a different view.

I never thought about food before until I was old enough to judge it. I went through most of my childhood with a mother whose idea of cooking was either Mac n’ cheese or ordering pizza on Friday nights when nothing else could be made. The rest of my family wasn’t much better either. A trip to my grandmothers meant a trip to McDonalds, burger king, or some other form of cheap food fast that came with a toy. This all changed about halfway through high school.
Around my junior year I was at a local park, just with some friends wasting the day when we decided to use the little pocket change we had to purchase a few cheap pizzas. The grease lingered on top of the cheesy mounds of pepperoni like puddles after a rain. A younger sister of one of my friends was with us, about ten years old at the time, she was an obese child with bad eyesight and a lacking I.Q., she had been held back,. I watched with great engrossment and partial disgust as she wolfed down an entire pizza. I dropped my slice at that moment and I have been a vegetarian ever since, that is at least until I started culinary school. My reasons being I, in all the infinite wisdom of my 16 year old body and mind, decided that it was the meat and grease of this cheap pizza that caused this young girl’s ailments. Since that moment though I’ve cared about everything I put in my body, and my body has been good to me because of it.
I look back at this moment as well and wish my childhood wasn’t filled with happy meals, and wish every child’s life was filled with more wholesome locally grown foods with less pesticides and hormones.
After I started paying attention to what I was eating I wanted to know more. I became an information hound. I was obsessed with where my food came from, what they put into it, howit was made, and why they chose to do the things they did. I was horrified to discover, but not completely shocked, that everything done by the food industry is done with money in mind. Money was the bottom line and the consumer and definitely not the animal or product. I decided to do my entire senior project on vegetarianism and factory farms even going as far as to hold a protest at the local KFC in order to get the message out that hormone filled genetically mutated meats and veggies were not the way to a healthy happy life. As always though I’ve yet to make an impact and I imagine that morals and ethics can be bought cheap, otherwise more people would be conscious about what they choose to consume on a daily basis. I don’t think that becoming a vegetarian will change your life dramatically; I don’t even believe that being a vegetarian is the only way to go. I didn’t disagree with eating meat, I do disagree with not being informed about what you choose to put into your body. Be informed. Know where your food comes from and make smart decisions based on what you know. We can change the damage we’ve done to this planet with ever decision we make, even ones which seem as insignificant as what we choose to eat. I’m hoping that my choice to join the culinary world will allow me to continue my crusade against the way our country views food even if it’s just being able to produce a cleaner food for our bodies, minds, and planet.