Meat-Eating Debate (Relocated Thread)

[HejiraNYC]

Originally Posted by jannieC

Oh, I hear, "give the kid a chicken nugget...it won't kill her!" from time to time.

It's funny, my mother said I always struggled with eating meat as a kid. My hamburgers had to be hockey pucks and she would always have to cut the chicken off the bone and hide it from me before I ate.

So I guess she wanted you to think chicken grew on trees.

Being "fresh off the boat," my parents immediately hit the ground running with American food. The earliest memories of my childhood are about eating at KFC every Sunday, year after year, for years! And there was no such thing as too much meat; I literally had it three times a day, every day of the week. And huge quantities of it. My mother would make hamburger patties that were 2 inches thick and 6 inches in diameter and pack them in my lunchbag for school; even the other kids thought it was nasty. My parents were also big membership warehouse fiends (even before Costco), so they would load up on industrial size cases of hot dogs, salami, bologna, ham... and after school I would literally take a package of sliced ham and eat it right out of the cellophane while I was watching TV. In a way, I think I've already eaten enough meat for a lifetime. So when I finally got off the meat wagon (or on it?), my body was quite shocked... in a good way. It also forced my mother to start learning how to cook without meat, and today my parents are pretty much vegetarian at home. I think it annoys my father a bit, but even he acknowledges that he feels a bit lighter on his feet after spending several days at my meat-free house.