I’ve been a vegetarian for nearly forty years.  Eating meals, as a child, presented a huge battle of wills between Frank and Jeanne (my parents) and myself.

It started with my first solid food offering.  I couldn’t swallow it and lacking certain verbal skills, could not express to my anxious parents why I didn’t want to eat.  I was on overcooked, super-pureed food well past the toddler stage.  I didn’t even talk until I was four years old, and even then my family couldn’t understand what I was saying because my speech pattern had an out-of-sync cadence.

I grew up in a middle-class environment with a schedule of seven dinners served, without variation, and rotated on a weekly basis.  By the time I was six I had committed the “blue plate specials” to memory:

Monday:  meatloaf

Tuesday: chicken

Wednesday: spaghetti (thanks to Anthony and the branding push of Prince’s Pasta)

Thursday: Westerns

Friday: steak (which my mother told us it was fish so we wouldn’t be held accountable for the venial sin of lying when asked by our grandparents what we had for dinner on Fridays)

Saturday:  frankfurters

Sunday:  pot roast or some variation of stewed beast at my grandparent’s home

As dinnertime approached, my stomach began to develop deep cramping pains.  The loud voices and threats of “You’re going to die if you don’t eat!”, juxtaposed with, “I don’t care if you sit there all night, you are going to finish that meal.”, was a set-your-watch-by-it confrontation each evening.

And sit there I did.  Sometimes I would fall asleep, only to revisit the same meal warmed up for breakfast.  I didn’t eat it then either.  Sunshine rarely makes a bad situation better, it just illuminates it.

Obviously I was having throat chakra issues.  Couldn’t swallow.  Speech delayed and not intelligible.  But the most frightening thing was what was happening in my brain as I took my place at the dinner table.  I could see the entire animal in its natural state, getting slaughtered with all the horrors of a child’s imagination.

A simple hamburger was, in my mind, an entire steer out on the range.  The story would unfold further upon staring at my dried chopped meat, as my mother smothered it in Heinz 57 – it was being led to the slaughter house.  There I would see it struggling, as it was being decapitated, entrails lying on the butcher’s floor.  Chicken, eggs, fish; sustenance that once had a face became an indelible image, trapped forever in my mind, of the sacrifice it made to be on my mother’s mundane menu.  The food would just hang on my fork.  Tears would run down my face – there was no way I could eat this.  And when forced to do so, I would put it in my mouth, pretend to chew it, stuff it in my cheeks, then spit it into my napkin.  I’m sure my parents knew this, but in order to maintain our pride, both teams allowed this ritual to continue well into my early teens.

So parents, if you have an eccentric child who refuses to eat things with a face take heart.  Vegetarians are just wired differently.  We don’t eat like birds, my scale can attest to that mis-information; we will not starve ourselves to death; and sitting hours on end staring at a plate of food that stimulates images of an animal’s demise is not being defiant and wasteful – it’s being mind-full.

Mindful that it takes people of all beliefs, shapes, sizes, and colours to co-exist on this magnificent planet.

Tags: battle of wills, child refuses to eat, eating like a bird, Heinz 57, Prince spaghetti, slaughterhouse, speech pattern, vegetarian, venial sin