Going Cold Tofurky

All through high school, I flirted with vegetarianism, like a good little punky-goth girl should. Notably for a few months after skipping school to watch 'Faces of Death' with my friends, and then again when I got the Smiths 'Meat is Murder' for Christmas in 1985. I couldn't even listen to the title track.

But it never really stuck, until one day in college, when I was eating a bean and beef combo burrito from Burrito Brothers. That was it... the last piece of cow I would eat until well into my 30's.

What was my motivation for giving up meat? This is a question I had to answer a lot in 17 years. But mostly, it was just the realization that meat eating, for most people in the USA, is totally hypocritical. Sure, I'll eat meat if I can walk into a grocery store and buy a slice neatly wrapped in plastic. Just don't remind me that it ever used to be a living breathing creature not unlike my pet dog. And I thought that was wrong. I still do.

But then I started feeling a bit unhealthy. Oh, and I was craving shrimp. So, I started thinking - If I were left to my own devices, and I were hungry, and there were no supermarkets around, what would I eat? I definitely wouldn't kill a cow, or a pig, or really any mammal. I might kill a chicken because I don't really like birds, but that would still be a stretch. But hell yes, I would kill me some shrimp. I killed cockroaches all the time just for coming in my house and a shrimp is really just an aquatic cockroach, right? And fish, well, they're bigger but still, I could kill one if I had do.

And so, one day in 1989, I became a pescatarian.