here's what i had for lunch today: italian meatballs with mushroom gravy, brown rice, and green beans.
this ordinarily wouldn't warrant a blog entry, but today was the first time i 've eaten meat since 1998 - nearly 8 years.
of course, i've eaten fish, seafood, dairy, and eggs in that time period, so i don't call myself a vegetarian. but no beef, pork, venison, poultry, or associated products. i've heard of other women who are vegetarian or non-meat eaters who find that they can't make it through pregnancy without going back on the meat. so this doesn't surprise me.
i wasn't quite expecting the extent that i would start to crave meat, though. as in: spend hours out of my day fantasizing about it. last nite we were eating brussel sprouts for dinner, and M* was suggesting various spices or condiments that might go well with them. i was like: "you know what would go good with these? HAM!!!!!" he just laughed and said we might need to make a trip out to our small local organically-grown humane-environment free-range hormone-free all-that-other-good-stuff meat producers & get me some protein.
speaking of which, my reasons for not eating meat over the last few years have been
1. health -- i started feeling better as soon as i quit eating meat. this is no longer true. while the second trimester is going better than the first, i don't have a huge amount of energy, am dragging most of the time, and am constantly, i mean CONSTANTLY hungry. nothing i put in my body seems to fill the hole, at least for long anyway.
2. ethics -- the meat-production industry is an ethical travesty. the environmental degradation, the chemicals pumped into the animals, the horrible conditions under which they are raised, the horrible working conditions of the underpaid, largely immigrant, workforce employed in the abattoirs, on it goes. i purposely haven't read "fast food nation" because i had already decided to not eat meat & didn't want to get grossed out. wimpy, i know.
but. but but but. i think for my health, i need to start with the red meat a bit again, maybe once per week or so. fortunately, there are a couple of options nearby which, as noted above, produce meat in such a way as to not violate most of the ethical considerations above. i'm not sure there is a way to humanely kill an animal that is intended to use for food, but, having grown up in a family of hunters, i'm actually okay with the killing for food part. carnivores and omnivores throughout the animal kingdom do it. it's the wastefulness of the meat industry as a whole, and the inhumane conditions in which the animals live their lives that bother me more than their deaths.
of course the environmental implications are what they are. on the one hand, these aren't cows that are grazing in sensitive riparian areas & damaging fish habitat. on the other hand, animals are high on the food chain & it takes an awful lot of water, food, and fossil fuel to produce 1 pound of meat, compared to 1 pound of tofu or beans.
the health implications of limiting my consumption to that which comes from the local farms are good too - no worry about hormones or antibiotics or other nasty chemicals, no worry about mad cow disease, less worry about e coli & some other infectious diseases that can be spread through contaminated meat. and, at this point, it would be dangerous for me to try to meet my protein needs through consuming more fish, regardless of what the sears's say in their book. tuna especially is a huge repository for mercury, and last i heard from the FDA, mercury ain't so good for the baby.
if it sounds like i'm rationalizing, perhaps i am a bit. this was a big change.
on the other hand? last nite? i dreamed i was eating venison polish sausage, raw, with my bare hands.
it's time to listen to my body.
