The Mental Jump to Eating Meat For The First Time In 16 Months

When you travel, you’re always going to be crossing barriers. Those barriers could be physical, such as going through customs at the airport, getting into your hotel room for the first time (shut up, the maid had to help us), or simply walking from one neighborhood to the next within the city. Other barriers though, can be mental: gaining the nerve to buy something from a street vendor without any shared language, starting your first lesson in Arabic, or, as I’m about to explain, the mental step it takes to eat meat for the first time in 16 months.

                “You probably should have started working it into your diet again a little sooner…”

                That’s the statement I got from many people when I told them Morocco would be my first time consuming any form of meat in over a year. Many people that had been vegetarians, but like me, planned to eat meat in Morocco, had started a few weeks back in the States. Something with a little chicken broth here, a dish with a little pork in it there, slowly working up how much they ate. If you’ve eaten meat your entire life, it’s not really an issue. When you stop for awhile, though, your body kind of quits caring enough to remember how to digest it. So yeah, I probably should have worked my way into eating it, but the reason I chose not to was solely based in my reason to be vegetarian in the first place.

                I first decided to quit eating meat after my time spent in Kenya, and for the most part, it all boils down to a single afternoon I had in Kenya. There was a day when many of us had decided to stay back at the house for the afternoon rather than go to Ombogo. The women that worked in the kitchen had promised us they’d teach us to make some of our favorite dishes that day, and it seemed like something I wanted to partake in. About four of us spent all afternoon in the kitchen making Chipati (Kenyan tortillas) with the women, really enjoying our opportunity to learn something from them, talk with them, and overall just bond with them.

As we were rolling out all of the dough, one woman also brought into the kitchen a chicken that had just been freshly beheaded and feathered in the courtyard out back. Lacking space to help with the Chipati, I turned around and began to help the woman finish feathering, and begin gutting the chicken. While we were doing this she was pointing out all of the anatomy of the chicken, and telling me about the whole process of how this was going to become our dinner later that evening. As I’m eagerly taking in an unexpected experience and probably way too into gutting this chicken, she finally looks at me to ask a question.

“Have you never eaten chicken in America?” she asked, a little bewildered. “No, of course I have. We eat it quite often actually” I responded, fairly confused and caught off guard by the question.

“So how is it that you’ve eaten chicken, yet never prepared a chicken? How do you eat in America?”

That question is often the line that I cite when I explain to people why I decided to be vegetarian. Trying to explain to a woman in very rural Kenya that chickens are kept on massive farms and that the average person simply walks into a grocery store and buys a chicken that’s frozen and doesn’t actually look anything like a chicken anymore is a difficult task.

Fast forward back to Morocco now. I have zero issues with eating meat I a developing nation. The food is local, it’s fresh, it’s sustainable, and to be honest, it’s just delicious. My issue is with America’s creation of our food. We’re disconnected, unaware, and entirely incapable of feeding ourselves if someone else didn’t do 90% of the work for us. So if my issue is with America’s food system, I don’t really want to use my time in America to prepare for eating meat in another country. Rather, I’d prefer to hold to my reasons, and only eat it in developing nations.

Unfortunately, that lead me to not exactly feel top notch my first day in Morocco. A combination of a red-eye flight to get here, immediate training, and eating meat for the first time, it’s fair to say I wasn’t entirely healthy that first day. However, while I may still do my best during my time here to eat as little meat as possible, my first goal is not to offend. If my host family makes me a meal that has no vegetarian options, I damn well better be eating that meal, and I better be grateful for it. They are kind enough to take me in, help me learn the language, and teach me their culture, the least I can do is return some respect for the culture. And trust me, food is most certainly part of any culture. My personal choices are in no way more important than the respect I owe to my host family. It took a change in mindset to jump that boundary of eating meat again after so long, but in the end, it’s worth it. If I can handle a bit of a stomach ache in order to gain some repertoire with my host family, and show them the respect they deserve, consider it done.