Jane Paully has ruined my life forever on Beef and most other edible things.  About 10 years ago, Jane and her 60 Minutes rabblerousers did a show on Mad Cow Disease.  I watched as a girl from England deteriorated throughout the episode from a fully functional adult into a puddle of goo.

Each day that week they showed a new 60 Minutes, each one featuring a different food you should avoid, including: pork, chicken, fish and finally fruits and vegetables.

To 60 Minutes, the only safe food to eat is other humans and water.

My middle school-aged brain immediately made the decision that fruits and vegetables were in everything – and there was no way to avoid them and survive.  Beef, pork, chicken, and fish were a different story.  You can imagine the letters that my parents started writing to Jane that night.  Meanwhile, I stayed up all night learning everything I could about Mad Cow, prions and everything else related to the topic.

For the next two months, my meals consisted of Boca Burgers and MorningStar Farms soy foods.  These served to ween me off my former all-meat diet.  After that, avoiding chicken was way too hard – there’s only so many ways you can cook a Boca Burger and only so many soy meals that Dad would stomach.  So, chicken was added back to the menu… and eventually, so was fish.  Beef, pork, and other red meat stayed off.

Within the first 6 months, I’d dropped 50 pounds of fat and had a lot more energy.

Ten years have gone by since then and I still don’t eat beef, pork or any other red meat – much to the dismay of my family and friends.  I gained the weight I’d lost back by eating poorly and not exercising.  I also learned not to call it vegetarianism, and I’m reticent to call it “pseudo-vegetarianism”, because “real” vegetarians tend to swarm like rabid Twilight fans to tear the non-believer apart.

I keep it up now not as much for mad cow, but because I like animals. – when you’re raised in suburbia you don’t really make a connection from cows to hamburgers until later on.

Last thanksgiving, my extended family decided to order pizza the day before thanksgiving.  The toppings?  You guessed it… meatlovers, meatlovers, pepperoni.  It’s a recurring theme that my dietary choices are forgotten by my family.  I have to remind them at every gathering – “Should I bring some chicken-something-or-other?”

Beyond forgetful family, I also have a hard time at restaurants.  Don’t believe me?

Go into a Taco Bell.  Ask for the meal with the two chalupas and the taco.  Ask for the two chalupas to be chicken supremes and the taco to be a chicken taco.  It doesn’t matter which Taco Bell you go to – 90% of the time, you’ll get a beef taco (trust me – I’ve done the math).  More often than not, you’ll get beef chalupas, too.  Next time, ask them in person and watch how many button pushes it takes them to find “chicken taco”.  This is not a system set up for the beef-adverse.

Here’s another example:

Go to McDonalds (make sure it’s the drive-thru, this time).  Order the premium chicken sandwich (or almost any other chicken meal).  This will usually take anywhere between 6-8 minutes to deliver because they cook the chicken fresh.  I’m not complaining about that part, except to point out that normal human behavior for beef-eaters, when in a line at McD’s and stuck behind chicken-eaters for 6-8 minutes before getting to “the first window”, is apparently to wig the hell out and speed off.  There have been 3 instances when someone has zoomed around and yelled some sort of profanity at me (or the drive-thru window) as they pass.  Short of bullet-proofing my car, the only resolution is for me to go in to McD’s and order non-beef meals in person.

This is true for just about any restaurant – see bacon listed for a salad or in potatoes and you can bet, even if you ask the waitress for no bacon, it’ll be there.

This might seem like small fry stuff, but when you’ve been trying to avoid beef and pork for ten years, it really starts to piss you off when people can’t be bothered to remember “let’s get a cheese pizza” or “oh, the customer asked for chicken”.

My great grandma always taught me to be thankful for my food – everything that went into my food.  I try damn hard to honor that – and remember that when I eat a chicken sandwich, some chicken somewhere isn’t pecking around anymore.  It is a hell of a lot harder for me to be thankful for animals I didn’t even know went into a meal.

Any other “pseudo-vegetarians” out there who have horror stories about this?

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed Skittles briefly changed their homepage to show the stream from Twitter of #Skittles.  Any time someone mentioned Skittles, a new message would appear on their homepage and push the older messages down.  What ended up happening is a lot of sexual innuendo and posturing from snarky idiots.  I guess that’s why you could say I wasn’t surprised when I found this in Walgreens: Sweethearts Twilight candy hearts.

Lower Left text: “Secret Scent, Rub to Reveal…”.  Lower Right text: “The Forbidden Fruit Tastes The Sweetest”.

Apparently the candies also Sparkle and feature such messages as “Bite Me”, “Lamb”, “Secret”, “With You” and “Live 4 Ever”.

The weirdest part?  What the hell month are we in???  It’s freakin’ MAY.  MAAAAAY.

I’ll let you know if they’re also aphrodesiacs.  My guess?  They’ll make me bloodthirsty enough to play Halo again.