Why I Am A Vegetarian.
Sunday, April 24th, 20052006+10+20
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Note: If you like my Friendster blog, check out my other blogs on Google Blogger: My All-Purpose Blog, My Tech Blog, My 100 Goals , Esperanto Blog ). 
–Shurik
PS Oh, and yeah, I’m still vegetarian, for 3 to 4 years now. Although I do occasionally eat eggs, caviar, and try fish oil once in a while. Also, I’m into the whole grass juicing concept. I’ll have to post a blog about that sometime (since I do have a book on it now, thanks to Wheatgrasskits.com
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Shurik’s blog: The 24th of April, 2005
Preface: This blog will first give you some background of where I come from (I wasn’t a vegetarian my whole life) and why my current lifestyle with respect to food is what it is today.
(May 27, 2006 Also, check out www.fruitarian.com Very interesting and informative and useful, if not a tad bit fanatica.!)
Something I want to add before delving into the details, is eat and drink whatever you want! I’d rather see you munch on a hot dog and wash it down with a diet coke than watch you as your stomach starts to eat itself because you’re starving from lack of food. Having said that, those of you lucky enough to be born (or immigrate) into a non-third-world country, especially Americans, let’s recognize that we live in the land of the plenty, and that when it comes to food, we’re blessed with the choice of what to put into our mouth.
The Entry:
Imagine Communist Russia circa 1984. Picture poverty, food rations, rampant alcoholism, dilapidated apartment buildings made of brick, outdated fashions that are are reminiscent of the American 60s or 70s. I was born in the city of Tomsk, Siberia, Russia, to a hard-working mathematician-turned-programmer father, and a mother who had a master’s in Chemistry (which, curiously, is said to be the equivalent of a PhD in America) but at that time worked part-time hours as a librarian. Our family lived in a two-room apartment (originally, we had all managed to lived in a meager one-room apartment) in an age-worn red-orange brick apartment building consisting of three floors. We lived on the second floor. When I use the word "apartment" I don’t mean one with the amenities of a bathroom or stove or toilet or faucet. I mean a room. Meaning, the facilities were public: the kitchen, the bathroom, the "shower" (our floor just had a bathtub and a hose that plugged into a bathtub’s faucet to be used as a makeshift shower head), the toilet.
Now that you have a sense of what I witnessed in my childhood, it’s no surprise I wasn’t a vegetarian all my life. As a kid, I used to love eating meat dishes, which is good, because the traditional Russian diet, besides stewed cabbage and a host of salads, has many meat dishes. E.g., the red-colored beat-juice-saturated soup "borsh" is usually made with meat (probably beef); the potato salad "Zimnij Salat" (literally translated, "Winter Salad") is usually garnished with bits of meat; the ravioli-or-dumpling-like "peljmenji" (mass noun having no singular variant) and the supersized version of pel’men’i called "manty" (plural of "mant"). And of course everyone in America has heard of "piroshki" (plural of "pirozhok"), which is fried dough that is filled with things like cabbage, meat, eggs, or maybe even something sweet. And one can’t forget the equivalent of a "meat patty" (the kind one places between hamburger buns), which the Russians call "kotlety" (plural of "kotleta"), and just eaten as-is, or with say a side of mashed potato, without the addition of buns. Then there’s "sasiski" (plural of "sasiska") which is just the weaner; again, it’s the cylindrical six-inch hot-dog, minus the bun, eaten by itself or with say some potatoes.
Being blessed with a mother who is a wonderful and creative cook, I got to experience many traditional Russian foods. Being blessed with a father who at one point was a strict vegetarian, I was introduced early on in my life to vegetables: cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions. One of my warmest memories of Russia is coming home from school and eating: either by preparing food for myself (a big salad, if we had the veggies available; or ) or by dipping into a dish my mom had prepared in the community kitchen on our floor, brought it to our apartment, and wrapped it in a blanket so it would stay warm.
When my family came to America (around the time of the Russian Perestroyka under Gorbachev), we were so fruit-starved that we devoured a giant fruit basket that awaited us at our sponsor’s home without difficulty, in what has to be record time. The next day, and the next day and so on, we filled our bellies with fruit at our host’s expense (to be paid with due time). This voracious appetite for fruit may be due to the scarcity of fruit in pre-Perestroyka Russia…just about tiny, sometimes rotting apples is what we had. At our sponsor’s apartment during our first few days in America, I remember that every day I would eat about a half dozen bananas…I suppose I was potassium-deprived. My mom said that one night I got up and walked over to the kitchen, peeled and ate a banana, and went back to bed. I must’ve been sleepwalking because I didn’t remember the episode in the morning (was there a peel left over as proof of the fact?).
Now to the meat of this blog entry, the part where I explain how I became a vegetarian. The impetus to be a vegetarian (besides my dad’s real-life example when I was a kid and he was in the stage of his life where he practiced vegetarianism) was a yoga book, published in Great Britain in 1980, that did a beautiful job in not only illustrating the various yoga postures (The Crow, The Cobra, The Splits, The Wheel, The Plow, The Headstand, The Handstand, and a multitude of others), but also featured an enlightening section on clean eating habits, as well as on spirituality and mediation (breathing techniques, candle-gazing exercises, written and oral mantras). This book is yet another blessing in my life, because, having been a vegetarian for about 3 years now, I can see why some people give up on the whole concept, and go back to their former lifestyle. I will detail my personal eating habits in another blog which I’ll title: Tips For Vegetarians.
