Transitioning to a Vegetarian Diet
What do you eat?
That’s the question meat-eaters ask
vegetarians all the
time. It’s a good question too, because if you look at the
Standard American
Diet (remember, it’s abbreviated “SAD”), there’s a lot of
meat to be sure.
But even among vegetarian foods, there aren’t very many
commonly eaten
things that aren’t dependent in some way on animal products.
If something
doesn’t have chickens’ eggs or
cows’ milk mixed into it, it probably has mayonnaise or
butter or cheese on top
of it.
Tell a meat-eater you’re a vegan and you don’t eat any
animal
products, and he or she will probably ask the question
twice: “But what do you
eat? What on Earth do you eat?”
Fortunately, there are some easy answers
to both of these questions.
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Many of the dishes meat-eaters
already love don’t
need meat at
all.
People have become so used to
throwing meat into
everything and so accustomed to heavy, high-fat dishes that
they’ve forgotten
what real food tastes like. Spaghetti sauce doesn’t need a
bunch of ground beef
in it to make it taste good. Soup doesn’t need chicken
broth, and stir-fry
doesn’t need chunks of pork hiding under the vegetables.
Without all that meat,
foods are lighter, more flavorful and lower in calories.
Best of all, you can
eat more of them!
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Change your eating
habits!
There are lots of
vegetarian foods out there that you haven’t
tried. And with new, lighter, tastier vegetarian foods in
your diet, your meals
won’t have to be defined by a single dish. (“Mom, what’s for
dinner? Pork chops?
Is that all?”)
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Don’t change
your eating habits!
Not if you don’t want to, anyway. There are
vegetarian substitutes for everything! You’ve heard of
veggie burgers; you’ve
heard of tofu dogs. (Don’t laugh—dress them
up, and
even hard-core meat eaters usually can’t tell the
difference.)
There are great vegetarian
substitutes to satisfy any animal food craving you might
have—from steak to
Reuben sandwiches. If you want to stuff yourself to the
gills every night with a
big pot roast and gravy (and a hot fudge sundae for
dessert!), you can, and
still eat a 100% vegetarian diet.
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Analyze what you are eating now.
Take a
survey of all the foods you and your family have eaten in
the last week—both at
home and away. Be honest, now. It’s not all broccoli and
skim milk.
Look
in your refrigerator and take note of all the stuff that’s
bad for you, bad for
the environment and bad for our furry and feathered friends.
Not just
the meat and the frozen pepperoni pizzas, but the milk, the
cheese, the carton
of eggs, the jar of mayonnaise and those frozen cheese
pockets.
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Eliminate the
unnecessary.
Take all that bad stuff out of
your refrigerator and throw it in the trash. No, just
kidding! But at least
consider not buying any more of it.
Now, think about
all the bad things in your diet that nobody
really likes anyway—the boiled hot dogs you make only
because they’re fast, the
Lard-O-Rama® breakfast scrapple, and the dry chickens’
breasts you eat because
you once thought they were healthy—and get rid of them from
your diet. OK, now
we’re making progress.
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Use
meat substitutes.
Once you’ve eliminated all
the animal products that are both boring and
unhealthy, trot right down to your local natural foods
grocery and find an
appropriate meat substitute.

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Use dairy substitutes.
The same thing goes
for dairy products. We’ve got substitutes for
everything from the cow’s milk on your breakfast cereal to
the chickens’ eggs in
your cookies. They taste great, and they’re much better for
you than something
that came from a farm animal.

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Adapted
with permission
from The Perfectly Contented Meat-Eater’s Guide to
Vegetarianism
by
Mark
Warren Reinhardt ©1998-2006 by Mark Warren Reinhardt. All rights
reserved.
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