I was eating dinner on Friday, October 22nd, 2006. My family was having a warm meal of pasta pesto and salad with chicken on the side. I saw the chicken, opened my mouth, and hesitated. I did not know if I was full or just could not put it inside my mouth. But something stopped me. All of the sudden, I remembered my dad telling me when I was younger, I roared like a lion and spit out all the fish bones onto a plate, making a “ping pong kink” on my plate. You could hardly hear the fish bone hitting the plate because I was coughing so loud. I could not stop eating the delicious fish. For me it taste like ice cream. I was a carnivore to the fullest.
I stopped staring at the ceiling and thinking of the past. Then I tried just to take a couple more bites. But it was still almost impossible to get that slimy goop in my mouth. It’s still hard for me to understand what kind of person would want to eat something that taste exactly like dirt. So I changed the subject by talking about my brother’s school activities. My Mom spent all day making the pesto for the pasta and pulling the chicken out of the oven at right moment. I felt really bad when I did not eat it. So we talked about my brother’s homework, what he’s reading, and the subjects he was taking in school. We also talked about my day, such as my upcoming play dates and stories that didn’t make sense but had to do with the playground. I look back on those stories today. I remember thinking “I get extra points for saying extraordinary”. For all I knew that could have meant pie. I was trying to stall and it worked. Before I knew it was time for me to go to bed. I realized that my food was still on the plate, and I couldn’t avoid it. The pasta pesto was touching the chicken on my plate. It was gross. I took one more bite of my pasta and said, “Speaking of food, I don’t like the taste of meat anymore so I want to become a vegetarian,” in a three-year-old voice, which actually sounded like a teacher scratching a blackboard with their fingernails to get attention from their students. After three minutes of silence, my mom and dad said, “Sure you can!”
It wasn’t hard for me to transfer from a meat eater to a vegetarian. My parents started to buy a lot more rice milk, veggie burgers, and meat became unavailable inside the house. Even though there was some (barely) my brother always found a way to eat it in spite of me. I am still a vegetarian a today.
Great story Zach