Hey guys, I'm Caroline! Just in case you have somehow landed here by accident and don't know who I am, let me introduce myself! I recently graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a double major in Biological Sciences and Psychology (and a minor in Chemistry, woo woo!), and am hanging out in my hometown of Pittsburgh for a couple months before starting the next adventure in my life as a medical student at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. That's all the serious stuff I would immediately respond with if asked to tell you about myself in an interview, and although those are accomplishments I am proud of, they def are not who I am! So, because I hope to be chronicling my new eating habits, adventures, and personal choices on a hopefully daily basis, let's get more intimate, eh? My name is Caroline, every morning I make coffee in my french press, I love pink, Elle Woods is my fictional hero, I like indie music, I am reading more than two books at any given time, I use too many exclamation points, I have a happiness journal, I'm learning how to whistle, I have a cactus and zen garden, I speak fluent french only when I am dreaming, (I use the oxford comma)...
... and I recently became a vegetarian! Well alright, maybe not a complete vegetarian, but the closest to it I have ever been. Now, if you know me, you are probably laughing, which is fine really because I laugh at myself quite often (unless you are Matt Baker, in which case you are probably pissed). For all who are not on the inside of this apparent joke, let me explain. I have always, and I mean ALWAYS, loved meat. Growing up, I used to go to the gym with my dad, work out, and come home and eat steak along side him (why I had a gym membership at the age of 8, I will never know). If I was on death row and got to plan my last meal (which is a serious concern of mine and something I will probably ask you within a week of hanging out, get ready new friends!), it would have always involved the summer meals with my father's steak eaten out on the back porch. This love created as a child had carried on throughout college, where I panicked when faced with the Tuesday decision of all-you-can-eat bacon and all-you-can-eat rib night (last time I chose the ribs, only because I cruised the bacon the week before). If anything, my craving for steak turned into one for daily bacon. I LOVE bacon (note: still present tense)! I don't think there is anything better than a BLT which I can eat daily for weeks on end, I baked bacon into cookies, I shamefully dipped bacon in peanut butter, I got giddy when a cute dude gave me chocolate covered bacon. Really, it is an intense love.
However, for the past couple months, things just felt a little off. I saw a couple documentaries, I really took time to taste my food, I started thinking about what I was putting into my body, and I started to pay attention to how my body felt afterwards. This led me to a few declarations that I would no longer eat red meat, based off the way my body felt after eating it and my belief that since pigs and cows had bigger brains than chicken and turkey, this was a good moral decision. This wasn't too life changing, since I somehow convinced myself that my favorite food, bacon, wasn't included in this exclusion.
But then something happened. I have had a lot of free time, some would argue too much, and have read tons of books. I have fallen in love with anything written by Jonathan Safer Foer, and compulsively requested a book of his, Eating Animals, out of the library without even thinking of the title. Ten pages in, I truly had a feeling that it would change my life. An entertaining book written by a best selling artist, the book is about Jonathan's quest for information regarding the meat industry so he could make informed decisions about what to feed his newborn son. I do not want to be one of those annoying, righteous vegetarians that preach their purpose to everyone in listening distance, but there was so much in the book that opened my eyes, enraged me, brought me to tears, disgusted me. Please, I am not forcing but asking you to read it. Based off the facts documented in his book and the recount of his experiences, I realized that he was talking about a subject that I was passionate about. Now, if there is one characteristic I cannot stand, it would be when someone is passionate about a cause, talks about it to no end, but doesn't do anything about it! It's incredibly frustrating! So I decided to make some changes for real this time.
The first change was signing up for a CSA, which apparently stands for Community Supported Agriculture (thanks, googs). I talked to this informative guy at a farming convention a couple months ago who originally sparked my interest, so enrolled in his program Clarion River Organics. More information on the CSA and this organization in my next post I promise! Now, that was the easy part. My other change has been the conscious elimination of any meat (cow, pig, chicken, turkey) from my diet. Now this is the part where people will understandably want to argue when I refer to myself as a vegetarian: I am not against eating meat and at this point, do not think I will eliminate it from my diet entirely. Instead what I am against is factory farming, which is the method through which Americans get 99% of their meat. The full out warfare that we have created against animals, the genetic modification that has resulted in animals that cannot either live to the age of reproduction or are not capable if that age is reached, the corporate influence of these factory farm empires, the ecological damage that results, the associated health risks, the treatment of animals in these facilities, now THAT is what I am against. If this is something you are interested in knowing more, or perhaps arguing against (please no), then let's talk! I'd love to! But like I said, I hate confrontational or highly opinionated people, so will leave that serious talk for another time.
So here is my game plan. I am going to seriously attempt to remove meat from my diet. I will hold exceptions for occasions where rejecting meat would be considered impossible, culturally insulting, or unrealistically rude. After a good talk with my older brother, I recognize that there are some nutrients in meat that us as humans need to consume, and since I am on a pretty rigorous workout routine, I know my body needs them. So, I have decided that I will only eat meat if it is from a local farm or if I know exactly where it is coming from. Yeah, this will be difficult and quite expensive, but the CSA I signed up with sells meat, some restaurants include on their menu where they obtain their meat, and it will be an excuse to eat high quality bacon some time in the future :) So yea, there it is. If you pass me during one of the rare occasions when I am cruising some animal, this will hopefully be one of the circumstances listed above. (If you see me in McDonald's on Forbes on a weekend night after 2 am, please gently remind me of these goals).
So there it is! The main reason for the creation of this blog. Over the next couple days, weeks, months I hope to share with you all my adventures in vegetarian land: the failures, the successes, the great finds, the disappointments, etc. etc. I hope to be able to show everyone that eliminating what we believe to be such a crucial element of our diet is possible, that you can afford decent produce on a college budget, that Pittsburgh (an infamous industrial city) has farmers markets and restaurants that focus on the local aspect of dining, that what you put into your body is important, and that you can have fun and laugh throughout it all!
If you have made it throughout those rambling paragraphs, I love you and thank you for reading. I promise future posts will e shorter with more pictures (another excuse to use my big camera), and more entertaining for us all! Let's begin this adventure together, shall we?
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