Many years ago, my little brother decided to follow in my footsteps and become a vegetarian. I figured this would be a short-lived lifestyle change, as the boy believed pepperoni was one of the food groups. I knew it would be short-lived when he asked me “do you know any vegetarians who eat ham?” I think it was the next morning that I found him in the kitchen, stirring chunks of maroon pepperoni into his scrambled eggs.
I was a vegetarian for twenty years. The first few years I would sometimes eat chicken and fish. Then, the bruised veins on chicken wings made it impossible for me to continue, and a few years later fish went by the wayside, too. I always loved animals, and wasn’t able to disassociate the fact that my meals were coming at the cost of their lives. For quite some time, I didn’t even eat eggs. I was never one of those annoying types who was waiting to lecture you on the environmental impact of eating meat, or the elevated risks of health problems due to eating meat, or the way that animals are treated before being killed for meat. (Okay, there was that one persuasive speech in 11th grade but that was for school!) I never would’ve eyed your steak with disdain. Eating meat was simply something that didn’t work for me, so I didn’t do it. “But you wear leather shoes!” occasional instigators would say, trying to point out my hypocrisy. I would shrug. So what? My grandma Louise always asked me if I was “still in that vegetarian phase? You know that God gave us animals to eat, don’t you?” The “phase” lasted years and years but she always called it just that, a phase. I was pretty certain, in fact, that the phase would last for a lifetime. I would occasionally wonder what would happen if I was in some sort of survivalist situation that required me to eat the meat of either animals or humans, and whether I would simply perish instead of eating the meat. Of course in this pondering I would turn waifish and ethereal before perishing, the other survivalists eyeing my hollowed out cheekbones with what I thought was admiration at my saintly determination. But probably they were just wishing that they could get their bony fingers on some salt to sass up my wilting flesh a bit.
Enter Max. My constantly nursing, sweet-faced, blue-eyed boy. Who seemed to be reacting to all the vegetarian staples in my diet—beans, soy. Veggie bacon. After a few visits to a woman who wiggles her fingers while holding a food in front of my and Max’s stomachs and tells us whether it’s a “no,” “yes,” or “1/3 of a cup, then three days off,” my already limited diet (no meat, no wheat flour, no cow’s milk), a self-imposed month of a bastardized Total Elimination Diet consisting of only rice products, sunflower seeds, pears, olive oil and squash, a yeast overgrowth test that saw me carting a sample of my own filth (tucked away in an innocent looking Hannaford bag) to a lab—which came back positive for yeast overgrowth and put me on a nearly no-grains diet—I realized I needed, for my own health and stamina, and in turn that of Max—to see if I could tolerate eating a little meat.
First I tried chicken. It seemed benign enough. My husband fried it up in olive oil and neatly chopped it into small pieces that could be hidden into my food. I tried that for about three days but I could feel the little chewy bits between my teeth. I tried some amazing Alaskan smoked salmon—same thing. It tasted delicious but the texture was just too… meaty. Little bits of turkey sausage fared better texture-wise, but it turned out there were spicy bits in it that Max didn’t like. Finally, after much thought, I wondered if bacon might just be the meat for me.
As a girl, I once impressed my grandma Jeanne by putting away an entire pound of bacon in one sitting. “Lynnie ate well,” she reported to my mom. I’m still not entirely sure how a lapsed Jew like my grandma came to be proud of my feat, or whether this early accomplishment was a flashing yellow light signaling long battles ahead with eating, dieting, and weight. Bacon makes little sense from a health or environmental standpoint, but it just tastes so fricking good. And though it had been twenty years since the flesh of piggies had seen the dark cavern of my mouth, my recall told me that it wouldn’t have the same disturbing chewy effect that poultry or fish did.
My recall was right. Due to the candida, I had to find a bacon that had no sugar added in the curing process—not easy or cheap. But persevere I did, and thanks to Lois’ Natural Marketplace, the bacon that would feed just me and not my naughty candida was found. Scott kindly fried it up for me (okay, he had a bunch of it himself. Not quite a pound, but still) and I popped a few digestive enzymes for good measure before tentatively lifted the purple-brown curly goodness to my mouth. Crunchy, not chewy. Salty. Porky. Delicious. “The only bad thing about bacon is that it makes the whole house smell like bacon for days afterwards,” Scott complained. “That’s not a bad thing,” I rebutted.
And that, my friends, is how I became the vegetarian who eats bacon. I don’t know that I will continue this erratic behavior, as I once again am struggling to pretend that this salty treat comes to my plate from a plant of some sort—a bacon bonsai, if you will—and not a (formerly) living, breathing, squealing creature. But for this moment—and new parenthood, I’m finding, is all about trying to stay in this moment—it’s working for me. I think my brother would be proud. My grandma Jeanne would certainly be proud. And my grandma Louise would say “I told you it was just a phase.”
