hormones, I thought it was a good time to give that up too. The hardest thing to give up was seafood...I LOVED seafood! In fact, I didn't think I was going to have the will-power to give up seafood until after college. Not to mention, I love eating out, and I know how unpleasant that can be for my mother, especially in Latin America where waiters look at you with an odd face and ask you if carrots and lettuce is okay. I'm not a rabbit! (okay I'm exxaggerating, people don't treat us THAT badly...anymore) But one day I just kind of didn't want to eat it anymore (again, weird).

It wasn't until college that the whole environmental factor kicked in to the equation. People would ask me if I was a vegetarian for environmental reasons and I would be puzzled. I never really heard of people being vegetarian solely for environmental reasons. So, I started reading about it and realized what an important issue it really was. I thought, cool! One more reason to be healthy!

But now in the readings I find out that that's not even good enough!! Nothing is really good enough for the environment unless you eat exclusively locally-grown foods. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for that, however like Serena mentioned, I don't always have the time to find a farmer's market. Thankfully many places like Whole Foods and Safeway are beginning to offer locally-grown goods, but now when I don't buy locally-grown goods, I feel uber guilty...sometimes I don't even enjoy my food (which to an Italian, is a sin!).

What I will say about my newly developed environmental food awareness is that I am more careful of where my food comes from and if it comes in too much packaging. Also, I am buying less cheese...and to anyone who knows me, that is saying A LOT!!! Cheese is the love of my life and by slightly considering going vegan just proves how much I love the environment. But haha that would probably mean that I would eat more soy products, and hence, do the same amount of damage, if not more! :(

I think that the food I eat that probably makes the most amount of damage to the environment is hummus! I buy a party-sized, plastic-packaged hummus container bi-weekly that is imported from Lebanon...talk about carbon footprint!