Having woken up one morning with a need for spiritual nourishment, I dusted off the book and flipped through the pages. Coming upon the vegetarian section, it occurred to me that I should try the vegetarian lifestyle, to see if it suits me. How healthy I felt just from this decision! Later, obviously, it dawned on me that turning vegetarian isn’t necessarily going to make you healthier than you already are, that vegetarianism is just one means for the end goal of a clean, spritually-fulfilling life.
So what are the reasons to turn vegetarian? If you can’t think of any, I’ll help you by listing all the reasons I know for cutting out meat from your life for good: 1) Meat is toxic. Any meat raised on a meat farm (chickens, turkeys, cows, pigs) is injected with at least two substances: hormones and antibiotics. Hormones are for speedy growth. Antibiotics are to fight off the diseases (that otherwise would run rampant given the conditions of meat farms–what conditions you may ask? For example, chickens are cooped up with no room for movement, smeared with each other’s feces–is being smeared with feces conducive to a healthy, delicious body?). Furthermore, even if meat were hormone- and antibiotic-free, some claim that the nature of meat–afterall, meat is flesh, composed of cells that are different in structure, nature, and function than the cells of plants, nuts, and other non-meat living entities. Oh, and have you heard that pregnant women aren’t supposed to have any (or very little) tuna because of tuna’s high-mercury content? You may not be pregnant, you may not even be a woman, but would you want to pump yourself up with mercury? (Of course, the same thing can be said about almost any food with a question like, Would you want to pump yourself up with lead [mushrooms, I hear, are excellent absorbers of lead]? or Would you want to pump yourself up with pesticides like methyl bromide (strawberries are said to have the highest concentration of methyl bromide)? My response to these counter-questions is two-fold: First, read my blog titled "Why I Buy Organic Products"; Second, choose your poisons–afterall, it’s your body and your money. 2) Meat is hard to digest. From personal experience, meat takes a longer time to digest than lighter foods like fruits, veggies, or whole-grain cereals. Apparently, there was once a medieval method of torture that involved feeding the prisoner meat for a period of time (30 days should suffice), until the subject’s body gave up and departed. To continue with this train of thought, people aren’t vultures or hyenas or wolves or lions or snakes, whose teeth and/or digestive processes are designed for uncooked meat. We must cook our meat, right? This of course naturally leads to the observation that we can’t eat raw oats like horses can, that we prefer to make oatmeal, so why aren’t we "meant" to cook our meat and it it. Nonetheless, the examples demonstrate that humans aren’t nearly as good at digesting meat as some creatures. Make what you will of my claim that meat is not easily digested and can (and oftentimes does) lead to constipation and hernias. 3) Meat is not requisite. Some people I talk to are convinced that only meat has some essential amino acids that no other non-meat foods contain. I am not a chemist or a nutritionalist, but I do know that flax seed and its derivatives (flax seed oil, ground flax seed) contain various amino acids. Additionally, nuts such as almonds and walnuts contain certain amino acids that are useful to a vegetarian striving to maintain a balanced diet. Some people think they won’t get enough protein in their diet if they don’t eat meat. It’s true, some types of meat have a lot of protein (fish, for example). On the other hand, many types of meat, unless they are "lean", contain a lot of saturated fat, a known "bad" fat (whereas vegetarian sources of fats such as flax seed, nuts, avocadoes, and so on, contain relatively little saturated fat, and NO cholesterol at all–only animal products or animal-derived products may contain cholesterol). Many vegetarian products are rich in protein: cottage cheese, beans, milk, cheese, yogurt, nuts, seeds, oatmeal (and other whole grains). Taken together, one can get plenty of protein from vegetarian sources. More importantly than how much protein you take in, is to combine certain types of foods to make a "complete protein" or "complex carbohydrate": Mix carbs (brown rice, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, whole-wheat pasta, barley, quinoa, etc) with protein (beans, milk, cheese, yogurt, tofu, soymilk and so on) and for an extra punch throw in some fats as well (almonds, walnuts, cashews, flax seeds, avocadoes, etc). This way you’ll have plenty of sustained energy after every meal. For example, eat bread & cheese, rice & beans, oatmeal & milk, and so on.
Did anything help me get through the learning stages of turning vegetarian? Yes, the fact that I can tell you the exact moment I ate my last piece of meat (besides the camouflaged bacon bits amidst a packaged salad that snuck past my field of vision one time). It was with a close friend Dominic up in the state of Maine, the summer after I had my fist upper division course (oh Abstract Algebra…) at UC Berkeley with Professor Lam. My last piece of meat was Maine lobster, dipped in melted butter, with mussels to boot. Thanks Dominic, for such a wonderful way to embark upon a new lifestyle! I should add that, although I found the lobster to be delicious, after three months of not eating meat, the next day my body showed slight distaste for the previous day’s festivities. 
In conclusion: In America at least, with the abundance of whole grains, nuts (including the irreplaceable flax seeds!), beans, vegetables, fruit, soy products, milk products, and in general every type of food at affordable prices, there’s no reason not to turn vegetarian. Additionally, if you mix certain types of foods to make a complex carbohydrate, and watch your intake of iron, you’ll have plenty of protein in your diet, and never face anemia.
