Interview - Kim the Flexitarian

Today's guest post is from my friend Kim Lone, who is currently teaching in Vietnam. 

As the fourth of five kids, vegetarianism is nothing new in my family, it was one of those good, yet not really dangerous ways of being different and upsetting mum and dad.  I grew up in a family where at some stage at least one or two members were vegetarian. My dad has always been against it yet somewhat resigned.  There is still always the occasional "you sure you don't want some meat with that?". 

At the moment in my family, there is one vegetarian, one vegan, one who will only eat ethical meat, one meat lover, and me, the one that usually eats meat when I've been drinking.  It's been a long and drawn out process till I got to this stage.  The original reason why I became and occasional vegetarian (flexitarian if you want) was because I hated handling raw meat when cooking, and also possibly because I was a poor student so my diet consisted mainly of pasta, eggs and bread.  I grew up in the suburbs completely divorced from the process of how meat ends up in the supermarket.  If you are ever on a country road and get stuck behind a truck carrying sheep the smell is one of indescribable rancidity.  (Is rancidity a word?)  So I only ever ate meat if someone else cooked it.

A couple of years later I ended up living in a vegetarian flat [I'm pretty sure this was the same flat Kim lived in where the kitchen sink had a plaque above it saying that it used to belong to Katherine Mansfield, cool eh - Evealyn].  Which was sweet because my flatmate used to cook dinner every night.  Possibly the healthiest eating I have ever done in my life.  Every now and again I would get a craving and smuggle meat into the house.  If you ever want tips on meat smuggling, ask me.  If my flatmates ever caught me there were disappointed looks all round.  Possibly the worst was when my friend Fe gave me a can of spam for my 21st birthday (I had told her on some occasion that I had never eaten spam).  It was the odd can that just sat in the pantry and my flatmates thought it was funny and anyone who came round thought it was just weird.  Then there was one night when I came home ridiculously drunk and decided to have a fry up.  In went the spam.  My flatmates were so upset when they found out that I had used the frypan to cook meat.

After that I moved back home with my parents due to no money and no job.  My mums a mean cook and she would always cook for my dad so, I ate meat.  Lots of meat and it was tasty.  Its hard to be a vegetarian if you are extremely lazy like me and not big on cooking all the time.

And now I am living in Vietnam.  And it's a pretty sweet place to live.  My occasional vegetarianism has come into full swing here just because of the lack of refridgeration.  If any of you have been to South East Asia and been to the meat section of markets you will know what I am talking about.  Meat is left sitting out in the hot sun and the stench is unbelievable.  So now, for the most part I am a vegetarian apart form the occasional craving for that tasty tasty meat.  My figuring is that it is better being an occasional vegetarian than not even trying at all. 

I've met lots of vegetarians too, the ones who are accepting of your meat eating, the judgmental ones, the ones that eat fish and the animal rights activists who have framed photos of battery farmed chickens on their bedroom walls.  I have one friend who became a vegetarian and the age of 7.  She was watching Neighbours with her mum one day and just turned to her and said "I want to be a vegetarian".  Her mum said "Ok, but I'm not cooking two meals" so the whole family became vegetarian by default.  I also have a friend who agrees with the principles behind vegetarianism but can't get over the taste of meat.  So he has decided that what he will do when he dies is make his friends and family have a big barbeque and they have to eat him, hopefully starting a trend towards eating humans rather than other animals.