I don’t believe in resolutions but..I’m off the Hen in 20 Ten

No, I am not refer­ring to the alco­holic bev­er­age that goes by a sim­i­lar name (rhymes with Tennessee). I am refer­ring strictly to poul­try. We’ll, not just poul­try (chicken’s, ducks, pheas­ants and etc) but all meat.

For the last two years I have strug­gled with this love-​hate rela­tion­ship with meat. Don’t get me wrong inside the body of this lit­er­ary nobody beats the heart (and clogged arter­ies) of a tried and true car­ni­vore. I have eaten a Bubba Gump vari­ety of meats in my life­time. But, lately almost every thing that con­tains meat I find almost too much to stom­ach. I am dis­gusted. Let me give you a visual exam­ple:

While most peo­ple see this:

I see this:

Disgusting right? You may think I’m exag­ger­at­ing, but I am seri­ous. When I eat meat I see them as the ani­mals they were walk­ing around cluck­ing and moo­ing at ran­dom objects. I am then imme­di­ately grossed out and over­come with guilt. I imag­ine some moth­er­less chick look­ing for its par­ents. I know. I’m tor­tur­ing myself. Or am I?

Case in point, just yes­ter­day I was eat­ing a piece of baked chicken (I baked it myself) deter­mined that I wasn’t going to let my mind inter­rupt my meal. Just as I’m about to take a big bite out of it, my well mean­ing and obliv­i­ous child says, “Mom, look at this.” And this is what I saw:

I thought I was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing. I looked at “Oscar” the feath­er­less cock­a­too and then I looked down at my food and came this close to toss­ing my cook­ies. After wish­ing there was such a thing as a full body lace front wig for this poor bird and her con­di­tion it was at that point that I deter­mined it’s offi­cially offi­cial. No more meat. None.

Something I plan to uti­lize to help me is a great post from fel­low writer @Maroonsista called “So you think you can be a veg­e­tar­ian?“over at her blog “Message from Montie”, that pro­vides an in depth list of arti­cles she’s writ­ten and other resources that can help you make this tran­si­tion.

I declare that I will be meat free in 2010 (that’ll rhyme in 2023). How about you? Have you gone vegan or are you plan­ning to?

Thanks for read­ing,